1.
Generative grammar
–
Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. Noam Chomsky first used the term in relation to the linguistics of grammar that he developed in the late 1950s. Linguists who follow the approach have been called generativists. The generative school has focused on the study of syntax, but has also addressed other aspects of a languages structure, early versions of Chomskys theory were called transformational grammar, which is still used as a general term that includes his subsequent theories. There are a number of versions of generative grammar currently practiced within linguistics, a contrasting approach is that of constraint-based grammars. Where a generative grammar attempts to list all the rules that result in all well-formed sentences, in stochastic grammar, grammatical correctness is taken as a probabilistic variable, rather than a discrete property. There are a number of different approaches to generative grammar, common to all is the effort to come up with a set of rules or principles that formally defines each and every one of the members of the set of well-formed expressions of a natural language. Chomsky, in an acceptance speech delivered in India in 2001. Generative grammar has been under development since the late 1950s, and has many changes in the types of rules. In tracing the development of ideas within generative grammar, it is useful to refer to various stages in the development of the theory. The so-called standard theory corresponds to the model of generative grammar laid out by Chomsky in 1965. A core aspect of standard theory is the distinction between two different representations of a sentence, called deep structure and surface structure, the two representations are linked to each other by transformational grammar. The so-called extended standard theory was formulated in the late 1960s, features are, syntactic constraints generalized phrase structures The so-called revised extended standard theory was formulated between 1973 and 1976. It contains restrictions upon X-bar theory, move α An alternative model of syntax based on the idea that notions like subject, direct object, and indirect object play a primary role in grammar. Chomskys Lectures on Government and Binding and Barriers, generative grammars can be described and compared, with the aid of the Chomsky hierarchy in the 1950s. This sets out a series of types of formal grammars with increasing expressive power, at a higher level of complexity are the context-free grammars. The derivation of a sentence by such a grammar can be depicted as a derivation tree, linguists working within generative grammar often view such trees as a primary object of study. According to this view, a sentence is not merely a string of words, such a tree diagram is also called a phrase marker
Generative grammar
–
Linguistics
2.
Phonology
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Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages, the word phonology can also refer to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the systems which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax. Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics, note that this distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid 20th century. The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek φωνή, phōnḗ, voice, sound, according to Clark et al. it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. The history of phonology may be traced back to the Ashtadhyayi, Baudouin de Courtenays work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of alternations, and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure according to E. F. K. Koerner. An influential school of phonology in the period was the Prague school. One of its members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose Grundzüge der Phonologie. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme. Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century, in 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for generative phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features and these features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a fixed set. There are at least two levels of representation, underlying representation and surface phonetic representation, ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation. An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable, furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969. In this view, phonology is based on a set of phonological processes that interact with one another, which ones are active. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups, prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance
Phonology
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Nikolai Trubetzkoy, 1920s
3.
Syntax
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In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, specifically word order. The term syntax is used to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages, in mathematics, syntax refers to the rules governing the behavior of mathematical systems, such as formal languages used in logic. The word syntax comes from Ancient Greek, σύνταξις coordination, which consists of σύν syn, together, and τάξις táxis, a basic feature of a languages syntax is the sequence in which the subject, verb, and object usually appear in sentences. Over 85% of languages usually place the subject first, either in the sequence SVO or the sequence SOV, the other possible sequences are VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV, the last three of which are rare. In the West, the school of thought came to be known as traditional grammar began with the work of Dionysius Thrax. For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a known as grammaire générale. This system took as its premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and therefore there is a single. It became apparent that there was no such thing as the most natural way to express a thought, the Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic. Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in terms of Subject – Copula – Predicate, initially, this view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such as Franz Bopp. The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th century, there are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. One school of thought, founded in the works of Derek Bickerton, sees syntax as a branch of biology, other linguists take a more Platonistic view, since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract formal system. Yet others consider syntax a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages, the hypothesis of generative grammar is that language is a structure of the human mind. The goal of grammar is to make a complete model of this inner language. This model could be used to all human language and to predict the grammaticality of any given utterance. This approach to language was pioneered by Noam Chomsky, most generative theories assume that syntax is based upon the constituent structure of sentences. Generative grammars are among the theories that focus primarily on the form of a sentence and this complex category is notated as instead of V. NP\S is read as a category that searches to the left for an NP and outputs a sentence. The category of verb is defined as an element that requires two NPs to form a sentence
Syntax
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A syntactic parse of "Alfred spoke" under the dependency formalism
4.
Pragmatics
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Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology. In this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, the ability to understand another speakers intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. The sentence You have a light is ambiguous. Without knowing the context, the identity of the speaker, and his or her intent, for example, It could mean that the space that belongs to you has green ambient lighting. It could mean that you are driving through a traffic signal. It could mean that you no longer have to wait to continue driving and it could mean that you are permitted to proceed in a non-driving context. It could mean that your body has a green glow and it could mean that you possess a light bulb that is tinted green. Similarly, the sentence Sherlock saw the man with binoculars could mean that Sherlock observed the man by using binoculars, the meaning of the sentence depends on an understanding of the context and the speakers intent. This suggests that sentences do not have meaning intrinsically, there is not an associated with a sentence or word. The cat sat on the mat is a sentence in English, if someone were to say to someone else, The cat sat on the mat, this is an example of an utterance. Thus, there is no such thing as a sentence, term, expression or word symbolically representing a true meaning, it is underspecified. The meaning of an utterance, on the hand, is inferred based on linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the non-linguistic context of the utterance. In mathematics with Berrys paradox there arose a systematic ambiguity with the word definable, the ambiguity with words shows that the descriptive power of any human language is limited. Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguistics as outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure, in many cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has an analyzable structure, composed of parts that can be defined in relation to others. Pragmatics first engaged only in study, as opposed to examining the historical development of language. However, it rejected the notion that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the space of langue. Meanwhile, historical pragmatics has also come into being, the study of the speakers meaning, not focusing on the phonetic or grammatical form of an utterance, but instead on what the speakers intentions and beliefs are
Pragmatics
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Topics and terminology
5.
Semiotics
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Semiotics is the study of meaning-making, the study of sign processes and meaningful communication. This includes the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, the semiotic tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications. As different from linguistics, however, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science, however. They examine areas belonging also to the life sciences—such as how organisms make predictions about, in general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study, the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics. John Locke used the term semiotike in book four, chapter 21 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, an intelligence capable of learning by experience, and which is philosophical logic pursued in terms of signs and sign processes. The Peirce scholar and editor Max H. Fisch claimed in 1978 that semeiotic was Peirces own preferred rendering of Lockes σημιωτική, Charles W. Morris followed Peirce in using the term semiotic and in extending the discipline beyond human communication to animal learning and use of signals. Ferdinand de Saussure, however, founded his semiotics, which he called semiology, in the social sciences, possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of psychology, and hence of general psychology. It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them, since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be applicable in linguistics. While the Saussurean semiotic is dyadic, the Peircean semiotic is triadic, Peircean semiotics further subdivides each of the three triadic elements into three sub-types. For example, signs can be icons, indices, and symbols, Thomas Sebeok assimilated semiology to semiotics as a part to a whole, and was involved in choosing the name Semiotica for the first international journal devoted to the study of signs. For Derrida, il ny a pas de hors-texte and he was in obvious opposition to materialists and marxists who argued that a sign has to point towards a real meaning, and cannot be controlled by the referents closed-loop references. The importance of signs and signification has been recognized much of the history of philosophy. Plato and Aristotle both explored the relationship between signs and the world, and Augustine considered the nature of the sign within a conventional system and these theories have had a lasting effect in Western philosophy, especially through scholastic philosophy. In contrast to this, human understanding adds to the animal Umwelt a relation of self-identity within objects which transforms objects experienced into things as well as +, –,0 objects, Peirces distinguished between the interpretant and the interpreter
Semiotics
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Chart
semiotics of social networking
Semiotics
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Color-coding hot- and cold-water faucets (taps) is common in many cultures but, as this example shows, the coding may be rendered meaningless because of context. The two faucets (taps) probably were sold as a coded set, but the code is unusable (and ignored), as there is a single water supply.
Semiotics
–
Signaling and communication between the
Astatotilapia burtoni
Semiotics
–
Topics and terminology
6.
Sociolinguistics
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Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics. It is historically related to linguistic anthropology and the distinction between the two fields has even been questioned. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, the study of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of his 1939 article Sociolinguistics in India published in Man in India. Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by such as William Labov in the US. For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of attitudes that a particular vernacular would not be considered appropriate language use in a business or professional setting. Sociolinguists might also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, the study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the given to the use of different varieties of language in different social situations. William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics and he is especially noted for introducing the quantitative study of language variation and change, making the sociology of language into a scientific discipline. Also, sociolinguistics can study a gradual transition of individual values of a word in the context its semantics which occur in some ethnic, altyntsev studied the semantics of the word love among the Ashkenazi Jews from Udmurtia and Tatarstan. Sociolinguistic interviews are a part of collecting data for sociolinguistic studies. There is an interviewer, who is conducting the study, and a subject, or informant, who is the interviewee. In order to get a grasp on a linguistic form and how it is used in the dialect of the subject. There are five different styles, ranging from formal to casual, the most formal style would be elicited by having the subject read a list of minimal pairs. Minimal pairs are pairs of words differ in only one phoneme. Having the subject read a word list will elicit a formal register, the reading passage style is next down on the formal register, and the interview style is when an interviewer can finally get into eliciting a more casual speech from the subject. Of course, the most sought after type of speech is the casual style and this type of speech is difficult if not impossible to elicit because of the Observers Paradox. The closest one might come to CS in an interview is when the subject is interrupted by a friend or family member
Sociolinguistics
–
Topics and terminology
7.
Evolutionary linguistics
–
Evolutionary linguistics is a subfield of psycholinguistics that studies the psychosocial and cultural factors involved in the origin of language and the development of linguistic universals. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data, inspired by the natural sciences, especially by biology, August Schleicher became the first to compare changing languages to evolving species. He introduced the representation of language families as a tree in articles published in 1853. Stammbaumtheorie proved very productive for comparative linguistics, but did not solve the problem of studying the origin of language. Some scholars abandoned the question of the origin of language as unsolvable, famously, the Société Linguistique de Paris in 1866 refused to admit any further papers on the subject. Joseph Jastrow published a theory of the evolution of language in the seventh volume of Science,1886. The field re-appeared in 1988 in the Linguistic Bibliography as a subfield of psycholinguistics, in 1990, Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom published their paper Natural Language and Natural Selection which strongly argued for an adaptationist approach to language origins. Evolutionary linguistics as a field is rapidly emerging as a result of developments in neighboring disciplines, to what extent languages features are determined by genes, a hotly debated dichotomy in linguistics, has had new light shed upon it by the discovery of the FOXP2 gene. An English family with a severe, heritable language dysfunction was found to have a copy of this gene. Mutations of the gene in mice cause reductions in size. If both copies are damaged, the Purkinje layer develops abnormally, runting is more common, additionally, higher presence of FOXP2 in songbirds is correlated to song changes, with downregulation causing incomplete and inaccurate song imitation in zebra finches. In general, evidence suggests that the protein is vital to neuroplasticity, there is little support, however, for the idea that FOXP2 is the grammar gene or that it had much to do with the relatively recent emergence of syntactical speech. Another controversial dichotomy is the question of human language is solely human or on a continuum with animal communication systems. Studies in ethology have forced researchers to reassess many claims of human abilities for language. For instance, Tecumseh Fitch has argued that the larynx is not unique to humans. Similarly, once held uniquely human traits such as formant perception, combinatorial phonology, as it leaves no fossils, languages form and even its presence are extremely hard or impossible to deduce from physical evidence. Computational modeling is now accepted as an approach to assure the internal consistency of language-evolution scenarios. Approximately one-third of all papers presented at the 2010 Evolution of Language conference rely at least in part on computer simulations, one original researcher in the field is Luc Steels, head of the research units of Sony CSL in Paris and the AI Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Evolutionary linguistics
–
Diagrammatic representation of the
divergence of modern
taxonomic groups from their
common ancestor
8.
