miércoles, 2 de mayo de 2012

Cuadro Conceptual "Avram Noam Chomsky"



Glosario


Absolute: Perfect in quality or nature; complete.

Adaptation: analogic change which extends the use of a glosseme.

Applications: A request pending at a patent office for the grant of a patent

Bound: a form which is not free.

Categories of a language: the functional meanings and class-meanings of a language.

Conflicting Forms: Distintion, being in conflict  or disagreement; not compatible: conflicting viewpoints.

Connotations: A connotation is frequently described as either positive or negative, with regards to its pleasing or displeasing emotional connection.

Constituents: A structural unit of a definable syntactic, semantic, or phonological category that consists of one or more linguistic elements (as words, morphemes, or features) and that can occur as a component of a larger construction

Contamination: analogic change which creates or enlarges a glosseme.

Deduced: To reach (a conclusion) by reasoning.

Degenator: Is any marketing-related activity intended to publicize the availability of a vendor's product or service.

Described: To convey an idea or impression of; characterize

Dialects: a linguistic change in groups of persons between which communication is disturbed.

Different: that which is not the same.

Endocentric: Of or relating to a group of syntactically related words, at least one of which is functionally equivalent to the function of the whole group.

Exocentric: Of or relating to a group of syntactically related words, none of which is functionally equivalent to the function of the whole group. For example, none of the words in the phrase on the table is an adverb, yet they combine to form a phrase having adverbial function.

Explanation: A mutual clarification of misunderstandings; a reconciliation.

Formal analogy: analogic change of formatives.

Formative: a bound form which is part of a word.

Form-class: all forms having the same functions.

Forms: the vocal features common ´o same or partly same utterances.

Free forms: Having or characterized by a usually flowing asymmetrical shape or outline.

Free: a form which may be an utterance.

Frequency: Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency. The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency

Function: the positions in which occurs.

Functional meaning: the meaning of a position.

Glosseme: whatever has a meaning.

Gramatical Forms: The representation of the way in which a sequence of words comes to be a well-formed sentence of a language. In a formal or artificial language grammar is laid down in formation rules, but the formation rules of natural languages are sufficiently complex to make accurate codification hazardous.

Homonyms: different forms which are alike as to phonemes.

Included: To take in or comprise as a part of a whole or group

Invalid: To incapacitate physically.

Labialized: when the lips are rounded during the production of the consonant.

Labiovelarized: both labialized and velarized.

Language: For mentalist, language is the expression of ideas, feelings or volitions.

Linguistic form: the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer.

Loan-words: borrowed words.

Material: Material is anything made of matter, constituted of one or more substances.

Meanings: the corresponding stimulus-reaction-features.

Metaphor: A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that describes a subject by asserting that it is, on some point of comparison, the same as another otherwise unrelated object.

Minor: The determinant of a certain submatrix

Morpheme: the minimum form of a word.

Morphologic construction: the construction of formatives in a word.

Noeme: is the meaning of a glosseme.

Observations: The act or faculty of observing.

Order: A condition of logical or comprehensible arrangement among the separate elements of a group.

Ordinary Language: The phrase ordinary language is often used in philosophy and logic to distinguish between ordinary, unsurprising uses of terms and their more specialized uses in theorizing, or jargon. For example, the statements "I find that class of person very annoying" and "Birds fall into a different class from bees" might be said to contain ordinary English

Palatalization: during the production of a consonant, the tongue and lips take up, as far as compatible with the main features of the phoneme, the position of a front vowel.

Parts of the speech: the maximum word-classes of a language of a language.

Phoneme (or distinctive sound): a minimum same of vocal feature.

Phonetics: the branch of science that deals with sound-productiond and can be described empirically.

Phrase formative: a phrase that contain a bound form which is not a part of a word.

Pitch: frequency of vibration in the musical sound of the voice.

Position: each of the order units in a construction.

Prestige: Refers to a good reputation or high esteem, though in earlier usage, it meant showiness.

Proportional analogy: adaptation which replaces one alternant with another.

Reductive: Of or relating to reduction, Relating to, being an instance of, or exhibiting reductionism

Related languages: when a linguistic change results in groups of persons between which communication is impossible.

Same: that which is alike .

