|
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The creation of Linguistics for Educators was prompted by the thousands of students I have taught over the
past ten years in these courses: Fundamentals of Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Grammar for ESL Teachers
and Cross-Cultural Communication. Many of them are teachers who are looking for ways to broaden their own education
for expansion into ESL teaching. Of all the courses I give, linguistics is the one that provokes the most apprehension. However, the students'
eagerness to deepen their understanding of our native tongue in spite of their fears has been the inspiration for the creation
of this book. Their responsiveness has pointed me toward that middle ground between the best that linguistics has to
offer and what is actually useful in the classroom. Chapter 1 Linguistics – Why Bother? The purpose of this textbook is to provide all teachers using English in the classroom
with a practical grasp of the main building blocks of language, focusing primarily on English, with a view to delivering objective,
realistic, effective and helpful guidance to ELs (English learners). With this structural framework you will acquire a “backdrop” to your understanding of English so that
you will become a better guide for your students, whether they be ESL or EFL students, autistic children, pre-K children or
adults 80 years old. When your students make a mistake in English, and you
know it’s a mistake, you will gain appreciation of “where they are coming from” in their struggle to get
control of this language. You will better be able to recognize that, in their struggle, their mistakes “make sense.” Many who use this book are native speakers of English, and many others have learned
English as a second or foreign language. Whatever the case, something magical happens when we uncover the miracle that
has taken place in our brains. It is, indeed, not an exaggeration to say that one’s fluency and control of any
language is a miracle. Something remarkable happens in the classroom when we begin to uncover exactly what it is that
we know when we know a language. Most of us know the basic features of linguistics;
we can’t help it. Anyone who has control of any human language knows these features almost intuitively. It is just that we don’t know exactly what it
is that we know, and by objectifying that knowledge we can deliver this language effectively to any learners of English. Chapter 2 Morphology: The Inner World of Words Words
live in two worlds: an inner world (morphology) and an outer world (syntax). This chapter concerns a word’s inner
world. What are its constituents? How receptive or unreceptive are they toward other possible constituents of
a word? What are the general patterns of word formation? If students can begin to conceptualize the inner workings
of this world, they will discover a chain reaction of efficient learning and vocabulary building. A teacher can become
a powerful catalyst to help students learn how to build vocabulary on their own. Morphemes Cats is a word but not a single morpheme. Its two morphemes make up a new word,
and this is exactly what morphemes do. We can still view this plural form as relatively independent. To investigate
this word from the point of view of morphology, we will continue to turn our gaze inward on these two parts of the word. Morphemes are the word builders of language. They are, as Fromkin points out, “the minimal linguistic
unit. . . the arbitrary union of a sound and a meaning that cannot be further analyzed” (Fromkin 2003:76). They
may be complete words, or they may be parts of words. Cat is both a complete word and a single morpheme.
From the point of view of English, it cannot be reduced further. If we add an –s, we now have cats,
a new word made up of two morphemes: cat and –s. Clearly –s cannot be reduced
any further. It is not a word. Does –s have meaning? Yes, but its meaning is dependent; it
relies on its attachment to cats in order for its meaning to emerge. Cat
is a free morpheme, and –s is a bound morpheme. –s belongs to a small number of inflectional
morphemes (a total of eight) that are extremely powerful in the English language. Each
time a teacher comes across words like biology, geography, philosophy, synonym or metaphor, he or she can
see through these words and realize the potential of leveraging vocabulary by teaching the morphemes. Rather than stopping
only long enough to learn one word in isolation, the teacher can make up games using the morphemes to build a metacognitive
process in the minds of students so that they can begin to manage their own learning of vocabulary throughout their lives.
They are putting word power into their lexicons. Think of a metacognitive skill as
the development of one’s internal manager of the learning process. Students can become their own teachers throughout
their lives. Rather than responding passively to whatever a teacher delivers in the classroom, a student can assertively
take control of the learning process. This is the key for success in college or in one’s professional life, whatever
the field. Chapter 3 Syntax: The Glue of Phrases and Sentences Syntax is what holds words together to produce a sentence. Here’s how it works. First, a word’s
inner world must be completed by the combination of all relevant morphemes (psyche + logos = psychology +-cal = psychological).
Then it is ready to enter its outer world, its contribution to the making of a sentence. This word sends out grammatical
feelers to other words and phrases, letting them know that it will play one or another role in the assembling of a grammatically
correct sentence. For example, psychological is an adjective, waiting to provide modification to a following
noun: psychological sense. Adding the determiner a, we get a psychological sense. This
grouping is called a noun phrase. The role this phrase plays in a sentence makes it a different
kind of noun, and it is important for the learner to realize this. This grouping has a grammatical life of its own.
