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How It’s Built: The Structure of Language

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to accomplish the following objectives:

• Describe how consonants and vowels sounds are organized in English and how we know which are important.

• Define morpheme and explain the difference between lexical and function morphemes.

• Identify the main constituents of a sentence, and explain the importance of word order in English.

• Define and explain the difference between semantics and pragmatics.

Associated Press

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CHAPTER 2Introduction

Introduction

After her first day of preschool at age 29 months, Isabelle and her father had the fol-lowing conversation about the rabbit named Bela who shared the classroom with Isabelle and nine other children: Isabelle: Papa, Bela bite Jason.

Papa: Who is Jason?

Isabelle: At my school.

Papa: Oh, and Bela bit him.

Isabelle: Yes. Bela bitted him.

Even though her language was still a work in progress, Isabelle had already, without being aware of it, mastered much of the language structure that will be described in this chapter.

In Chapter 1, we began to see how impressive a feat this is. In 29 months, Isabelle had grown from an infant who did not yet know her name and whose only vocalization was crying, to a little girl who could make herself understood talking about something that had happened in the past. True, some of her forms were imperfect, but she was already well on her way to being a proficient language user.

In order to understand and appreciate what she and children the world over accomplish in the first few years and how teachers can build on that accomplishment in the school set- ting, it is useful to understand how language is organized. Many people consider them- selves experts on language by virtue of the fact that they have been using it successfully for a number of years and may have become quite proficient in it. Attaining proficiency does not require speakers to have a conscious knowledge of the formal structure of lan- guage—and certainly most children do not—but it takes a linguist to understand and explain the underlying mechanics of language that we all take for granted (Bauer & Trud- gill, 1998). Actually, it would take many linguists and several volumes because there are so many aspects of language to be described. Here, we will take only an introductory look at how language is structured in order to begin to appreciate the magnitude of children’s accomplishment.

Children learn language in order to express meaning and to communicate with people around them. The miracle of the infant brain is its capacity to acquire all of the structures of any language spoken on earth. Children do not learn the components of language sepa- rately or in isolation. They don’t master the sound system and then move on to learning words and then sentences. Nor do they learn the structures of the language as a cognitive exercise. In order to learn to communicate effectively, children master the complex struc- tures of their language. Watching them do so is fascinating. In Chapter 3 we take a closer look at how children acquire the structures of language. For now, let’s look at how the English language is structured.

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CHAPTER 2Pre-Test

Language has several components—sounds (phonology), words (morphology), and sen- tences (syntax). These are descriptors that adults use. Children, at least at the beginning, are happily unaware of either the structure of language or the need to learn it.

Languages differ in many other ways. Have you ever tried to master the sounds of French, the syntax of German, or the tones of Mandarin? Mandarin speakers also struggle with the sounds of English, finding the l/r/w distinctions especially confusing. Speakers of Arabic have trouble mastering English prepositions because there are only about 20 prepositions in Arabic but 57 in English. Beginning learners often try to understand a new language in terms of their first language. Arab speakers of English cannot readily translate and have difficulty getting the troublesome little English words right. Indeed, almost all non-native speakers struggle to some degree with English prepositions.

All languages can be described using the same categories and the same descriptors. Pho- nology is the branch of linguistics concerned with the description of the sound system. Morphology is the branch concerned with word structure, and syntax refers to sentence structure. Semantics refers to meaning, and pragmatics refers to the functional use of language in real-life settings.

Pre-Test

1. In comparison to consonants, vowels

a. use less air obstruction in their production. b. are more often the reason children are referred for speech therapy. c. exist in greater numbers in the English alphabet. d. are produced with more impediments in air stream.

2. Inflectional morphemes are types of

a. function morphemes. b. lexical morphemes. c. content morphemes. d. function words.

3. The two major considerations of syntactic learning are

a. the order of words and the relationships among aspects of sentences. b. to whom the speaker is speaking and the time frame of the information. c. the number of words needed and the time needed to communicate. d. the tense of the verbs and the number of objects.

4. Which of the following is true of semantics?

a. Semantics can differ within the same language. b. Words in some languages do not mean the same thing in others. c. Individual and cultural variations do not affect language. d. Language has fairly rigid conventions for communication.

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.1 The Sounds of English: Phonology

Answers 1. a. use less air obstruction in their production. The answer can be found in Section 2.1. 2. a. function morphemes. The answer can be found in Section 2.2. 3. a. The order of words and the relationships among aspects of sentences. The answer can be found in Section 2.3. 4. b. Words in some languages do not mean the same thing in others. The answer can be found in Section 2.4.

2.1 The Sounds of English: Phonology

At age 3, Isabelle’s pronunciation of yellow was “lalo.” She couldn’t manage the initial “y” sound, nor did she get the first vowel quite right. It wasn’t that she was unable to produce the “y” sound or the correct vowel—the word yes, for example, with the same vowel and initial consonant, gave her no problem at all. But in the word yellow, she couldn’t quite get all the sounds right. The reason is that the process of learn- ing the sound structure of English is not just a matter of learning individual sounds, it is learning the system—all of the sounds and how they are combined and pronounced in various environments. For a child, the “environment” of a two-syllable word is very different from that of a single syllable, and she simplified the pronunciation according to certain predictable processes. In this section, we will look at the sounds of English, which ones are distinctive and which are not, and some of the rules for combining them. We will also look briefly at stress, or the force with which a syllable is articulated, and intonation, or the rhythm of the language, and the role they play in English.

Linguists who study the sounds of a language are called phonologists. In general terms, phonology is concerned with the physical, or acoustic, properties of speech sounds and the rules that govern how those sounds are combined in speech. From the child’s point of view, the business of phonology is figuring out how to produce those sounds that are necessary for making meaning. When children are very young, it is unlikely that they can focus on any unit smaller than the word, at least not directly. As soon as they understand that cat and hat are different words conveying very different meanings, however, they have unknowingly recognized that the /k/ sound is different from the /h/ sound. This is a good example of a minimal pair, or two words that differ by only one sound, which is an important concept in determining which sounds are separate phonemes, or sounds that native speakers perceive to be different, in English.