Selection: In the context of evolution, certain traits or alleles of genes segregating within a population may be subject to selection. Under selection, individuals with advantageous or "adaptive" traits tend to be more successful than their peers reproductively—meaning they contribute more offspring to the succeeding generation than others do.

Semantic change: analogic change of words.

Sentence: a maximum construction in any utterance.

Signification: The established meaning of a word

Speech: is taken to be an objectively observable activity of an organism, a succession or substitute stimuli and responses.

Speech-community: any such community.

Stable States: change in ecosystem conditions can result in an abrupt shift in the state of the ecosystem, such as a change in population or community composition.

Standard language: a relatively uniform auxiliary dialect used by such groups.

Stress: intensity or loudness.

Sub-categories: the meaning of the form class that contains relatively few forms.

Subclasses: A category in biological classification ranking below a class and above an order

Substitution: linguistic substitution of phonemes.

Substitutions: The act, process, or result of substituting one thing for another

Superficial: Presenting only an appearance without substance or significance

Suppletive: occurs when in a construction all the component forms are irregular.

Syntactic construction: the construction of free forms (and phrase-formatives in a phrase.

Utterance: an act of speech.

Velarization: in which the tongue is retracted as for a back vowel.

Word: a minimum free form.

Word-class: a form-class of words.

Leonard Bloomfield main contributions to linguistics

Leonard Bloomfield main contributions to linguistics Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) was an American linguistic and philologist, one of the most important representatives of American structuralism. Bloomfield rejects the application of all that was not “directly observable” for linguistic analysis; in the study of language he marginalizes the semantic aspect. Leonard Bloomfield left his mark on the fields of morphology and syntax. He was teacher and founder of antimentalism (a theory contrary to the Sapir’s mentalism which is an interpretation of language inextricably linked to acts of the mind), leads to its ultimate limits the dissociation of signifiers and meanings, to exclude these of his consideration. He claims that the linguist can only make assertions about the system of signifiers, because the facts of meaning, mental and conceptual in nature, are not his concern. His linguistic is concern only in analyzing formal features of language. The significance is only taken into account as a control, to be sure that the conclusions are not irrationals. Bloomfield was a colleague of Sapir at Yale University, after having worked in Ohio and Chicago, both of which were located in opposite theoretical positions, as Bloomfield rejected the possibility that linguistics analyze meaning, while for Sapir semantics is an essential part of the studies about the language and languages. Bloomfield’s main works is admittedly Language (1933), setting out his version of structuralism linguistics. Bloomfield says that his work draws on the three main traditions in the study of language: the comparative–historical, philosophical and empirical, descriptive and prescriptive. Despite this triple, Bloomfield boosted mainly descriptive field studies. That descriptivism is limited by the fact that as he admitted, speaking communities are often not homogeneous, an observation that history has placed as required of all socio and ethnolinguistic studies today. One of the major concerns of Bloomfield is to give linguistics a similar character to that of the natural sciences, which explicitly considers an epistemological model. To do this, Bloomfield proposes to eliminate all mentalist or psychological studies of language, focusing on materials and mechanical aspects, that is, language is conceived by Bloomfield as a visible human behavior. Behaviors are described in terms of response and pair of stimulus on typical situations and that’s way Bloomfield is considered a representative of behaviorism, which has had expressions in various social sciences and humanities. Behaviorism requires Bloomfield’s to reformulate the place of semantic within linguistics, since this conception of language does not have place for any kind of concept or mental image (the definition of significance of Saussure): all that can be seen is a set of stimuli and reactions that occur in certain situations. Bloomfield accepts the Saussure premise that language study involves studying the correlation between sound and meaning, but technically, the meaning is too difficult to “see”, so you should be outside the scope of linguistics. For Bloomfield, then, the language “begins” with the phonetics and Phonology. Bloomfield argues that are two components that should focus the study of the correlation between sound and meaning: the lexicon and grammar. While the lexicon is the total inventory of morphemes of a language, grammar is the combination of morphemes in any “complex form”. That is, the meaning of a statement follows from the sum of the meaning of lexical items plus “something else” that is the meaning provided by the grammar. Grammar includes both syntax (e.g. the construction of phrases) and morphology (e.g. the construction of words). Each individual language morpheme is an “irregularity” as far that represents an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning that must be memorized. Thus the lexicon is defined as “a list of basic irregularities”, a notion that has been recovered in various theories. Bloomfield’s interest was to make linguistics a true science of language. This defined the task of the linguist as one that would address to study the emissions corpus, discovering regularities and structures.

