7. Comparing languages. The estimated number of world languages. Contrastive linguistics and the theory of universals.

COMPARING LANGUAGES

Estimates as to the number of different languages in the world vary considerably, partly because of problems in defining the word 'lan­guage' /The figure most usually quoted is somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000. A few linguists carry out detailed studies of individual languages. Many more, however, are involved in compar­ing pairs or groups of them. Sometimes they compare them in order to pinpoint dissimilarities (contrastive linguistics) and sometimes to identify similarities, which may be due to universal, genetic, areal or typological factors.

The comparison of languages in order to find dissimilarities is known as contrastive linguistics. Many linguists, however, study char­acteristics shared by groups of languages, rather than all of them. Genetic, areal and typological factors are the three main causes behind these shared features.

Genetic similarities

The search for genetically related languages, and the reconstruction of the hypothetical parent language from which they were descended, was considered to be the most important task of linguistics in the nine­teenth century.

It is often not immediately apparent which languages are related. At first glance, Welsh, Spanish and Russian look quite different, yet these are all Indo-European languages. We need to look for system-

atic correspondences between the languages, rather than similar-looking words, which can be misleading. For example, it is mere chance that German haben 'have' resembles Latin habere 'have'.

Two basic assumptions underlie our search for systematic corre­spondences. First, linguistic symbols are essentially arbitrary. The second assumption is that sound changes are for the most part regular.

7. Comparing languages. Linguistic typology. Morphological and word order criteria for language classification

Language types

Parallel structures in languages may occur because the languages are of a similar type.

The recent interest in linguistic typology has arisen in part out of the failure to find large numbers of language universals. Absolute uni-versals, characteristics shared by all languages, proved to be hard to identify, and those attempting to list them were driven back onto vague statements such as: 'All languages have the means of asking questions'. When people tried to pin these statements down further, such as querying how questions were asked, it became clear that cer­tain devices recurred in human languages, though different lan­guages favoured different constructions.

Of course, the observation that different languages use different con­structions is by no means new. What is new, is the recent interest in implicational universals and implicational tendencies.

That is, if a lan­guage has a particular construction,

it is also likely to have further pre­dictable characteristics.

Morphological criteria for language classification

The number of morphemes per word varies from language to lan­guage - so does the way in which morphemes are combined within aword. In the 19th century, scholars tried to use such criteria for divid­ing languages into different types. They recognized at least three dif­ferent morphological types.

An isolating (or analytical) language is one in which words fre­quently

consist of one morpheme. This is often the case in English:

Will you please let the dog out now.

An agglutinating language (from the Latin word for 'glue together') is one in which words can be divided into morphemes with­out difficulty. Turkish and Swahili are well-known examples. But agglutination is also used to a limited extent in English:

A fusional language is one such as Latin which fuses morphemes together in such a way that they are not easily recognizable as sepa­rate elements.

At one time it was thought that languages followed a fixed pattern of development. The first stage was an isolating one, the second aggluti­nating, the third fusional. Greek and Latin were spoken of in senti­mental terms as representing the highest and best of language types.

Word order criteria

English uses word order as a basic syntactic device. In linguistic terminology, it is a configurational language (Chapter 7). Perhaps for this reason there has been an enormous amount of interest in word order as a typological characteristic. Among the possible word orders, only a limited number are commonly used, and each of these is likely to possess certain predictable characteristics.

The most usual preliminary classification is in terms of subject, verb, object. In theory, there are six possibilities:

Examples of languages which fit each of these types, with the literal order in which they would express a sentence The dog killed the duck are:

SOV The dog the duck killed (Turkish).

SVO The dog killed the duck (English).

VSO Killed the dog the duck (Welsh).

VOS Killed the duck the dog (Malagasy (Madagascar)).

O VS The duck killed the dog (Hixkaryana (S. America)).

OSV The duck the dog killed (? Apurina (S. America)).

