#fptu

[quantranfpt2509]

Chapter 14: Second Language Acquisition/Learning

Acquisition: the gradual development over time of ability in a language by using it naturally in communicative situations with others who know the language

Learning: applies to a more conscious process of accumulating knowledge through analysis of features of a language, such as vocabulary and grammar, typically in an institutional setting, with teachers

Acquisition Barriers: For most people, the experience with an L2 is fundamentally different from their L1 experience and it is hardly conducive to acquisition

The Age Factor: after the critical period for language acquisition has passed, around the time of puberty, it becomes very difficult to acquire another language fully

Affective Factor: negative feelings or experiences that can create a barrier to acquisition.

The Grammar–Translation Method: Vocabulary lists and sets of grammar rules are used to define the target of learning, memorization is encouraged, and written language rather than spoken language is emphasized

The Audiolingual Method: a systematic presentation of the structures of the L2, moving from the simple to the more complex, in the form of drills that the student had to repeat

Communicative Approaches: reaction against the artificiality of “pattern-practice” and also against the belief that consciously learning the grammar rules of a language will result in an ability to use the language

Transfer: using sounds, expressions or structures from the L1 when performing in the L2

Interlanguage: the language produced by L2 learners contains a large number of “errors” that seem to have no connection to the forms of either the L1 or L2

Instrumental motivation: Learners want to learn the L2 in order to achieve some other goal, such as completing a graduation requirement or being able to read scientific publications, but they have no plans to engage in much social interaction using the L2

Integrative motivation: Learners want to learn the L2 for social purposes, to take part in the social life of a community using that language and to become an accepted member of that community

Input: the language that the learner is exposed to

Communicative Competence: the general ability to use language accurately, appropriately and flexibly

[quantranfpt2509]

Chapter 13: First Language Acquisition

The process of language acquisition has some basic requirements

Input: by the typical behavior of older children and adults in the home environment who provide language samples

Caregiver Speech: a type of conversational structure that seems to assign an interactive role to the young child even before he or she becomes a speaking participant

The Acquisition Schedule: Cooing, Babbling, One-word, Two-word, Telegraph speech

The Acquisition Process: Learning through Imitation & Correction

Developing: Morphology, Syntax, Semantics

[quantranfpt2509]

Chapter 12: Language and the Brain

Neurolinguistics: the study of the relationship between language and the brain

Language Areas in the Brain

(1) Broca’s Area

(2) Wernicke’s Area

(3) The Motor Cortex

(4) The Arcuate Fasciculus

Tongue Tips: There is, for example, the tip of the tongue phenomenon in which we feel that some word is just eluding us.

Slips of the Tongue: a long shory stort (instead of “make a long story short”), use the door to open the key and a fifty-pound dog of bag food

Slips of the Brain: Perseveration is when one sound is carried over to the next word, so that my favorite song comes out as my favorite fong. Anticipation is when a sound is used before its occurrence in the next word, so that roman numeral comes out as noman numeral. Exchange is when sounds change places, so that feel better comes out as beel fetter

Slips of the Ear: in our hearing great ape and wondering why someone should be looking for one in his office

Aphasia: an impairment of language function due to localized brain damage that leads to difficulty in understanding and/or producing linguistic forms

Dichotic Listening: an experimental technique that has demonstrated a left hemisphere dominance for syllable and word processing

The Critical Period: during childhood, there is a period when the human brain is most ready to receive input and learn a particular language

[quantranfpt2509]

Chapter 10: Pragmatics

In many ways, pragmatics is the study of “invisible” meaning, or how we recognize what is meant even when it is not actually said or written. In order for that to happen, speakers (or writers) must be able to depend on a lot of shared assumptions and expectations when they try to communicate

Context: the parts of something written or spoken that immediately precede and follow a word or passage and clarify its meaning

Reference: as an act by which a speaker (or writer) uses language to enable a listener (or reader) to identify something

Inference: additional information used by the listener to create a connection between what is said and what must be meant

Presupposition: something that you believe is true without having any proof

Pragmatic Markers: be used to mark a speaker’s attitude to the listener or to what is being said

