1. © 2010 by W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.
Language
Chapter 9
Lecture Outline

2. Chapter 9: Language
 Lecture Outline
 Organization of Language
 Phonology （音韻學）
 Words
 Syntax （句法）
 Sentence Parsing
 Biological Roots of Language
 Language and Thought

3. Chapter 9: Language
 Language
 Unique to humans
 Present in all cultures
 Essential for knowledge and culture
 Without it, cultural transmission of information and
the acquisition of knowledge would be much more
limited

4. The Organization of Language
Thoughts become sounds
Sounds become thoughts
HOW? Hierarchical organization

5. The Organization of Language
 Sentence—sequences of words
 Word—smallest free form
 Morpheme （詞素）— smallest unit of
meaning
 Phoneme （音素）— smallest unit of
sound

6. The Organization of Language
 Hierarchical, with each level composed of other
sublevels

7. Phonology
Flow of air from lungs
Modulation
of air by
mouth
and nose
Production of phonemes

8. Phonology
 Voicing
 Whether vocal folds （聲帶） vibrate ([z], [d], [b], [v])
 Or not ([s], [t], [p], [f])
 Manner of production
 Whether air is fully stopped ([b], [p], [d], [t])
 Or merely restricted ([z], [s], [v], [f])
 Place of articulation
 Where in the mouth the air is restricted
 Closing of lips ([b], [p])
 Top teeth against bottom lip ([v], [f])
 Tongue behind upper teeth ([d], [t], [z], [s])

9. Phonology
Many words have no clear boundaries
yet speech segmentation is effortless
Speech segmentation is the process of “slicing” the speech stream into
words and phonemes.

10. Phonology
10
The sky is NOT falling!

11. Phonology
 Coarticulation the blending of phonemes
at word boundaries
 refers to how the production of each phoneme
is slightly altered depending on the preceding
and following sounds.
 “My name is Dan Reisberg”
 “My name is Noam Chomsky”
S is slightly different
D and N are slightly different

12. Phonology
 Perception of language is constructed
 Use prior knowledge to fill in missing
information
The state governors met with their respective legi*latures
convening in the capital city.
Phonemic restoration effect

13. Phonology
 Pollack and Picket (1964)
 Spliced out words from conversations
 Easily identified in context
 Hard to do without context
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14. Phonology
Continuous variation of sounds
are filtered to
produce clear phonemes
Categorical perception
Our categorization of phonemes shows
abrupt boundaries, even when there is
no corresponding abrupt change in the
stimuli themselves.

15. Phonology
 Sequences
 Only some are acceptable in a language.
 For example, the sequence [tl] is not acceptable in
English
 Adjustments for certain phoneme sequences.
 For example, the [s] sound becomes a [z] in words
like “bags”

16. Words
 For each word that a speaker knows,
there are several kinds of information
 Phonology—the sequence of phonemes that
make up the word
 Orthography—how the word is spelled (if the
person is literate)
 Syntax—how to combine the word with other
words
 Semantics—what the word means

17. Words
 The referent is the actual object, action,
or event in the world that a word refers to
 Conceptual information
 A large part of “knowing a word” is knowing
the relevant concept

18. Words
 Generativity
 Our morphological knowledge specifies how
to create variations of each word by adding
appropriate morphemes
 New words can be formed
 “Hardware,” “software” lead to “spyware” and
“malware”
 Words can take on new meanings
 “I have been hacked by a hacker.”

19. Syntax
 Generativity
 Infinite number of sentences by combining finite
set of words
 For practical purposes, there is an infinitely large
number of sentences that speakers can produce in
their language

20. Words
Syntax tells us which verbs can take direct objects
及物 vs 不及物動詞

21. Syntax
 Acceptable sequences:
 “The boy hit the ball.”
 Unacceptable ones:
 “The boy hit ball the.”
 These rules also help us determine the
relationships among the words in the sentence
 Who is doing what to whom?
 “The boy chased the girl.”

22. Syntax
 Jabberwocky
 Sentences can be
syntactically and
morphologically
correct even when
meaningless
 “’Twas brillig, and the
slithy toves did gyre
and gimble in the
wabe...”

23. Syntax
Phrase structure rules
How the trees branch
noun phrase (NP) and verb phrase (VP)

24. Syntax
 Descriptive rules, “To boldly go where no
one has gone before.”
 Prescriptive rules “To go boldly where no
one has gone before.”

25. Syntax
Phrase
structure
No
phrase
structure
Easier Harder

26. Syntax
He wants to discuss
sex with Jay Leno.
He wants to discuss sex
with Jay Leno.
D-structure

27. 2014 年外國人中文十級考試試題：請考生寫出以下兩句話
的區別在哪裡？
 1. 冬天：能穿多少穿多少；夏天：能穿多
少穿多少。
 2. 剩女產生的原因有兩個，一是誰都看不
上，二是誰都看不上。
 3. 地鐵裡聽到一個女孩，大概是給男朋友
打電話：「我已經到西直門了，你快出來
往地鐵站走。如果你到了，我還沒到，你
就等著吧；如果我到了，你還沒到，你就
等著吧。」
© 2010 by W. W. Norton &
Co., Inc.
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28.  4. 單身的原因：原來是喜歡一個人，現在
是喜歡一個人。
 5. 兩種人容易被甩：一種不知道什麼叫做
愛，一種不知道什麼叫做愛。
 6. 想和某個人在一起的兩種原因：一種是
喜歡上人家，另一種是喜歡上人家。
 7. 女孩約的男孩遲到了有兩個原因： 1. 睡
過了。 2. 睡過了。
© 2010 by W. W. Norton &
Co., Inc.
28

