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Levels of Representation

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What are UR and SF? Speakers in all languages possess abstract concepts about the sounds they articulate. In other words, they believe that they have an accurate awareness of speech sounds that they utter. Typically, though, there is a discrepancy between speakers’ own ideas about the sounds in their language use, and what they are actually articulating in practice.  The underlying representation … [Read more...]

Features and Classes 101

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Features Phonetic features The perception of natural speech sounds is based on phonetic features, the smallest units of distinction between any two phonemes.  We use features such as voicing to differentiate between the words /kejm/ ‘came’ and /gejm/ ‘game’.  The only distinguishing feature between these 2 sounds is that the vocal cords not do vibrate for during the articulation of /k/, and do … [Read more...]

An Introduction to Natural Classes

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When studying phonology, it is fundamental to understand phonemes in terms of the features that they bear and share. Doing so allows us to group phonemes together into natural classes, which gives insight into how classes of sounds pattern together when undergoing various phonological processes. Natural classes are groups of phonemes that share one or a set of phonological features. Binary … [Read more...]

Ecuadorian Quechua

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Allinta uyariyta yachaspaqa, allintatiqmi yachanki. If you listen and pay attention, you will learn well. Quechua Proverb  Quechua and Ecuadorian Kichwa Introduction Quechua, [ˈkɛtʃwə], is a family of languages spoken by over 7 million people primarily in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, and with more than one million speakers found elsewhere in the Andean Region of South America. Quechua … [Read more...]

Modern Persian (Farsi)

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Modern Persian      Did you know: Middle Persian is believed to be the language spoken between Marco Polo and Khubilai Kahn. Historical Background Modern Persian or Farsi (Parsi) is a member of the Indo-Iranian language family, a sub-group of Indo-European languages. Despite being currently written with a variant of the Arabic alphabet, Persian does not share language groups with Arabic, … [Read more...]

More on Semantics

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Semantics - The Study of Meanings That Are Unconsciously Understood Semantics is the study of meaning in terms of what speakers unconsciously know prescriptively (what language critics invoke during disagreements over word meaning and sentence interpretation) and descriptively (the way in which word and sentence meaning are encoded in a native language as part of mental grammar). Meaning is … [Read more...]

An Introduction to Semantics

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Semantics covers a very broad list of topics dealing mainly with meaning of and the relationships between words. Most introductory linguistics courses focus on three basic areas: lexical semantics (word meaning and relatedness), phrasal or sentential semantics (sentential meaning and relatedness), and pragmatics (meaning in the context of discourse). Lexical Semantics Semantic Features Lexical … [Read more...]

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