Casos Gramaticales y Análisis del Discurso

La gramática de casos es el módulo gramatical que se encarga de estudiar la distribución y el movimiento de los sintagmas nominales. Como teoría de análisis gramatical fue desarrollada a partir 1968 por el lingüista americano Charles J. Fillmore en el contexto de la Gramática transformacional.

Según esta teoría, una predicación está constituida por un verbo que es combinado con uno o varios papeles temáticos, tales como el Agente, el Tema o el Instrumental. Estos papeles temáticos toman la forma de sintagmas nominales, y la distribución de estos viene dada por el caso gramatical, que es una propiedad asignada a los SN de manera obligatoria, pues en caso de carecer de ella, la frase resultante no sería gramatical. La labor del caso es pues la de asignar una función gramatical específica a cada sintagma nominal.

Caso estructural y caso inherente

En términos de Principios y parámetros el caso gramatical es un principio de la Gramática universal que puede realizarse mediante diferentes parámetros en las distintas lenguas: mediante un sistema morfológico-sintáctico o de forma inherente. Todo sintagma nominal debe estar dotado de caso gramatical; a esta condición se la denomina filtro de caso.

Caso estructural

Las lenguas flexivas como el latín o el alemán designan el caso gramatical mediante un sistema declinatorio basado en desinencias morfológicas:

Der Mann sieht den Hund.

el hombre ve al perro

'el hombre ve al perro'

Der Hund sieht den Mann.

El perro ve al hombre.

Caesar Belgas vincit

César a los belgas vence

Caso inherente

El caso inherente, por su parte, es dependiente de la asignación de papeles temáticos. Generalizando se considera que los casos genitivo, dativo y partitivo son ejemplos de caso inherente. Se considera que el caso es una propiedad idiosincrática del papel temático cuya función cumple el SN en la frase.

John's belief of the rumor (genitivo)

De John creencia del rumor

La creencia de John en el rumor.

Análisis del discurso

Básicamente, el análisis del discurso es una trans-disciplina de las ciencias humanas y sociales que consiste en estudiar sistemáticamente el discurso escrito y hablado como una forma del uso de la lengua, como evento de comunicación y como interacción, en sus contextos cognitivos, sociales, políticos, históricos y culturales.

En cuanto a su historia y sus primeros representantes, el primer lingüista moderno que comenzó el estudio de la relación de las condenas y acuñó el nombre de "analisis del discurso", que después se denota una rama de la lingüística aplicada, fue Zellig Harris. Su método consistía en utilizar un criterio de la distribución complementaria al igual que realiza el campo de la fonología, retoma a procedimientos de la lingüística descriptiva enfocándose también en las conexiones entre la situación social y el uso lingüístico. El Análisis del Discurso (AD) como disciplina independiente surgió en los años 1960 y 1970 en varias disciplinas y en varios países al mismo tiempo: la antropología, la lingüística, la filosofía, la poética, la sociología, la psicología cognitiva y social, la historia y las ciencias de la comunicación. El desarrollo del AD fue paralelo y relacionado con la emergencia de otras trans-disciplinas, como la semiótica o semiología, la pragmática, la sociolingüística, la psicolingüística, la socio-epistemología y la etnografía de la comunicación. En los últimos años el AD se ha hecho muy importante como aproximación cualitativa en las ciencias humanas y sociales.

Van Dijk (1992) sugiere que en todos los niveles del discurso podemos encontrar "huellas del contexto". Estas huellas o indicios permiten entrever características sociales de los participantes como por ejemplo sexo, clase, etnicidad, edad, origen, posición y otras formas de pertenencia grupal. Además, sostiene que los contextos sociales son cambiantes y como usuarios de una lengua seguimos pasivamente a los dictados de grupo, sociedad o cultura.

Según el enfoque sobre el discurso (como texto, estructura verbal, proceso mental, acción, interacción o conversación) hay muchas líneas en el AD, como la gramática del texto, el análisis de la conversación, la psicología del procesamiento del texto, la psicologí  discursiva (una tendencia de origen británico en la psicología social), la estilística, la retórica, la ideología, el análisis de la argumentación, el análisis de la narración, la teoría de géneros, y mucho más. El análisis crítico del discurso es un enfoque especial que toma posición política y analiza el papel del discurso en la reproducción de la dominación (como abuso de poder), así como en la resistencia contra la dominación.

