Linguistic Relativity Principle

Last session we've talked about the so called linguistic relativism.

That's theory by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf who claimed that there is a systematic relatiship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it, for instance the structure of a speaker's mother tongue influences the way his mind perceives the world.

difference in vocabulary -> difference in attitude or perception

During the studies of psycholinguistics everybody comes across the example of the Inuits who have about a hundred words for snow. Have a look at this link, which lists up the different words.

Moreover if you want to hear the Inuit language go here
(it's funny and the theory becomes a bit more interesting!)

Other examples which support this hypothesis are differences in the perception of spatial relations, for instance the most language have the spatial terms left - right and North - South. There are languages, however which do not use left - right, but only North - South, like Guugu Yimithir.

Other examples are presented in the texts
The Power of Language
or
Sapir-Whorf and what to tell students these days

Whorf is a pure determist and at first sight the examples seem to be logical, however there are even scientists who deny the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. One of them is Geoffrey K. Pullum.
In a blog Pullum himself posts the reason why the hypothesis cannot be true. He has written the essay The Great Eskimo Hoax and wants to clary that the hundred words for snow are is just a myth.

"The story about Inuit (or Inuktitut, or Yup'ik, or more generally, Eskimo) words for snow is completely wrong. People say that speakers of these languages have 23, or 42, or 50, or 100 words for snow --- the numbers often seem to have been picked at random. The spread of the myth was tracked in a paper by Laura Martin (American Anthropologist 88 (1986), 418-423), and publicized more widely by a later humorous embroidering of the theme by G. K. Pullum (reprinted as chapter 19 of his 1991 book of essays The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). But the Eskimoan language group uses an extraordinary system of multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation called postbases. The list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn't that long: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.

That does not mean there are huge numbers of unrelated basic terms for huge numbers of finely differentiated snow types. It means that the notion of fixing a number of snow words, or even a definition of what a word for snow would be, is meaningless for these languages. You could write down not just thousands but millions of words built from roots that refer to snow if you had the time. But they would all be derivatives of a fairly small number of roots. And you could write down just as many derivatives of any other root: fish, or coffee, or excrement."

I' ve cited the first part of Pullum's argumentation, but I highly recommend a further reading, so go on this blog and read more. If you are lazy then at least watch this video I found on youtube, which summarises Pullum's thought.

My opinion to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:

I don't think that language determines your thoughts completely, but rather influences it. For instance the mass media and advertisements always uses a subtle language in order to influence the readers' and consumers' thoughts. One example is the euphemism freedom fighter instead of terrorist.

It's on the tip of my tongue!

Everybody knows the situation which is presented in the comics:

tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

What is the tip-of-the tongue phenomenon?

The tip-of-the-tongue phenomen is characterized by being able to retrieve quite a lot of information about the target word without being able to retrieve the word itself.

You know the meaning of the word. You may know how many syllables the word has, or its initial sound or letter. But you can’t retrieve it all. This experience is coupled with a strong feeling (this is the frustrating part) that you know the word, and that it is somehow kept in your brains. When you eventually remember it, the experience is often as erratic and abrupt as the initial failure — typically it pops up later when you don not need it anymore!

Often a similar sounding word seems to block your the word which is on the tip of your tongue.

The tip-of-the tongue phenomenon probably occurs, because of a weaker connection between the meaning a word its phonetical realisation (the sound)

If you are interested in this phenomeno go on tip of the tongue: web extra have a look at the videos. Pedestrians are supposed to answer questions which at first sight seem to be easy, but these questions elicit the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. It's quite funny.

More over there is a questionaire with 25 various question. Go to the members of your family and try to do the experiment! Unfortunately you have to translate the questions into German, because the phenomenon would occur in a more intensified degree, if the speaker had to answer the questions in a L2.

Group Work on Second Language Acquisition

Todays topic is Second Language Acquisition.

I'd like to present a group work we've done today during our Psycholinguisics class. It sums up the most important ideas of the topic Second Language Acquisition based on the text by John H. Schumann (1986).

If you are interested on further reading I highly recommend the hompage by Vivian Cook. Here you have a wide overview about different topics regarding Second Language Acquisition.

Prototype Theory

Dear all,

I'd like to introduce the so called prototype theory.

brief definition:
Each language consists of a very high amount of concepts (the lexicon). Humans tend to bring them in order by defining certain categories, e.g. the category of animals, pieces of furniture, drinks or foods, etc. Each language however has its own prototypes for each category, e.g. if you ask an English speaker "Please give the name of a bird" he would probably name a robin, because this kind of bird is very present in the minds of the English, maybe because of its role as a tipical motif on christmas cards. A German, on the contrary, would probably rather tend to name a blackbird, maybe because of the song "Alle Vögel sind schon da".

