Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Introduction to Linguistics
Fall 2004
Week 3 - Answers for homework and discussion (Intro to Ling, pp. 27-65 and CogLing, pp. 18-29).
Intro to Ling, pp. 27-65
1. How does air become sound?
How air becomes sound is generally quite simple. Air is pumped out of the lungs and into the trachea, a pipe moving up your chest and into your neck. As air moves through the voice box, a kind of notch in the trachea, where it is made resonant. This resonance is created as the air moves across the vocal cords. The vocal cords are stringy muscles which stretch across the inside of the voice box. As the air passes across them it is churned around and acquires resonance, the possibility for carrying sound. At this point, however, there is still no identifiable sound, just the potential for sound. Think of the wind. The wind moving across an open space makes no noise, but as it moves into trees it starts to make noise. The air then comes into either the mouth of the nasal cavity. In the mouth there are things called articulators. The prime articulator is the tongue. As the tongue touches some part of the mouth, the resonance which has been carried with the air up from the voice box becomes a specific sound. There are other articulators besides the tongue, such as the lips and the glottis and the thing to remember about them is that they move. It is when the air pushed up from the lungs is turned into resonance and fine-tuned by the articulators that specific sounds are made.
Speech sounds are classified based on two main criteria, their POA and MOA. The POA is easy, it simply refers to the location of the passive articulators used to make the sound when the sound is actually made. POA for consonants is quite easy because it usually involves actual physical contact between articulators or articulators and some rather stationary part of the oral cavity or glottis. POA in vowels is harder to get a feel for since there the articulators do not actually touch anything. MOA is related to the airflow and how it is free or impeded and the nature of the impediment. There are different classes of sounds based on MOA and airflow, they are (in the order of highly impeded to not impeded) stops, affricates, fricatives, nasals, liquids, glides (Liquids an glides are also referred to as semi-vowels), and vowels.
2. What is the main difference between vowels and consonants?
The difference between vowels and consonants is based on the position of the vocal folds. The vocal folds control air flow out of the voice box. In vowels the vocal folds are completely open. This means that air flows through the voice box is unobstructed. For this reason vowels carry much more resonant air and are much louder than consonants. In consonants there is some and actually a quite varied degree of obstruction of the airflow. The degree of obstruction varies greatly from total obstruction (stop sounds) to minimal (semi-vowels).
3. What is the difference between a vowel and the nucleus of a syllable?
All syllables require a nucleus. The nucleus is the peak or main part of the syllable and the nucleus is usually a vowel. In some cases, however, a limited number of consonants may act as the nucleus of a syllable. Such examples are /l/ and nasals like /n/. Take the noun weapon /wɛ pn/. In this case since there is no possible vowel in the second syllable. The consonant /n/ has to function as a nucleus. In such cases the /n/ is said to be syllabic and the sound is slightly different then for a strictly consonantal /n/. It is, however, more a notational, theoretical difference than a real phonetic one.
4. Can you think of any variables in English? List them and give some examples.
Some examples of social variables would be economic status, perceived ethnic status, gender, regional affiliation, and even job. People`s dialects are a conglomeration of all these possible variables mixed with certain linguistic variables. These are things we all need to consider all the time when approaching a speaking situation. Some strictly phonemic linguistic variables in the English of the United States, for example, would be nasalization, vowel quality (diphthongization), medial alveolar stop flapping, and r-deletion. The best study of these is the one conducted by Labov (1972) and mentioned in the beginning of this book. The main point to remember is that variation is constrained. It is based on the structure of language and is not the product of laziness or ignorance.
One highly variable linguistic unit across different varieties of English is the phoneme /r/. In thinking about the phoneme /r/ and its high degree of variability across and within dialects we need to first think about phonemes themselves and their highly idealized nature. Maybe it will help to think about individual sounds like keys on a keyboard. When typing all you have to do is hit the right key. It does not matter if you hit the key right in the center or on the top or bottom or any of the side edges. Either way, the right letter will appear. Sounds are like that too. Speakers don`t all make the same sounds in exactly the same way. This is even more impossible when we think about the fact that everyone`s mouth has a different shape. In order to get the target sound we need to get our tongue in approximately the right position. Different languages favor slightly different tongue positions and that is why many non-native speakers have accents even on simple sounds like /t/ and /k/. It is why we have variation (a lot of it) across single languages. Now, let`s turn to /r/.