Forensic linguistics
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It is a branch of applied linguistics. The discipline of linguistics is not homogenous, it involves a range of experts. The phrase forensic linguistics first appeared in 1968 when Jan Svartvik, during the early days of forensic linguistics in the United Kingdom, the legal defense for many criminal cases questioned the authenticity of police statements. At the time, customary police procedure for taking suspects statements dictated that it be in a specific format, statements by witnesses are very seldom made in a coherent or orderly fashion, with speculation and backtracking done out loud. The delivery is often too fast-paced, causing important details to be left out, early work of forensic linguistics in the United States concerned the rights of individuals with regard to understanding their Miranda rights during the interrogation process. An early application of linguistics in the United States was related to the status of trademarks as words or phrases in the language. In the 1980s, Australian linguists discussed the application of linguistics and sociolinguistics to legal issues and they discovered that a phrase such as the same language is open to interpretation. Aboriginal people have their own understanding and use of English, something that is not always appreciated by speakers of the dominant version of English, the Aboriginal people also bring their own culturally based, interactional styles to the interview. The range of topics within forensic linguistics is diverse, but research occurs in the following areas and that includes the study of text types and forms of analysis. Any text or item of spoken language can potentially be a text when it is used in a legal or criminal context. It can also refer to the attempts at making legal language more comprehensible to laypeople. Intonational emphasis, voice pitch and the extent to which there is cooperation between the caller and the recipient at any one time are very important in analysing an emergency call. Full cooperation includes frank and timely responses, urgency plays a role in emergency calls, so hesitations, signs of evasiveness, and incomplete or overly short answers indicate that the caller might be making a false or hoax call. A genuine call has distinctive interlocking and slight overlap of turns, the recipient trusts the caller to provide accurate information and the caller trusts the recipient to ask only pertinent questions. If the caller uses a pitch at the end of every turn, it might represent a lack of commitment. The call ideally moves from nil knowledge on the part of the recipient to an amount of knowledge in a minimum possible period of time. This makes the emergency call unlike any other kind of service encounter, threat is a counterpart of a promise and is an important feature in a ransom demand. Ransom demands are also examined to identify genuine and false threats
Forensic linguistics
–
Forensic science
9.
Internet linguistics
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Internet linguistics is a domain of linguistics advocated by the English linguist David Crystal. It studies new language styles and forms that have arisen under the influence of the Internet and other New Media, studying the emerging language on the Internet can help improve conceptual organization, translation and web usability. This study is intended to both linguists and web users. The study of Internet linguistics can be effectively done through four main perspectives, sociolinguistics, education, stylistics, the Internet continues to play a significant role in both encouraging as well as diverting attention away from the usage of languages. David Crystal has identified four main perspectives for further investigation – the sociolinguistic perspective, the perspective, the stylistic perspective. The four perspectives are effectively interlinked and affect one another and this perspective deals with how society views the impact of Internet development on languages. The advent of the Internet has revolutionized communication in many ways, it changed the way people communicate, significant avenues include but are not limited to SMS text messaging, e-mails, chatgroups, virtual worlds and the Web. The evolution of these new mediums of communications has raised concern with regards to the way language is being used. At a personal level, CMC such as SMS Text Messaging, some examples include the iPhone and the BlackBerry. In schools, it is not uncommon for educators and students to be given personalized school e-mail accounts for communication and interaction purposes, classroom discussions are increasingly being brought onto the Internet in the form of discussion forums. These forms of social networking and media are slated to rise as educators from all over the world continue to seek new ways to better engage students. ”This will affect the way language is used as students. At a professional level, it is a sight for companies to have their computers and laptops hooked up onto the Internet. This greatly facilitates internal and external communication, mobile communications such as smart phones are increasingly making their way into the corporate world. In general, these new CMCs that are possible by the Internet have altered the way people use language – there is heightened informality. However, as David Crystal puts it, these should be seen positively as it reflects the power of the creativity of a language, the sociolinguistics of the Internet may also be examined through five interconnected themes. Multilingualism – It looks at the prevalence and status of languages on the Internet. Language change – From a sociolinguistic perspective, language change is influenced by the constraints of technology. It explores the changes over time, with emphasis on Internet lingo
Internet linguistics
–
Source: Internet World Stats
Internet linguistics
–
An
Opte Project visualization of
routing paths through a portion of the Internet
10.
Language acquisition
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Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition is one of the human traits, because non-humans do not communicate by using language. Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants acquisition of their native language and this is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition of additional languages. The capacity to use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. Language can be vocalized as in speech, or manual as in sign, human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand a number of sentences. Evidence suggests that individual has three recursive mechanisms that allow sentences to go indeterminately. These three mechanisms are, relativization, complementation and coordination, some early observation-based ideas about language acquisition were proposed by Plato, who felt that word-meaning mapping in some form was innate. In a more modern context, empiricists, like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, proponents of behaviorism argued that language may be learned through a form of operant conditioning. In B. F. Skinners Verbal Behaviour, he suggested that the use of a sign, such as a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus. Some empiricist theories of language include the statistical learning theory. Charles F. Hockett of language acquisition, relational frame theory, functionalist linguistics, social interactionist theory, Skinners behaviourist idea was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky in a review article in 1959, calling it largely mythology and a serious delusion. Arguments against Skinners idea of language acquisition through operant conditioning include the fact that children often ignore language corrections from adults. Instead, children follow a pattern of using an irregular form of a word correctly, making errors later on. For example, a child may learn the word gave. Eventually, the child will go back to learning the correct word. The pattern is difficult to attribute to Skinners idea of operant conditioning as the way that children acquire language. Chomsky argued that if language were solely acquired through behavioral conditioning, children would not likely learn the use of a word
Language acquisition
–
Learning box for language acquisition
11.
Language education
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Language education refers to the process and practice of acquiring a second or foreign language. It primarily is a branch of applied linguistics, however can be considered an interdisciplinary field, there are four main learning categories for language education, communicative competencies, proficiencies, cross-cultural experiences, and multiple literacies. Increasing globalization has created a large need for people in the workforce who can communicate in multiple languages, the uses of common languages are in areas such as trade, tourism, international relations, technology, media, and science. Many countries such as Korea, Japan and China frame education policies to teach at least one language at the primary and secondary school levels. However, some such as India, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan. According to GAO, China has recently been putting enormous importance on foreign language learning, although the need to learn foreign languages is older than human history itself, the origins of modern language education are in the study and teaching of Latin in the 17th century. John Amos Comenius was one of people who tried to reverse this trend. He composed a complete course for learning Latin, covering the school curriculum. In this work, Comenius also outlined his theory of language acquisition and he is one of the first theorists to write systematically about how languages are learned and about pedagogical methodology for language acquisition. He held that language acquisition must be allied with sensation and experience, the schoolroom should have models of things, and failing that, pictures of them. As a result, he published the worlds first illustrated childrens book. The study of Latin diminished from the study of a language to be used in the real world to a subject in the school curriculum. Such decline brought about a new justification for its study and it was then claimed that its study developed intellectual abilities, and the study of Latin grammar became an end in and of itself. Grammar schools from the 16th to 18th centuries focused on teaching the grammatical aspects of Classical Latin, advanced students continued grammar study with the addition of rhetoric. The study of modern languages did not become part of the curriculum of European schools until the 18th century, based on the purely academic study of Latin, students of modern languages did much of the same exercises, studying grammatical rules and translating abstract sentences. Oral work was minimal, and students were required to memorize grammatical rules. This tradition-inspired method became known as the grammar-translation method, innovation in foreign language teaching began in the 19th century and became very rapid in the 20th century. It led to a number of different and sometimes conflicting methods, the earliest applied linguists included Jean Manesca, Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff, Henry Sweet, Otto Jespersen, and Harold Palmer
Language education
–
Henry Sweet was a key figure in establishing the
applied linguistics tradition in language teaching
Language education
–
High school Spanish taught as a second
language to a class of native
English speakers at an
American private school in
Massachusetts.
12.
Neurolinguistics
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Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, Neurolinguistics is historically rooted in the development in the 19th century of aphasiology, the study of linguistic deficits occurring as the result of brain damage. Aphasiology attempts to structure to function by analyzing the effect of brain injuries on language processing. The work of Broca and Wernicke established the field of aphasiology, harry Whitaker popularized neurolinguistics in the United States in the 1970s, founding the journal Brain and Language in 1974. The N400 was the first language-relevant brain response to be identified, much work in neurolinguistics involves testing and evaluating theories put forth by psycholinguists and theoretical linguists. Neurolinguistics research is carried out in all the areas of linguistics, the main linguistic subfields. Much work in neurolinguistics has, like Brocas and Wernickes early studies, another area of neurolinguistics literature involves the use of electrophysiological techniques to analyze the rapid processing of language in time. Another topic is the relationship between brain structures and language acquisition, ping Li, Jennifer Legault, Kaitlyn A. Litcofsky, May 2014. Since one of the focuses of this field is the testing of linguistic and psycholinguistic models, modern brain imaging techniques have contributed greatly to a growing understanding of the anatomical organization of linguistic functions. Brain imaging methods used in neurolinguistics may be classified into hemodynamic methods, electrophysiological methods, hemodynamic techniques take advantage of the fact that when an area of the brain works at a task, blood is sent to supply that area with oxygen. Such techniques include PET and fMRI, functional near-infrared spectroscopy is another hemodynamic method used in language tasks. Electrophysiological techniques take advantage of the fact that when a group of neurons in the fire together. The technique of EEG measures this electric current using sensors on the scalp, in addition to these non-invasive methods, electrocorticography has also been used to study language processing. On the other hand, the location of activity can be difficult to identify in EEG, consequently. Research using EEG and MEG generally focuses on event-related potentials, which are distinct brain responses elicited in response to a particular stimulus, studies using ERP may focus on each ERPs latency, amplitude, or topography. Some important and common ERP components include the N400, the negativity, the early left anterior negativity, the P600. Neurolinguists employ a variety of techniques in order to use brain imaging to draw conclusions about how language is represented and processed in the brain. These techniques include the subtraction paradigm, mismatch design, violation-based studies, various forms of priming, the mismatch negativity is a rigorously documented ERP component frequently used in neurolinguistic experiments
Neurolinguistics
–
An image of neural pathways in the brain taken using
diffusion tensor imaging
Neurolinguistics
–
Surface of the human brain, with
Brodmann areas numbered
Neurolinguistics
–
Images of the brain recorded with
PET (top) and
fMRI (bottom). In the PET image, the red areas are the most active. In the fMRI image, the yellowest areas are the areas that show the greatest difference in activation between two tasks (watching a moving stimulus, versus watching a black screen).
Neurolinguistics
13.
Linguistic prescription
–
Linguistic prescription is the practice of elevating one variety or manner of language use over another. It may imply that some forms are incorrect, improper, or illogical, or lack communicative effect, sometimes informed by linguistic purism, these normative practices may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, grammar, semantics, pronunciation, and syntax. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use, Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach what a particular society perceives as a correct form, or advise on effective communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to change, if radical. Prescriptive approaches to language are often contrasted with linguistics, which observes. The basis of research is text analysis and field study. Description, however, may include researchers observations of their own language usage, the chief aim of linguistic prescription can be to specify standard language forms in a way that is easily taught and learned. Prescription may apply to most aspects of language, including spelling, grammar, semantics, pronunciation, syntax, while such a lingua franca may evolve by itself, the desire to formulate and define it is widespread in most parts of the world. Writers or communicators often adhere to prescriptive rules to make their communication clearer, similarly, stability of a language over time helps one to understand writings from the past. In addition, it is useful to have a standard so as to be able to decide whether or not a speaker or writer is using an educated form of the language. Linguistic prescription may also be used to impose a political ideology, during the second half of the 20th century, politically motivated efforts driven by various advocacy groups had considerable influence on language use under the broad banner of political correctness. These successfully imposed special rules for anti-sexist, anti-racist or generically anti-discriminatory language, george Orwell criticized the use of euphemisms and convoluted phrasing as a means of hiding insincerity in Politics and the English Language. His fictional Newspeak is a parody of ideologically motivated linguistic prescriptivism, prescription presupposes authorities whose judgment may be followed by other speakers and writers. The Duden grammar has a status for German. Although lexicographers often see their work as purely descriptive, dictionaries are widely regarded as prescriptive authorities, books such as Lynne Trusss Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which argues for stricter adherence to prescriptive punctuation rules, also seek to exert an influence. Linguistic prescription is regulated formally in some places, the Académie française in Paris is a French national body whose recommendations are widely respected, though not legally enforceable there. In Germany and the Netherlands, recent spelling reforms were devised by teams of linguists commissioned by the government, some met with significant dissent, for example the German orthography reform of 1996. Other kinds of authorities exist in specific settings, such as establishing a house style specifying preferred spellings or grammatical forms
Linguistic prescription
–
The Royal Spanish Academy, Madrid
Linguistic prescription
–
Ptolemaic hieroglyphics from the
Temple of Kom Ombo
Linguistic prescription
–
Samuel Johnson, ca. 1772
14.
