Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych
Exam Review. In this video, we're going to
have a brief introduction to some ideas
of linguistics; the study of language. Now
if we're studying language, one thing
that we might do is break it down into
pieces. One way we could do this would be
to break it down into the individual
sounds that make up the language. So
these would be called the phonemes.
Phonemes are all of the sounds that are
used within a language to make all of
the words that exist in that language.
In English, for instance, we have about 40
phonemes that we use. There's about 40
different sounds that you can use to
make all of the words in English.
Other languages might have different
numbers of phonemes. So there are languages
that have just over a dozen phonemes
there are languages that have almost
twice as many phonemes as English. If
you've ever studied a foreign language,
you might be aware of some of these
different phonemes. For instance, if
you were studying Spanish you might be
aware of this double r; this rolled R
sound, like in arriba or tierra, right? Now
this is a sound you might struggle with
initially because this is a phoneme that
is used in Spanish but it's not used in
English. You don't have much practice
making this sound so it might be more
difficult for you to use this when you
first encounter it. Of course there's
other phonemes besides just this double r,
you know, there's nasal sounds in
French that might be difficult for
English speakers or if you're learning a
language like Xhosa that has clicking
sounds, you're going to find these
difficult initially because you're not
used to producing these sounds and the
same will be true for people who are
learning English. English has phonemes
that their languages may not have and
they might struggle with these. All right
so we'll come back to that in a minute
when we talk about accents. Another way
we could break a language down is that
we could think about meaning. We could
break it into meaningful pieces and so
if we do that we're looking at morphemes. So
phonemes refer just to the individual
sounds in language whereas morphemes
refer to meaningful units in the
language. Ok, let's say I look at a
word like "bat". Ok, there's multiple
phonemes in this word, you know, I have
this B sound and this T sound at the end
of the word. But in terms of morphemes
this is a single unit. In other words I
can't break this down any further and
still have meaningful pieces, right? If I
look at another word, however, like "batman"
well, now I can say okay, this is one
word but it's possible to break it down
and still have meaningful units left.
I say all right this is actually two
morphemes "bat" plus "man" so one word but
two morphemes and actually even more
phonemes, right? There's still more sounds
in there, we have an m sound an sound right?
There's a lot of different sounds but
there's only two meaningful pieces.
What about a word like "bats"? Well what we
have here, actually we can break
this down further, we can say this is
really bat, that's a morpheme, plus this s
sound. Even though it's a single
letter and it's a single sound, it has
meaning in this case and that makes it a
morpheme, right? Morphemes always have
meaning and what's the meaning here? Well
this s, the meaning is it makes it plural,
it changes the meaning of that, when you
add an S to it that means that s counts
as a morpheme. This also applies to
other things that we add to words to
change the meaning. So prefixes and
suffixes that change the meaning would
still be considered morphemes. Things
like "pre" you know, whatever or "post" or at
the end of a word you might add "ism" and
that makes it a noun and so that
changes the meaning and therefore that
"ism" would still be considered a
morpheme. Ok, when we think about
combining things in a language we can
combine sounds of course in order to
make words from all these different
phonemes that we have and there's
certain rules for how we combine those
sounds and these are called the
phonological rules.
Just like phonemes can vary between
languages, the rules for combining sounds
can vary between languages and in fact
the rules for combining sounds can vary
within a language. What I mean by that
is that we can have regional variation
in how we combine particular sounds. So
regional accents would be examples of
different phonological rules within the
same language. Ok, what would be an
example of this? Well if we think about a
sort of stereotypical regional accent in
English, we have the Boston accent. All
right, so what's going on in the Boston
accent? What's happening is there's
some slightly different phonological
rules that are being applied compared to
say standard you know "newscaster" English.
So what's one of these rules? What
makes this Boston accent noticeable?