Comúnmente usamos el texto como enfoque para un análisis de discurso, porque el texto es una parte real del lenguaje. Partiendo de un texto podemos analizar las estructuras verbales, análisis de conversación, análisis de argumentación, porque partiendo de un texto es más preciso detallar un análisis y tener una descripción detallada de cada estructura.

En cuanto a los métodos del Análisis del Discurso son en general cualitativos: descripción detallada de las estructuras y estrategias de los discursos escritos o hablados, en varios niveles: sonidos y estructuras visuales y multimedia, la sintaxis (estructuras formales de las oraciones), la semántica (las estructuras del sentido y de la referencia), la pragmática (los actos de habla, la cortesía, etc.), la interacción y la conversación, los procesos y representaciones mentales de la producción y de la comprensión del discurso, y las relaciones de todas esas estructuras con los contextos sociales, políticas, históricas y culturales.

En ese sentido el AD se distingue del análisis de contenido que este es un método más bien cuantitativo de las ciencias sociales que se aplica a grandes cantidades de textos, por ejemplo con una codificación de propiedades observables de los textos.

Ahora vayamos con los tipos o estilos de estudios del discurso; dentro y entre las disciplinas hay muchos tipos o estilos de hacer análisis del discurso:

Analítico lingüístico

Análisis de la conversación

Psicología cognitiva

Inteligencia artificial-informática

En mi opinión personal, considero que el análisis del discurso es de mucha utilidad para nosotros ya que es un método de lectura en el cual los textos se conectan, se unen, ya sea de algún artículo periodístico, algún artículo de índole cultural, etc., con las cuestiones sociales. Es un método que cobra mucha importancia en distintos ámbitos de las ciencias sociales; en nuestra carrera considero que sí es de suma importancia ya que así podemos analizar el significado contextual de los mensajes, relacionándolo con un conjunto de estrategias para llegar a una buena interpretación que resulte de gran valor. También nos ayuda como que a complementar el procesamiento de la información del texto que se esté tratando y de esta manera llegar a un buen entendimiento.

Teoria Linguistica

View more presentations from Estefania Cavazos.

Conceptos

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (oftenM.A.K. Halliday) (born 1925) is a British linguist who developed an internationally influential grammar model, the systemic functional grammar (which also goes by the name of systemic functional linguistics. Halliday rejects explicitly the claims about language associated with the generative tradition. Language, he argues, "cannot be equated with 'the set of all grammatical sentences', whether that set is conceived of as finite or infinite"

Halliday's first major work on the subject of grammar was "Categories of the theory of grammar"

he argued, are "of the highest order of abstraction", but he defended them as those necessary to "make possible a coherent account of what grammar is and of its place in language" In articulating the category unit, Halliday proposed the notion of a rank scale. The units of grammar formed a "hierarchy", a scale from "largest" to "smallest" which he proposed as: "sentence", "clause", "group/phrase", "word" and "morpheme".Halliday defined structure as "likeness between events in successivity" and as "an arrangement of elements ordered in places'. Halliday rejects a view of structure as "strings of classes, such as nominal group + verbalgroup + nominal group" among which there is just a kind of mechanical solidarity" describing it instead as "configurations of functions, where the solidarity is organic"

Halliday (1975) identifies seven functions that language has for children in their early years. Children are motivated to acquire language because it serves certain purposes or functions for them. The first four functions help the child to satisfy physical, emotional and social needs. Halliday calls them instrumental, regulatory, interactional, and personal functions.

• Instrumental: This is when the child uses language to express their needs (e.g.'Want juice')
• Regulatory: This is where language is used to tell others what to do (e.g. 'Go away')
• Interactional: Here language is used to make contact with others and form relationships (e.g. 'Love you, mummy')
• Personal: This is the use of language to express feelings, opinions, and individual identity (e.g. 'Me good girl')

Sociolinguistica

La sociolingüística es la disciplina que estudia los distintos aspectos de la sociedad que influyen en el uso de la lengua, como las normas culturales y el contexto en que se desenvuelven los hablantes; la sociolingüística se ocupa de la lengua como sistema de signos en un contexto social. Se distingue de la sociología del lenguaje en que esta examina el modo en que la lengua influye en la sociedad.