American Structuralism

American Structuralism Structuralism background Language is a system of values, which are set by social facts: values of linguistic signs are based on the use and community consensus. A system element has no value but in relation to the entire system, language is a system in which all elements are integral and in which each value results from the simultaneous presence of the other. The notion of value is verified at both meaning in terms of the signifier. For Saussure and the structuralists, signs are interconnected to form the structure of language. Language would be a closed system of structural relationships in which the meanings grammar usage of linguistic elements depend on the set of positions created between all the system elements. The American structuralism must be understood in the context of philosophical and empirical positivism. Indeed, this school is distinguished by a strong psychological emphasis anchored on the assumption of considering the human mind a “tabula rasa” as postulated by empiricism. Thus, only the observable can be considered reliable and intuition or semantic evidence would be misleading and uncertain. Main authors of American structuralism The school of linguistic relativism represented by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf has been noted for field work, and that begins the systematic collection of direct evidence of exotic minority languages, non Indo- European and unwritten. In addition to using this methodology, these authors have claimed the same scientific value for all languages, contrary to certain deviations from the nineteenth- century European comparativism. Franz Boas (1858-1942) In contrast to those nineteenth- century linguistics were based on Darwin’s ideas to justify the supremacy of certain peoples and languages in an evolution parallel to the natural selection. Boas emphasized the equal value of each type of language regardless of race and cultural level of the people associated. He further argues that there are no real “pure races” and that is no race innately superior to another. From a linguistic point of view, and under the influence of the great nineteenth century German linguistics, as Herder or Humboldt, Boas argued that each language represents an implicit classification of experience and that these classifications are different according to the languages, but this has no effect on the “level” of thought or culture. Edward Sapir (1884 1939) Germany, The focus of Sapir in language is not on the linguistic form itself (e.g. if a language use or not bending), or linguistic meaning as such (e.g. if a language can express or not referent), but rather in the organization of formal meaning which is proper to a particular language, that is how meanings are systematized or grammaticalized (e.g. grammatical categories or patterns of composition). Sapir’s research on the role of meaning in grammatical form and the importance of this in the use of language and the development and transmission of ideas contributed to what is known as the Sapir and Whorf (or linguistic relativity hypothesis). In fact the hypothesis was developed after Sapir’s death by his student Benjamin lee Whorf (1897 1941). Whorf says that each language can process an infinite variety of experiences through a finite set of formal categories (lexical and grammatical) and that the experiences are classified by means of a process of analogy. Languages vary considerably not only in the basic distinction that recognize, but also on the manner in which they are grouped into a coherent system. This means that the system of categories that each language has to its speakers is not universal but particular. Central to the hypothesis formulated by Whorf is that linguistic categories are used as guides in the habitual thought. Thus, if the speakers are able to interpret the experience in terms of a particular category available in his language, automatically will group by analogy other meanings in that category. These categories, in turn, will naturalize speakers tend to view intrinsic experience in relation to the categories they use, even if these are the result of a process of linguistic analogy.

Ethnography and Linguistic Ethnography

Ethnography and Linguistic Ethnography The ethnography is a qualitative research method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena and which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group, is also a branch of anthropology that provides scientific description of individual societies. The linguistic ethnography as a term designating a particular configuration of interests within the broader field of socio and applied linguistics, Linguistics Ethnography is a theoretical and methodological development orientating toward particular, established traditions but defining itself in the new intellectual climate of late modernity and post-structuralism.

Linguistic ethnography generally holds that language and social life are mutually shaping, and that close analysis of situated language use can provide both fundamental and distinctive insights into mechanisms and dynamics of social and cultural production in every activity. The most representative linguists of ethnolinguistics were Franz Boas and Edward Sapir.

