Speaker A
Welcome to a new series, Introduction to Linguistics. I'm going to do an overview video just because I think with a course like Introduction to Linguistics, it's very broad.
Intro to Linguistics covers syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics, and phonology basics for beginners.
Key Takeaways
- Linguistics studies language structure and meaning through five core areas.
- Syntax involves sentence structure and word order variations across languages.
- Semantics addresses meaning, ambiguity, and presuppositions in language.
- Morphology focuses on meaningful word parts and how they combine.
- Phonetics and phonology analyze sounds and sound patterns in speech.
Summary
- The video introduces the five main aspects of linguistics: syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics, and phonology.
- Syntax is explained as the structure of language, focusing on word order and sentence trees.
- Semantics covers meaning in language, including ambiguity and presupposition.
- Morphology studies the smallest units of meaning in words, such as morphemes and derivational suffixes.
- Phonetics examines the physical production of sounds, including vocal fold vibration differences.
- Phonology looks at patterns of sounds and their relationships within language.
- Examples include SVO word order in English and SOV in Japanese.
- Ambiguity examples highlight how sentences can have multiple interpretations.
- Morphological examples show how suffixes can change word classes, like 'establish' to 'establishment'.
- Phonetic examples demonstrate voiced vs voiceless consonant pairs like S/Z, T/D, P/B, and K/G.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
I might as well show a little introduction of what we're going to be doing in this series, so this is to be equivalent of a first semester in what I call linguistic analysis or contemporary linguistic analysis.
Speaker A
That is, we look at the five main aspects of language, which would be syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics, and phonology, and these are the only things that will be covered.
Speaker A
So if you're looking for historical, socio-linguistics, or specifically discourse or something a little bit more advanced, probably not yet the topic for you.
Speaker A
So what are these five things? Well, we'll start with syntax, and syntax is the structure of language.
Speaker A
So languages like English have a word order, for instance, we would say, I hit the ball, and with this sentence, we would have a subject, which is I, we have a verb, which is hit, and then we have the ball, which is our object, and we can classify this as an SVO language.
Speaker A
Now, all of these other different permutations of subject, verb, and objects like actually exist in other languages, for instance, as you'll see in the first introductory syntax video, Japanese is subject, object, verb.
Speaker A
There are other languages where the verb comes first and then an object subject, and so on.
Speaker A
Now, with syntax, because language has structures and our sentences have structures, we can do a little bit more than just list word order, in fact, we can create trees with sentences, so a sentence will consist of a noun phrase and a verb phrase, for instance, in this case, the noun is going to be I.
Speaker A
In a verb phrase, well, we have a verb, which is hit, and then it has another noun phrase, which would be the ball, so the noun is ball, and then it also has this thing called a determiner, which is the word the, which specifies exactly which ball we're talking about.
Speaker A
So we can use our hierarchical structure and we can draw a tree or a structure for language as well.
Speaker A
Now, of course, this structure you see here isn't the most advanced we can get, in fact, this course won't cover what advanced sentences look like, but it'll cover the basics and that's enough for an introduction course.
Speaker A
We will then move on to semantics and we'll talk about the meaning of language.
Speaker A
We won't be looking at mathematical semantics, but we'll be looking at things such as ambiguity.
Speaker A
So for instance, if I say, I bought a pen, what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the sentence I bought a pen?
Speaker A
It's probably something that looks like this.
Speaker A
That's probably what it was.
Speaker A
What you didn't think probably was this sort of pen that holds a dog because you don't want it to escape at night.
Speaker A
So you probably didn't think of a pen like that.
Speaker A
So for instance, when we say I bought a pen, do we have to specify I bought an animal pen, I bought a dog pen?
Speaker A
What exactly when I think I bought a dog pen, do you think?
Speaker A
In fact, a lot of people would think that you bought a pen that has dogs on it.
Speaker A
Because how often do we use the word pen?
Speaker A
Not that often.
Speaker A
So we have ambiguity like that.