Sounds and letters are different. There is a somewhat predictable relationship between the sounds of English and the letters used to represent them in print. For the most part, the sound /m/ is represented by the letter “m,” and we can usually count on the letter “b” to represent the sound /b/. But the sound-symbol correspondence in English is far from perfect, as any second language learner or anyone who struggles with English spelling can testify. The sound /f/, for example, can be spelled in four different ways, as illustrated by fame, tough, phone, and puff. Moreover, the word of has the letter “f” but the pronunciation is /v/. For now, we are concerned with the sounds of English with only passing reference to the alphabet.

How Speech Sounds Are Formed

Human speech can be described in acoustic terms, or the nature of the disturbance to the airwaves that occurs when we speak. Each vowel and consonant sound has distinctive acoustic properties that can be measured on a sound spectrogram. How and why do speech sounds differ from each other? Here is an example from a grade-school science class. If we

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.1 The Sounds of English: Phonology

take two identical, glass soft-drink bottles and pour 4 inches of water into one, leave the other empty, and then blow into them, as if blowing a flute or piccolo, the sound produced by each will be different. The sound produced by the bottle with liquid will be of a higher pitch than the sound produced by the one without liquid. That is because the resonator (i.e., the soft-drink bottle) has changed with the addition of liquid; vibration occurs above the level of the water only. The water has effectively shortened the resonator and caused the sound to have a pitch. The human head is also a resonator, and because we are all a little different from each other, our voices and speech sounds tend to be unique. But there is enough similarity that we can understand each other because we produce the speech sounds of our language in more or less the same way. Each speech sound is distinguished from the others by the shape of the resonator (i.e., the vocal apparatus) during speech.

When we speak, the airstream—the same one used in breathing—is modulated, or changed, by the articulators as it moves from the lungs upward to exit through the oral or nasal cavity (or both). The articulators, as shown in Figure 2.1, are of two types. Passive articulators, which include the teeth, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum, uvula, and phar- ynx (or pharyngeal wall) remain static during speech. Active articulators move to create different speech sounds. The tongue is the most important of these, but the glottis and the lips, particularly the lower lip, also play roles in speech production.

Figure 2.1: Articulators involved in speech

Nasal cavity

Teeth

Lips

Aveolar ridge

Esophagus

Larynx (vocal cords)

Tongue

Or al

cav ity

(Soft Palate) Velum

Pharynx

Epiglottis

Body Apex

Root

This figure shows the parts used to form verbal speech patterns.

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.1 The Sounds of English: Phonology

How We Know Which Sounds Matter

The human vocal apparatus is capable of creating an almost infinite variety of sounds. Every child born with normal hearing and speech organs is born with the capacity to learn the sounds of any language. Anyone who has heard an infant babble will have heard sounds that may be difficult for an adult to reproduce and which may bear little resemblance to the speech sounds that adults use. A child’s job in the first years of life is to figure out which sounds of language are meaningful and how to produce them. Children are not linguists, but in order to understand what they accom- plish, it is useful to look at how adult speakers know which sounds are meaningful in a lan- guage. How is it that we come to recognize the two broad catego- ries of speech sounds known as consonants and vowels?

Generally speaking, consonants are sounds that are produced with more obstruction of the air somewhere in the vocal tract than vowels, which are produced with a relatively unimpeded airstream. English has many more consonants than vowels, and they are harder for children to learn than vowels. When children are referred for speech therapy, it is often because an adult has identified a problem with how some of the consonant sounds are produced.

Unlike consonants, vowels are produced with very little obstruction of the vocal appara- tus but simply by changing the shape of the resonator. Vowels get their distinct character from the placement of the tongue in the mouth during articulation and whether or not the lips are rounded. Vowels are highly resonant, making them easier to hear and to dis- tinguish from one another. When Sarah, at 27 months, pronounced butterfly as “fuhfly,” she showed perfect control of the vowels, although she left out the middle syllable, but simplified the consonants to two, “f”and “l.”

For a representation of how the change in tongue placement produces actual vowel sounds, see the Weblinks at the end of the chapter for a video.

The Consonants and Vowels of English

Infants are capable of producing the sounds of any human language. Gradually, they learn which ones are relevant to the language they are learning and which are not. As adult speakers of English, we already know which sounds are meaningful, but children have to figure out what to pay attention to and what can be ignored. If children were linguists, they would look for minimal pairs. Consider these words: cat, hat, bat, sat, mat, fat, gnat, pat, rat, tat, vat. Ten words, all with different meanings, tell us that English has at least 10 consonants, because as we change the first sound of each word, we also change

Blowing into these bottles would create a different sound for each because of their different shapes. This is similar to what happens when we move our tongue or jaw during speech.

Hemera/Thinkstock

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.1 The Sounds of English: Phonology

the meaning. If we were to consider the words bat, bit, bet, beat, boat, boot, bought, and but, we would readily see that English has at least eight different vowel sounds, because that is what distinguishes one word from the other. Continuing to act as linguists, if we were given the words trite and trout (or light and lout), we would have evidence for two more English sounds. These are also vowels, but they are called diphthongs because they are created by one vowel gliding quickly into another.

While children are not little linguists, as they learn the meanings of words and understand that hat, cat, and bat all have different meanings, they sort out the relevant sounds of Eng- lish. Table 2.1 shows the consonant sounds of standard American English, and Table 2.2 shows the vowels with the phonemic symbols linguists use to identify them.

Table 2.1: English consonant phonemes and common spellings

Phoneme (symbol) Common spellings Exemplar words

/p/ p, pp pit, tipple, sip

/b/ b, bb bib, kibble, stub

/t/ t, tt, th time, little, thyme

/d/ d, dd dust, puddle

/s/ s, ss sister, miss

/z/ z, zz, s zap, jazz, houses

/tʃ/ ch, tch check, which, witch /d�/ j, dg, g jelly, grudge, gel

/∫/ sh, ss, t(i),ch(e) shell, session, nation, panache

/ʒ/ z, s, g azure, lesion, beige

/f/ f, ff, ph, gh father, waffle, phone, rough

/v/ v, f vote, evolve, of

/θ/ th thick, thin, myth

/ð/ th this, that, lather

/k/ k, ck, c, ch , q kit, pick, cat, ache, quick /kwIk/

/g/ g, gg, gue wig, wiggle, fatigue

/w/ w, wh win, wile, while

/l/ l, ll laugh, alive, doll

/r/ r, rr range, arrange, far

/y/ y yes

/m/ m, mm, mn mix, summer, rhythm

/n/ n, nn nine, penny

/ŋ/ ng long, singer

/h/ h high, ahem

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.1 The Sounds of English: Phonology