29. Syntax
 Linguistic universals
 Rules that apply to all languages
 Subject-verb-object
 “Sally ate the apple.”
 Preferred order for 98% of the languages

30. Syntax
 Linguistic universals
 Innate knowledge of these universals may
prepare children for learning language rapidly
 Others suggest that grammar learning is
constrained by many factors

31. Sentence Parsing
 Parse
 Process of assigning words to a phrase
structure

32. Sentence Parsing
 Garden-path sentences
 “The secretary applauded for his efforts was
soon promoted.”
 “Fat people eat accumulates.”
 “The horse raced past the barn fell.”

33. Sentence Parsing
 Garden-path sentences
 “Because he ran the second mile went
quickly.”
First interpretation
Something wrong
Reinterpretation

34. Sentence Parsing
 Minimal attachment—simplest phrase structure
One phrase
Because he ran the second mile he was able to finish quickly.
Because he ran the second mile went quickly.
Two phrases

35. Sentence Parsing
The detectives examined by
the reporter revealed the truth
about the robbery
The evidence examined
by the reporter revealed
the truth about the
robbery
Background knowledge plays a part

36. Sentence Parsing
 Extralinguistic context
 “Put the apple on the towel into the box.”

37. Sentence Parsing
 Prosody （音韻學） refers to the
patterns of pauses and pitch changes that
characterize speech production. It is used
to:
 Emphasize elements of a sentence
 Highlight the sentence’s intended structure
 Signal the difference between a question and
an assertion

38. Sentence Parsing
 Pragmatics.
 “What happened to the
roast beef?”
 “Well, the dog sure
does look happy.”
He must have eaten it

39. The Biological Roots of Language
Motor planning
Language
Comprehension
nonfluent aphasia
fluent aphasia

40. The Biological Roots of Language
 Children learn language even with no
exposure
 May have some biological mechanisms for
that

41. The Biological Roots of Language
 Specific language impairment
 Normal intelligence
 Normal muscle movement
 Difficulty learning and using language
 May be evidence of specialized mechanism for
language learning

42. The Biological Roots of Language
 Overregularization
errors
 “Yesterday, I thinked.”

43. The Biological Roots of Language
 Learning of information present in the
environment is also critical to language
acquisition
 Children as young as 8 months are
sensitive to the statistical regularities in
the language that they hear, as shown in
studies employing nonsense syllable
streams

44. The Biological Roots of Language
 Semantic bootstrapping refers to using
semantic knowledge to make inferences
about the syntactic structure of a language

45. Language and Thought
 Linguistic relativity is the hypothesis that
people who speak different languages
think differently
 Benjamin Whorf’s original argument was
that Hopi speakers and English speakers
think differently about time

46. Language and Thought
 A language’s
color
categories
may affect
how its
speakers
perceive and
remember
color

47. Language and Thought
 The spatial terminology of a language—for
instance whether absolute or relative
terms are used—may affect how its
speakers perceive and remember spatial
information

48. Language and Thought
 One possibility for such results is that the
language you speak determines the
concepts and categories that you use, and
as a result, shapes what you can think
about
 A more flexible possibility is that language
influences what we pay attention to, and
this shapes experience, which influences
how we think

49. Chapter 9 Questions

50. The hierarchy of linguistic units, from largest
to smallest, is
a)phrases, words, morphemes, phonemes.
b)phonemes, phrases, words, morphemes.
c)morphemes, phonemes, phrases, words.
d)phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases.

51. Which of the following is a function
morpheme?
a) ing
b) -les
c) wish
d) noun phrase

52. Which of the following claims is TRUE?
a) Reliance on prototypes is likely to emerge
gradually as a participant’s experience with a
category grows.
b) People are likely to rely strongly on prototypes
early in their exposure to a particular category.
c) People only rely on prototypes when they have
time to make a decision.
d) With exposure to many instances of a
particular category, it becomes easier to
remember each particular instance, and this
contributes to the emergence of a prototype.

53. Which of the following is TRUE of speech
segmentation?
a) It is made harder by the fact that more than
half of the speech we hear consists of the 50
most common words in English.
b) Speech recognition programs can
understand a lot of speech from one person
and very limited speech from many people.
c) When words are in context, they are far more
difficult to identify.
d) It is made harder by the process of
coarticulation, where each phoneme
overlaps with the ones before and after it.

54. Categorical perception cannot explain
a) why it is more difficult to detect variations
within a single category than differences
between two phonemic categories.
b) why we sometimes confuse phonemes
when in a noisy environment.
c) how we identify spaces between words in
a continuous speech stream.
d) why certain phoneme combinations are
difficult for English speakers to
pronounce.

55. The fact that new words in English do not
typically start with start with sound
combinations like “tl” or “ks” demonstrates
a) the generativity of English.
b) the role of phrase-boundaries in English.
c) the phonological rules of English.
d) the biological basis of English.

56. Which sentence is the hardest to read?
a) The witness examined by the lawyer
was nervous.
b) The witness examined by the lawyer was
nervous.
c) both a and b
d) neither a nor b