The example with the birds is explained in every detail on:
http://culturitalia.uibk.ac.at/hispanoteca/Lexikon%20der%20Linguistik/po/PROTOTYP%20%20und%20PROTOTYPENSEMANTIK%20%20%20Prototipo.htm

Speech production - Phonetics of the English Language

Dear all,

With regard to the topic speech production I highly recommend the following link:

http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Eacadtech/phonetics/

Here the University of Iowa presents how the single sounds of the English language are produced.

At first click on articulatory anatomy and have a look at all the parts and muscles of the head that are deeply involved with speech production.

Then click on american/english (or on German, if you are interested in the phonetics of our mothertongue) and have a look at the production of the single sounds. The English language consists of about forty sounds which are introduced with very concrete examples. You can find out the different marks of each consonant and vowel, e.g. that a /v/ is a fricative, labiodental, voiced sound. Too much confusion? Don't worry, the homepage offers you step-by-step descriptions that make clear which parts in the articulatory system are used. Even little videos which show speakers, who are producing single sounds, are uploaded.

I am very fascinated by this presentation of a rather theoretical disciplin of linguistics and it really makes fun to develope how speech is produced!

You can compare this to the homepage of the International Phonetic Association http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ipa/ipa.html

but I think that the homepage of the Univiersity of Iowa comes up to the linguist's expectations.

Language Acquisition

Dear all,

If you are interested in the topic language acquisition at first have a closer look at these two links:

http://culturitalia.uibk.ac.at/hispanoteca/Lexikon%20der%20Linguistik/sp/SPRACHERWERB%20%20%20Adquisici%F3n%20de%20la%20lengua.htm

http://lexikon.anaman.de/lexikon.htm

brief definition:

The process by which a human being develops the capability to produce sounds and speech is called language acquisition. We have to differentiate first language acquisition and second language acquisition. The first concerns with the development of a mothertongue (L, the latter concerns with the acquisition of a second, foreign language (L2) learned both by children and by adults.

http://www.mutterspracherwerb.de/kurzdar1.htm

Turkish Children Learn Their Mother Tongue Earliest

A research conducted worldwide has established that Turkish children are the fastest at learning their native language.
The results were released at the International Association for the Study of Child Language’s 10th congress in Berlin, Germany, where it was indicated that Turkish children could speak their native language by the age of 2-3 years in a grammatically correct manner. Linguistics Professor Klann Delius noted that the Turkish language was easy to learn. “Suffixes in Turkish that determine person and tense are regular. Using them is like arranging Lego pieces.” According to the research, it takes 12 years for Arab speaking children, and 4-5 years for German children to acquire the grammatical mastery in their mother tongue. The congress held in Berlin is attended by about 800 linguists from around the world.

If you are interested in this congress have a look at the abstract of the topics presented there!
http://www.ctw-congress.de/iascl/papers.html

Witty puns!

Today I'd like to present the topic witty puns

What's a pun?

Answer:
"The leopard moved from 'spot' to 'spot'". That's a Pun - the leopard has spots on it's body and it moved from one place to another (spot). A "Pun" is a figure of speech and can be used in prose and poem. It bascically means double meaning. Pete walks up to u with a "bucket" on his head and asks do I look a little "pail"

see http://www.eduqna.com/Words-Wordplay/558-1-words-wordplay.html

I've to own up that it's not easy to find jokes or puns which are not in one's mothertongue.
As a German student of the English language I really have to cross borders in ordern to understand some of the jokes. That proves that the study of vocabulary, grammar, literature and linguistics can never be sufficient enough in order to look "behind the scenes" of a foreign language. On the contrary, I have to study more jokes and idiomatic expressions! ;-)

Here's a fantastic pun I found on
http://www.punoftheday.com/cgi-bin/disppuns.pl?ord=F&cat=0&sub=0&page=1

«He drove his expensive car into a tree and found out how the Mercedes bends.»

Confusion? Laughter? Did you get the joke? In this case it's easy, especially for me as a German. It works as follows:

The double meaning is hidden in the word bends. On the one hand it is the verb of the subordinate clause "and [he] found out how the Mercedes bends". To bend means to bend sth. out of shape, therefore the bodywork of the car. On the other on Benz is the last name of one of the founders of the automobile company. The pun is created by the homophony of the words.

As mentioned above it is not always easy to decode puns. Although Mercedes Benz is a world wide known German automobile company, there nevertheless might be people who cannot understand the joke.

In addition to this I'd like to mention William Shakespeare who already in the 17th century was a fantanstic writer who provided his characters with witty puns, e.g.

Claudio:Benedick, didst thou note the daughter of Signior Leonato?
Benedick: I noted her not, but I look’d on her” (Much Ado about Nothing)

Benedick’s quibble confirms a distinction between merely looking at and noticing closely.

see more on: http://www.bard.org/education/studyguides/muchadoaboutnothing/muchmore.html