Origin of language
–
The origin of language in the human species has been the topic of scholarly discussions for several centuries. In spite of this, there is no consensus on the origin or age of human language. The topic is difficult to study because of the lack of direct evidence, many argue that the origins of language probably relate closely to the origins of modern human behavior, but there is little agreement about the implications and directionality of this connection. This shortage of evidence has led many scholars to regard the entire topic as unsuitable for serious study. Today, there are numerous hypotheses about how, why, when, despite this, there is scarcely more agreement today than a hundred years ago, when Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection provoked a rash of armchair speculation on the topic. Some theories see language mostly as an innate faculty—largely genetically encoded, other theories regard language as a mainly cultural system—learned through social interaction. Berwick, suggests it is compatible with modern biology. What we do not see is any kind of gradualism in new technologies or innovations like fire, shelters. Berwick and Chomsky therefore suggest language emerged approximately between 200,000 years ago and 60,000 years ago and that leaves us with about 130,000 years, or approximately 5, 000–6,000 generations of time for evolutionary change. This is not overnight in one generation as some have inferred—but neither is it on the scale of geological eons, a majority of linguistic scholars as of 2015 hold continuity-based theories, but they vary in how they envision language development. Others in this intellectual camp—notably Ib Ulbæk—hold that language evolved not from primate communication but from primate cognition, where vocal precursors are concerned, many continuity theorists envisage language evolving from early human capacities for song. Ritual/speech coevolution theory exemplifies this approach, scholars in this intellectual camp point to the fact that even chimpanzees and bonobos have latent symbolic capacities that they rarely—if ever—use in the wild. Because the emergence of language lies so far back in human prehistory, another approach inspects early human fossils, looking for traces of physical adaptation to language use. In some cases, when the DNA of extinct humans can be recovered, a further study by Q. D. Atkinson suggests that successive population bottlenecks occurred as our African ancestors migrated to other areas, leading to a decrease in genetic and phenotypic diversity. Atkinson argues that these bottlenecks also affected culture and language, suggesting that the further away a particular language is from Africa, the fewer phonemes it contains. By way of evidence, Atkinson claims that todays African languages tend to have large numbers of phonemes. Relying heavily on Atkinsons work, a subsequent study has explored the rate at which phonemes develop naturally, the results suggest that language first evolved around 350, 000–150,000 years ago, which is around the time when modern Homo sapiens evolved. In 1861, historical linguist Max Müller published a list of speculative theories concerning the origins of spoken language, the bow-wow or cuckoo theory, which Müller attributed to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, saw early words as imitations of the cries of beasts and birds
Origin of language
–
"Hmmmmm" redirects here. For the sound, see
Hum (sound).
Origin of language
15.
Origin of speech
–
The origin of speech in Homo sapiens is a widely debated and controversial topic. The problems relate to humans unprecedented use of the tongue, lips, other animals vocalise, but do not use the tongue to modulate sounds. The topic is a separate one because language is not necessarily spoken, Speech is in this sense optional, although it is the default modality for language. Uncontroversially, monkeys, apes and humans, like other animals, have evolved specialised mechanisms for producing sound for purposes of social communication. On the other hand, no monkey or ape uses its tongue for such purposes, the term modality means the chosen representational format for encoding and transmitting information. A striking feature of language is that it is modality-independent, should an impaired child be prevented from hearing or producing sound, its innate capacity to master a language may equally find expression in signing. Sign languages of the deaf are independently invented and have all the properties of spoken language except for the modality of transmission. From this it appears that the centres of the human brain must have evolved to function optimally irrespective of the selected modality. Animal communication systems routinely combine visible with audible properties and effects, no vocally impaired whale, dolphin or songbird, for example, could express its song repertoire equally in visual display. Indeed, in the case of communication, message and modality are not capable of being disentangled. Whatever message is being conveyed stems from intrinsic properties of the signal, modality independence should not be confused with the ordinary phenomenon of multimodality. Monkeys and apes rely on a repertoire of species-specific gesture-calls — emotionally expressive vocalisations inseparable from the visual displays which accompany them, humans also have species-specific gesture-calls — laughs, cries, sobs and so forth — together with involuntary gestures accompanying speech. Many animal displays are polymodal in that appears designed to exploit multiple channels simultaneously. The human linguistic property of modality independence is conceptually distinct from this and it allows the speaker to encode the informational content of a message in a single channel, while switching between channels as necessary. Modern city-dwellers switch effortlessly between the word and writing in its various forms — handwriting, typing, e-mail. Whichever modality is chosen, it can transmit the full message content without external assistance of any kind. When talking on the telephone, for example, any accompanying facial or manual gestures, when typing or manually signing, conversely, theres no need to add sounds. Then, when released from the taboo, these same individuals resume narrating stories by the fireside or in the dark, speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures
Origin of speech
–
Human vocal tract
Origin of speech
–
Places of articulation (passive and active): 1. Exo-labial, 2. Endo-labial, 3. Dental, 4. Alveolar, 5. Post-alveolar, 6. Pre-palatal, 7. Palatal, 8. Velar, 9. Uvular, 10. Pharyngeal, 11. Glottal, 12. Epiglottal, 13. Radical, 14. Postero-dorsal, 15. Antero-dorsal, 16. Laminal, 17. Apical, 18. Sub-apical
Origin of speech
–
Linguistics
Origin of speech
–
Birds flocking, an example of
self-organization in biology
16.
Language
–
Language is the ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so, and a language is any specific example of such a system. The scientific study of language is called linguistics, questions concerning the philosophy of language, such as whether words can represent experience, have been debated since Gorgias and Plato in Ancient Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau have argued that language originated from emotions while others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought, 20th-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language. Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky, estimates of the number of languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. However, any precise estimate depends on an arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken or signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, in whistling, signed and this is because human language is modality-independent. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings, human language has the properties of productivity and displacement, and relies entirely on social convention and learning. Its complex structure affords a wider range of expressions than any known system of animal communication. Language is processed in different locations in the human brain. Humans acquire language through interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently when they are approximately three years old. The use of language is deeply entrenched in human culture, a group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family. The languages of the Dravidian family that are mostly in Southern India include Tamil. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100. The English word language derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s tongue, speech, language through Latin lingua, language, tongue, and Old French language. The word is used to refer to codes, ciphers. Unlike conventional human languages, a language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. This article specifically concerns the properties of human language as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics. As an object of study, language has two primary meanings, an abstract concept, and a specific linguistic system, e. g. French
Language
–
A mural in
Teotihuacan, Mexico (c. 2nd century) depicting a person emitting a
speech scroll from his mouth, symbolizing speech
Language
–
Two girls learning
American Sign Language
Language
–
Braille writing represents language in a
tactile form.
Language
–
Two men and a woman having a conversation in
American Sign Language
17.
India
–
India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and it is bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast. It shares land borders with Pakistan to the west, China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the northeast, in the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Indias Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a border with Thailand. The Indian subcontinent was home to the urban Indus Valley Civilisation of the 3rd millennium BCE, in the following millennium, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism began to be composed. Social stratification, based on caste, emerged in the first millennium BCE, early political consolidations took place under the Maurya and Gupta empires, the later peninsular Middle Kingdoms influenced cultures as far as southeast Asia. In the medieval era, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived, much of the north fell to the Delhi sultanate, the south was united under the Vijayanagara Empire. The economy expanded in the 17th century in the Mughal empire, in the mid-18th century, the subcontinent came under British East India Company rule, and in the mid-19th under British crown rule. A nationalist movement emerged in the late 19th century, which later, under Mahatma Gandhi, was noted for nonviolent resistance, in 2015, the Indian economy was the worlds seventh largest by nominal GDP and third largest by purchasing power parity. Following market-based economic reforms in 1991, India became one of the major economies and is considered a newly industrialised country. However, it continues to face the challenges of poverty, corruption, malnutrition, a nuclear weapons state and regional power, it has the third largest standing army in the world and ranks sixth in military expenditure among nations. India is a constitutional republic governed under a parliamentary system. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society and is home to a diversity of wildlife in a variety of protected habitats. The name India is derived from Indus, which originates from the Old Persian word Hindu, the latter term stems from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which was the historical local appellation for the Indus River. The ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi, which translates as The people of the Indus, the geographical term Bharat, which is recognised by the Constitution of India as an official name for the country, is used by many Indian languages in its variations. Scholars believe it to be named after the Vedic tribe of Bharatas in the second millennium B. C. E and it is also traditionally associated with the rule of the legendary emperor Bharata. Gaṇarājya is the Sanskrit/Hindi term for republic dating back to the ancient times, hindustan is a Persian name for India dating back to the 3rd century B. C. E. It was introduced into India by the Mughals and widely used since then and its meaning varied, referring to a region that encompassed northern India and Pakistan or India in its entirety
India
–
Flag
India
–
The granite
tower of
Brihadeeswarar Temple in
Thanjavur was completed in 1010 CE by
Raja Raja Chola I.
India
–
Writing the will and testament of the Mughal king court in Persian, 1590–1595
18.
Sanskrit
–
Sanskrit is the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, a philosophical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and a literary language and lingua franca of ancient and medieval South Asia. As a result of transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia and parts of Central Asia, as one of the oldest Indo-European languages for which substantial written documentation exists, Sanskrit holds a prominent position in Indo-European studies. The body of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as scientific, technical, philosophical, the compositions of Sanskrit were orally transmitted for much of its early history by methods of memorization of exceptional complexity, rigor, and fidelity. Thereafter, variants and derivatives of the Brahmi script came to be used, Sanskrit is today one of the 22 languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which mandates the Indian government to develop the language. It continues to be used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals and Buddhist practice in the form of hymns. The Sanskrit verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- may be translated as refined, elaborated, as a term for refined or elaborated speech, the adjective appears only in Epic and Classical Sanskrit in the Manusmṛti and the Mahabharata. The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit, with the language of the Rigveda being the oldest and most archaic stage preserved, Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini, around the fourth century BCE. Sanskrit, as defined by Pāṇini, evolved out of the earlier Vedic form, the present form of Vedic Sanskrit can be traced back to as early as the second millennium BCE. Scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or Pāṇinian Sanskrit as separate dialects, although they are quite similar, they differ in a number of essential points of phonology, vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a collection of hymns, incantations and theological and religio-philosophical discussions in the Brahmanas. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, for nearly 2000 years, Sanskrit was the language of a cultural order that exerted influence across South Asia, Inner Asia, Southeast Asia, and to a certain extent East Asia. A significant form of post-Vedic Sanskrit is found in the Sanskrit of Indian epic poetry—the Ramayana, the deviations from Pāṇini in the epics are generally considered to be on account of interference from Prakrits, or innovations, and not because they are pre-Paninian. Traditional Sanskrit scholars call such deviations ārṣa, meaning of the ṛṣis, in some contexts, there are also more prakritisms than in Classical Sanskrit proper. There were four principal dialects of classical Sanskrit, paścimottarī, madhyadeśī, pūrvi, the predecessors of the first three dialects are attested in Vedic Brāhmaṇas, of which the first one was regarded as the purest. In the 2001 Census of India,14,035 Indians reported Sanskrit to be their first language, in India, Sanskrit is among the 14 original languages of the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution. The state of Uttarakhand in India has ruled Sanskrit as its official language. In October 2012 social activist Hemant Goswami filed a petition in the Punjab. More than 3,000 Sanskrit works have been composed since Indias independence in 1947, much of this work has been judged of high quality, in comparison to both classical Sanskrit literature and modern literature in other Indian languages
Sanskrit
–
Rigveda (
padapatha) manuscript in
Devanagari, early 19th century
Sanskrit
–
Devi Mahatmya palm-leaf manuscript in an early
Bhujimol script,
Bihar or
Nepal, 11th century
Sanskrit
–
A poem by the ancient Indian poet Vallana (ca. 900 – 1100 CE) on the side wall of a building at the Haagweg 14 in Leiden, Netherlands
Sanskrit
–
Kashmir Shaiva manuscript in the
Śāradā script (c. 17th century)
19.
Ambiguity
–
Ambiguity is a type of uncertainty of meaning in which several interpretations are plausible. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be resolved according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. The concept of ambiguity is contrasted with vagueness. In ambiguity, specific and distinct interpretations are permitted, whereas with information that is vague, context may play a role in resolving ambiguity. For example, the piece of information may be ambiguous in one context. The lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase pertains to its more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. Meaning here refers to whatever should be captured by a good dictionary, for instance, the word bank has several distinct lexical definitions, including financial institution and edge of a river. Another example is as in apothecary, one could say I bought herbs from the apothecary. This could mean one actually spoke to the apothecary or went to the apothecary, the context in which an ambiguous word is used often makes it evident which of the meanings is intended. If, for instance, someone says I buried $100 in the bank, however, some linguistic contexts do not provide sufficient information to disambiguate a used word. Lexical ambiguity can be addressed by algorithmic methods that automatically associate the meaning with a word in context. The use of multi-defined words requires the author or speaker to clarify their context, the goal of clear concise communication is that the receiver have no misunderstanding about what was meant to be conveyed. Ambiguity is a tool of political science. More problematic are words whose senses express closely related concepts, good, for example, can mean useful or functional, exemplary, pleasing, moral, righteous, etc. I have a daughter is not clear about which sense is intended. The various ways to apply prefixes and suffixes can also create ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity arises when a sentence can have two different meanings because of the structure of the sentence—its syntax. This is often due to an expression, such as a prepositional phrase. He ate the cookies on the couch, for example, could mean that he ate those cookies that were on the couch, to get in, you will need an entrance fee of $10 or your voucher and your drivers license
Ambiguity
–
Sir
John Tenniel 's illustration of the
Caterpillar for
Lewis Carroll 's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is noted for its ambiguous central figure, whose head can be viewed as being a human male's face with a pointed nose and pointy chin or being the head end of an actual
caterpillar, with the first two right "true" legs visible.