In addition, so-called pro-drop languages cause problems. These are languages which can omit pronouns, usually the subject pronoun. In Latin, for example, cano 'sing-Г was commoner than ego cano 'I sing-Г, where the pronoun was added only if extra emphasis was needed. In these languages, the order of verb and object when the pronoun is dropped is not necessarily the same as that of verb and object when S, V, О are all present.

Most languages have some inconsistencies, and some doublets (double possibilities). English, for example, can say Sheba 's queen as well as queen of Sheba.

However, a list of statistical probabilities is only a first stage in the working out of language types. The second, and more important stage, is to find out why these probabilities exist. This is still under discussion, and there may be several interacting explanations. One suggestion is that in languages there is a principle of cross-category harmony. That is, different linguistic categories such as nouns, verbs and prepositions, all behave somewhat similarly to one another: the main word or head in a phrase is likely to be in a similar position throughout the different types of phrases. For example, if a verb normally occurs at the beginning of the verb phrase, as in English eats peanuts, then a preposition is likely to be at the front of its phrase, as in on Saturday, and an adjective at the front of its phrase, as in red in the face, and a noun at the front of its phrase, as in father of the family. Interestingly, the conclusion that languages behave in this way has also been arrived at independently by theoretical linguists trying to describe sentence patterns

12. Comparing languages. Typological classifications of languages: syntactic classification, morphological classification Syntactic classification focuses on the formal means for representing grammatical categories and on the ways in which words are combined in phrases and sentences.

Analytic languages, where the grammatical forms are mostly represented through such media as functional words, phonetic means, and invariable word order E.g. English, French, Persian, Bulgarian, and some other Indo-European languages.

Synthetic languages, where the grammatical forms are mostly manifested by affixes – suffixes, prefixes, and inflections. variable word order. The words combining in phrases and sentences are individual units. E.g. Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and most contemporary Indo-European languages.

Polysynthetic, or incorporating, languages, characterized by long, complex word forms incorporating roots and various affixes (suffixes, prefixes, and inflections). E.g. languages of American Indians, and Paleo-Siberian (Paleo-Asian) languages.

Synthetic and polysynthetic languages are further subdivided into nominative and ergative.

In nominative languages, a noun in the nominative case typically represents the subject in active and passive syntactic constructions, while a noun in the objective (accusative) case typically represents a direct object. This rule holds for constructions with both transitive and intransitive verbs. E.g. Робітники будують дім. Дім будується робітниками. Робітники працюють. Most Indo-European languages belong to the nominative type.

In ergative languages (from Greek ergates ‘doer of the action’),

there are two ways for representing the subject of a sentence.

The sentences with an intransitive verb have the subject in the

absolute (nominative) case, e.g. Georgian Kat’s-i sin movida ‘The man has come home’. The sentences with a transitive verb have the subject in the ergative case, while the direct object is in the absolute (nominative) case, e.g. Georgian Kat’s-ma sahli aasena ‘The man has built a house’ Ergativity is characteristic of most Caucasian and Papua languages, and of the languages of American Indians.

Morphological classification focuses on the types of morphemes

that manifest grammatical and derivational meanings. The types of languages are:

Root, or isolating, languages that do not have either inflections

or other affixes. In these languages there are only free root

morphemes that function as individual words.

Notional and functional word classes have no clear-cut distinctions. The languages are analytical: E.g. Chinese gunzhen ‘worker’ (gun ‘work’ + zhen ‘man’). The other examples of root languages are Bantu, Vietnamese, and most languages of South-East Asia.

Agglutinative languages, in which words are built up by stringing forms together, often into quite lengthy sequences. Indian languages of Indo-European family, Japanese, and Korean. Agglutinative languages are subdivided into prefixational (e.g. Semitic languages), and postfixational (e.g. Turkish languages). Agglutinative languages can be analytic (e.g. Polynesian languages), synthetic (e.g. Bantu), and polysynthetic (e.g. Chukot).