Politeness: showing awareness and consideration of another person’s face

Speech Acts: describe an action that involves language such as “requesting,” “commanding,” “questioning” or “informing”

[quantranfpt2509]

Chapter 9: Semantics

This distinction is generally presented in terms of referential meaning as opposed to associative or emotive meaning

A semantic feature is a component of the concept associated with a lexical item

The noun phrases in the sentence describe the roles of entities, such as people and things, involved in the action. We can identify a small number of semantic roles (also called “thematic roles” or “case roles”) for these noun phrases

Agent: the entity that performs the action

Theme: the entity that is involved in or affected by the action

If an agent uses another entity in order to perform an action, that other entity fills the role of instrument

When a noun phrase is used to designate an entity as the person who has a feeling, perception or state, it fills the semantic role of experiencer

Where an entity is fills the role of location

Where the entity moves from is the source

Where it moves to is the goal

We are characterizing the meaning of each word, not in terms of its component features, but in terms of its relationship to other words. This approach is used in the semantic description of language and treated as the analysis of lexical relations

Two or more words with very closely related meanings are called synonyms

Two forms with opposite meanings are called antonyms

The idea of “the characteristic instance” of a category is known as the prototype

When we encounter two or more words with the same form and related meanings, we have what is technically known as polysemy

One way we seem to organize our knowledge of words is simply on the basis of collocation, or frequently occurring together

[quantranfpt2509]

Chapter 8: Syntax

Syntax: the grammatical arrangement of words in a sentence

Syntactic rules: our analysis must account for all the grammatically correct phrases and sentences and only those grammatically correct phrases and sentences in whatever language we are analyzing

A Generative Grammar: a prepositional phrase in English consists of a preposition followed by a noun phrase

Surface Structure: the different syntactic forms they have as individual English sentences

Deep Structure: he basic components (Noun Phrase + Verb + Noun Phrase) shared by the two sentences can be represented

Structural Ambiguity: It has two distinct underlying interpretations that have to be represented differently in deep structure

Syntactic Analysis: NP → Art N, NP → Art (Adj) N, NP → Pro

Phrase Structure Rules: started to create is a set of syntactic rules

Lexical Rules: specify which words can be used when we rewrite constituents

Tree Diagrams: one of the best ways to create a visual representation of underlying syntactic structure

Just Scratching the Surface: At the bottom of all the trees are surface structure variations of a single underlying deep structure, revealing the generative power of the phrase structure rules involved

[quantranfpt2509]

Chapter 7: Grammar

English Grammar: the structure of phrases and sentences in such a way that we account for all the grammatical sequences in a language and rule out all the ungrammatical sequences

Traditional Grammar: “article,” “adjective” and “noun”

The Parts of Speech: illustrated in the following sentence and simple definitions of each technical term are listed below

Agreement: “number,” “person,” “tense,” “voice” and “gender”

Grammatical Gender: the type of biological distinction based on “natural gender” in English is quite different from the more common distinction found in languages

The Prescriptive Approach: telling people what they should do, rather than simply giving suggestions or describing what is done

The Descriptive Approach: the categories of traditional grammar did not seem to fit these languages, a different method

Subjects and Objects: Since English uses position in the sentence to indicate grammatical function, we can normally identify the subject as the first noun phrase before the verb and the object as the noun phrase after the verb.

Word Order: SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS

Language Typology: The use of word order patterns such as SVO or VOS to talk about different “types” of languages is part of a more general area of study

[quantranfpt2509]

Chapter 6: Morphology

Morphology: The type of exercise we have just performed is an example of investigating basic forms in language

Morphemes: a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function

Free and Bound Morphemes: can stand by themselves as single words

Lexical Morphemes: set of ordinary nouns that we think of as the words that carry the “content” of the messages we convey

Functional Morphemes: Other types of free morphemes

Derivational Morphemes: to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem

Inflectional Morphemes: to indicate the grammatical function of a word

Morphological Description: The difference is worth emphasizing

Morphs, Allomorphs and Special Cases

Other languages: When we look at the morphology of other languages, we can find other forms and patterns realizing the basic types of morphemes we have identified