20.
Noam Chomsky
–
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as the father of modern linguistics, Chomsky is also a figure in analytic philosophy. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, born to middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. At the age of sixteen he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania, taking courses in linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. From 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard Universitys Society of Fellows and he is credited as the creator or co-creator of the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a role in the decline of behaviorism. Associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism, while expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the Linguistics Wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later co-wrote an analysis articulating the propaganda model of media criticism, however, his defense of unconditional freedom of speech—including for Holocaust deniers—generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the early 1980s. Following his retirement from teaching, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the War on Terror. One of the most cited scholars in history, Chomsky has influenced an array of academic fields. Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7,1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and his father was William Zev Chomsky, an Ashkenazi Jew originally from Ukraine who had fled to the United States in 1913. Chomskys mother was the Belarusian-born Elsie Simonofsky, a teacher and activist whom William had met while working at Mikveh Israel, Noam was the Chomsky familys first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, was five years later. The brothers were close, although David was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive, as a Jew, Chomsky faced anti-semitism as a child, particularly from the Irish and German communities living in Philadelphia. He was substantially influenced by his uncle who owned a newspaper stand in New York City, whenever visiting his uncle, Chomsky frequented left-wing and anarchist bookstores in the city, voraciously reading political literature. He later described his discovery of anarchism as an accident, because it allowed him to become critical of other far-left ideologies, namely Stalinism. Chomskys primary education was at Oak Lane Country Day School, an independent Deweyite institution that focused on allowing its pupils to pursue their own interests in a non-competitive atmosphere. It was here, at age 10, that he wrote his first article, on the spread of fascism, from the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics
Noam Chomsky
–
Noam Chomsky at an
antiwar rally in
Vancouver, 2004
Noam Chomsky
–
Anarcho-syndicalist
Rudolf Rocker (left) and English democratic socialist
George Orwell (right) were both influences on the young Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
–
Noam Chomsky (1977)
21.
Generative linguistics
–
Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. Noam Chomsky first used the term in relation to the linguistics of grammar that he developed in the late 1950s. Linguists who follow the approach have been called generativists. The generative school has focused on the study of syntax, but has also addressed other aspects of a languages structure, early versions of Chomskys theory were called transformational grammar, which is still used as a general term that includes his subsequent theories. There are a number of versions of generative grammar currently practiced within linguistics, a contrasting approach is that of constraint-based grammars. Where a generative grammar attempts to list all the rules that result in all well-formed sentences, in stochastic grammar, grammatical correctness is taken as a probabilistic variable, rather than a discrete property. There are a number of different approaches to generative grammar, common to all is the effort to come up with a set of rules or principles that formally defines each and every one of the members of the set of well-formed expressions of a natural language. Chomsky, in an acceptance speech delivered in India in 2001. Generative grammar has been under development since the late 1950s, and has many changes in the types of rules. In tracing the development of ideas within generative grammar, it is useful to refer to various stages in the development of the theory. The so-called standard theory corresponds to the model of generative grammar laid out by Chomsky in 1965. A core aspect of standard theory is the distinction between two different representations of a sentence, called deep structure and surface structure, the two representations are linked to each other by transformational grammar. The so-called extended standard theory was formulated in the late 1960s, features are, syntactic constraints generalized phrase structures The so-called revised extended standard theory was formulated between 1973 and 1976. It contains restrictions upon X-bar theory, move α An alternative model of syntax based on the idea that notions like subject, direct object, and indirect object play a primary role in grammar. Chomskys Lectures on Government and Binding and Barriers, generative grammars can be described and compared, with the aid of the Chomsky hierarchy in the 1950s. This sets out a series of types of formal grammars with increasing expressive power, at a higher level of complexity are the context-free grammars. The derivation of a sentence by such a grammar can be depicted as a derivation tree, linguists working within generative grammar often view such trees as a primary object of study. According to this view, a sentence is not merely a string of words, such a tree diagram is also called a phrase marker
Generative linguistics
–
Linguistics
22.
Ferdinand de Saussure
–
Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotician. His ideas laid a foundation for significant developments in both linguistics and semiology in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics, one of his translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussures contribution to linguistics and the study of the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology, although they have undergone extension and critique over time, the dimensions of organization introduced by Saussure continue to inform contemporary approaches to the phenomenon of language. Prague school linguist Jan Mukařovský writes that Saussures discovery of the structure of the linguistic sign differentiated the sign both from mere acoustic things. And from mental processes, and that in this development new roads were opened not only for linguistics. He was born in Geneva in 1857 and his father was Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, a chemist, entomologist, and taxonomist. Saussure showed signs of talent and intellectual ability as early as the age of fourteen. In the fall of 1970, he began attending the Institution Martine, there he lived with the family of fellow classmate, Elie David. Saussure was not pleased, as he complained, I entered the Collège de Genève, after a year of studying Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit and taking a variety of courses at the University of Geneva, he commenced graduate work at the University of Leipzig in 1876. Two years later, at 21, Saussure published a book entitled Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes and he returned to Leipzig to defend his doctoral dissertation De lemploi du génitif absolu en Sanscrit, and was awarded his doctorate in February 1880. Soon, he relocated to the University of Paris, where he lectured on Sanskrit, Gothic and Old High German and he taught at the École pratique des hautes études for eleven years during which he was named Chevalier de la Légion dHonneur. When offered a professorship in Geneva in 1892, he returned to Switzerland, Saussure lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European at the University of Geneva for the remainder of his life. It was not until 1907 that Saussure began teaching the Course of General Linguistics and he died in 1913 in Vufflens-le-Château, Vaud, Switzerland. His brother was the Esperantist René de Saussure, and his son was the psychoanalyst Raymond de Saussure, Saussure attempted, at various times in the 1880s and 1890s, to write a book on general linguistic matters. Saussure also had a impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century. His two currents of thought emerged independently of other, one in Europe, the other in America. The results of each incorporated the basic notions of Saussures thought in forming the central tenets of structural linguistics, in Europe, the most important work in that period of influence was done by the Prague school
Ferdinand de Saussure
–
Ferdinand de Saussure
23.
Speech
–
Speech is the vocalized form of communication based upon the syntactic combination of lexicals and names that are drawn from very large vocabularies. Each spoken word is created out of the combination of a limited set of vowel. These vocabularies, the syntax that structures them, and their sets of speech sound units differ, creating thousands of different. Most human speakers are able to communicate in two or more of them, hence being polyglots, the vocal abilities that enable humans to produce speech also enable them to sing. A gestural form of human communication exists for the deaf in the form of sign language, speech in some cultures has become the basis of a written language, often one that differs in its vocabulary, syntax and phonetics from its associated spoken one, a situation called diglossia. Speech is researched in terms of the production and speech perception of the sounds used in vocal language. Several academic disciplines study these, including acoustics, psychology, speech pathology, linguistics, cognitive science, communication studies, otolaryngology, another area of research is how the human brain in its different areas such as the Brocas area and Wernickes area underlies speech. It is controversial how far human speech is unique, in animals also communicate with vocalizations. The origins of speech are unknown and subject to much debate, in linguistics, manner of articulation describes how the tongue, lips, jaw, vocal cords, and other speech organs used to produce sounds, make contact with each other. Often the concept is used for the production of consonants. For any place of articulation, there may be several manners of articulation, normal human speech is produced with pressure from the lungs, which creates phonation in the glottis in the larynx, which is then modified by the vocal tract into different vowels and consonants. However humans can pronounce words without the use of the lungs and glottis in alaryngeal speech, speech perception refers to the processes by which humans can interpret and understand the sounds used in language. The study of perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how human listeners recognize speech sounds, speech research has applications in building computer systems that can recognize speech, as well as improving speech recognition for hearing- and language-impaired listeners. Spoken vocalizations are quickly turned from sensory inputs into motor instructions needed for their immediate or delayed vocal imitation and this occurs independently of speech perception. This type of mapping plays a key role in enabling children to expand their spoken vocabulary, speech is a complex activity, as a result, errors are often made in speech. Speech errors have been analyzed by scientists to understand the nature of the involved in the production of speech. There are several organic and psychological factors that can affect speech, among these are, Diseases and disorders of the lungs or the vocal cords, including paralysis, respiratory infections, vocal fold nodules and cancers of the lungs and throat
Speech
–
Paul Broca
Speech
Speech
–
Topics and terminology
24.
Discourse (linguistics)
–
Discourse analysis, or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyze written, vocal, or sign language use, or any significant semiotic event. The objects of analysis are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech. Text linguistics is a related field. Policy analysis requires discourse analysis to be effective from the post-positivist perspective, political discourse is the informal exchange of reasoned views as to which of several alternative courses of action should be taken to solve a societal problem. The intervention was a hasty reaction to a social problem, however, due to the political rhetoric used, this was largely unidentified. Although the ancient Greeks had much to say on discourse, some scholars consider Austria-born Leo Spitzers Stilstudien of 1928 the earliest example of discourse analysis and it was translated into French by Michel Foucault. Formal equivalence relations among the sentences of a coherent discourse are made explicit by using sentence transformations to put the text in a canonical form, words and sentences with equivalent information then appear in the same column of an array. During this time, however, most linguists ignored such developments in favor of a succession of theories of sentence-level syntax. In January 1953, a linguist working for the American Bible Society, James A. Lauriault/Loriot, needed to find answers to some errors in translating Quechua. He then applied the process to Shipibo, another language of Eastern Peru and he taught the theory at the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Norman, Oklahoma, in the summers of 1956 and 1957 and entered the University of Pennsylvania to study with Harris in the interim year. He tried to publish a paper Shipibo Paragraph Structure, but it was delayed until 1970. In the meantime, Dr. Kenneth Lee Pike, a professor at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, taught the theory, the software for the Medical Language Processor is publicly available on SourceForge. Many of these approaches, especially influenced by the social sciences. An example is conversational analysis, which was influenced by the Sociologist Harold Garfinkel, in Europe, Michel Foucault became one of the key theorists of the subject, especially of discourse, and wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge. Since the 1970s, Foucault´s works have had an impact especially on discourse analysis in the social sciences. Thus, in modern European social sciences, one can find a range of different approaches working with Foucault´s definition of discourse. Apart from the context in France, there is, at least since 2005. Here, for example, the sociologist Reiner Keller developed his widely recognized Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse, therefore, the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse can also be seen as an approach to deal with the vividly discussed micro-macro problem in sociology
Discourse (linguistics)
–
Topics and terminology
25.
Speech community
–
A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations with regard to how their language should be used. Exactly how to define speech community is debated in the literature and it has also been assumed that within a community a homogeneous set of norms should exist. Each speech community has different norms that tend to share only partially. Communities may be de-localized and unbounded rather than local, and they often comprise different sub-communities with differing speech norms, such groups can be villages, countries, political or professional communities, communities with shared interests, hobbies, or lifestyles, or even just groups of friends. Speech communities may share both particular sets of vocabulary and grammatical conventions, as well as styles and genres, and also norms for how. The adoption of the concept of the community as a unit of linguistic analysis emerged in the 1960s. Dialectologists rather realized that traits spread through diffusion and that social factors were decisive in how this happened. They also realized that traits spread as waves from centers and that several competing varieties would exist in some communities. This could be done by focusing on the aspect of language. This definition gives equal importance to the structural and interactional layers, the community is a group of people that frequently interact with each other. This is not a definition of a group because frequency of interaction is relative and graduated. The definition of the system is also not exclusive because it is defined as being set off from other systems by significant differences in usage. Here Gumperz again identifies two important components of the community, its members share both a set of linguistics forms and a set of social norms that govern the use of those forms. Gumperz also sought to set up a framework for describing how linguistic systems can be in use within a single speech community. Where Gumperz formulation was designed to incorporate heterogeneity, by focusing on shared norms of language use rather than a linguistic system. Like that of Gumperz, Labovs formulation stressed that a community was defined more by shared norms than by shared linguistic forms. But like Chomsky, Labov also saw each of the formally distinguished linguistic varieties within a community as homogeneous, invariant. Probably because of their considerable power, Labovs and Chomskys understandings of the speech community became widely influential in linguistics
Speech community
–
Arnold Lakhovsky, The Conversation (circa 1935)
26.