Table 2.2: English vowel phonemes and common spellings

Phoneme (symbol) Common spellings Exemplar words

/l/ i kit, sit, quit

/¡/ ee, ea, ey, ie, ei, e keep, leaf, key, lien, receive, decide

/ / e, ea set, led, tell, threat, lead (as in “lead pencil”)

/eI/ a, ay, ai, ei made, may, maid, weigh

/æ/ a, ai sad, matter, plaid

/ / u, ou, e cut, bubble, trouble, double, the

/ / ou, au, o caught, cause, thought

/a/ o cot, shot, got

/ow/ o, ow, oa comb, shown, coat

/uw/ oo, u, ew moo, prune, strewn

/ / u, oo put, foot

/ j/ oy, oi boy, boil

/aj/ ie, ai, i, uy tie, Thai, time, guy

/aw/ ow, ou cow, bough

Some readers will not be able to hear the difference between the vowels in caught and cot. There is no need to have a hearing test, though, since these vowels are the same in some dialects of American English.

Whether a child is learning English, Portuguese, or Mandarin, the task is the same— figuring out which sounds are meaningful and learning how to produce them. That is not the only task; part of learning the sound system is learning the stress and intonation patterns of that language.

Stress and Intonation

Stress refers to the force with which a syllable is articulated. In fact, stressed syllables are not only louder, they also have a slightly higher pitch and are longer in duration than nonstressed syllables. Sometimes, stress is distinctive. Consider the two pronunciations of the word convict. The noun, as in The convict was released from prison, has stress on the first syllable. The verb, however, as in The jury took only two hours to convict the defendant, is stressed on the second syllable. In this way, stress is phonemic because it contributes to the meaning. Stress in these examples occurs at the word level. The stress pattern of each word is part of its identity, just as its phonemes are. So the word bluebell is always stressed on the first syllable, and specifically, on the first vowel of the syllable. That is because syllables, by definition, must have a vowel (and only one vowel), and it is the vowel that carries the stress.

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.1 The Sounds of English: Phonology

Learning the stress pattern of a word is part of learning that word, and it is an aspect of phonological learning that causes young children less difficulty than mastering each of the individual sounds. In fact, very early on, at the babbling stage, children “create” words that are nonsensical but somehow sound like the language of the adults around them. They are able to do so, in part, because they have picked up the stress patterns of the words they have heard. As evidence, children attend to stressed syllables more than to unstressed ones. Consider again Sarah’s pronunciation of butterfly as fuhfly. She reduced a three-syllable word to two, and the syllable she left out was the middle, unstressed one. At the same time, her correct pronunciation of the French equivalent, papillon showed that she was capable of producing three syllable words. In the case of the French word, how- ever, the middle syllable carries more stress than the middle syllable of butterfly, so she was not as likely to leave out the syllable.

Although English words spoken in isolation have syllabic stress, there is also a level of stress associated with the rhythm of continuous speech. Intonation, sometimes called prosodic stress, refers to the rhythm of the language as it is spoken or read—the rising and falling pitch that occurs in connected speech. Although explaining the rules for assigning English stress in sentences is difficult, learning them appears not to be difficult at all. Even at the babbling stage, before they have sorted out the individual phonemes and before they can articulate words, children babble in streams that have many of the prosodic qual- ities of the adult form of the language they are learning.

Syllables

How many syllables does the word chocolate have? In most American English dialects, it has two, although many people would say that it has three because they are aware of the written form and think it should have. If asked to read the word in isolation, many people will carefully produce that middle syllable. If asked to read a sentence such as “Do you want chocolate or vanilla ice cream?” most people will pronounce only two syllables. So what is this thing called the syllable?

In English, syllables have several different “shapes,” or structures, depending on the con- figuration of vowels (V) and consonants (C). The one thing every English syllable must have is a nucleus, usually a vowel but sometimes /r/, /m/ or /ŋ/, or /l/ (as in the sec- ond syllable of little). English syllables need not have any consonants. The word amazing, for example, has three syllables, and the first one consists only of a vowel. The other two illustrate two additional syllable shapes in English: vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) and vowel-consonant (VC). There are eight other possibilities in English, as shown in Table 2.3.

Table 2.3: Possible English syllable structures

V VC VCC CV CCV CVC CCVC CCVCC CCCV CCCVC CCCVCC

eye, oh am, eyes

apt, ilk me, woe

play, sty did, make

plaid, stall

plaids, brains

splay, straw

splayed, straws

straps, screams

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.2 The Building Blocks of Words: Morphology

Syllable structures vary from language to language—the only universal is that every syl- lable must contain a nucleus. Beyond that, languages differ widely. In Mandarin, the usual syllable structure is CV. When Mandarin-speaking adults are learning English, they tend to “drop” the final consonant in words such as cat because that is the syllable form that is most familiar to them.

Children with normal hearing tend to be aware of syllable structure and reproduce it fairly accurately, even at a very young age. Evidence can be found in their ability to pro- duce rhymes, which usually require them to create new forms with the same number of syllables, if not the exact same structure. A child’s ability to rhyme bad with sad and mad shows that she can exchange the initial consonant, and when pronouncing glad, the child provides strong evidence that it is the syllable that is the salient unit, and not the individ- ual sounds. In fact, nearly all preschool children can produce rhymes, even nonsensical ones, but if asked how many sounds in a word, they often falter.

The components of the sound system—sounds, syllables, stress, and intonation—are not learned in isolation. They are learned in the contexts of words, and words are made up of morphemes.

2.2 The Building Blocks of Words: Morphology

A mother, asked if her infant is talking yet, might well respond, “Yes, she has three words already!” To most people, at least those who are neither English teachers nor linguists, the smallest unit of language that has meaning is the word. Cer- tainly, words are essential building blocks of language, and it is true that the word is the smallest unit that can stand alone in speech or writing. The smallest unit of meaning, however, is not the word but the morpheme, and the study of how morphemes are cat- egorized and combined is morphology. English morphology is fairly complex—perhaps even more complex than the sound system. But it is also easier to understand because morphemes are more easily recognized than individual sounds. Most of us know a great deal about the different kinds of morphemes and how they are combined into words. It is the language for talking about them that gets a little complicated. Nevertheless, in order to appreciate what children accomplish in learning to make and use words, it is necessary to understand something about the morphology of English.