The individual words and these groupings are called constituents, and it is essential that learners internalize this concept
because it carries meaning from the smallest to the largest units of a sentence. When we add in, a preposition,
we produce a prepositional phrase, yet another constituent in the sentence. In a psychological sense operates
as a relatively independent constituent on a higher, more powerful grammatical level than any of the individual words in the
phrase. Chapter 4 Semantics: The World of Meaning “Semantic Pockets” in our
Lexicons What does the organization of vocabulary in our “mental dictionaries”
(our lexicons) look like? No one can say for sure, but there is no question that our brains have ways of organizing
the world of meaning we carry for the languages we speak. One way to visualize this is to
think of the stacks of books in a library. Let’s say that an educated native speaker of English has control of
about 60,000 words. We know by the examples shown in Broca’s Aphasia vs. Wernicke’s Aphasia (pages 36 and
following in the Fromkin book), that we store function words and content words in different parts of the brain. This
is undoubtedly the most basic division of vocabulary. As to content words, it is also
clear that we have ways of storing them in groups, all the way from large groups of content words (e.g., nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs) to small groups (e.g., colors, musical instruments, etc.). Bibliographers in a library have
to make decisions as to which grouping a particular book should belong. The main disciplines of a university provide
an obvious basis for the groupings. Also, books attached to a particular language will be a criterion. Inevitably,
compromises will have to be reached because millions of books belong in more than one category. There is no perfect
way to store all of the books in the stacks so that they will fit all relevant criteria. In like manner, words may belong
to a particular category but may also belong to many other categories outside the main one. Another
metaphor might be the use of general to specific “menus” in a computer. This can have the advantage of showing
groupings within groupings. As is so often the case in the study of language, it is a metaphor
that is most useful in helping us to visualize and then to organize and teach word groupings around meaning: semantic
pockets (pockets within pockets within pockets). It would seem that our brains have an ability to organize these
pockets in many different locations with many ways to have them overlap and interact. Some pockets are far removed from
each other. Others are close together. A word may belong to many different pockets at the same time as is depicted
in the graph below. The word “noun” is the hypernym (the general term) for all of the hyponyms (all of the
individual words “under” this category) contained in the pocket. All words
in English can be designated as either hypernyms or hyponyms. The hypernym "noun" subsumes all of the many
thousands of its hyponyms, that is, all of the “persons, places, things, ideas” and even “sentences within
sentences” (noun clauses which serve as subjects or direct objects for the main clause). The two-word hypernym,
"musical instruments," stands for the specific categories listed among its hyponyms, such as clarinet, trumpet,
etc. This is an example where English simply does not have a single word to serve as the hypernym. Chapter 5 Phonemes: The Atoms of Language [By 1999 I had already developed and begun the use of the concept
"atoms of language." Afterwards I came across Mark Baker's book, The Atoms of Language.
However, our uses of this metaphor are completely unrelated.] Phonemes and Allophones One can produce
the accurate sounds of any language only if one has control of the complicated world of its phonemes and allophones. Like atoms, the
most fundamental building blocks of all matter, phonemes are the basis for everything that happens in language. A speaker’s
perception, understanding and creation of morphemes, words, constituents and sentences can happen only by expansion from these
fundamental units. As we saw in Chapter 4 on semantics, the
more one explores the “after shocks” of metaphors (the “semantic earthquakes” of language), the richer
and more meaningful they become. The lock in the relationship between the proton and the neutron
of an atom is reflected in the fusion of sound and the basis of meaning at the core of the phoneme. Phonemes do not
carry full meaning themselves, but they “signal” meaning; that is, they are the originators, the most fundamental
source of this union between sound and meaning. When the sound and the signal for meaning are “fused” together,
the importance of this for language is reflected in the “strong nuclear force” that ties protons and neutrons
together, the strongest force in nature. The “electrons” of phonemes are its allophones.