Discourse analysis
–
Discourse analysis, or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyze written, vocal, or sign language use, or any significant semiotic event. The objects of analysis are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech. Text linguistics is a related field. Policy analysis requires discourse analysis to be effective from the post-positivist perspective, political discourse is the informal exchange of reasoned views as to which of several alternative courses of action should be taken to solve a societal problem. The intervention was a hasty reaction to a social problem, however, due to the political rhetoric used, this was largely unidentified. Although the ancient Greeks had much to say on discourse, some scholars consider Austria-born Leo Spitzers Stilstudien of 1928 the earliest example of discourse analysis and it was translated into French by Michel Foucault. Formal equivalence relations among the sentences of a coherent discourse are made explicit by using sentence transformations to put the text in a canonical form, words and sentences with equivalent information then appear in the same column of an array. During this time, however, most linguists ignored such developments in favor of a succession of theories of sentence-level syntax. In January 1953, a linguist working for the American Bible Society, James A. Lauriault/Loriot, needed to find answers to some errors in translating Quechua. He then applied the process to Shipibo, another language of Eastern Peru and he taught the theory at the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Norman, Oklahoma, in the summers of 1956 and 1957 and entered the University of Pennsylvania to study with Harris in the interim year. He tried to publish a paper Shipibo Paragraph Structure, but it was delayed until 1970. In the meantime, Dr. Kenneth Lee Pike, a professor at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, taught the theory, the software for the Medical Language Processor is publicly available on SourceForge. Many of these approaches, especially influenced by the social sciences. An example is conversational analysis, which was influenced by the Sociologist Harold Garfinkel, in Europe, Michel Foucault became one of the key theorists of the subject, especially of discourse, and wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge. Since the 1970s, Foucault´s works have had an impact especially on discourse analysis in the social sciences. Thus, in modern European social sciences, one can find a range of different approaches working with Foucault´s definition of discourse. Apart from the context in France, there is, at least since 2005. Here, for example, the sociologist Reiner Keller developed his widely recognized Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse, therefore, the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse can also be seen as an approach to deal with the vividly discussed micro-macro problem in sociology
Discourse analysis
–
Topics and terminology
27.
Conversations
–
Conversation is a form of interactive, spontaneous communication between two or more people. Typically, it occurs in spoken communication, as written exchanges are not referred to as conversations. The development of skills and etiquette is an important part of socialization. The development of skills in a new language is a frequent focus of language teaching and learning. Conversation analysis is a branch of sociology which studies the structure and organization of human interaction, no generally accepted definition of conversation exists, beyond the fact that a conversation involves at least two people talking together. Consequently, the term is defined by what it is not. A ritualized exchange such as a greeting is not a conversation. An interaction with a focused topic or purpose is also generally not considered a conversation. Summarizing these properties, one authority writes that Conversation is the kind of speech that happens informally, symmetrically, Conversations follow rules of etiquette because conversations are social interactions, and therefore depend on social convention. Specific rules for conversation arise from the cooperative principle, failure to adhere to these rules causes the conversation to deteriorate or eventually to end. Contributions to a conversation are responses to what has previously been said, Conversations may be the optimal form of communication, depending on the participants intended ends. Conversations may be ideal when, for example, each party desires a relatively equal exchange of information, on the other hand, if permanency or the ability to review such information is important, written communication may be ideal. Or if time-efficient communication is most important, a speech may be preferable, Conversation involves a lot more nuanced and implied context that lies beneath just the words. Banter is short witty sentences that bounce back and forth between individuals, often banter uses clever put-downs and witty insults, misunderstandings, zippy wisecracks, zingers, flirtation, and puns. The idea is each line of banter should top the one before it, every line in a banter should be able to evoke both an emotional response and ownership without hurting ones feelings. etc. It is important to quit the bantering with the sensibility of playground rules and it is as Shakespeare said Brevity is the soul of wit. One element of conversation is discussion, sharing opinions on subjects that are thought of during the conversation, in polite society the subject changes before discussion becomes dispute or controversial. For example, if theology is being discussed, no one is insisting a particular view be accepted, many conversations can be divided into four categories according to their major subject content, Subjective ideas, which often serve to extend understanding and awareness
Conversations
–
People conversing with each other on a path
Conversations
–
Professor and student in conversation at
Shimer College.
Conversations
–
Topics and terminology
28.
Discourse
–
Discourse denotes written and spoken communications, In semantics and discourse analysis, Discourse is a conceptual generalization of conversation within each modality and context of communication. The totality of codified language used in a field of intellectual enquiry and of social practice, such as legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse. In the work of Michel Foucault, and that of the social theoreticians he inspired, discourse describes an entity of sequences, of signs, therefore, a discourse is composed of semiotic sequences between and among objects, subjects, and statements. The term discursive formation conceptually describes the regular communications that produce such discourses, as a philosopher, Michel Foucault applied the discursive formation in the analyses of large bodies of knowledge, such as political economy and natural history. In the first sense-usage, the discourse is studied in corpus linguistics. In the second sense and in the sense, the analysis of a discourse examines and determines the connections among language and structure. Discourse affects the persons perspective, it is impossible to avoid discourse, for example, two notably distinct discourses can be used about various guerrilla movements describing them either as freedom fighters or terrorists. In other words, the chosen discourse provides the vocabulary, expressions, discourses are embedded in different rhetorical genres and metagenres that constrain and enable them. Discourse is closely linked to different theories of power and state and this conception of discourse is largely derived from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. Modernist theorists were preoccupied with obtaining the truth and reality and sought to develop theories which contained certainty and predictability, modernist theorists therefore viewed discourse as being relative to talking or way of talking and understood discourse to be functional. Discourse and language transformations are ascribed to progress or the need to develop new or more words to describe new discoveries, understandings. In modern times, language and discourse are dissociated from power and ideology, in other words, it is the structure itself that determines the significance, meaning and function of the individual elements of a system. Structuralism has made an important contribution to our understanding of language, saussures theory of language highlights the decisive role of meaning and signification in structuring human life more generally. Following the perceived limitations of the era, emerged postmodern theory. Postmodern theorists rejected modernist claims that there was one approach that explained all aspects of society. Rather, postmodernist theorists were interested in examining the variety of experience of individuals and groups and emphasized differences over similarities, in contrast to modern theory, postmodern theory is more fluid and allows for individual differences as it rejected the notion of social laws. Postmodern theorists shifted away from truth seeking and instead sought answers for how truths are produced and sustained, postmodernists contended that truth and knowledge is plural, contextual, and historically produced through discourses. Postmodern researchers therefore embarked on analyzing discourses such as texts, language, French social theorist Michel Foucault developed a notion of discourse in his early work, especially the Archaeology of knowledge
Discourse
–
Sociology
29.
Genres
–
Genre is any form or type of communication in any mode with socially-agreed upon conventions developed over time. Genres form by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented, often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Stand alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles, some genres may be rigid with strictly adhered to guidelines while others may be very flexible. Genre began as a classification system for ancient Greek literature. Poetry, prose, and performance each had a specific and calculated style that related to the theme of the story. Speech patterns for comedy would not be appropriate for tragedy, in later periods genres proliferated and developed in response to changes in audiences and creators. Genre became a tool to help the public make sense out of unpredictable art. Because art is often a response to a state, in that people write/paint/sing/dance about what they know about. Genre suffers from the ills of any classification system. Genre is to be reassessed and scrutinized, and to works on their unique merit. While the genre of storytelling has been relegated as lesser form of art because of the heavily borrowed nature of the conventions, proponents argue that the genius of an effective genre piece is in the variation, recombination, and evolution of the codes. The term genre is used in the history and criticism of visual art. These are distinguished from staffage, incidental figures in what is primarily a landscape or architectural painting, Genre painting may also be used as a wider term covering genre painting proper, and other specialized types of paintings such as still-life, landscapes, marine paintings and animal paintings. The concept of the hierarchy of genres was a one in artistic theory. It was strongest in France, where it was associated with the Académie française which held a role in academic art. Genres may be determined by technique, tone, content. Genre should not be confused with age category, by which literature may be classified as adult, young adult. They also must not be confused with format, such as novel or picture book
Genres
–
A genre painting (Peasant Dance, c. 1568, by
Pieter Brueghel the Elder)
30.
Jacques Derrida
–
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts and he is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy. During his career Derrida published more than 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and he also influenced architecture, music, art, and art criticism. Particularly in his writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work. Some critics consider Speech and Phenomena to be his most important work, others cite Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Margins of Philosophy. These writings influenced various activists and political movements and he became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious difficulty of his work made him controversial. Derrida was the third of five children and his elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old, the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life his role as a replacement for his deceased brother. Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar, on the first day of the school year in 1942, French administrators in Algeria — implementing anti-Semitic quotas set by the Vichy government — expelled Derrida from his lycée. He secretly skipped school for a rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students. In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers an instrument of revolt against family and his reading also included Camus and Sartre. In the late 1940s, he attended the Lycée Bugeaud and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, on his first day at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1952, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium, he completed his masters degree in philosophy on Edmund Husserl and he then passed the highly competitive agrégation exam in 1956. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956–57 academic year reading Joyces Ulysses at the Widener Library, in June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence of 1954–1962, Derrida asked to teach children in lieu of military service, teaching French. Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne and his wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, in 1965 Derrida began an association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years. Derridas subsequent distance from the Tel Quel group, after 1971, has attributed to his reservations about their embrace of Maoism. At the same colloquium Derrida would meet Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man, a second son, Jean, was born in 1967
Jacques Derrida
–
Jacques Derrida
31.
Palaeography
–
Palaeography or paleography is the study of ancient and historical handwriting. The discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating ancient texts, however, it cannot in general be used to pinpoint dates with high precision. Palaeography can be a skill for historians and philologists, as it tackles two main difficulties. First, since the style of an alphabet in each given language has evolved constantly. Second, scribes often used many abbreviations, usually so as to more quickly and sometimes to save space. Knowledge of individual letter-forms, ligatures, punctuation, and abbreviations enables the palaeographer to read, the palaeographer must know, first, the language of the text, and second, the historical usages of various styles of handwriting, common writing customs, and scribal or notarial abbreviations. Philological knowledge of the language, vocabulary, and grammar generally used at a time or place can help palaeographers identify ancient or more recent forgeries versus authentic documents. Knowledge of writing materials is essential to the study of handwriting. Palaeography can be used to provide information about the date at which a document was written, scholars also tend to oversimplify diachronic development, assuming models of simplicity rather than complexity. It spread from the Mediterranean coast to the borders of India, becoming popular and being adopted by many people. The Aramaic script was written in a form with a direction from right to left. One innovation in Aramaic is the matres lectionis system to indicate certain vowels, Early Phoenician-derived scripts did not have letters for vowels, and so most texts recorded just consonants. Most likely as a consequence of changes in North Semitic languages. The letter aleph was employed to write /ā/, he for /ō/, yod for /ī/, Aramaic writing and language supplanted Babylonian cuneiform and Akkadian language, even in their homeland in Mesopotamia. The wide diffusion of Aramaic letters led to its writing being used not only in monumental inscriptions, Aramaic papyri have been found in large numbers in Egypt, especially at Elephantine – among them are official and private documents of the Jewish military settlement in 5 BC. In the Aramaic papyri and potsherds, words are separated usually by a small gap, at the turn of the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC, the heretofore uniform Aramaic letters developed new forms, as a result of dialectal and political fragmentation in several subgroups. The most important of these is the so-called square Hebrew block script, followed by Palmyrene, Nabataean, Aramaic is usually divided into three main parts, Old Aramaic Middle Aramaic, and Modern Aramaic of the present day. Old Aramaic appeared in the 11th century BC as the language of the first Aramaean states
Palaeography
–
William Shakespeare's will, written in
secretary hand: a script difficult for modern readers to interpret
Palaeography
–
Table showing the
Mandaic alphabet (Abagada) with some of the mysteries represented by the letters
Palaeography
–
Detail of the
Berlin papyrus 9875 showing the 5th column of
Timotheus' Persae, with a
coronis symbol to mark the end.
Palaeography
–
The
Derveni Papyrus, a Greek Macedonian philosophical text dating around 340 BC, considered Europe's oldest manuscript
32.