Identifying Morphemes

First, morphemes and words differ, although a word can be a single morpheme. The word of, for example, is a single morpheme, but it is still a word. Often, however, a word consists of more than one morpheme. Words such as helpful, eyeball, and toys consist of two mor- phemes while helpfully and eyeballs consist of three. How do we know? With of, we know because we cannot break it down further and be left with anything that makes sense. With eyeball, on the other hand, we can clearly see that there are two parts to the word that have meaning: eye and ball. Then, adding a plural suffix, -s, we add a third element of meaning and thus have three morphemes. Similarly, toys has two meaning elements: toy and the plural suffix.

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.2 The Building Blocks of Words: Morphology

What the adult knows about morphology, however, is not what the child knows. Return- ing to the word eyeball, for example, a 3-year-old who knows the meaning of the word and uses it will not be aware that it has two components, nor does she need to. For her, it is a single word, a single morpheme, and it has one specific meaning. For this reason, when linguists or teachers study children’s language in terms of MLU (mean length of utterance), they normally consider compound words such as eyeball, baseball, or cupcake as a single entity.

English words can consist of many morphemes. The word predictability, for example, has four: pre- (a prefix meaning “before”), -dict- (meaning “to say”), -able (meaning “capable of”), and -ity (making the word a noun). Notice that these four morphemes have differ- ent kinds of meaning. That is because not all morphemes are created equal. Some carry a great deal of meaning, and others are merely grammatical conventions; still others fall somewhere in the middle.

Different Kinds of Morphemes

Broadly speaking, there are two types of morphemes: content, or lexical morphemes, and functional morphemes. To distinguish between them, let’s return for a moment to the word eyeballs. As noted, it consists of three morphemes. Most of the meaning is borne by eye and ball. We see both morphemes in many other English words such as baseball, ballgame, birds-eye, and eyeglasses. Because they have meaning that can be understood independently of any other morpheme, they are called lexical morphemes. The remaining morpheme is of a different type. It indicates that the noun is plural and is thus called an inflectional morpheme, and is one kind of functional morpheme as shown in Figure 2.2. The function words and the inflectional morphemes are the little workhorses of the language. They do not carry a great deal of dictionary-type meaning, but their presence is necessary for con- structing meaningful sentences. They essentially carry out grammatical functions. Func- tion words stand alone as words, but unlike other words in the language, they cannot usually have other morphemes attached. The exception is with the per- sonal pronouns, which can have number or case indicators as in he, him, his, you, your, yours, etc. and certain prepositions that can be combined, such as into and within. All the others stand alone; there is no suffix or prefix that can be added to the or of.

Inflectional morphemes serve similar purposes to function words in English sentences; they carry grammatical information. In English, most inflections are suffixes but some require an internal change—the plural of

When this child produces his first word, it will be a lexical morpheme. Why do you think this is true?

Exactostock/SuperStock

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.2 The Building Blocks of Words: Morphology

mouse, for example. Inflectional suffixes are added to lexical morphemes to indicate more information and include familiar forms such as the past tense marker (usually spelled as -ed) and the plural marker (usually an -s or -es). The most common English inflections are shown in Table 2.4.

Table 2.4: Examples of grammatical inflections in English

Tense Aspect Number Possessive Case

Comparative Superlative

• s/-es (walks, talks, fixes) -d/-ed (walked, talked, fixed)

• Vowel change (write/ wrote; bring/ brought; sing/sang, shoot/shot)

• ed, with a form of have (have walked, has talked, had fixed)

• No change (have brought; has shot)/ Vowel change (has / sung)

• en (with an auxiliary have or be) (written, driven)

• ing (with a form of be) (is writing, was singing)

• s/-es (cats, fits, horses, boxes)

• Vowel change (mouse/ mice; goose/ geese)

• en (Oxen) • um (singular

in words such as medium datum)

• a (plural in words such as media, data)

• s (Bob’s, children’s)

• er (funnier, meaner)

• est (strongest, liveliest)

Inflections are not the only suffixes in English. English also has a number of morphemes with sufficient content meaning to be considered lexical but which cannot stand alone. These include prefixes such as bio-, morpho-, phono-, and multi- and suffixes such as -logy, i, and -ful. Because they cannot stand alone but must be “bound” to other morphemes, they are thus considered bound lexical morphemes (see Figure 2.2). English, then, has a num- ber of different ways of forming words: by adding prefixes and suffixes—whether lexical or inflectional—and by compounding (combining lexical morphemes). Other languages, however, have different processes.

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.2 The Building Blocks of Words: Morphology

This diagram shows the criteria used for categorizing morphemes.

Morphology in English and Other Languages

In terms of how they combine morphemes to form words, the world’s languages fall along a continuum with analytic languages at one end and synthetic languages at the other. A strictly analytic language would have one morpheme per word while a strictly synthetic language would combine all the morphemes needed to make the meaning of a sentence. Although there are no strictly analytic nor strictly synthetic languages, Mandarin and Vietnamese are highly analytic while Turkish and Russian are highly synthetic. English is usually categorized as an analytical language, although with its inflectional affixes and compounding, it too has certain synthetic properties.

English is the way it is because of its history. Every country that ever invaded the British Isles left behind some of its language. Three Germanic tribes—the Angles, the Jutes, and the

Figure 2.2: How morphemes are categorized

Morpheme

Significant content meaning?

Yes Lexical

Morpheme

No Function

Morpheme

Can morpheme stand alone?

Can morpheme stand alone?

Yes Free Morpheme (Content Word)

No Bound Lexical

Morpheme Function Word

Inflectional Morpheme

Can morpheme carry most of the word meaning?

No Derivational Morpheme

Yes Bound Lexical

Morpheme

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.3 How Sentences Are Made: Syntax

Saxons—arrived in less than friendly fashion around 450 CE and left behind the Germanic foundation of the English language, Anglo-Saxon. Words surviving into modern English include earth, dirt, sheep, and tree, along with many of the 100 most commonly used words in English today as well as most of the words that our mothers tried to keep us from using. The next major influence on English, still felt today, came with the Norman Invasion in 1066. In other words, the Latin influence came through the French language spoken by the invaders.