 

Estilistica

Estudio del estilo o de la expresión lingüística en general: la estilística analiza los efectos bellos y expresivos del lenguaje logrados por el empleo artístico de sus recursos.

Analiza todos los elementos de una obra o del lenguaje hablado, el efecto que el escritor o hablante desea comunicar al lector o receptor del discurso hablado y los términos, giros o estructuras complejas que hacen más o menos eficaces esos efectos. Intenta establecer principios capaces de explicar los motivos que llevan a un individuo o a un grupo social a seleccionar expresiones particulares en su uso del lenguaje, la socialización de esos usos y la producción y recepción de significados. Comprende la crítica literaria y el análisis del discurso crítico.

Un género literario puede observarse como un grupo de características que marcan el estilo y lo diferencian. Por ejemplo, prosa y poesía. Otros aspectos considerados por la estilística son el diálogo, la descripción de escenas, el uso de voz pasiva o voz activa, la distribución y extensión de las oraciones, la utilización de registros dialectales, las figuras de dicción y las figuras de pensamiento, el predominio de una categoría morfológica o clase de palabra, el uso de los símiles o comparaciones, la selección o predominio de unos determinados tropos, metáforas o imágenes

Neurolingüística

La neurolingüística estudia los mecanismos del cerebro humano que facilita el conocimiento y la comprensión del lenguaje, ya sea hablado, escrito o con signos establecidos a partir de su experiencia o de su propia programación.

Busca integrar a la persona en un todo y permite influir en ella, de manera sutil, manteniendo la visión de donde se encuentra la negociación con el otro individuo y hacia donde se pretende llegar.

Debido a su naturaleza interdisciplinar, la lingüística, la neurobiología, y la lingüística computacional, entre otras, participan aportando diversas técnicas experimentales, así como perspectivas teóricas marcadamente distintas.

Históricamente, el término neurolingüística se ha asociado a menudo con el estudio de las afasias, el estudio de las carencias lingüísticas causadas por formas específicas de daño cerebral.

Psicolingüística

La psicolingüística es una rama de la psicología interesada en cómo la especie humana adquiere y utiliza el lenguaje. Para ello estudia los factores psicológicos y neurológicos que capacitan a los humanos para la adquisición y deterioro del mismo, uso, comprensión, producción del lenguaje y sus funciones cognitivas y comunicativas.

Esta disciplina analiza cualquier proceso que tenga que ver con la comunicación humana, mediante el uso del lenguaje (sea este el que sea, oral, escrito, etc.). A grandes rasgos, los procesos psicolingüísticos más estudiados pueden dividirse en dos categorías, unos llamado de codificación (producción del lenguaje), otros llamado de decodificación (o comprensión del lenguaje). Comenzando por los primeros, aquí se analizarían los procesos que hacen posible que seamos capaces de formar oraciones gramaticalmente correctas partiendo del vocabulario y de las estructuras gramaticales. Estos procesos se denominan codificación.

La psicolingüística también estudia los factores que afectan a la decodificación, o con otras palabras, las estructuras psicológicas que nos capacitan para entender expresiones, palabras, oraciones, textos, etc. La comunicación humana puede considerarse una continua percepción-comprensión-producción.

Modalidad del Pensamiento

Hay dos modalidades de funcionamiento cognitivo, dos modalidades de pensamiento, y cada una de ellas brinda modos característicos de ordenar la experiencia, de construir la realidad. Las dos, si bien son complementarias, son irreductibles entre sí. Los intentos de reducir una modalidad a la otra o de ignorar una a expensas de la otra hacen perder inevitablemente la rica diversidad que encierra el pensamiento.

En uno, la verificación se realiza mediante procedimientos que permiten establecer una prueba formal y empírica. En el otro no se establece la verdad sino la verosimilitud. Se ha afirmado que uno es un perfeccionamiento o una abstracción del otro. Pero esto debe ser falso o verdadero tan sólo en la manera menos esclarecedora.

Crossword puzzle game » crossword creator

Avram Noam Chomsky: Bio

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.

Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, to Jewish parents in the affluent East Oak Laneneighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the elder son of noted professor of Hebrew at Gratz College and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member William Chomsky (1896–1977), a native of Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky)—a native of what is present-day Belarus—grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English". Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it.  Although Chomsky's mother was part of the radical activism in the 1930s, he was influenced largely by his uncle who, having never passed 4th grade, owned a newsstand that acted as an "intellectual center [where] professors of this and that argu[ed] all night". Chomsky was influenced also by being a part of a Hebrew-based, Zionist organization, as well as by hanging around anarchist bookstores.

In 1949, he married linguist Carol Schatz. They remained married for 59 years until her death from cancer in December 2008.

POLITICAL VIEWS

Chomsky is one of the best-known figures of the American left although he doesn't agree with the usage of the term. He has described himself as a "fellow traveller" to the anarchist tradition, and refers to himself as a libertarian socialist, a political philosophy he summarizes as challenging all forms of authority and attempting to eliminate them if they are unjustified for which the burden of proof is solely upon those who attempt to exert power. He identifies with the labor-oriented anarcho-syndicalist current of anarchism in particular cases, and is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. He also exhibits some favor for the libertarian socialist vision of participatory economics, himself being a member of the Interim Committee for the International Organization for a Participatory Society

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 He believes that libertarian socialist values exemplify the rational and morally consistent extension of original unreconstructed classical liberal and radical humanist ideas in an industrial context.

Chomsky has further defined himself as having held Zionist beliefs, although he notes that his definition of Zionism would be considered by most as anti-Zionism these days, the result of what he perceives to have been a shift (since the 1940s) in the meaning of Zionism (Chomsky Reader).

Chomsky is considered "one of the most influential left-wing critics of American foreign policy" by the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers.

Contributions of Chomsky

Syntactic Structures was a distillation of his book Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory in which he introduces transformational grammars. The theory takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax which can be (largely) characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a Context-free grammar extended with transformational rules. Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e. they assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain restricted kind). This innate knowledge is often referred to as universal grammar. It is argued that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has previously said.

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P) — developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB) — make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.

More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters", Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.

Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating the acquisition of language in children, though some researchers who work in this area today do not support Chomsky's theories, often advocating emergentist or connectionist theories reducing language to an instance of general processing mechanisms in the brain.

Contributions to psycologhy

Chomsky's work in linguistics has had major implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how language is learned by children and what, exactly, the ability to use language is. Many of the more basic principles of this theory (though not necessarily the stronger claims made by the principles and parameters approach described above) are now generally accepted in some circles.

In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, a book in which Skinner offered a speculative explanation of language in behavioral terms. "Verbal behavior" he defined as learned behavior which has its characteristic consequences being delivered through the learned behavior of others; this makes for a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions. (Chomsky-Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and phrases into intelligible utterances.

In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned", cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism

.

It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "cognitive revolution", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966 Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.

There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the experiential input of the external environment. Subsequent psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).

Chomsky hierarchy

Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory).

Hang the man hangman game » hangman creator

Leonard Bloomfield: American Estructuralism

9.00 Scientific has become such a prestige label that whatever is dismissed as the work of mire philoshopers, taxomomic grammarians, literateurs, descriptivists, etc. Mere is a syncategorematic expression: It lacks both sense and reference. Is not quantifiable and does not function a subject or predicate in falsifiable assertions. This expressions condemns the confusion of technical jargon and empirical trappings with whatever “real science” is. Debates depend on contemporary intutions about admissible evidence, legitimate data, and reasonable goals, or on the mere prestige of a novel approach promising better results.

9.01 Metalism and Behaviorism: At least three things seem to be involved: what its outside (A) speakers, what is inside them (B) and the speech relating the two(C).

9.02 Linguistics is talk about language: The scheme suggests that if A and C are equally, though differently, distinguishable from B as outside, a method designed to study the outside can be different from another best adapted for studying the inside.

9.03 Old and new language about language: We use language to study language. It is here that conflicting assumptions about what can be a legitimate data, what is an appropriate method, what counts as evidence and what are feasible goals, lead to fundamental differences of opinion, even when many of the facts are not in dispute.