Dictionary
–
It is a lexicographical product which shows inter-relationships among the data. A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries, Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a complete range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are called terms instead of words. In practice, the two approaches are used for both types, there are other types of dictionaries that do not fit neatly into the above distinction, for instance bilingual dictionaries, dictionaries of synonyms, and rhyming dictionaries. The word dictionary is usually understood to refer to a general purpose monolingual dictionary, there is also a contrast between prescriptive or descriptive dictionaries, the former reflect what is seen as correct use of the language while the latter reflect recorded actual use. Stylistic indications in many modern dictionaries are also considered by some to be less than objectively descriptive, the birth of the new discipline was not without controversy, the practical dictionary-makers being sometimes accused by others of astonishing lack of method and critical-self reflection. The oldest known dictionaries were Akkadian Empire cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla, the early 2nd millennium BCE Urra=hubullu glossary is the canonical Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlists. Philitas of Cos wrote a pioneering vocabulary Disorderly Words which explained the meanings of rare Homeric and other words, words from local dialects. Apollonius the Sophist wrote the oldest surviving Homeric lexicon, the first Sanskrit dictionary, the Amarakośa, was written by Amara Sinha c. 4th century CE. Written in verse, it listed around 10,000 words, according to the Nihon Shoki, the first Japanese dictionary was the long-lost 682 CE Niina glossary of Chinese characters. The oldest existing Japanese dictionary, the c.835 CE Tenrei Banshō Meigi, was also a glossary of written Chinese, a 9th-century CE Irish dictionary, Sanas Cormaic, contained etymologies and explanations of over 1,400 Irish words. In India around 1320, Amir Khusro compiled the Khaliq-e-bari which mainly dealt with Hindavi, in medieval Europe, glossaries with equivalents for Latin words in vernacular or simpler Latin were in use. The Catholicon by Johannes Balbus, a large grammatical work with a lexicon, was widely adopted. It served as the basis for several bilingual dictionaries and was one of the earliest books to be printed, in 1502 Ambrogio Calepinos Dictionarium was published, originally a monolingual Latin dictionary, which over the course of the 16th century was enlarged to become a multilingual glossary. The first monolingual dictionary written in Europe was the Spanish, written by Sebastián Covarrubias Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, published in 1611 in Madrid, in 1612 the first edition of the Vocabolario dellAccademia della Crusca, for Italian, was published. It served as the model for works in French and English. In 1690 in Rotterdam was published, posthumously, the Dictionnaire Universel by Antoine Furetière for French, in 1694 appeared the first edition of the Dictionnaire de lAcadémie française. Between 1712 and 1721 was published the Vocabulario portughez e latino written by Raphael Bluteau, the Totius Latinitatis lexicon by Egidio Forcellini was firstly published in 1777, it has formed the basis of all similar works that have since been published
Dictionary
–
English -English and English-
Persian dictionaries
Dictionary
–
A multi-volume Latin dictionary by
Egidio Forcellini.
Dictionary
–
The French-language
Petit Larousse is an example of an illustrated dictionary.
33.
Translation
–
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. While interpreting—the facilitating of oral or sign-language communication between users of different languages—antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature, there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh into Southwest Asian languages of the second millennium BCE. Translators always risk inappropriate spill-over of source-language idiom and usage into the target-language translation, on the other hand, spill-overs have imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched the target languages. Indeed, translators have helped substantially to shape the languages into which they have translated, because of the laboriousness of translation, since the 1940s engineers have sought to automate translation or to mechanically aid the human translator. The rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for services and has facilitated language localization. Translation studies systematically study the theory and practice of translation, the English word translation derives from the Latin word translatio, which comes from trans, across + ferre, to carry or to bring. Thus translatio is a carrying across or a bringing across, in this case, the Germanic languages and some Slavic languages have calqued their words for the concept of translation on translatio. The Romance languages and the remaining Slavic languages have derived their words for the concept of translation from an alternative Latin word, traductio, the Ancient Greek term for translation, μετάφρασις, has supplied English with metaphrase — as contrasted with paraphrase. Metaphrase corresponds, in one of the more recent terminologies, to formal equivalence, nevertheless, metaphrase and paraphrase may be useful as ideal concepts that mark the extremes in the spectrum of possible approaches to translation. Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity, the ancient Greeks distinguished between metaphrase and paraphrase. Literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed, Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of imitation, i. e. of adapted translation, When a painter copies from the life. He has no privilege to alter features and lineaments, despite occasional theoretical diversity, the actual practice of translation has hardly changed since antiquity. The grammatical differences between languages and free-word-order languages have been no impediment in this regard. The particular syntax characteristics of a source language are adjusted to the syntactic requirements of the target language. When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a language, translators have borrowed those terms. However, due to shifts in ecological niches of words, an etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. For example, the English actual should not be confused with the cognate French actuel, the Polish aktualny, the Swedish aktuell, the translators role as a bridge for carrying across values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, the 2nd-century-BCE Roman adapter of Greek comedies. The translators role is, however, by no means a passive, mechanical one, the main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics such as Cicero
Translation
–
Rosetta Stone
Translation
–
John Dryden
Translation
–
Cicero
Translation
–
Martin Luther
34.
Language interpretation
–
Interpretation or interpreting is oral translation of speech or sign from a language into another. Translation studies is the study of the theory, description and application of interpretation and translation. The terms interpretation and translation are used interchangeably but are not synonymous. Interpretation describes immediate conversion of source orally, whereas translation is the conversion of source to text, the primary practical distinction is that, in translation, the translator has more time to consider the output and may access resources in that process. g. A spoken Chinese dialect written using characters or spoken English represented in a signed form of English, Signed Exact English. In a legal context, such as interpretation, where ramifications of misinterpretation may be dire. Teams of two or more interpreters, with one actively interpreting and the monitoring for greater accuracy. Translators have time to consider and revise each word and sentence before delivering their product to the client, while live interpretations goal is to achieve total accuracy at all times, details of the original speech can be missed and interpreters can ask for clarification from the speaker. In any language, including languages, when a word is used for which there is no exact match. The most common form is extempore SI, where the interpreter does not know the message until he or she hears it. In the ideal setting for language, the interpreter sits in a sound-proof booth and speaks into a microphone. The simultaneous interpretation is rendered to the target-language listeners via their earphones, the technology arose in the 1920s and 1930s when American businessman Edward Filene and British engineer Alan Gordon Finlay developed simultaneous interpretation equipment with IBM. In consecutive interpreting, the speaker is required to pause to allow interpretation — accuracy is greatly enhanced, traditionally, the interpreter will sit or stand near the speaker. Consecutive interpretation can be conducted in a pattern of short or long according to the interpreters preference. In short CI, the interpreter relies mostly on memory whereas, in long CI, Consecutive interpreting of whole thoughts, rather than in small pieces, is desirable so that the interpreter has the whole meaning before rendering it in the target language. This affords a truer, more accurate, and more accessible interpretation than where short CI or simultaneous interpretation is used, on occasion, document sight translation is required of the interpreter during consecutive interpretation work. Sight translation combines interpretation and translation, the interpreter must render the source-language document to the target-language as if it was written in the target language, sight translation occurs usually, but not exclusively, in judicial and medical work. This is also known as double-interpretation
Language interpretation
–
Interpreting booths in the
European Parliament simultaneously translate debates between the 24 official
languages of the European Union (in comparison, the United Nations have
six official languages). The European Parliament is the most
multilingual parliament and the biggest employer of interpreters in the world.
Language interpretation
–
Simultaneous interpreter's station (Televic Conference) at the
European Court of Justice
Language interpretation
–
The CI interpreter Patricia Stöcklin renders Klaus Bednarz's speech to
Garry Kasparov.
35.
Foreign language
–
A foreign language is a language indigenous to another country. It is also a language not spoken in the country of the person referred to. These two characterisations do not exhaust the possible definitions, however, and the label is applied in ways that are variously misleading or factually inaccurate. Some children learn more than one language from birth or from a young age. For example, a child learning English from his English father and this is common in countries such as India, South Africa, or Canada due to these countries having multiple official languages. In general, it is believed that children have advantage to learning a language over adults. However, there are studies which have shown adult students are better at foreign language learning than child students and it is because adults have pre-existing knowledge of how grammar works, and a superior ability of memorizing vocabulary. See main article, Language education Most schools around the world teach at least one language and most colleges. On average in Europe, at the start of foreign language teaching, compulsory lessons in a foreign language normally start at the end of primary school or the start of secondary school. In Luxembourg, Norway and Malta, however, the first foreign language is studied at age six, in Wales, all children are taught Welsh from the first year of primary school. The Welsh language is compulsory up to the age of 16. This method is highly used in Canada, wherein anglophone students spend all of most of their lessons learning the materials in French. In 1995, the European Commissions White Paper on Education and Training emphasised the importance of learning at least two foreign languages before upper secondary education. The Lisbon Summit of 2000 defined languages as one of the five key skills, despite the high rate of foreign language teaching in schools, the number of adults claiming to speak a foreign language is generally lower than might be expected. In 2001, a European Commission survey found that 65. 9% of people in the UK spoke only their native tongue, since the 1990s, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages has tried to standardise the learning of languages across Europe. An article from The Atlantic claims that only 1 percent of the adults within the American population consider themselves proficient in speaking a foreign language and this is in stark contrast to many other countries, where the percentage is much higher. Even though there are benefits that come with learning a foreign language. Further results showed that nine out of 10 British companies thought their businesses could benefit from better language skills, also due to the increase of international population, a multilingual person can easily communicate and translate to perspective viewers
Foreign language
–
A German student learning French.
English (1.5 billion learners),
French (82 million learners) and
Chinese (30 million learners) are the three most commonly studied foreign languages.
36.
Philology
–
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources, it is a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics. It is more defined as the study of literary texts and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist, in older usage, especially British, philology is more general, covering comparative and historical linguistics. Indo-European studies involves the comparative philology of all Indo-European languages, Philology, with its focus on historical development, is contrasted with linguistics due to Ferdinand de Saussures insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis. The contrast continued with the emergence of structuralism and Chomskyan linguistics alongside its emphasis on syntax, the term changed little with the Latin philologia, and later entered the English language in the 16th century, from the Middle French philologie, in the sense of love of literature. The adjective φιλόλογος meant fond of discussion or argument, talkative, in Hellenistic Greek also implying an excessive preference of argument over the love of true wisdom, as an allegory of literary erudition, Philologia appears in 5th-century post-classical literature, an idea revived in Late Medieval literature. The meaning of love of learning and literature was narrowed to the study of the development of languages in 19th-century usage of the term. Most continental European countries still maintain the term to designate departments, colleges, position titles, J. R. R. Tolkien opposed the nationalist reaction against philological practices, claiming that the philological instinct was universal as is the use of language. Based on the critique of Friedrich Nietzsche, US scholars since the 1980s have viewed philology as responsible for a narrowly scientistic study of language. The comparative linguistics branch of philology studies the relationship between languages, similarities between Sanskrit and European languages were first noted in the early 16th century and led to speculation of a common ancestor language from which all these descended. Philology also includes the study of texts and their history and it includes elements of textual criticism, trying to reconstruct an authors original text based on variant copies of manuscripts. Since that time, the principles of textual criticism have been improved and applied to other widely distributed texts such as the Bible. Scholars have tried to reconstruct the original readings of the Bible from the manuscript variants and this method was applied to Classical Studies and to medieval texts as a way to reconstruct the authors original work. A related study method known as higher criticism studies the authorship, date, as these philological issues are often inseparable from issues of interpretation, there is no clear-cut boundary between philology and hermeneutics. When text has a significant political or religious influence, scholars have difficulty reaching objective conclusions, some scholars avoid all critical methods of textual philology, especially in historical linguistics, where it is important to study the actual recorded materials. Supporters of New Philology insist on a diplomatic approach, a faithful rendering of the text exactly as found in the manuscript. Another branch of philology, cognitive philology, studies written and oral texts and this science compares the results of textual science with the results of experimental research of both psychology and artificial intelligence production systems. In the case of Bronze Age literature, philology includes the prior decipherment of the language under study and this has notably been the case with the Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Hittite, Ugaritic and Luwian languages
Philology
–
Cover of Indo-European philology historical and comparative by
William Burley Lockwood
37.