Every language that influenced English had a different way of forming words, and Eng- lish somehow accommodated most of them, much to the frustration of adult learners of the language. Fortunately, children have no expectations about this, and for the most part, they figure out how morphemes fit together without difficulty. They do experience some confusion. Carter, at age 5, will say, “I forgotted that,” adding the regular past tense form

to a verb that already has the irregular form. In all likelihood, he does this because he learned forgot before forget and has yet to make the connection between the two forms. In time, he will sort it out just as he will figure out that the past tense of bring isn’t “bringed,” and the plural of goose is geese.

Carter and other children his age are not terribly concerned about the correctness of the form. He is far more interested in talking about the geese that he saw fly- ing in formation across the sky than with the fact that the word

goose comes from Anglo-Saxon along with its plural form, largely unchanged. To tell his story about the geese, he needs more than individual words; he needs to be able to com- bine them into sentences, the next level of language structure.

2.3 How Sentences Are Made: Syntax

In everyday conversation, we sometimes speak in sentences and often speak in frag-ments. But even when we speak in shortened or truncated forms, we tend to mentally “fill in” the missing parts. In elementary school, most of us were taught that a sentence must have a subject and a verb or, depending on the precision of our teacher, a subject and a predicate. That is true—not terribly helpful, but true. It is just the beginning of the story. English sentence structure, or syntax, is about word order. More precisely, English sentence structure is about how morphemes are combined to form meaningful utterances.

Basic Sentence Structure

All human languages were created by humans as a way to express meaning, and there are many experiences that all humans have in common. Thus, it is not surprising that all

How would you help Carter tell his story about the geese flying over him?

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.3 How Sentences Are Made: Syntax

languages share certain struc- tural properties. They all use sentence structures with a sub- ject, a verb, and an object, but the order in which those ele- ments appear differs from lan- guage to language. In some lan- guages, word order is flexible because the role the word plays in the sentence is indicated by an affix—a morpheme indi- cating whether a noun serves as a subject or an object, for instance. Most of the languages of the world, however, are either subject-verb-object (SVO) or subject-object-verb (SOV) lan- guages. SOV is the most com- mon word order in terms of the number of distinct languages that employ it (Mihalicek & Wil- son, 2011). Japanese, Korean, and Turkish are all SOV languages. SVO is the most common word order in terms of the number of people who speak a language, since it is employed by English, all of the Romance languages, and Mandarin. Not all SVO languages have exactly the same structure, but the major constituents tend to be ordered in the same way.

There is far more to sentence structure and syntax than the ordering of the major constitu- ents. Look at the following sentences. Can you explain the kinds of differences apparent in them?

a. Sarah builds sandcastles. b. Isabelle builds sandcastles. c. Sarah built sandcastles.

For the moment, let’s ignore the likelihood that Sarah, at age 2, is more apt to sit down in the middle of her sister’s sandcastle than to build one. Think about the differences between sentences (a) and (b) and between (a) and (c). Sentences (a) and (b) have exactly the same structure but profoundly different meanings: It is Sarah who is building the sandcastle in (a) but Isabelle in (b). The two sentences have different subjects. Sentences (a) and (c) have a syntactic difference that changes the meaning. The morphemes in sen- tence (a) can be described as follows:

• Sarah (a lexical morpheme) • build (a lexical morpheme) • the present tense inflection, -s, indicating habitual or current activity • three additional morphemes: the nouns sand and castle, which form a compound

word and the plural inflection, -s.

Sentence (c) has the same major constituents as (a), but instead of the present tense marker, there is a past tense morpheme changing build to built. The difference here is syntactic.

Humans use language to communicate meaning. As diverse as we are, our languages share certain structural aspects. Why do you think this is?

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.3 How Sentences Are Made: Syntax

Basic sentence constituents for Papa winned the race.

The difference between sentences (a) and (b) is easier for children to understand than the difference between sentences (a) and (c). The “players” are different—it is a lexical difference that has a great deal of meaning. With (a) and (c), the difference is grammati- cal, a change in tense. Because tense is related to time, the difference is one that adults readily understand, but it takes a while for children to learn it. It takes longer to learn not only because it is a very subtle change in form (build to built is not even easy to hear) but because very young children have a shaky notion of past time.

There are, then, basically two kinds of syntactic learning that children must accomplish: the order in which words are put together to form sentences and the relationships that exist among the different constituents. In sentences, not all words are of the same magni- tude of importance. Consider this sentence from Isabelle at age 5:

Papa winned the race.

Even though Isabelle regularized the past tense of win to make it sound like other regular verbs such as talks and runs, she had all the elements of a perfectly formed sentence. I have used a bracketing convention that linguists sometimes use to show the major constituents, subject and predicate:

[[winned the race]]

We learned that English is an SVO language, so we will break down the predicate further. From this point, it is easier to see the syntactic constituents of Isabelle’s sentence using a tree diagram, although the tree and brackets convey the same information. Figure 2.3 represents the basic SVO constituent structure of the sentence.

Figure 2.3: Basic sentence structure

Papa winned

S (Sentence)

the race

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.3 How Sentences Are Made: Syntax

If Isabelle were asked when her Papa won the race and she answered in a full sentence, the same structure would be expanded as in Figure 2.4, which shows all the morphemes in the sentence and their relationship to each other.

Figure 2.4: Constituent sentence structure

Papa win Past

S

the

NP VP

race Ø yesterday

Adverb

NounArticle

NumberN

TenseVtrans

Verb NP

Constituent structure of Papa winned the race yesterday.

Learning Sentence Structure

The task of learning sentence structure involves learning the conventions for word order and constituent structure or, from the child’s perspective, which bits of meaning fit together and how. Until children learn at least rudimentary syntactic rules, they can- not make themselves understood, but it is learning that begins very early. When a child barely able to walk says, “Want cookie,” she is already demonstrating SVO word order. Although she has left out the subject noun, it is clearly understood to be “I.” From this point on, syntactic learning progresses very quickly. Graham, at age 2 years 10 months, produced the following sentences:

a. Calley hit me ‘cause it hurt.

b. Mama give me time-out ‘cause I bit Melissa.