Boas encouraged the far field concept of anthropology; he personally contributed to physical anthropology, linguistics, archeology as well as cultural anthropology. His work in these field was pioneer; in physical anthropology, he led scholars away from static taxonomical classification of race to an emphasis on human biology and evolution; in linguistics he broke through the limitations of classic philology and established some of the central problems in modern linguistics and cognitive anthropology; in cultural anthropology he (along with polish-  English anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski) established the contextualist approach to culture, cultural relativism, and the participant- observer method of fieldwork. They worked with American-Indian tribes in order to establish their theories. Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the disciplines of linguistics. With his solid 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 he was interested in the relation between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world views.

This part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis. In anthropology Sapir is known as an early proponent of the importance of psychology to anthropology, maintaining that understanding relationships between different individual personalities is important for the ways in ways in which culture and society develop. Among his major contributions to linguistics is his classification of Indigenous languages of the Americas, which he elaborated for most of his professional life. He played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme, greatly advancing the understanding of phonology. Before Sapir it was generally considered impossible to apply the methods of historical linguistics to languages of indigenous peoples because they were believed to be more primitive than the Indo-European languages. Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages.

miércoles, 7 de marzo de 2012

London School





Prague School

The Prague School practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics. The hallmark of Prague linguistics was that it saw language in terms of function. They analyzed a given language with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language.


The Prague linguistics looked at languages as one might look at a motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.


They used the notion of ‘phoneme and morpheme’, for instance; but they tried to go beyond descriptions to explanation, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were.


One example of functional explanation concerns his use of terms commonly translated theme and rheme, and the notion which has to be called ‘Functional Sentence Perspective’: the theme, which refers to something about which the hearer already knows, and the rheme, which states some new fact about that given topic. Very often, the theme/rheme division will correspond to the syntactic distinction between subject and predicate, or between subject-plus-transitive-verb and object: we may say John kissed Eve because we have been talking about John and want to say wht he did next, or because the hearer knows that John kissed Eve because we have been talking about John want to say what he did next, or because the hearer knows that john kissed someone and want to tell him who it was.


Many Prague linguistics were actively interested in questions of standardizing linguistic usage.


 


Prince Nicolai Sergeyvich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the ‘PragueSchool’ and he was from Russia. Trubetzkoy’s ides today chiefly through the book, Principles of Phonology, he gives a central role to the phoneme; but Trubetzkoy, and the Prague School in general were interested primarily in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes, i.e. the nature of the oppositions between the phonemes that potentially contrast one another at a given point in a phonological structure.


Trubetzkoy, in the Principles, establishes a rather sophisticated system of phonological typology – that is, a system which enables us to say what kind of phonology a language has. Typology was another distinctive preoccupation of the Prague School; ‘linguistic characterology’, which aimed to enable one to discuss what kind of grammar a language has.


 


 


Roman Jakobson (b. 1896) is a scholar of Russian origin; he studied and thought in Praga. Jakobson was one of the founding members of thePrague Linguistic Circle.


Jakobson represents one of the very few personal links between European an American traditions of linguistics, and his ides have much to do with the radical change of direction that has occurred in American linguistics over the last twenty years.


The most important aspect of Jacobson’s work is his phonological theory. Here Jakobson is recognizably a member of the Prague School– like Trubetzkoy he is interested in the analysis of phonemes into their component features rather than in the distribution of phonemes.


The essence of Jakobson’s approach to phonology is the notion that there is a relatively simple, orderly, universal ‘psychological system’ of sounds underlying the the chaotic wealth of different kinds of sounds observed by the phonetician.


Jakobson’s important contributions:


Speech sounds. - A vowel may be ‘close or open’


                           -Vowels may be ‘front’ or ‘back’


                           - Any vowel (and many consonants) can be ‘nasal’ or ‘oral’


 


One of the lessons of the articulatory phonetics is that human vocal anatomy provides a very large range of different parameters (articulation points).


All our sounds are made with air forced of the lungs by the respiratory muscles; and the wide range of possible vocal-chord actions are only marginally exploited, for the simple voiced/voiceless distinction and for the use of pitch in stress and intonation, the later being  relatively peripheral matters in English phonology.


 


The notion that the universal distinctive features are organized into an innate hierarchy of relative importance or priority appears in a book (Jakobson 1941). He makes the point, to begin with, that the study of children’s acquisition of language shows that the various distinctions are by no means mastered in a random order.


One of the characteristics of Prague  approach to language was a readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative ‘systems’, ‘registers’, or ‘styles’, where American Descriptivist’s tended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system.


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