French language
–
French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages, French has evolved from Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues doïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to Frances past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, a French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French. French is a language in 29 countries, most of which are members of la francophonie. As of 2015, 40% of the population is in Europe, 35% in sub-Saharan Africa, 15% in North Africa and the Middle East, 8% in the Americas. French is the fourth-most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union, 1/5 of Europeans who do not have French as a mother tongue speak French as a second language. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 17th and 18th century onward, French was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, most second-language speakers reside in Francophone Africa, in particular Gabon, Algeria, Mauritius, Senegal and Ivory Coast. In 2015, French was estimated to have 77 to 110 million native speakers, approximately 274 million people are able to speak the language. The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie estimates 700 million by 2050, in 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked French the third most useful language for business, after English and Standard Mandarin Chinese. Under the Constitution of France, French has been the language of the Republic since 1992. France mandates the use of French in official government publications, public education except in specific cases, French is one of the four official languages of Switzerland and is spoken in the western part of Switzerland called Romandie, of which Geneva is the largest city. French is the language of about 23% of the Swiss population. French is also a language of Luxembourg, Monaco, and Aosta Valley, while French dialects remain spoken by minorities on the Channel Islands. A plurality of the worlds French-speaking population lives in Africa and this number does not include the people living in non-Francophone African countries who have learned French as a foreign language. Due to the rise of French in Africa, the total French-speaking population worldwide is expected to reach 700 million people in 2050, French is the fastest growing language on the continent. French is mostly a language in Africa, but it has become a first language in some urban areas, such as the region of Abidjan, Ivory Coast and in Libreville. There is not a single African French, but multiple forms that diverged through contact with various indigenous African languages, sub-Saharan Africa is the region where the French language is most likely to expand, because of the expansion of education and rapid population growth
French language
–
The
"arrêt" signs (French for "stop") are used in
Canada while the international stop, which is also a valid French word, is used in France as well as other French-speaking countries and regions.
French language
–
Regions where French is the main language
French language
–
Town sign in
Standard Arabic and French at the entrance of
Rechmaya in
Lebanon.
French language
–
An obsolete 100
Lebanese pound note with the French language inscriptions "Banque du Liban" and "Cent livres".
38.
English language
–
English /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/ is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now the global lingua franca. Named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to England, English is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. It is the third most common language in the world, after Mandarin. It is the most widely learned second language and a language of the United Nations, of the European Union. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch, English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the century, are called Old English. Middle English began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest of England, Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London and the King James Bible, and the start of the Great Vowel Shift. Through the worldwide influence of the British Empire, modern English spread around the world from the 17th to mid-20th centuries, English is an Indo-European language, and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Most closely related to English are the Frisian languages, and English, Old Saxon and its descendent Low German languages are also closely related, and sometimes Low German, English, and Frisian are grouped together as the Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic languages. Modern English descends from Middle English, which in turn descends from Old English, particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other English languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian and Forth and Bargy dialects of Ireland. English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares new language features with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German and these shared innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor, which linguists call Proto-Germanic. Through Grimms law, the word for foot begins with /f/ in Germanic languages, English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic. The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon, in the fifth century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain and the Romans withdrew from Britain. England and English are named after the Angles, Old English was divided into four dialects, the Anglian dialects, Mercian and Northumbrian, and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon. Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex. The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the period of Old English were written using a runic script. By the sixth century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms and it included the runic letters wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨þ⟩, and the modified Latin letters eth ⟨ð⟩, and ash ⟨æ⟩
English language
–
The opening to the Old English epic poem
Beowulf,
handwritten in
half-uncial script: Hƿæt ƿē Gārde/na ingēar dagum þēod cyninga / þrym ge frunon... "Listen! We of the Spear-Danes from days of yore have heard of the glory of the folk-kings..."
English language
–
Countries of the world where English is a majority native language
English language
–
Title page of Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales c.1400
39.
Chomsky
–
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as the father of modern linguistics, Chomsky is also a figure in analytic philosophy. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, born to middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. At the age of sixteen he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania, taking courses in linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. From 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard Universitys Society of Fellows and he is credited as the creator or co-creator of the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a role in the decline of behaviorism. Associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism, while expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the Linguistics Wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later co-wrote an analysis articulating the propaganda model of media criticism, however, his defense of unconditional freedom of speech—including for Holocaust deniers—generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the early 1980s. Following his retirement from teaching, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the War on Terror. One of the most cited scholars in history, Chomsky has influenced an array of academic fields. Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7,1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and his father was William Zev Chomsky, an Ashkenazi Jew originally from Ukraine who had fled to the United States in 1913. Chomskys mother was the Belarusian-born Elsie Simonofsky, a teacher and activist whom William had met while working at Mikveh Israel, Noam was the Chomsky familys first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, was five years later. The brothers were close, although David was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive, as a Jew, Chomsky faced anti-semitism as a child, particularly from the Irish and German communities living in Philadelphia. He was substantially influenced by his uncle who owned a newspaper stand in New York City, whenever visiting his uncle, Chomsky frequented left-wing and anarchist bookstores in the city, voraciously reading political literature. He later described his discovery of anarchism as an accident, because it allowed him to become critical of other far-left ideologies, namely Stalinism. Chomskys primary education was at Oak Lane Country Day School, an independent Deweyite institution that focused on allowing its pupils to pursue their own interests in a non-competitive atmosphere. It was here, at age 10, that he wrote his first article, on the spread of fascism, from the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics
Chomsky
–
Noam Chomsky at an
antiwar rally in
Vancouver, 2004
Chomsky
–
Anarcho-syndicalist
Rudolf Rocker (left) and English democratic socialist
George Orwell (right) were both influences on the young Chomsky.
Chomsky
Chomsky
–
Noam Chomsky (1977)
40.
Words
–
In linguistics, a word is the smallest element that can be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content. This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning, a word may consist of a single morpheme, or several, whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word. A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes, words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. The term word may refer to a word or to a written word. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, the difficulty of deciphering a word depends on the language. Dictionaries categorize a languages lexicon into lemmas and these can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a word in the opinion of the writers of that language. The most appropriate means of measuring the length of a word is by counting its syllables or morphemes, when a word has multiple definitions or multiple senses, it may result in confusion in a debate or discussion. Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of Minimal Free Forms in 1926, words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves. However, some words are not minimal free forms as they make no sense by themselves. Some semanticists have put forward a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, according to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations. In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words are construed as bundles of features that are united into a structure with form. For example, the word koalas has semantic features, category features, number features, phonological features, the task of defining what constitutes a word involves determining where one word ends and another word begins—in other words, identifying word boundaries. There are several ways to determine where the boundaries of spoken language should be placed, Potential pause, A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries, however, this method is not foolproof, the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words, or fail to separate two or more closely linked words. Indivisibility, A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud, thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become My family and I have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have infixes, which are put inside a word, similarly, some have separable affixes, in the German sentence Ich komme gut zu Hause an, the verb ankommen is separated. Phonetic boundaries, Some languages have rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be
Words
–
Letters and words
41.
Encyclopedia
–
An encyclopedia or encyclopaedia is a type of reference work or compendium holding a comprehensive summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge. Encyclopedias are divided into articles or entries, which are usually accessed alphabetically by article name, Encyclopedia entries are longer and more detailed than those in most dictionaries. Encyclopedias have existed for around 2,000 years, the oldest still in existence, AD77 by Pliny the Elder and was not fully revised at the time of his death in AD79. The modern encyclopedia evolved out of dictionaries around the 17th century, some modern encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, are often electronic and freely available. Together, the phrase literally translates as complete instruction or complete knowledge, one of the oldest vernacular uses was by François Rabelais in his Pantagruel in 1532. Several encyclopedias have names that include the suffix -pedia, e. g. Banglapedia, in British usage, the spellings encyclopedia and encyclopaedia are both current. In American usage, only the former is commonly used, the spelling encyclopædia—with the æ ligature—was frequently used in the 19th century and is increasingly rare, although it is retained in product titles such as Encyclopædia Britannica and others. The Oxford English Dictionary records encyclopædia and encyclopaedia as equal alternatives, websters Third New International Dictionary features encyclopedia as the main headword and encyclopaedia as a minor variant. In addition, cyclopedia and cyclopaedia are now rarely used shortened forms of the word originating in the 17th century, the modern encyclopedia was developed from the dictionary in the 18th century. Historically, both encyclopedias and dictionaries have been researched and written by well-educated, well-informed content experts, a dictionary is a linguistic work which primarily focuses on alphabetical listing of words and their definitions. Synonymous words and those related by the matter are to be found scattered around the dictionary. Thus, a dictionary typically provides limited information, analysis or background for the word defined. While it may offer a definition, it may leave the reader lacking in understanding the meaning, significance or limitations of a term, and how the term relates to a broader field of knowledge. An encyclopedia is, allegedly, not written in order to convince, an encyclopedia article also often includes many maps and illustrations, as well as bibliography and statistics. General encyclopedias often contain guides on how to do a variety of things, as well as embedded dictionaries and gazetteers. There are also encyclopedias that cover a variety of topics but from a particular cultural, ethnic, or national perspective. Works of encyclopedic scope aim to convey the important accumulated knowledge for their domain, such as an encyclopedia of medicine, philosophy. Works vary in the breadth of material and the depth of discussion, some systematic method of organization is essential to making an encyclopedia usable as a work of reference
Encyclopedia
–
Brockhaus Enzyklopädie
Encyclopedia
–
Title page of " Lucubrationes..." 1541 edition, the first book to use the word encyclopedia in the title
Encyclopedia
–
Title page of
Skalich's Encyclopaedia, seu orbis disciplinarum, tam sacrarum quam prophanarum, epistemon from 1559, first to use the word encyclopaedia as a noun in the title
Encyclopedia
–
Naturalis Historiæ, 1669 edition, title page
42.
Linguistic relativity
–
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers world view or cognition. Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined to include two versions, the idea was first clearly expressed by 19th-century thinkers, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, who saw language as the expression of the spirit of a nation. Harry Hoijer, one of Sapirs students, introduced the term Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, a strong version of relativist theory was developed from the late 1920s by the German linguist Leo Weisgerber. As the study of the nature of human language and cognition came into focus in the 1960s the idea of linguistic relativity fell out of favor among linguists. Some effects of relativity have been shown in several semantic domains. Research is focused on exploring the ways and extent to which language influences thought, the strongest form of the theory is linguistic determinism, which holds that language entirely determines the range of cognitive processes. The hypothesis of linguistic determinism is now agreed to be false. This is the form, proposing that language provides constraints in some areas of cognition. Research on weaker forms have produced positive empirical evidence for a relationship, the idea that language and thought are intertwined is ancient. Plato held instead that the world consisted of eternal ideas and that language should reflect these ideas as accurately as possible, following Plato, St. Augustine, for example, held the view that language was merely labels applied to already existing concepts. This view remained prevalent throughout the Middle Ages, roger Bacon held the opinion that language was but a veil covering up eternal truths, hiding them from human experience. For Immanuel Kant, language was but one of several used by humans to experience the world. In 1820, Wilhelm von Humboldt connected the study of language to the national romanticist program by proposing the view that language is the fabric of thought, thoughts are produced as a kind of internal dialog using the same grammar as the thinkers native language. This view was part of a picture in which the world view of an ethnic nation. Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820, The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds, the idea that some languages are superior to others and that lesser languages maintained their speakers in intellectual poverty was widespread in the early 20th century. The first anthropologist and linguist to challenge this view was Franz Boas, while undertaking geographical research in northern Canada he became fascinated with the Inuit people and decided to become an ethnographer. Boas student Edward Sapir reached back to the Humboldtian idea that languages contained the key to understanding the world views of peoples and he espoused the viewpoint that because of the differences in the grammatical systems of languages no two languages were similar enough to allow for perfect cross-translation. Sapir also thought because language represented reality differently, it followed that the speakers of different languages would perceive reality differently, Sapir, No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality
Linguistic relativity
–
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Linguistic relativity
–
Franz Boas
Linguistic relativity
–
Edward Sapir
43.
World view
–
A comprehensive world view or worldview is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the entirety of the individual or societys knowledge and point of view. A world view can include natural philosophy, fundamental, existential, and normative postulates, or themes, values, emotions, the term is a calque of the German word Weltanschauung, composed of Welt and Anschauung. The German word is used in English. It is a fundamental to German philosophy and epistemology and refers to a wide world perception. Additionally, it refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs forming a global description through which an individual, group or culture watches and interprets the world, Worldview remains a confused and confusing concept in English, used very differently by linguists and sociologists. It is for this reason that Underhill suggests five subcategories, world-perceiving, world-conceiving, cultural mindset, personal world, and perspective. However, core worldview beliefs are often rooted, and so are only rarely reflected on by individuals. The founder of the idea that language and worldview are inextricable is the Prussian philologist, Humboldt argued that language was part of the creative adventure of mankind. Culture, language and linguistic communities developed simultaneously, he argued, human beings take their place in speech and continue to modify language and thought by their creative exchanges. Edward Sapir also gives an account of the relationship between thinking and speaking in English, the hypothesis was well received in the late 1940s, but declined in prominence after a decade. The theory has gained attention through the work of Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University. One of the most important concepts in philosophy and cognitive sciences is the German concept of Weltanschauung. The term Weltanschauung is often attributed to Wilhelm von Humboldt the founder of German ethnolinguistics. As Jürgen Trabant points out, however, and as Underhll reminds us in his Humboldt, Worldview and Language, Weltansicht was used by Humboldt to refer to the overarching conceptual and sensorial apprehension of reality shared by a linguistic community. But Humboldt maintained that the human being was the core of language. Worldviews are not prisons which contain and constrain us, they are the spaces we develop within, create and resist creatively in speaking together. A worldview can be expressed as the cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things. If the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is correct, the map of the world would be similar to the linguistic map of the world
World view
–
Emotions
44.
