Referring to Module 15 Content（see the attachments), answer the following.1. In your opinion, when might descriptive grammar be superior to prescriptive grammar as a form of communication? (One full paragraph [5- 6 sentences]).2. In your opinion, which interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (the strong version or the weak version) is preferable? (One full paragraph [5-6 sentences])
Descriptive Linguistics While other species of primates apparently possess protolanguage (ability to associate actions with mean- ings, to produce new combinations of signs, to refer to events distant in time or space), language is both symbolic and structured. Virtually all modern humans (even those with hearing loss and other cognitive issues) have language with symbols (sounds that are arbitrary representations of things, processes or ideas) and structure (word components, word order, rules of phrase construction). Phonology is the study of sound. Phonetics is the objective study of sound. Linguists must be trained to identify sounds as they actually are. Phonemics is the study of culturally significant sounds, with the phoneme as the smallest unit of culturally significant sound. Since the human vocal tract can make more sounds than is necessary for a particular language, children learn which sounds are relevant and which are to be ignored. Example: [p] in pit versus spit. One explodes the [p] and the other does not. The two sounds are only one phoneme since the explosion of the [p] is ignored. Example: [v] and [b] in Spanish as in vivir. [v] is a labiodental (lip and teeth) and [b] is a bilabial. The difference in the sounds are very slight and not relevant, forming one phoneme. Morphology is the study of meaningful sounds. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaningful sound. A free morpheme can stand alone as a word, while a bound morpheme can not stand alone as a word. The word "meaningful" itself has three morphemes: one free morpheme ("mean") and two bound morphemes ("ing" and "ful"). Syntax is word order. Without syntax, we would not be able to distinguish the two English sentences: "Dog bites man" versus "Man bites dog". English and other languages are "SVO" -- subject verb object -- in declarative (statement) sentences. There are SOV and VOS languages, as well as languages with weak or no syntax. They use morphemes to distinguish subjects and objects. Grammar includes prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar . Prescriptive grammar is what is taught in school and used formally; descriptive grammar is how the language is actually spoken. If a child says to the teacher that "me and my friends, we went to the movies", the teacher's job is to correct the child. Parents pay taxes or tuition to insure that the child can function in the society and become a responsible -- and up- wardly mobile -- citizen. Mastery of the current fashion in one's language is the route to success. Dialects are regional or historical forms of a language with some pronunciation and vocabulary differences from each other. Nevertheless, they are mutually intelligible, meaning, they can understand each other. If someone from England states that he is "going down the lift to look under the bonnet of the lorry", one can understand some of the references and inquire about the rest. Schools do not teach Spanish or French or Italian. They teach Castillian, the dialect of Madrid, which is in the provine of Castille. They teach the dialect spoken in Paris or the dialect spoken in Naples. The dialect of the politically and/or economically powerful region becomes the standard version of the language, also known as "a dialect with an army". Speakers of other dialects may suffer from ethnocentric discrimination against them. Developmental Linguistics Developmental Linguistics is the study of how human children learn language. 1. Children first hear sounds in the womb, especially their mothers' voices. 2. They make their first attempts at articulation a few months after birth by cooing v owels and babbling consonants as well as by mimicking intonation patterns. 3. They learn which sounds are culturally significant phonemes. 4. They enter the "one-word phase" at about 9 to 12 months at which time they can articulate "mama" and "dada" or "papa", simple repetitions of sounds made in the front of the mouth. 5. They enter the "two-word phase" some months later. The child combines a noun and a verb or a noun and an adjective, with simple syntax, but without prepositions to clarify the relationships between words. "Mommy car" and "Doggie ball" may be statements or commands. 6. They overgeneralize by applying words or grammatical rules too broadly until they gain more vocabulary and more grammatical competence. The two-year-old who called an elderly neighbor "Grandpa" probably called him that because that was her word for all old men. Similarly, a child may at first imitate a phrase "I ran", then tries to apply a gram- matical rule and says "I runned", and finally returns to "I ran" after learning about irregular verbs. Historical Linguistics is the study of how languages change over time. Several processes may cause change. 1. There can be inventions of new words for new technologies, like "refrigerator". 