As we saw from the text, /r/ is a semi-vowel. Not only is there a lot of air used in the making of the sound, but the tongue does not touch anything. This means that the entire tongue is used in the creation of the /r/ sound. In short, the mechanisms for making the /r/ sound are quite complicated and are subject to change rather more easily than say a /p/ or an /f/. One slight movement and the sound quality will change. Try it for yourself!! You need to learn how to play with your mouth to make new and exciting sounds and get a firm understanding of the ones you already know.
5. How can knowing about linguistic variability make us more effective teachers?
Giving our students our own highly personalized idealized version of language use in the target language environment may ultimately cause problems in the future because the students will be left with gaps in their knowledge of the TL and will probably be loaded down with dangerous preconceptions of what the language should be like. The bottom line is this: there no idealized or perfect form of any language and no one knows the complete system. Variation is the life blood of all languages. A native speaker`s collective knowledge of their language includes variation and they will engage in it freely without thinking about the mechanics of it. Just as linguists seek to describe language in a neutral fashion commenting on all the utterances they hear, so should language teachers try to teach the students the language as it is actually used by native speakers, all native speakers, not just a small sub-set of the native speakers they happen to like. Non-native speakers do not have to be experts in all the different kinds of variation, but they should have some idea about some of the major types or their comprehension might be seriously inhibited when to go to actually use the language in the TL environment.
The idea here is that in English, and this is not the case in all languages, not only is there no native-speaker set standard which dominates all other varieties, but there are actually many more non-native speakers than native-speakers. This calls into serious question the strict use of so-called native speaker norms when such norms are in the minority. All this makes our job as teachers of English very difficult. As teachers we have to have a norm which we follow, but we need to be open-minded in relation to other norms, even those that are outside the traditional region expanse of the language.
6. Briefly explain how variation can be affected by the linguistic context or environment? Give some examples.
The bottom line here is that variation is in the generative model rule-governed (constrained in the cognitive model). New Yorkers, for example, only drop r`s in certain linguistic environments. In phonology, it is the often environment which determines how sounds might change. The implicational chart on page 60 of the text shows how the phonological environment has an effect on the frequency of the variation. Don`t worry too much about this right now. Next week we will get to see how rule-governed phonological processes work. Variation is a phonological process that works in more or less the same way.
7. Do you see any similarities between phonological processes in L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition?
Yes, there are similarities. People in both situations seem to go through the same types of mistakes. Even the order of acquisition for individual sounds seem to be similar. It takes children years to acquire the sounds of their L1 at the acceptable adult level. Both L1 and L2 learners acquire similar types of sounds (unmarked sounds) first and marked sounds later. This often occurs regardless of the person`s first language.
8. Is there any evidence that interlanguage is based on universal principles?
Yes! This might be a bit difficult for you to understand at this point, but evidence from first language acquisition shows that babies undergoing FLA necessarily go through similar processes than people undergoing SLA. According to Chomsky much of the FLA process is simply identifying the individual and idiosyncratic properties that the child`s TL contains. In principle, SLA (or Interlanguage as the descriptive entity of those developmental stages) is the same. Interlanguage can be seen as a continuum which shows how a language learner, using the principles of UG to help them, has to unravel the mysteries of their TL. As they do so, they move away from reliance on their L1 and toward a reliance on the systems of the TL. Of course SLA takes longer than FLA because the amount of input is much smaller and the need for a second language is always much less than the need for a first language. Think about it.
9. What is markedness?
Markedness is a theory developed by the Prague school of linguistics way back in the 1920s. It is a simple idea which states that certain elements of language are more basic (less marked than others). A marked sound or structure is one that is somehow more complicated than others and as a result is less common in the languages of the world. Again it is a simple idea, but it goes far in being able to describe the phonetic inventories of languages as well as their structural possibilities. When we get deeper into phonology and language change and variation (soon) we will return to this term.