Speaker A
We also have structural ambiguity.
Speaker A
So for instance, um, I like small cats and dogs.
Speaker A
So there are two ways that we could interpret the sentence I like small cats and dogs.
Speaker A
For instance, we may have Mr. Whiskers here, and we might have a dog here, which they look pretty similar, but these are both small for I like small cats and dogs.
Speaker A
But another interpretation is that Mr. Whiskers is small, so I like small cats, but I also just like dogs.
Speaker A
So instead, we get this huge dog.
Speaker A
And we say, well, how do we know what each of the meaning is?
Speaker A
That's a dog, by the way.
Speaker A
Well, again, this is ambiguity and we can analyze this with semantics.
Speaker A
We'll also talk about presupposition.
Speaker A
So for instance, if I say, do you regret kicking the dog last night, if you answer the question, you've just admitted to kicking the dog.
Speaker A
So presupposing some things there.
Speaker A
There's implication and some other things that we'll talk about, but I won't cover it in the overview here.
Speaker A
After talking about semantics, we will move on to morphology.
Speaker A
Which we call sort of the structures of words.
Speaker A
Now, these are things that have meaning.
Speaker A
In fact, they're the smallest unit of meaning.
Speaker A
So for instance, if I say birds, what is the smallest unit of meaning in here?
Speaker A
In fact, there's two meanings.
Speaker A
Well, there's two separate meanings that we join together.
Speaker A
One of these is the word bird, and we know what a bird looks like with another horrible drawing.
Speaker A
Uh, kind of looks like that, has feathers, that's a bird.
Speaker A
And then we have this extra marker here, the S, that simply has this old meaning of multiple.
Speaker A
So this implies, birds implies that there's a bird and there's more than one.
Speaker A
But let's take a look at another word.
Speaker A
Say the word pets.
Speaker A
Now again, we have pet and we have S.
Speaker A
But this S and this S in pets and birds, these are different sounds.
Speaker A
Interesting.
Speaker A
This is a Z sound, and this is an S sound.
Speaker A
But we interpret them to mean the exact same thing when we hear them.
Speaker A
But why is it that these two different sounds are interpreted to have the exact same meaning of multiple?
Speaker A
Well, we'll look at that.
Speaker A
We'll look at that a little bit more in phonology.
Speaker A
But what about say the word establishment?
Speaker A
This is a good word.
Speaker A
I like the word establishment.
Speaker A
This is going to be our last example for morphology here.
Speaker A
And this is interesting because establish is a verb.
Speaker A
But there's this suffix here, this other morpheme called ment, and I would argue that most people, you know, this doesn't really have a meaning on its own.
Speaker A
But what happens when you take these two verbs and this ment suffix?
Speaker A
Well, not necessarily a suffix, but they they put together, and they become a noun.
Speaker A
So this is a derivational morpheme.
Speaker A
This ment morpheme takes establish and turns it into a noun.
Speaker A
So we can also look at other words and other ways that put things together, but this is probably the most interesting one out of the bunch for morphology.
Speaker A
So after looking at words, meaning of words, structure of words, we move on to phonetics.
Speaker A
And sort of an entirely different topic.
Speaker A
Because now, instead of looking at words and the parts and meaning, we're just going to be looking at sounds.
Speaker A
So what is the difference between an S and a Z?
Speaker A
In fact, I shouldn't write that Z right there.
Speaker A
I should write this Z to be linguistically sound.
Speaker A
What is the difference between these two sounds?
Speaker A
In fact, do you even know what you do when you make these sounds?
Speaker A
When you go or in your mouth?
Speaker A
Do you know where your tongue is?
Speaker A
Do you know the shape of your mouth?
Speaker A
Do you know what part of your throat is working to make these sounds?
Speaker A
We're going to look at all the different sounds we make in English.
Speaker A
And we'll see that the difference between these two sounds specifically is simply the voice box.
Speaker A
In fact, I use the voice box very loosely here just to explain what it is at this point.