Both sentences are complex, meaning that they have two clauses—two units, each with a subject and a verb. In sentence (a), he gets the word order within each of the two clauses right but the order of the two clauses themselves wrong, likely because he has an imperfect

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.3 How Sentences Are Made: Syntax

understanding of the meaning of because. In sentence (b), he gets everything right in terms of word order. At this age, Graham was also able to produce negatives and questions:

a. I don’t like yellow Jell-O!

b. Melissa won’t give me the clock.

c. Mama, can Melissa have a cookie?

Graham has already learned a great deal about English word order, but there is still much more to learn. One kind of structure, the passive voice, will continue to be a problem for several years (we will look more closely at the progression of syntactic learning in Chap- ter 6). As mentioned earlier, English is an SVO language. This is one of the first realities of English syntax that children internalize. When Graham was 4 years old, his mother conducted an experiment to test his understanding of the passive structure. She used the two sentences:

The dog bit the cat.

The cat was bitten by the dog.

Using stuffed animals, Graham’s mother asked him to demon- strate the action when she said each sentence. His responses demonstrated that word order was far more significant than the bothersome little grammati- cal morphemes, by and so. While he correctly demonstrated the dog biting the cat in response to the first sentence, when it came to the second, he was convinced that the cat bit the dog. Graham will start to figure it out when he is 6 or so, and that learning will likely continue until he is 9 or 10. Fortunately, it isn’t a prob- lem that will often arise before then because the passive form is more often used in writing than in speech, and adults rarely use it with children. Still, Graham’s struggle with the passive struc-

ture provides a good illustration of how significant word order is to young children learn- ing to understand the language around them. Meaning is also important, as children’s understanding of the truncated passive shows. Truncated passives are those sentences in which the “doer” of the action is not expressed. Sentences such as the ball was stolen or the doll was broken are usually easier for children to understand. Upon hearing such a

When asked to demonstrate the second scenario (The cat was bitten by the dog.) using stuffed animals, Graham showed the cat biting the dog. Why do you think he is struggling with the passive form?

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.4 Semantics and Pragmatics: Making Meaning, Making Sense

sentence, a child of 4 or older might even ask, “Who stole the ball?” thus revealing that in the world of children, meaning always trumps structure.

Learning to combine words according to the rules of syntax, children learn to understand and to produce new and unique sentences (i.e., sentences that they have not heard or pro- duced before). Learning the rules of syntax is essential to language learning, but it is only part of the business of meaningful communication.

2.4 Semantics and Pragmatics: Making Meaning, Making Sense

The study of meaning in language is called semiotics. Although all the levels of lan-guage work together to achieve meaning, most linguists consider the study of semi-otics to include three levels of language: syntax (which we already examined in brief), semantics, and pragmatics. Semantics refers to the relationship between linguistic signs (whether words or sentences or larger units of discourse) and the real world. Prag- matics refers to the study of the relationship between language signs and language users. Certainly, all three are essential to understanding how meaning is created. Syntax cannot do the job alone. Linguists are fond of using sentences such as the following to exemplify how syntactic rules can generate perfectly formed but meaningless sentences:

If you can’t hear me, please hold up your hand.

Syntactically, there is nothing wrong with the sentence. All the words have meaning and are properly sequenced, the subjects and verbs agree—it is perfectly formed. A syntacti- cian wouldn’t be much interested in the sentence, but a semanticist, interested in how meaning is constructed, might be interested in explaining why the sentence fails to gener- ate the intended meaning, why it actually expresses an impossibility in the real world. The pragmatist, however, concerned with the relationship between speakers and listeners and utterances, would be positively salivating at the opportunity to analyze it. To understand why, let’s take a closer look at semantics and pragmatics.

Constructing Meaning: Semantics

To study any aspect of language without taking meaning into consideration is impos- sible. We don’t go around (most of us, usually) babbling nonsense syllables. Meaning is, after all, the business of language. Semantics is concerned with word meanings as well as the meaning that results from combining words in various ways and with how language represents real-world meaning—in brief, meaning as it resides in and is constructed with language. Formally, semantics is a little more resistant to formal description than is pho- nology, morphology, or syntax. The reason is that in order for people to communicate, language has to have certain fairly rigid conventions—if words didn’t have more or less the same meanings from speaker to speaker, it would be impossible to communicate. Sim- ilarly, if English sentence structure were a matter of random ordering of words, the result would be miscommunication or, indeed, no communication at all. Linguistic descriptions of phonology, morphology, and syntax are possible only because there is considerable agreement on what the rules are—there is standardization. When it comes to meaning, or

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.4 Semantics and Pragmatics: Making Meaning, Making Sense

specifically, how people view and represent reality, the “rules” are harder to formulate. The reason is that reality is defined, to a significant degree, by individual and cultural experience. In English, unless we are talking about rain, we use the word water to refer to the chemically defined substance H

2 0. In Japanese, however, there are different words for

hot water and cold water, and it is not possible to talk about water without specifying one or the other—there is not a generic term.

Even among speakers of the same language, there can be differences. Although there has to be a commonly agreed upon “dictionary” in order for any communication to happen, it is surprising how much variation is possible. For example, there is a difference between Canadian and American English in the meaning and usage of the word quite. In general, Ameri- cans use the word to indicate a significant amount or degree. To say that someone is “quite beautiful” usually means that the person possesses an extraor- dinary beauty. In Canada, how- ever, the term may indicate res- ervations. To say that someone works “quite hard” may actu- ally mean that the person works somewhat hard or even imply that the person doesn’t work all that much.

Cultural variation is only one thing that frustrates linguists attempting to describe semantic structure in any way that comes close to the precision with which they are able to describe the other levels of the language. The major problem is that meaning doesn’t reside in one place. Because meaning is the purpose and the product of language, it resides in every level from the sound through the sentence and to even larger units of discourse. The generative and case grammar models are of relevance to teachers for the simple reason that understanding or even describing children’s language learning is difficult without also understanding that the levels of lan- guage interact with one another.

