Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics

by Universiteit Leiden & Meertens instituut (KNAW)

Prof: Marc van Oostendorp

In this course, there are two types of readings:

Required readings: These are part of the official course materials. You will be tested on your knowledge and insight into the required readings in weekly quizzes and in the final exam.

Background readings: These are not part of the official course materials but are recommended for those of you who want to gain a deeper knowledge into the subjects of that week. You will not be tested on this material in the weekly quizzes or the final exam, but we still encourage you to read some of this material. Please note that some of the recommended readings might not be open-access. They could be behind a pay-wall or in the case of books, you need to purchase them somewhere. Unfortunately, there is still little material available free of charge.

Resources: In this first module, you will find also find some general background reading, as well as some good online resources.

Required Readings

Anderson, Stephen R. “How Many Languages are there in the World?” Linguistic Society of America Brochure Series, 2010 Click here to read.

Jackendoff, Ray. “How did Language begin?” Linguistic Society of America. Click here to read.

Dasgupta, Shreya. “Can any animals talk and use language like humans?” BBC Online, 16 Februari 2015. Click here to read.

“Language Status” Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version, 2014. Click here to read.

“The Waggle Dance of the Honeybee.” Georgia Tech College of Computing, 2011. Click here to watch.

Background Readings

Michael Tomasello (2010). “Origins of Human Communication”. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Click here for more information.

Steven Pinker (1994). “The Language Instinct: How the mind creates language”. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Click here for more information.

Victoria A. Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams (2013). “An Introduction to Language.” 10th ed. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning. Click here for more information.

Noam Chomsky (2006). “The Architecture of Language”. Oxford India Paperbacks. Click here for more information.

Guy Deutscher (2006). “The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention”. Holt Paperbacks. Click here for more information.

Joel Davis (1994). “Mother Tongue: How Humans Create Language. Birch Lane Press.” Click here for more information.

Resources

How to get access to Ethnologue?

LanguageLog. Blogposts on news, new articles and observations by several renowned linguists, among which Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum. Click here to read.

Babel. Language Magazine featuring everything from Chinglish to Shakespeare. Click here for more information.

Bergmann, A., Hall, K.C., & Ross, S.M. (Eds.). (2011). “Language files: Materials for an introduction to language and linguistics”. 11th ed. Columbus, OH: Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University. Click here for more information

Linguistic Society of America. This organisation publishes one of the most important scholarly journals in linguistics, appropriately called Language. However, they have also published a plethora of free pamphlets on a wide variety of linguistic topics, written by pre-eminent scholars. Some of these we are allowed to use in this MOOC (for which we are very grateful), and there are many more on their website. Click here for more information.

1. Communicate ideas
2. Think
3. Show who we are, which group of human beings we blong or want to belong to

Intended group:

People without language:

• Wolf children: children growing up without parents or language
• Physical and psychological abuse

E.g: Genie. be locked in a room from 20 months old to 13. No human interaction. Father: barked at her. Mother was not allowed to talk to her. => can’t figure out the system of combine all these work into definitely

• People who lose their language:
• Aphasia: the (partial) loss of language abilities due to brain damage

Language is common to all human beings

 

Coursera

? What is language?

3 dimensions:
1. Descrete infinity: Language is infinite!

descrete = limited = countable

E.g: alphabet system. limited set. unlimited words.

apes can’t do that. they can have some simple combination, but they can’t combine them to make more and more complicated system.

2. Displacement

In time

In place

Abstract notions

E.g: Bees can communicate about space, because they can dance and wiggle and tell other bees where to find their honey. Can only talk about what they have really seen.

3. Joint attention

Human language expresses a share goals.

Language is inherently cooperative

Animals do have system of communication

SUMMARY

Human communication:

• Infinite message with finite means
• Talk about things not in here and now
• Language is a fundamentally cooperative tool

WE USE LANGUAGE:

• To communicate ideas
• To think
• To show who we are, which group