Inflectional languages, where words typically contain more than one morpheme, but there is no one-to-one correspondence between these morphemes and the linear structure of the word. The differences between inflectional and agglutinative languages are as follows:

One morpheme, particularly the inflection, typically manifests several grammatical meanings at a time, e.g. Ukr. студент-у (singular, masculine gender, dative case), чит-ав (past tense, 3^rd person, singular, masculine gender).

Unlike suffixes in agglutinative languages, inflections may have morphological variants, e.g. Russian, singular, GEN: стола, схару, жены, кости.

Wile suffixes in agglutinative languages are attached to the root or stem mechanically, inflections may converge with the root or stem and cause their phonetic changes, e.g. Ukr. пис-ав, пиш-е.

Inflectional languages are mostly synthetic. Among inflectional languages, are Arabic and most Indo-European languages (Ukrainian, Russian, German, Latin, Greek, etc.).

13.Language and the Brain/Mind. Linguistic studies of the brain/mind: objectives. Neurolinguistics vs. psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics. Neurolinguistics. Language areas. Aphasia and its types

Language is intended for evoking concepts (meanings) which exist in our mind. The mind, as an information system, is the “product” of our brain. Hence, there are two approaches to the study of language: (1) in its relation to the BRAIN, and (2) in its relation to the MIND.

Neurolinguistics

The problem “language and the brain” is considered by neurolinguistics that studies the basis in the human nervous system for language development and use. It specifically aims to reconstruct a model of the brain’s control over the processes of speaking, reading, writing and signing. To study the brain’s activity related to the operations with language, neurolinguistics employs various technical appliances (positron emission tomography, magnetic resonance, etc.) which help to expose activation of the respective brain zones. The most developed branches of neurolinguistics are the study of speech disorders and the study of bilingualism.

Neurolinguistics started in the 19^th century with the discovery of the areas in the brain which seem to be most closely implicated in the operations with language – speaking, listening, reading, and writing. These areas, located in the left hemisphere, have been termed language areas, or language centers. They are known as the Broca’s /`brouk∂z/ area and Wernicke’s /`ve:nik∂z/ area, according to the names of two people who first described them – the French surgeon Paul Broca (1824-1880), and the German neurologist Karl Wernicke (1848-1905). Damage of language areas causes aphasias /∂ `fei∫∂/, or speech disorders. The latter are studied by aphasiology.

The Broca’s area is located in front of, and slightly above, the left ear. Damage of this area influences speech production, while comprehension of speech may be unimpaired. Broca’s aphasia is also called expressive aphasia, because it is characterized by effortful speech. The speech appears to be without grammar (agrammatism), and a person has problems with finding proper words (anomia).

Another language center, the Wernicke’s area, is under and surrounding the left ear. The damage of this area causes Wernicke’s aphasia characterized by difficulty in comprehending speech, and by the production of speech which is fluent but empty of meaning (fluent aphasia).

The character of speech disorders makes it possible to presume that the Broka’s area is mostly “responsible” for combining words together (syntagmatics), while the Wernicke’s area has something to do with the organization of the vocabulary (paradigmatics). However, most cases of aphasia are not clear-cut.

Psycholinguistics vs. Cognitive Linguistics

The problem “language and the mind” is studied by psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics. They both center on acquiring, processing (comprehending), storing and retrieving information via the use of language. Sharing their objective – to study the relation between language and the mind – psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics are different with regard to their priorities and methods.

Psycholinguistics attempts to find the linguistic evidence for supporting the psychological theories as to how the mind works when people produce and comprehend speech, i.e. the final objective

is the mind (LANGUAGE  MIND). In this respect, psycholinguistics is close to psychology. Besides, they both apply similar research methods grounded on observations and experiments. Psycholinguistics obtains its data from observing the actual speech behavior of adults and children.

Cognitive Linguistics aims to find the psychological (cognitive) evidence for explaining the phenomena of language and speech, so its final objective is the language and its construals influenced by the mind’s workings (MIND  LANGUAGE).