CogLing, pp. 18-29
10. What is the concept of space and how is it used in cognitive models of language?
The concept of space is one of the most basic and important elements in the field of cognitive linguistics. It has been used to basically set up the entire field and it can be argued that almost all the ideas currently used in cognitive linguistics really were developed based on simple investigations of space such as the kind we have seen in this short chapter.
The relation of language and the world
Principles of categorization
Prototypes
Conventionality
The idea which starts all this is that the development of language and the specific forms and meanings language uses are derived form the physical world. This links the development of language to what is known as Gestalt psychology, or the psychology of objects and their placing in the physical world. As language encapsulates the world the structures that language creates must in some way be representative of the world, but the representation is not exact, due to an inherent ambiguity of the physical world as we discussed last week. The language we create and use has to somehow represent the physical world and we therefore have to create terms which invoke meanings of physical relationships related to space. Thus space is very closely tied to our general cognitive development as well as our linguistic development and remember in the cognitive model a distinction is not made between the two, while it is in a very profound way in the generative model.
So, we have to find a way to encode spacial relations from the physical world on our cognition/language but it turns out that we can`t do it directly because cognition/language which is centered on making meaning from the physical world has to deal with all this incessant ambiguity. Thus, the terms we create and use to describe the physical world need to be abstract. They start out with some central or prototypical meaning and have to expand beyond that in order to really cover all the different ambiguities. Thus, from the study of space and spatial terms like prepositions we can see one of the basic ideas of language in the cognitive approach. This is the idea that language development and use are based on abstractions from central cores. Thus, all structures, all concepts in both thought and language are really categories of related points rather than specific. Everything is fuzzy. Another important aspect related to space is the idea of conventionality. Conventionality basically claims that certain structures come about simply because they are used. For example, the preposition on is used with boat for many reasons but one of these is the simple idea that it is learned and used because it is heard. This describes the basic model of usage-based linguistic systems.
11. How does the concept of space relate to construals?
Space relates to construals because, as we could see from the different but related connotations related to a certain preposition, different meanings are created based on the units contained. The combination of these units and the frames that they invoke play a pivotal role in creating a specific construal. Thus, perspective and foregrounding, the elements which go into creating a specific construal, are created by a certain correlation between the elements in the structure. This correlation comes from the specific properties or meanings associated with a particular linguistic units are derived from its different possibilities anas encased in its categorial meaning and function.
Basic Phonetics
It is unthinkable to conceive of a teacher of a given language trying to teach that language without a sound grasp of the phonetic features of that language. There has been a lot of debate over the years about the necessity of teaching students of a language the phonetic features of that language overtly. My personal feeling is that students of a certain profile (older, somewhat higher level, late starters) can certainly benefit from learning the basic phonetic features of the target language, but that for many other profile groups the overt teaching of phonetics is not necessary. What is undebatable, however, is the necessity of teachers being proficient in this, for all language teachers need to be able to function as junior speech therapists in that language teacher should be able to provide a basic feedback and personal instruction.
As all of you have already learned, Interlanguage mistakes come from a variety of sources, but these sources can be strongly differentiated as TL (Target language) internal or external. Basically put, mistakes, and for the moment we are interested mostly in pronunciation mistakes, either come from influences from other languages (external) or come from the learner`s incomplete knowledge of the TL itself (internal). In order to deal with both types of pronunciation mistakes, the teacher has to have a firm grounding in the phonetic systems of the TL. Knowing our enemies is half the battle, so this knowledge of phonetics is often imperative in being able to recognize the problems our students are experiencing.
If we are to take a contrastive approach (and we do this only with a serious grain of salt), then we have to go one step further and make sure that all teachers are familiar with the phonetic structure of the students` first, and possibly less importantly, other languages. Since you are all Koreans endeavoring, for the most part I believe, to teach in Korea and Korean happens to be your first language as well as that of your students, you have certain advantages. You speak Korean and can refer back to your own history of learning English. In theory anyway, you might be able to predict, based on the contrastive approach, where your students might have difficulty with pronunciation. These predictions without some sort of science backing them up, however, will remain just guesses. We can use our knowledge of phonetics both of the TL and the L1 of the students to help them overcome potential problems, particularly in certain students who might be older or don`t have a great ear for language. If they lack the ear, we can give them the feel. Each language feels different and by teaching languages using some strategies from basic phonetics, we can help our students discover what it feels like to speak that language.