Just as electrons are in varying orbits around the nucleus of an atom, so we speakers of English are usually not consciously
aware of the “location” of a phoneme’s allophones. Sometimes they are far removed from our perception
of them. Such is the case in a word like situation. The /t/ goes far afield from what we perceive it
to be. In this case, speakers of English are heavily influenced
by the writing system. Though the allophones are real sounds (unlike the phonemes they represent), they are somewhat
“rebellious” toward the nucleus of the phoneme as they fly around it “in orbit.” Chapter 6 Phonetics: The Public Display of Phonemes Steps in
Making the Consonants: b (voiced bilabial stop): 1. Activate your vocal cords (what this means is that you must be prepared to vibrate the vocal cords just at the time of the release of this stop). 2. Completely close your mouth between your lips. 3. Build up a moderate amount of pressure within your mouth (this can actually be measured by PSI, pounds per square inch, exactly like the pressure in the tires of your car). 4. Release the pressure without producing any clear vowel afterwards. Just say [b-b-b]. Train yourself not to say the name of this letter in the English alphabet. The last part of the name consists of a vowel [i], and this only confuses the production of the consonant by itself. d (voiced alveolar stop): 1. Activate your vocal cords in preparation for the sound. 2. Completely close your mouth by placing the tip of your tongue on the alveolar ridge. 3. Build up pressure in your mouth. 4. Release to a nondescript sound, not a clear vowel as would be included in sounding out the name for this letter in English. f (voiceless labiodental fricative): 1. Deactivate your vocal cords. 2. Place your lower lip tightly against your upper teeth. It is impossible to completely close this off because air can escape between
your teeth. This escaping air between the teeth is what makes the turbulent sound of this fricative. 3. Blowing air out in this configuration will create the sound. Words live in two worlds: an inner world (morphology) and an
outer world (syntax). This chapter concerns a word’s inner world. What are its constituents? How receptive
or unreceptive are they toward other possible constituents of a word? What are the general patterns of word formation?
If students can begin to conceptualize the inner workings of this world, they will discover a chain reaction of efficient
learning and vocabulary building. A teacher can become a powerful catalyst to help students learn how to build vocabulary
on their own. Morphemes Cats
is a word but not a single morpheme. Its two morphemes make up a new word, and this is exactly what morphemes do.
We can still view this plural form as relatively independent. To investigate this word from the point of view of morphology,
we will continue to turn our gaze inward on these two parts of the word. Morphemes are
the word builders of language. They are, as Fromkin points out, “the minimal linguistic unit. . . the arbitrary
union of a sound and a meaning that cannot be further analyzed” (Fromkin 2003:76). They may be complete words,
or they may be parts of words. Cat is both a complete word and a single morpheme. From the point of view
of English, it cannot be reduced further. If we add an –s, we now have cats, a new word made
up of two morphemes: cat and –s. Clearly –s cannot be reduced any further.
It is not a word. Does –s have meaning? Yes, but its meaning is dependent; it relies on its attachment
to cats in order for its meaning to emerge. Cat is a free morpheme,
and –s is a bound morpheme. –s belongs to a small number of inflectional morphemes (a
total of eight) that are extremely powerful in the English language. Each time
a teacher comes across words like biology, geography, philosophy, synonym or metaphor, he or she can see
through these words and realize the potential of leveraging vocabulary by teaching the morphemes. Rather than stopping
only long enough to learn one word in isolation, the teacher can make up games using the morphemes to build a metacognitive
process in the minds of students so that they can begin to manage their own learning of vocabulary throughout their lives.
They are putting word power into their lexicons. Think of a metacognitive skill as
the development of one’s internal manager of the learning process. Students can become their own teachers throughout
their lives. Rather than responding passively to whatever a teacher delivers in the classroom, a student can assertively
take control of the learning process. This is the key for success in college or in one’s professional life, whatever
the field. Chapter 3 Syntax: The Glue of Phrases and Sentences Syntax is what holds words together to produce a sentence. Here’s how it works. First, a word’s
inner world must be completed by the combination of all relevant morphemes (psyche + logos = psychology +-cal = psychological).
Then it is ready to enter its outer world, its contribution to the making of a sentence. This word sends out grammatical
feelers to other words and phrases, letting them know that it will play one or another role in the assembling of a grammatically
correct sentence. For example, psychological is an adjective, waiting to provide modification to a following
noun: psychological sense. Adding the determiner a, we get a psychological sense. This
grouping is called a noun phrase. The role this phrase plays in a sentence makes it a different
kind of noun, and it is important for the learner to realize this. This grouping has a grammatical life of its own.