2. There are invasions of people bringing new languages to new places, leading to the fusion of languages. This process is creolization. Creoles are not "broken" languages, but are languages formed from the vocabulary of the incoming, dominant culture and the grammatical structure of the native language. English can be considered to be a creole. Anglo-Saxon England, speaking "Old English", was invaded in 1066 by the Norman French. By the 1300s, a creolized "Middle English" formed from the fusion of the languages. A quote from the Old English of "Beowulf": "And we to symble sseseten haefdon". A quote from the Middle English of "The Canterbury Tales" : "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote". The Old English is virtually incomprehensible, while the Middle English looks more like English. 3. There are sound transformations. When Middle English is spoken, it departs from expectations. "Whonn thot Ah-preel with his shoor-ez soh-teh". The vowels are pronounced more like other languages, such as French. The Great Vowel Shift then occurred in England in the 1400s in which vowels moved one step higher in the mouth. This produced the Modern English of Shakespeare: "Now is the winter of our discontent". In the 1964 film "My Fair Lady", Eliza Doolittle is a young woman from Cockney East London who is the object of a bet by Professor Henry Higgins. His bet is that he can transform her lower class accent to that of upper class Londoners. She valiantly tries to say "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain" but repeatedly says "The rine in Spine sties minely on the pline". Eliza was simply pronouncing the vowel as it might have been from before the Great Vowel Shift. Grimm's Law is another type of sound transformation. Jakob Grimm was a linguist and folklorist who, with Wilhelm Grimm, collected folk tales. Jakob Grimm saw patterned transformations of sound from an ancient predecessor of Indo-European languages (which include the Germanic, Romance, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian branches) and such modern languages as German. The law shows that people hear sounds differently across geographic space, regularly replacing one sound with another. If one knows what the transformation is, translation may be possible. For example, Cinderella's slippers, in French were "vair" (not "verre" for glass). The [v] transforms to an [f] and the vowel drops and the result is "fur". There are also transformations which may be simple mispronunciations that occur due to slurring of words, rather than perceiving sounds differently, with interesting results. One example of change of enunciation pro- duced the phrase "the spitting image", which was originally "the spit and image". The latter makes sense, while the former does not. Another example is the word "bedlam" for total confusion. The source of this word was a London insane asylum known with "Bethlehem" as part of its name, the slurring of syllables leading to a new, descriptive word. Anthropological Linguistics Anthropological Linguistics is the relationship between language and culture, and has two related phenomena. 1. Focal Vocabulary -- This refers to how the vocabulary of a language reflects the culture and its adaptations. A classic example is color terms. Some cultures only have two terms: black (or dark) and white (or bright). Other cultures have those two plus one, two, three, or more color terms in a particular order (adding in red, green and yellow, and blue). Their adaptations as pre-industrial societies do not require more terms. The multiplicity of color terms in industrialized societies apparently derives from the fashion, upholstery, and paint industries, which are important parts of their economies. 2. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis -- This refers to how vocabulary precedes mental categories. There are two versions. a. The Strong Version states that language determines mental categories. b. The Weak Version states that language influences mental categories. Gender terminology is an area where this has been discussed. The strong version suggests that replacing terms that have sexist bias ("policeman", "stewardess") with gender neutral terms ("police officer", "flight attendant") that biased mental categories would be eliminated. The weak version suggests that gender neutral terms may reduce bias, but other factors, including that most police officers are male and most flight attendants are female, come in to play in the overall phenomenon of sexist bias. Sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics refers to how language is used differently in different social situations, including the following. 1. The social status of different dialects (as noted in Part 1, above) depends upon the geographic location, and there- fore the political and economic power, of the speakers. Some dialects are culturally dominant (as in cities such as in the greater metropolitan New York area or upper class London) compared to more rural, and, to a degree, more old-fashioned, locales. (Consider New Yorkers saying "soda" and others using the older term "pop", a difference which may be considered one of sophistication versus lower status, or Professor Higgins ethnocentric demeaning of Eliza Doolittle's older dialect.) 2. "Code switching" refers to the use of more than