Still another reason for learning basic phonetics is because you are non-native speakers of English. You possibly do not have the full range of native-speaker intuitions that are often so useful in the classroom. This relates not only to base-line (surface level) pronunciation factors (operations) but, more importantly, to morphological operations. Later in this course we will be looking in greater depth into how English works at the word level to combine and assimilate different units of meaning into complex words. It is at this stage that the basic terminology you have learned in this short unit of phonetics will be used again to describe phonological and morphological operations at the word level. To bring us back the point presented in the beginning of this paragraph, since you are non-native teachers of English, many of the results of these phonological and morphological operations are probably unfamiliar or at least unclear to you. This puts you at a disadvantage and that disadvantage must be compensated for. Guess how this can be done? By becoming aware of the systematic nature of these operations. I hope you are now convinced.
Sound Change and Variation
As the world becomes more connected and technology allows us to be exposed to much more, we find ourselves presented with new challenges. Teaching English, or any language for that matter, from books written from a prescriptive viewpoint is no longer deemed effective or acceptable. Koreans are now able to be exposed to a barrage of English on a daily basis if they so wish. Once more, it not only the nice text book English, that many of you grew up with. Today, through various sources, Koreans are exposed to a multitude of different regional and social dialects. Variability is a factor that teachers of English, no matter how old they are or whether they want to or not, have to deal with. This is a good thing, because it means that we can open the file on authenticity. It also means, however, that the well-educated and trained English teacher has to be savvy in the different varieties of English.
One of the greatest gifts linguistics has given to the field of language teaching is that it has freed language instruction from the confines of prescriptionist dogma. What native speakers actually say, as long as there are no performance errors involved, is acceptable as the language. This basic concept has had huge effects on the types of materials teachers are able to implement in the classroom. Unfortunately, however, it has yet to have large effects on the way certain components of language, most notably grammar, is taught. This freeing up of the language also creates special challenges for the language teacher, and particularly the non-native speaker variety.
Teachers today have to know how to explain non-standard varieties of the language they are teaching. You as well as your students are constantly being bombarded with many different forms of English. This is not limited to spoken English either. Web-based communication tends to be less formal and therefore reveals variation much more than conventionally written sources. On web-sites, in chat rooms, through e-mail readers all over the world are constantly being exposed to non-standard and often non-native varieties of English. English teachers today, therefore, have a job to tackle that their counterparts 20 years in the past never had to deal with.
Teachers today have to guide their students through the patchwork of English varieties without being overtly prescriptive. They have to be able let the students know what is standard, at least for a certain major geographical region, and what is to be heard and respected but not necessarily used in all contexts. We have to tie language to extra-linguistic context more than ever as we endeavor to help our students function in English.
This can be made much harder when students have internalized certain non-standard forms without realizing that they are indeed non-standard. In Korea this includes the use of what is known as Konglish. Koreans who use Konglish do so, for the most part, in the mistaken belief that it is acceptable English, or that it is even standard English because they are not corrected and/or because it is prevalent and accepted in the environment. In theory, Konglish has little to do with English. Konglish is Korean-based in most respects. It is the result of a large amount of borrowings from English, among with some other languages, into Korean in recent years. It will take a quite few years before these Konglish words and expressions are fully assimilated into Korean and until then it Konglish will continue to be a problem because it recent enough to still seem foreign. All this is heightened by socio-linguistic factors relating primarily to education level. A thorough study of this phenomena would make an excellent thesis and might just make someone`s career. No good research has been done on this as far as I know.
In Korea, the whole Konglish debate has been clouded by fact that few people are able to differentiate between Konglish and Koreans in the interlanguage stage of English development. Much of what is commonly thought of as Konglish is really, Korean-tainted English. It is the job of the English teacher to point out the difference and this requires some knowledge about linguistic variation.
