Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. This lecture introduces your course's key elements, from language's building blocks to the many ways linguistic practitioners use them to learn more about us and the role of language in our lives.
The English alphabet, with only 26 letters, offers only an approximate sense of the 44 sounds English uses. You learn how linguists therefore transcribe consonants phonetically.
You continue your exploration of the International Phonetic Alphabet with a look at its vowels—a much larger resource than the five provided by the conventional alphabet—and are able to transcribe entire words and sentences in the IPA.
Some sounds are "real" ones that distinguish meaning; others are just variations. In exploring how words are generated on two levels, you learn about a contrast basic to modern linguistics: the difference between phonemic and phonetic sounds.
Just as actual sounds correspond only partially to the alphabet, the words we write correspond only partially to actual units of meaning. This lecture introduces you to the linguistic "unit of meaning" called a morpheme, several of which might be contained in a single word.
Although best known outside linguistics for his political writings, Noam Chomsky inaugurated a revolution in linguistic thought, proposing in the 1950s that the capacity for language is innate, driven by a neurological configuration that generates words in a hierarchical, branching "tree" format known as phrase structure.
You learn the evidence for Chomsky's argument that the sentences we utter at "surface structure" level often emerge with a different constituent ordering than was in place at "deep structure" level—the result of processes of movement he originally called transformations.
Syntax, in linguistics, refers to the mechanisms that order words in sentences. This lecture introduces you to the idea that languages' syntaxes differ according to whether certain parameters—such as whether objects come before or after verbs—are set to "on" or "off."
Languages differ in how they express basic concepts of meaning, such as person, space, and tense. This lecture introduces you to semantics—the ways in which different languages use the building blocks you've learned about to communicate messages about the full range of reality.
You begin to learn about pragmatics—how we move beyond the literal meaning of sentences to real-world matters like attitude, general presuppositions, and what is known versus what is new. Pragmatics is what makes strings of words express the full range of humanity and consciousness.
Jacob Grimm was more than a compiler of fairy tales. In learning how Grimm's Law spurred the development of a scientific way of charting sound changes, you are introduced to historical linguistics, the study of how language changes over time.
Linguists can reconstruct what earlier languages were like by comparing their modern descendants. In this lecture you see how comparative reconstruction is applied to the recovery of the ancestor of the Romance languages and the ancestor to the Polynesian languages.
Where do a language's "grammatical" words—words that, like "about," have no independent meaning in the sense that a concrete word like "apple" does—actually come from? You learn how independent words marking concrete concepts are reinterpreted over time to serve as grammatical markers.
You get a chance to observe the process of language change described in the previous three lectures, examining a passage of Old English to see how changes in sound patterns, word formation, and grammatical patterns changed that language into the one we now speak.
There are ways in which a language can and does change, but there are also ways in which it cannot. You gain an understanding of the concept of markedness and its key role in defining the constraints on a language's possible changes.
Children acquire language spontaneously without being explicitly taught how. In examining how this is accomplished, you learn about the strong evidence that such ability is innate and that much of language acquisition is about the ability to master underlying rules rather than to memorize words.
Unlike learning a first language, learning a second can be a slippery slope, with rules of the first often bleeding into the second. You learn why this is so and what factors can make the process easier.
You encounter the field of sociolinguistics, which investigates how social factors like class affect the way in which people say words or arrange their sentences grammatically.
You continue your examination of sociolinguistics with a look at two ways in which researchers have presented the impact of social factors on the way people express themselves, including Basil Bernstein's controversial hypothesis that working-class people use a more restricted code of language that hampers educational achievement.
You learn how variation is often an early sign of change in a language and that the working class, because its members are less constrained by prescriptive norms and maintain new variants as "in-group" markers, is the source of most change in a language.
How we speak is determined significantly by whether we are men or women. You learn the many ways by which this difference is brought to bear, including grammatical markers, the social favor or disfavor of a form, and other social factors.
With 6,000 languages coexisting in just 200 or so nations, bilingualism and multilingualism are not oddities; they are norms. What happens in such a situation? This lecture shows you the results of bilingualism according to social context.
One of the consequences of widespread bilingualism and multilingualism is the use of two languages within one conversation and even within the same sentence. This does not occur randomly but according to specific linguistic traffic rules and social factors—a phenomenon known as code-switching.
Linguists and sociologists have discovered that conversation between people—with not only its conveyance of data but also its interruptions and strategies—is guided by subconsciously controlled rules, just as syntax is. You gain insight into those rules in this lecture on conversation analysis.
You meet Ferdinand de Saussure, who established linguistics as a discipline concerned with language in a present-tense sense rather than as a historical procession. De Saussure inaugurated the study of language as a human activity, rather than as something recorded on paper.
Much of what we say is as much about doing something as saying something; as much about serving a social function as communicating. This is the concept termed the "speech act," and you learn in this lecture how the various kinds of speech acts have been explained and categorized.
How a language is actually used in various situations can vary widely from culture to culture, where differing social norms define how a speaker functions within the language. You gain an introduction to what is called the ethnography of communication.
This lecture introduces you to a seductive theory known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis—the idea that a language's particular vocabulary and grammar determine how its speakers process the world—and its inherent problems, despite its persistent popular acceptance.
You continue your exploration of the Whorfian hypothesis, learning that sociological concerns as well as linguistic ones have determined many of its adherents' approaches, before moving on to interesting new studies that suggest a less stark version of the Whorfian idea.
Linguists have had little success in convincing the public that there is no such thing as "bad grammar" and that casual speech is not an imperfect version of "proper" language. You explore why this is so and why past changes in English are viewed as acceptable in a way that current, ongoing change is not.
You continue your examination of the argument for descriptivism over prescriptivism begun in the previous lecture, learning that there is no human language without logical lapses and imperfections and why there is little point in trying to build one.
Writing is not language but only a secondary expression of it, a representation of it on the page. This lecture explains how writing first emerged, exploring the picture-based system that became abstract cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the alphabetic system that became the source of the Roman alphabet.
You explore the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems before plunging into the fascinating story behind the decoding of the extinct Greek writing system known as Linear B, discovered on the island of Crete in 1900. Mistakenly assumed to be a lost Cretan language, Linear B was ultimately deciphered in 1953 and shown to be a form of Greek.
You get the opportunity to learn something about actually being a linguist as you explore the grammar of a language called Saramaccan—a hybrid of English, Portuguese, and African languages, with a little Dutch—which is spoken in the Republic of Surinam in South America.
In this lecture, your foray into practical linguistics involves an obscure, difficult, and peculiar language—Kabardian—presented as if you were encountering it for the first time. Spoken in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia, Kabardian's sound system and syntax show various concepts you have seen in this course.
Interest in how language emerged in humans, long dormant in the field, has recently re-emerged. You conclude the course with a brief look at some of this new work, including Ray Jackendorf's assertions that sentence generation, contrary to Chomskyan theory, begins with semantics, not syntax.