One of these is, how do you combine
certain sounds that have "R"s in them? So
what do you do when you have a word like
park? When you have this r here, you have this r
followed by a consonant. Well the
standard pronunciation would be to say
park but the Boston variation is to kind
of ignore that R. You don't need to
really bother to pronounce it very much
so you end up saying something like "pahk".
So this is why you have this
stereotypical phrase for making
fun of the Boston accent which is "pahk
the cah in Hahvahd Yahd" so what
you're doing is you're taking all those
r's and you're sort of dropping them out.
You're changing the rules, the
phonological rules, for how you combine
those sounds and as a result you have
this regional accent. Now you also have
accents across languages, so you can have
variation by region or you can carry
over the phonological rules. This
happens when somebody learns a new
language but they start applying the
phonological rules of their native
language. They carry them over to the new
language and as a result they sound kind
of funny right? This would happen, for
instance, if people are learning English
right? I mentioned there's
different phonemes that are used like
the "th" sound that's used in English is
not common in a lot of other languages.
Like we use in "the" right? This sound at
the beginning of the word is not used in
a lot of other languages. As a result,
people have difficulty with it, they
carry over some other rule that's close
enough from their
language. So they say something like
"ze" instead of "the". That accent is also a
result of this different phonological
rules between their native language and
the language that they are trying to
speak. Another example of this would
be if you've seen the show "An Idiot
Abroad" with Karl Pilkington. There's
an episode where he goes to China and
they're going to write his name Karl in
Chinese characters but there's a problem
here that in Mandarin they don't have
this phoneme where a sound ends in an L
or a word, sorry a word ends in an L
sound. So his name Karl, they don't
have a way to end it with that L sound
in Chinese characters when they write it
and even when they're speaking. So an L
sound in Mandarin is always followed by
a vowel so you can have la, li, le, lu,
right? You can have these different
sounds but you can't have L by itself. So
when they try to write Karl with Chinese
characters they end up always writing
Karla and it always comes out as Karl LA
because there's no way for them to
represent this L sound using Chinese
characters because that's not a phoneme
that exists in Mandarin. All right so
that's sort of an explanation of why
this happens. Obviously it's a lot
funnier on the show then how I'm
describing it but we can now understand
a little bit about why that happens. Ok
the last type of rules I want to look at
are what are called syntactical rules
and the syntactical rules are
rules for how we combine words.
Phonological rules are how we combine
phonemes in order to get words then
syntactical rules are
how we combine words to get phrases and
sentences. There's rules about how
we do this and violating those rules is
going to change the meaning. What
would be an example of this? Well in
English we have a syntactical rule that
says if you want to describe a noun you
want to have an adjective that describes
a noun, almost always it's going to be
the case that the adjective comes before
the noun. You say the adjective and then
you save the noun, right? Now other
languages don't necessarily follow this
rule. Spanish has just the opposite rule
where you would put the adjective after
the noun but in English we generally say
it's going to be adjective followed by
noun. So if I take two words and I say
okay "yellow banana" right? In English this
means I'm talking about a banana and
yellow is describing it. It's a yellow
banana. What happens if I flip these?
Well using these same words the
syntactic rules are now going to say
that actually what I'm doing here is I'm
talking about the color yellow and I'm
describing it as being "banana yellow"
right? I'm using banana as an adjective
here to describe the color rather than
in this case where I'm using yellow to
describe the banana. So just by changing
the order of those two words, the
syntactical rules are going to change
the meaning. Now it's fairly amazing how
easily we learn this when we're kids.
When we first start speaking, when we're
two years old we first start stringing
words together, we start following these
syntactical rules this shows that we're
learning grammar from a very very young
age. We're picking it out, picking it up
without explicit instruction. We don't
need you know an English teacher to sit
down with us and say you know you have
to put adjectives before nouns when
you're two years old you don't even know
what adjectives means but you're able to
start applying these rules and this
tells us something about how language
acquisition occurs and we'll go into
that in a future video. Ok, I hope you
found this helpful, if so, please like the
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more. Thanks for watching!