Below you will find some notes on Macken and Ferguson. (1981). `Phonological universals in language acquisition`, in Winitz, (Ed.) Native Language and Foreign Language Acquisition. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences. I have used to use this article previously in this course, but since I promised you on day one that I would not be forcing you to read any technical articles, I will simply include my comments here and make the article available in the office for those who want to come and copy it and other related articles.
Phonological universals
This paper covers a wide spectrum of important ideas in just a few short pages. While the main focus of the paper is on first language acquisition phonological universals, the authors make some important and potentially far-reaching claims about second language acquisition as well. The first of these claims is that second language acquisition, particularly of phonetic values and phonemes (Under the belief that the authors of this paper and I share, namely that language is prey to the same cognitive controls as everything else in the brain and that all the structural components of language (syntax, morphology, phonology) behave along the same lines as dictated by a limited range of abstract cognitive constraints, we can assume that other parts of language and, indeed, any other facet of human thought processes will be prey to the same basic set of parameters.), seems to be controlled by a mesh of different and sometimes conflicting systems. These systems work togther to create language as we know it, but the systems are in a constant state of conflict, ever vying for prominence.
People going through the process of language acquisition, even those with the same L1, often follow the same set of milestones in the acquisition of phonemes, but there is also a great deal of variation that must be accounted for. This tells is it is, therefore, not enough for teachers to do a contrastive analysis of the students` first and second language. Research has shown that there are many phonological processes which are clearly not related to L1 interference.
Universals, as they have been sketchily identified in this paper, are not the key to the solution either, particularly in SLA. Second language learners do seem to follow some universal principles. Much was discussed about the notion that voiceless stops and particularly voiceless stops made in the front of the mouth are simpler to make than other sounds and therefore come first regardless of their L1. Think about it. Have you noticed this in your students?
In relation to this, Macken and Ferguson identify a certain pattern of behavior that children learning their first language seem to go through. This seems to be a universal, they argue imposed by cognitive constraints. We might go one step further and claim that this is the universal learning code and even second language learners will go through the same set of operations depending on how the receive input in their second language. The more closely the acquisition of input resembles the patterns of acquisition in the L1, the more closely their behavior will follow this universal. This is a controversial claim if one believes strongly in the LAD and the critical period hypothesis. It also implies that the implementation of different teaching approaches (inductive -vs- deductive) will have wide ranging effects on whether the learner will be able to have the universal nature of language acquisition reactivated.
Teachers have to look at the level of the cognitive development of the learner. Younger learners of both L1 and L2 seems to go through certain phonological processes that older learners do not (reduplication of initial syllables in multi-syllabic words is an example). It is these cognitive differences, Macken and Ferguson claim, that account for the individual differences that are often spotted in both first and second language acquisition. This means that cognitive factors are able to override L1 influence as well as universal features in certain situations.
At first glance this creates a huge mess for teachers to try to figure out, but it`s really not that complicated or dark a picture. It has long been known that extra-linguistic factors are one of the most important aspects of second language acquisition. The effects of the L1 are also well documented. Universals are a rather new idea and the facts on them are still sketchy and unsubstantiated. What is available is not hard to understand. What is new here is the claim that all these systems are somehow integrated and constantly fighting for the right to control the given linguistic situation.
How does all this effect us as teachers? Well, it`s not far different from what was written here earlier. Teacher have to be trained to recognize what is going on with their students` pronunciation or any other facet of language. They also have to know how the use of certain approaches to teaching will effect the overall cognitive situation of the learning. Based on what Macken and Ferguson wrote we can assume that a more communicative-type approach with less overt teaching of rules and more freedom for the students to figure things out for themselves, albeit with carful control of the input, will work to reactivate universals.
The last question that remains is: Do we really want to, or need to, reactivate universals in later acquisition processes. The quick reaction to this is yes, but there is no clear indication that this is true. Much depends on the age and cognitive development of the students. Are they fully cognitively developed? For older students who are fully developed cognitively, it might be more efficient to go the overt route. Universal acquisition, if it happens might lengthen the process. Remember, it often takes children acquiring their L1 much longer than adults learning an L2 to actually do so, once we compensate for environmental factors. Think about this and let me know what your feelings are on the issue next week.