Making Sense: Pragmatics

The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is easily demonstrated with a true anecdote, courtesy of my granddaughter Isabelle, when she was about two and a half. Isabelle is bilingual; her mother speaks only French to her, and her father speaks only English. She lives with her family in Canada. Twice a year, the family comes to Florida where I live in a condominium where most residents are retirees. Nevertheless, residents are accustomed to children and enjoy having them around. Usually. One day we were all at the swimming pool. An octogenarian named Julia saw Isabelle, who is very petite, in

In England, this would be called a zebra crossing. An American child hearing this term might look for large, striped animals.

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.4 Semantics and Pragmatics: Making Meaning, Making Sense

the pool, and as soon as she came out asked her, “Child, are you potty trained?” Isabelle did not understand the question and turned to her mother who repeated the question in French, using terms more familiar to the child. Isabelle turned to Julia and said, in perfect French, Oui, Madam, et vous? (“Yes, Madam, and you?”) Syntacticians would find noth- ing of interest in this sentence; semanticists would have to concede that the meaning was clear. To a pragmatist, however, the conversation is fodder for analysis and discussion. Certainly, Isabelle made sense, and from her perspective there was nothing inappropri- ate about the utterance. But the fact that it is amusing tells us that there is some kind of mismatch between the child’s understanding of real-world language use and the adult’s.

In constructing rules for English sentences, syntacticians focus on “grammatical” and fully formed sentences. Their work is highly theoretical, more about the language that people think they speak than the language they use. Real language used in everyday conversation is filled with fragments, false starts, and wrong words. For linguists study- ing pragmatics, it is the language used by real people to communicate in real time that provides the data for their study.

Stylistics is a form of pragmatics. Earlier in this chapter, we looked at syntactic paraphrase. For purposes of describing sentence structure, the meanings are considered to be identi- cal, but in actual usage, they seldom are. Consider the following paraphrases:

a. The duchess wore the diamond well. b. The diamond was worn well by the duchess. c. It was the duchess who wore the diamond well.

Each sentence consists of exactly the same propositions, and they would all have the same underlying syntactic structure. But for native speakers, each sentence conveys slightly dif- ferent information, and it has to do with focus. In sentence (a), a simple declarative state- ment, there is no particular emphasis on either the duchess or the diamond. In sentence (b), the diamond is the focus of the sentence by virtue of its placement at the beginning of the sentence. Similarly, the addition of it was at the beginning of sentence (c) emphasizes the duchess (as opposed to other potential wearers of the diamond). Word order, then, conveys more than just the syntactic role words may play in a sentence. If we consider the meaning difference between the blue house and the house that is blue, we see once more the subtle differences conveyed by word order. When an adjective comes before a noun, as in the blue house, it defines or characterizes the house. When it comes in a relative clause following the noun, as in the house that is blue, the modifier serves to distinguish it from other houses. The distinction is in emphasis and the conditions under which each would be used. English has conventions for arranging words to achieve particular meanings, and while they are somewhat difficult to formalize, speakers of the language eventually come to understand what they are and to apply them. For example, it would be rare to hear a native speaker say, “the blue old house,” even though it is perfectly grammatical.

Manipulation of Language

Another aspect of pragmatics relates to how language is used to manipulate situations or people for specific purposes. Two such uses are fairly common: the language of propa- ganda and language related to gender and sexism.

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CHAPTER 2Section 2.4 Semantics and Pragmatics: Making Meaning, Making Sense

Propaganda Propaganda presents a classic example of language used to manipulate. Whether in war- time or in everyday political life, people (often politicians) use language to influence or persuade, not through a thorough presentation of all sides or all information available, but through highly selected and sometimes inflammatory language. Today, the term pro- paganda carries largely a negative connotation, but it has an honorable past. It originally

referred to any language used to persuade. Today it refers to biased language used to manipulate opinion or behavior (Hoyt, 2008). When politicians started to refer to rich people as “job creators,” the point was to influence how people thought about the wealthy. It was easy to see, whether one agreed with the politicians or not, that the change was motivated by a desire to keep tax rates low for wealthy people. By relabeling rich people as job creators, poli- ticians tried to make the idea of taxing them less more appeal- ing to the general public. Not only political talk is designed to manipulate. Some would argue that the language of commercial advertising verges on propa-

ganda. In the sense that it is intended to persuade or manipulate us into buying something, that is true, and advertisers are often very clever in their use of language to ensure that they speak the truth—selectively—while simultaneously seducing us into their worlds.

Sexist Language Sexist language is another excellent example of how language can be used to manipulate. The fact that there are far more pejorative terms for talking about females than males is not only a consequence of women’s secondary status in society for many centuries; it arguably serves to shape perceptions of women and perpetuate that status. Even suppos- edly equivalent terms such as master and mistress are not equivalent in certain contexts. Saying that “Bruce is Betsy’s master” conveys a very different kind of power arrangement than “Betsy is Bruce’s mistress.” Throughout the English language, there are examples of language that diminish females. Even the fact that style manuals normally insist on he as the so-called neutral pronoun in English is evidence that females are historically of less significance in the society, and arguably, this has a role on how children perceive them- selves. There is, in fact, evidence that young children do not perceive the so-called gen- der neutral he as neutral at all. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, researchers, educators, linguists, and those in the women’s movement all paid a great deal of attention to sexist language (Cincotta, 1978; Gaff, 1978). As a result, there has been a real attempt in recent decades to ensure that children’s books are more gender-neutral than they were in the

Advertisers often use propaganda to influence consumers to prefer their product. How might bright colors and cartoon characters appeal to children?

Associated Press

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CHAPTER 2Conclusion

past. The issue has not disap- peared, however. As a colleague of mine recently noted, “The Three Bears are still boy bears.” Perhaps the best evidence that gender bias is still an issue in language may be the number of books, articles, blogs, and Web pages still devoted to the sub- ject of gender bias in language.

Another matter in language and gender that occupies the time of sociolinguists, anthro- pological linguists, and others interested in linguistic pragmat- ics is the differences between male and female language use. What is particularly interesting is not structural differences per se, although some of these may exist, but differences in how language is used for communication. One of the foremost scholars on this subject is Deborah Tannen who makes the case that men and women use talk for different purposes. Men, she claims, are more likely to use talk to establish or exhibit status while women are more likely to use it to build solidarity (Tannen, 2001; 2011). Hence, men are generally more talkative in public than in private, and the reverse is true for women. Women are more likely to engage in talk about their troubles to establish solidarity while men tend to avoid such talk. In general, women establish and maintain eye contact more than men, and while both men and women will engage in linguistic sparring, men are far more likely to do it “for fun,” than are women.