Edward Sapir
–
Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics. Sapir was born in German Pomerania, his parents emigrated to United States of America when he was a child and he studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas who inspired him to work on Native American languages. While finishing his Ph. D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there. He was employed by the Geological Survey of Canada for fifteen years, where he came into his own as one of the most significant linguists in North America, the other being Leonard Bloomfield. He was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, by the end of his life he was professor of anthropology at Yale, where he never really fit in. Among his many students were the linguists Mary Haas and Morris Swadesh, with his linguistic background, Sapir became the one student of Boas to develop most completely the relationship between linguistics and anthropology. Sapir studied the ways in which language and culture influence each other and this part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Among his major contributions to linguistics is his classification of Indigenous languages of the Americas and he played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme, greatly advancing the understanding of phonology. Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages and he was the first to produce evidence for the classification of the Algic, Uto-Aztecan, and Na-Dene languages. He proposed some language families that are not considered to have been adequately demonstrated and he specialized in the study of Athabascan languages, Chinookan languages, and Uto-Aztecan languages, producing important grammatical descriptions of Takelma, Wishram, Southern Paiute. Later in his career he worked with Yiddish, Hebrew, and Chinese, as well as Germanic languages. Sapir was born into a family of Lithuanian Jews in Lauenburg in the Province of Pomerania where his father, Jacob David Sapir, the family was not Orthodox, and his father maintained his ties to Judaism through its music. The Sapir family did not stay long in Pomerania and never accepted German as a nationality, Edward Sapirs first language was Yiddish, and later English. In 1888, when he was four years old, the moved to Liverpool, England. Here Edward Sapir lost his younger brother Max to typhoid fever and his father had difficulty keeping a job in a synagogue and finally settled in New York on the Lower East Side, where the family lived in poverty. As Jacob Sapir could not provide for his family, Sapirs mother, Eva Seagal Sapir, even though Eva Sapir was an important influence, Sapir received his lust for knowledge and interest in scholarship, aesthetics, and music from his father. At age 14 Sapir won a Pulitzer scholarship to the prestigious Horace Mann high school, and saving the scholarship money for his college education. Through the scholarship Sapir supplemented his mothers meager earnings, Sapir entered Columbia in 1901, still paying with the Pulitzer scholarship
Edward Sapir
–
Edward Sapir (about 1910)
Edward Sapir
–
Franz Boas
Edward Sapir
–
Tony Tillohash with family. Tillohash was Sapir's collaborator on the famous description of the
Southern Paiute language
Edward Sapir
–
Alfred Kroeber and Ishi
45.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
–
Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer. Whorf is widely known as an advocate for the idea that differences between the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world, throughout his life Whorf was a chemical engineer by profession, but as a young man he took up an interest in linguistics. At first this interest drew him to the study of Biblical Hebrew and this led him to begin studying linguistics with Edward Sapir at Yale University while still maintaining his day job at the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. During his time at Yale he worked on the description of the Hopi language, and he was chosen as the substitute for Sapir during his medical leave in 1938. Whorf taught his seminar on Problems of American Indian Linguistics, many of his works were published posthumously in the first decades after his death. Critics argued that Whorfs ideas were untestable and poorly formulated and that they were based on badly analyzed or misunderstood data, the son of Harry Church Whorf and Sarah Edna Lee Whorf, Benjamin Lee Whorf was born on April 24,1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Harry Church Whorf was an artist, intellectual and designer – first working as a commercial artist, Benjamin had two younger brothers, John and Richard, who both went on to become notable artists. Benjamin was the intellectual of the three and at an age he conducted chemical experiments with his fathers photographic equipment. He was also a reader, interested in botany, astrology. He read William H. Prescotts Conquest of Mexico several times, at the age of 17 he began to keep a copious diary in which he recorded his thoughts and dreams. Whorf graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918 with a degree in chemical engineering where his performance was of average quality. In 1920 he married Celia Inez Peckham, who became the mother of his three children, Raymond Ben, Robert Peckham and Celia Lee, around the same time he began work as a fire prevention engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. He was particularly good at the job and was commended by his employers. His job required him to travel to production facilities throughout New England to be inspected, one anecdote describes him arriving at a chemical plant in which he was denied access by the director because he would not allow anyone to see the production procedure which was a trade secret. Having been told what the plant produced, Whorf wrote a chemical formula on a piece of paper, saying to the director, the surprised director asked Whorf how he knew about the secret procedure, and he simply answered, You couldnt do it in any other way. Whorf helped to attract new customers to the Fire Insurance Company, another famous anecdote from his job was used by Whorf to argue that language use affects habitual behavior. Whorf argued that by speaking of the vapor-filled drums as empty and by extension as inert. Whorf was a man throughout his lifetime although what religion he followed has been the subject of debate
Benjamin Lee Whorf
–
Benjamin Lee Whorf
Benjamin Lee Whorf
–
Edward Sapir, Whorf's mentor in linguistics at Yale
46.
George Lakoff
–
George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist, best known for his thesis that lives of individuals are significantly influenced by the central metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. According to him, an experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues is influenced by being framed in linguistic constructions. Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank and he is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundación IDEAS, Spains Socialist Partys think tank. The more general theory that elaborated his thesis is known as embodied mind and he is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as purely a linguistic construction, the essential thrust of Lakoffs work has been the argument that metaphors are primarily a conceptual construction, and indeed are central to the development of thought. He suggested that, Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Non-metaphorical thought is for Lakoff only possible when we talk about physical reality. For Lakoff, the greater the level of abstraction the more layers of metaphor are required to express it, people do not notice these metaphors for various reasons. One reason is that some metaphors become dead and we no longer recognize their origin, another reason is that we just dont see what is going on. Lakoffs disfluent, frequent use of you know e. g. ferries our attention between the knowable enclave of things and the world of the intellect. For instance, in intellectual debate the underlying metaphor is usually that argument is war and he shot down all my arguments. His criticisms were right on target, if you use that strategy, hell wipe you out. For Lakoff, the development of thought has been the process of developing better metaphors, the application of one domain of knowledge to another domain of knowledge offers new perceptions and understandings. Lakoff began his career as a student and later a teacher of the theory of transformational grammar developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky, in the late 1960s, however, he joined with others to promote generative semantics as an alternative to Chomskys generative syntax. In an interview he stated, During that period, I was attempting to unify Chomskys transformational grammar with formal logic, I had helped work out a lot of the early details of Chomskys theory of grammar. I came up with the beginnings of a theory in 1963 and, along with wonderful collaborators like Haj Ross and Jim McCawley. Chomsky goes further and claims that Lakoff has virtually no comprehension of the work he is discussing and his differences with Chomsky contributed to fierce, acrimonious debates among linguists that have come to be known as the linguistics wars. Lakoff offers three complementary but distinct sorts of arguments in favor of embodiment, on the contrary, most categories are supposed to be much more complicated and messy, just like our bodies
George Lakoff
–
Professor George Lakoff
47.
Deconstructivism
–
Deconstructivism is a movement of postmodern architecture which appeared in the 1980s, which gives the impression of the fragmentation of the constructed building. It is characterized by an absence of harmony, continuity, or symmetry and its name comes from the idea of Deconstruction, a form of semiotic analysis developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Architects whose work is described as deconstructionism include Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi. Besides fragmentation, Deconstructivism often manipulates the structures surface skin and creates by non-rectilinear shapes which appear to distort, the finished visual appearance is characterized by unpredictability and controlled chaos. The New York exhibition featured works by Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelbau, since the exhibition, some architects associated with Deconstructivism have distanced themselves from it. Nonetheless, the term has stuck and has come to embrace a general trend within contemporary architecture, Tschumi believed that Deconstructivism was simply a move against the practice of Postmodernism, which he said involved making doric temple forms out of plywood. The term Deconstructivism in contemporary architecture is opposed to the rationality of Modernism and Postmodernism. Though postmodernist and nascent deconstructivist architects both published in the journal Oppositions, that journals contents mark a break between the two movements. Deconstructivism took a stance to architectural history, wanting to disassemble architecture. In addition to Oppositions, a text for both deconstructivism and postmodernism was Robert Venturis Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. It argues against the purity, clarity and simplicity of modernism, with its publication, functionalism and rationalism, the two main branches of modernism, were overturned as paradigms. The reading of the postmodernist Venturi was that ornament and historical allusion added a richness to architecture that modernism had foregone, some Postmodern architects endeavored to reapply ornament even to economical and minimal buildings, described by Venturi as the decorated shed. Rationalism of design was dismissed but the functionalism of the building was still somewhat intact and this is close to the thesis of Venturis next major work, that signs and ornament can be applied to a pragmatic architecture, and instill the philosophic complexities of semiology. The deconstructivist reading of Complexity and Contradiction is quite different, the basic building was the subject of problematics and intricacies in deconstructivism, with no detachment for ornament. Rather than separating ornament and function, like such as Venturi. This subverts the functional aspects of modernist simplicity while taking modernism, particularly the style, of which its white stucco skin is reminiscent. Another example of the deconstructivist reading of Complexity and Contradiction is Peter Eisenmans Wexner Center for the Arts, the Wexner Center takes the archetypal form of the castle, which it then imbues with complexity in a series of cuts and fragmentations. A three-dimensional grid, runs somewhat arbitrarily through the building, the grid, as a reference to modernism, of which it is an accoutrement, collides with the medieval antiquity of a castle
Deconstructivism
–
Libeskind 's
Imperial War Museum North in
Manchester. A prime example of deconstructivist architecture comprising three fragmented, intersecting curved volumes which symbolise the destruction of
war.
Deconstructivism
–
Jewish Museum, Berlin,
Germany
Deconstructivism
–
Alpine Deconstructivism in
Kitzbühel,
Austria, by Christine & Horst Lechner
Deconstructivism
–
Günter Domenig' s "Steinhaus" at
Lake Ossiach, Austria
48.
Sign language
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A sign language is a language which chiefly uses manual communication to convey meaning, as opposed to acoustically conveyed sound patterns. This can involve simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, Sign languages share many similarities with spoken languages, which depend primarily on sound, and linguists consider both to be types of natural language. They should not be confused with language, which is a kind of non-linguistic communication. Wherever communities of people exist, sign languages have developed. Although signing is used primarily by the deaf, it is used by others, such as people who can hear but cannot physically speak. It is not clear how many languages there are. A common misconception is that all languages are the same worldwide or that sign language is international. Aside from the pidgin International Sign, each country generally has its own, native sign language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue lists 137 sign languages. Some sign languages have obtained some form of recognition, while others have no status at all. Groups of deaf people have used sign languages throughout history, pedro Ponce de León is said to have developed the first manual alphabet. In 1620, Juan Pablo Bonet published Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a hablar a los mudos in Madrid and it is considered the first modern treatise of sign language phonetics, setting out a method of oral education for deaf people and a manual alphabet. In Britain, manual alphabets were also in use for a number of purposes, such as communication, public speaking. Arthrological systems had been in use by hearing people for some time, some have speculated that they can be traced to early Ogham manual alphabets, the vowels of this alphabet have survived in the contemporary alphabets used in British Sign Language, Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language. The earliest known printed pictures of consonants of the modern two-handed alphabet appeared in 1698 with Digiti Lingua and he suggested that the manual alphabet could also be used by mutes, for silence and secrecy, or purely for entertainment. Nine of its letters can be traced to earlier alphabets, and 17 letters of the modern two-handed alphabet can be found among the two sets of 26 handshapes depicted and he described codes for both English and Latin. By 1720, the British manual alphabet had found more or less its present form, frenchman Charles-Michel de lÉpée published his manual alphabet in the 18th century, which has survived basically unchanged in France and North America until the present time. In 1755, Abbé de lÉpée founded the first school for children in Paris. Clerc went to the United States with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet to found the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817
Sign language
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Two men and a woman signing
Sign language
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Juan Pablo Bonet, Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a hablar a los mudos ("Reduction of letters and art for teaching mute people to speak") (Madrid, 1620).
Sign language
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Chirogram from Chirologia, 1644.
Sign language
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Sign language relief sculpture on a stone wall: "Life is beautiful, be happy and love each other", by Czech sculptor
Zuzana Čížková on Holečkova Street in
Prague -
Smíchov, by a school for the deaf.