Speaker A
But more importantly, these are vocal folds, now what happens is when you make a Z sound, you are simply making an S sound, but your vocal folds are vibrating at the same time.
Speaker A
So you can change from an S to a Z just by vibrating your vocal folds.
Speaker A
And you'll see that a lot of sounds actually are paired just like this, where the vibration of the vocal folds is the only thing that changes it.
Speaker A
In fact, there's T's and D's make this distinction.
Speaker A
P's and B's are exactly the same.
Speaker A
K's and G's.
Speaker A
Yeah, all there is in these these pairs of sounds, the only difference is that you're vibrating your vocal folds.
Speaker A
So that's pretty cool.
Speaker A
So we'll be looking at that.
Speaker A
Then, in our last topic, we'll move on to phonology.
Speaker A
And these are patterns of sounds.
Speaker A
So I'm going to write out three words here.
Speaker A
The words are pay, bay, and eBay.
Speaker A
Now, if I ask you, let's take a look at the B's, the P's, and okay.
Speaker A
Here's a question.
Speaker A
This B right here, is it more similar to the B in eBay or more similar to the P in pay?
Speaker A
And the result, you you might guess it because this is a I'm setting this question up in a way that's meant to trick you.
Speaker A
But you might be surprised that this B is more closely related to the sound that a P makes than the B in eBay.
Speaker A
Now, why is this?
Speaker A
Well, for one, we're native English speakers, so we don't notice the difference.
Speaker A
However, when we transcribe these and we look at the properties, the pay or the P in pay is aspirated.
Speaker A
It has this little H up here that we transcribe it with because we have a puff of air.
Speaker A
Now, in English, when we start sentences or we start utterances with a voiced sound like B, it's actually transcribed as an unaspirated version of the voiceless sound.
Speaker A
So for instance, B and P are pairs where B, the only difference with a b is that you're vibrating your vocal cords for a p.
Speaker A
But we just don't aspirate it.
Speaker A
So we hear it as a B.
Speaker A
And we think we're making a B sound, but we're actually just making an unaspirated P.
Speaker A
Now, languages like Korean can hear the difference between this P and this B.
Speaker A
However, in English, we don't notice the difference.
Speaker A
But for Koreans and other languages in the world, this is a very noticeable difference.
Speaker A
But we interpret the two B's in eBay and bay to be exactly the same.
Speaker A
So listen for a second.
Speaker A
eBay.
Speaker A
Bay.
Speaker A
Pay.
Speaker A
If you listen really closely, you can hear a difference in those two B's.
Speaker A
But it's difficult and requires training, so a lot of the things we learn in phonology, you'll have to take for granted initially.
Speaker A
And through sort of listening carefully and tuning your ears, you can hear the differences.
Speaker A
But if you say, hold on a second, this isn't right, well, these sounds are actually analyzed through computer software.
Speaker A
And if you record your own voice and know what to look for for sounds and sound waves and sound forms, you can verify that yes, these are the sounds you're actually making.
Speaker A
Of course, this assumes you're a Western speaker or an English speaker, um, if you're in Britain or anywhere in the UK, anywhere in the Northwestern United States, this is pretty accurate information.
Speaker A
So we're going to take a look at all five of these things, we're going to cover the very basics of them.
Speaker A
We won't go too deep into each topic because this is a broad overview.
Speaker A
In fact, if you are to go into more in-depth, uh, the following courses when you take linguistics, usually each course will focus on one aspect.
Speaker A
Phonetics and phonology might be grouped up, syntax and semantics might be grouped up.
Speaker A
But if I do continue to go on to more series, each of these topics will be covered much more in-depth as their own series.
Speaker A
So hopefully you'll enjoy this.
Speaker A
And as always, leave some comments down below so I can hear what you guys think about this.
Speaker A
What you guys want me to cover in the future, and if you have any suggestions or concerns, it's always great to hear them.
Topics:linguisticssyntaxsemanticsmorphologyphoneticsphonologylanguage structurelanguage meaninglinguistic analysislanguage sounds
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