Conclusion

This chapter begins to explain the complexity of language so that we can appreciate what children—infants, really—accomplish as they learn to communicate through language. There is much to do. There is a sound system to learn, and words to learn and to string together into sentences that make sense in all kinds of situations. In the first months and years of life, children lay the foundation for the language that will take them to school. This foundation will continue to grow throughout their lives. Anyone who has been a parent or who has spent enough time with young children stands in awe at the speed of their learning. Now that we have a basic understanding of what children accom- plish, in the next chapter, we take a closer look at how children acquire language.

A professor at Georgetown University, Deborah Tannen has written both popular and scholarly books and articles about the differences in how males and females use language.

Associated Press

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CHAPTER 2Key Ideas

Post-Test

1. A diphthong occurs when

a. a change in one consonant sound changes the meaning of a word. b. two vowel sounds glide quickly together. c. a word is spelled the same forward and backward. d. the use of a word changes its meaning.

2. Morphemes are

a. the same as words. b. fairly basic to understand in English. c. difficult to use in English. d. the smallest units of meaning in a word.

3. Of the following, generally the most complex structure for English-speaking children to use is

a. questions. b. multiple clauses. c. passive. d. SVO.

4. Using “he” as a term for both males and females

a. has increased since the 1970s. b. is perceived by most children as gender neutral. c. is the style recommended by some writing manuals. d. provides evidence that females are generally considered to be superior.

Answers 1. b. Two vowel sounds glide quickly together. The answer can be found in Section 2.1. 2. d. The smallest units of meaning in a word. The answer can be found in Section 2.2. 3. c. Passive. The answer can be found in Section 2.3. 4. c. Is the style recommended by some writing manuals. The answer can be found in Section 2.4.

Key Ideas

• The English language has four distinct “levels” of structure: phonology, morphol- ogy, syntax, and meaning, including semantics and pragmatics.

• All languages have all these levels of structure and each language is unique. • The human brain is able to learn any human language. • Before they reach school age, children have learned a great deal of language

structure; they have not done so intentionally or consciously but rather in the process of learning to communicate.

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CHAPTER 2Critical Thinking Questions

Critical Thinking Questions

1. English has 25 distinctive consonant sounds and 19 distinctive vowel sounds. Most dialects of Spanish have only 16 consonant sounds and 5 vowels. Does this mean that Spanish-speaking children learn their sound system faster than Eng- lish-speaking children? Defend your answer. You will be asked to reassess it after reading Chapters 3 and 4.

2. Some people insist that there is a distinction between the initial sound in the words which and witch. Do you hear one? If so, what are the distinct phonemes that distinguish the two?

3. When you go to the doctor and she wants to look at your throat, which vowel does she ask you to say and why? (Why not /i/ or /u/, for example?)

4. How many morphemes are in unsystematically? List and provide the meaning or function of each.

5. Look at the auxiliary verbs in Table 2.5. Why do you think the auxiliary verbs had, has, and was are not included in the list? Is it simply that they were left out of the sample, or is there another explanation?

Table 2.5: Auxiliary verbs

Prepositions Articles Conjunctions Pronouns Auxiliary verbs

to the and I be

for a or you, your have

of an nor he, him, his may, might

in but she, her shall, should

into neither It can, could

on either who will, would

onto yet some must

from because one ought to

6. In which category would more and most (as in more likely and most productive) fall in Figure 2.1?

7. Look at the following three sentences and suggest a context that would be more appropriate for each sentence. In other words, what question might each be answering?

a. Mommy ate the cookies. b. It was Mommy who ate the cookies. c. The cookies were eaten by Mommy.

8. Find three examples of magazine or newspaper advertisements that use lan- guage to manipulate you into buying a product.

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CHAPTER 2Key Terms

Key Terms

analytic language A strictly analytic language would have one morpheme per word.

consonant A speech sound produced by impeding the airflow in the vocal tract.

diphthong A vowel sound created by one vowel “gliding” into another as in the word eye.

functional morpheme A morpheme, either a word or an inflection, that has minimal content meaning but serves a grammatical purpose in the sentence.

function words Stand alone as words, but unlike other words in the language, they cannot usually have other morphemes attached.

inflectional morphemes Types of func- tion morphemes; they carry grammatical information.

intonation The rise and fall and rhythm, or cadence, of language.

lexical morpheme A morpheme with sub- stantive content meaning.

minimal pair Two words that differ by only one sound.

morphology The branch of linguistics concerned with how words are structured.

phoneme The smallest unit of sound that has meaning to a native speaker.

pragmatics The study of language as it is used in real-life context.

semantics The branch of linguistics con- cerned with the study of meaning.

semiotics The study of signs and symbols and how they are used or interpreted.

stress The force with which a syllable is articulated.

synthetic languages A strictly synthetic language would combine all the mor- phemes needed to make the meaning of a sentence.

vowel A highly resonant speech sound made when air passes through the vocal tract with little obstruction.

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CHAPTER 2Weblinks

Weblinks

For charts illustrating the different conventions for representing vowel sounds as well as the audio representation of each sound: http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/newstart.html

http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/ws2000/presentations/preliminary/victor_zue/Zue-lecture2.pdf

http://www.indiana.edu/~hlw/PhonUnits/vowels.html

For a complete description and discussion of syllable structure, see The World Atlas of Language Structures Online at http://wals.info/chapter/12

Deborah Tannen also puts interfamilial talk under the microscope in her I Only Say This Because I Love You: How the Way We Talk Can Make or Break Family Relationships Throughout Our Lives. (2001, New York: Random House). For further writings by Deborah Tannen, see her homepage at http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/

For an interesting study on gender differences in written text, see http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/pennebaker/reprints/Newman SexDif2007.pdf

For an excellent video and opportunity to assess your understanding of persuasive and manipulative language, see http://www.mindset.co.za/learn/node/44968

There are many good videos of babies babbling on YouTube and other sites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPGekZreJLc

http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2011/04/03/babbling-twins-video-goes-viral/

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