The individual words and these groupings are called constituents, and it is essential that learners internalize this concept
because it carries meaning from the smallest to the largest units of a sentence. When we add in, a preposition,
we produce a prepositional phrase, yet another constituent in the sentence. In a psychological sense operates
as a relatively independent constituent on a higher, more powerful grammatical level than any of the individual words in the
phrase. Chapter 4 Semantics: The World of Meaning “Semantic Pockets” in our
Lexicons What does the organization of vocabulary in our “mental dictionaries”
(our lexicons) look like? No one can say for sure, but there is no question that our brains have ways of organizing
the world of meaning we carry for the languages we speak. One way to visualize this is to
think of the stacks of books in a library. Let’s say that an educated native speaker of English has control of
about 60,000 words. We know by the examples shown in Broca’s Aphasia vs. Wernicke’s Aphasia (pages 36 and
following in the Fromkin book), that we store function words and content words in different parts of the brain. This
is undoubtedly the most basic division of vocabulary. As to content words, it is also
clear that we have ways of storing them in groups, all the way from large groups of content words (e.g., nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs) to small groups (e.g., colors, musical instruments, etc.). Bibliographers in a library have
to make decisions as to which grouping a particular book should belong. The main disciplines of a university provide
an obvious basis for the groupings. Also, books attached to a particular language will be a criterion. Inevitably,
compromises will have to be reached because millions of books belong in more than one category. There is no perfect
way to store all of the books in the stacks so that they will fit all relevant criteria. In like manner, words may belong
to a particular category but may also belong to many other categories outside the main one. Another
metaphor might be the use of general to specific “menus” in a computer. This can have the advantage of showing
groupings within groupings. As is so often the case in the study of language, it is a metaphor
that is most useful in helping us to visualize and then to organize and teach word groupings around meaning: semantic
pockets (pockets within pockets within pockets). It would seem that our brains have an ability to organize these
pockets in many different locations with many ways to have them overlap and interact. Some pockets are far removed from
each other. Others are close together. A word may belong to many different pockets at the same time as is depicted
in the graph below. The word “noun” is the hypernym (the general term) for all of the hyponyms (all of the
individual words “under” this category) contained in the pocket. All words
in English can be designated as either hypernyms or hyponyms. The hypernym "noun" subsumes all of the many
thousands of its hyponyms, that is, all of the “persons, places, things, ideas” and even “sentences within
sentences” (noun clauses which serve as subjects or direct objects for the main clause). The two-word hypernym,
"musical instruments," stands for the specific categories listed among its hyponyms, such as clarinet, trumpet,
etc. This is an example where English simply does not have a single word to serve as the hypernym. Chapter 5 Phonemes: The Atoms of Language [By 1999 I had already developed and begun the use of the concept
"atoms of language." Afterwards I came across Mark Baker's book, The Atoms of Language.
However, our uses of this metaphor are completely unrelated.] Phonemes and Allophones One can produce
the accurate sounds of any language only if one has control of the complicated world of its phonemes and allophones. Like atoms, the
most fundamental building blocks of all matter, phonemes are the basis for everything that happens in language. A speaker’s
perception, understanding and creation of morphemes, words, constituents and sentences can happen only by expansion from these
fundamental units. As we saw in Chapter 4 on semantics, the
more one explores the “after shocks” of metaphors (the “semantic earthquakes” of language), the richer
and more meaningful they become. The lock in the relationship between the proton and the neutron
of an atom is reflected in the fusion of sound and the basis of meaning at the core of the phoneme. Phonemes do not
carry full meaning themselves, but they “signal” meaning; that is, they are the originators, the most fundamental
source of this union between sound and meaning. When the sound and the signal for meaning are “fused” together,
the importance of this for language is reflected in the “strong nuclear force” that ties protons and neutrons
together, the strongest force in nature. The “electrons” of phonemes are its allophones.
Just as electrons are in varying orbits around the nucleus of an atom, so we speakers of English are usually not consciously
aware of the “location” of a phoneme’s allophones. Sometimes they are far removed from our perception
of them. Such is the case in a word like situation. The /t/ goes far afield from what we perceive it
to be. In this case, speakers of English are heavily influenced
by the writing system. Though the allophones are real sounds (unlike the phonemes they represent), they are somewhat
“rebellious” toward the nucleus of the phoneme as they fly around it “in orbit.” Chapter 6 Phonetics: The Public Display of Phonemes Steps in
Making the Consonants: b (voiced bilabial stop): 1. Activate your vocal cords (what this means is that you must be prepared to vibrate the vocal cords just at the time of the release of this stop). 2. Completely close your mouth between your lips. 3. Build up a moderate amount of pressure within your mouth (this can actually be measured by PSI, pounds per square inch, exactly like the pressure in the tires of your car). 4. Release the pressure without producing any clear vowel afterwards. Just say [b-b-b]. Train yourself not to say the name of this letter in the English alphabet. The last part of the name consists of a vowel [i], and this only confuses the production of the consonant by itself. d (voiced alveolar stop): 1. Activate your vocal cords in preparation for the sound. 2. Completely close your mouth by placing the tip of your tongue on the alveolar ridge. 3. Build up pressure in your mouth. 4. Release to a nondescript sound, not a clear vowel as would be included in sounding out the name for this letter in English. f (voiceless labiodental fricative): 1. Deactivate your vocal cords. 2. Place your lower lip tightly against your upper teeth. It is impossible to completely close this off because air can escape between
your teeth. This escaping air between the teeth is what makes the turbulent sound of this fricative. 3. Blowing air out in this configuration will create the sound.
"Linguistics for Educators" is published by the
International Institute of Language and Culture. All rights reserved. No part of this book or its excerpts may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief
quotations in a review. Copyright 2005 by Steven Landon West.
ISBN 0-9778029--6
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