9.04 Psychologists talk about language. Bloomfield was convinced that any form of mentalism was inimical to science. The status he wanted for linguistics was that of an autonomous discipline compatible with an ideal of united science.

9.05 Subjective talk about language: Language was clearly out of step with empirical science defined by positivists. Mentalism assumes that there are factors in mental operations exempts from physical laws and the empirical realm.

9.06 Objective talk about language: Mechanism takes it fro granted that there is a causal continuity from A through B to C. Behaviorism assumed the fundamental identity of physically determined C—behavior with any other kind of non-linguistic A—behavior.

9.07 Language as response: Language can be seen as the totality of mutually effective substitute responses. Mentalism differs from Materialism by distinguishing real potentials from their actualization. Mentalism is dualistic: recognizes two kinds (mental and material) of data, experience, perception, etc. Behaviorism is monistic as it only admits a single kind (material).

9.08 Leonard Bloomfield: Bloomfield’s early interests were in Germanic and Indo-European philology. In 1914 “Introduction to Language” he had contrasted philological concern for more conscious cultural attainments with a linguist’s interests in the unconscious communal grouping of ideas.

9.09 Starting to talking about language: Bloomfield made concrete suggestions for starting orderly study of linguistics. 1. Begin with your own language’s articulations. 2. Study phonetics. 3- Study your language’s morphology and syntax. 4- Study the history of the English language. At the same time read some modern psychology.

9.10 Postulates: Thirteen years later, ‘A set Of Postulates for The Science of Language’ updated Bloomfield’s reflections on the ongoing linguistic enterprise.

9.12 The study, used and spread of Language: Bloomfield proposes that the empirical science of language should study a real rather than a fancied object. Language conceived as a normative ideal does not constitute and empirical object; language as a universal phenomenon can only be established inductively; one can observe actual speech, and its actual effect on hearers, without preconceptions, so the behaviorist approach provides a model.

9.13 Speech communities are best observed behavioristically. Density of communication can be empirically observed, quantified, and correlated with geography, social stratification, occupation, success in cooperation, and consequences in describable speech differences.

9.14 The Phoneme: Sound-production can be described empirically. Phonetics is the branch of science that deals with it. But this study demonstrated that actual sounds lack clear-cut phonetic differences, even when refined discrimination is possible in the laboratory. Language therefore must depend upon our habitually and conventionally discriminating some features of sound and ignoring others.

9.15 Presuppositions: So the unproved assumption of linguistics is that ‘in every speech-community some utterances are alike in form and meaning’, and we must ‘act as though’ science had established the situations and responses that make up these meanings.

Phonetic Basis

 This predominantly phonetic account may be viewed as a kind of basis which may be modified in various ways. Modification, of course, presumes some standard from which a departure is made, and the criteria for establishing the base can very, legitimately or inconsientently. For instance, it might be inconsistent to shift, in phonology, from sunjective or objective production to subjective reception or objetive disturbance of the air, or from objective measurement to subjective tandars as Bloomfield does.

The manner in wich the vocal organs pass from inactivity to the formation of a phoneme, or from the formation of the one phoneme to that of the next, or from the formation of a phoneme to inactivity.

Contrast.

Inability to decide on how a language sounds is less important than establishing  its structual contrasts: it is differences that count, since a pair of languages might have the same phonetic inventory, yet be differently structured. Such differences among identities could be found in the distribution and fuctioning of the same phonetic composition.

Meaning.

 Bloomfield returns to meaning with some refinements. One way to appreciate the dimension of the problem is  to try out alternative interpretations of common terms about meaning within our triangle.

Identical relations hold for sense and reference taken as state or process. Metaphor or analogy are involved when they are taken as action. Taken concretely, society cnstitutes the totality of senses and references wich match between individual speakers and hearers.

If meaning is sense-and-reference as a unity, expression is a static relation, process, or action linking an aspect of mediated sbjectively extended or restrictedwithin by. Reference is a static relation, dynamic process or action, whose terms are in and; the term in mental is a sense in behaviorist a disposition to respond; in a thing, property, rlation, satate or event of wich has partial experience.

Distinguish denotation and connotation:

Denotation is rererence and or referent; connotations are subjective or socialized relations of the referent for speaker to other referents and properties. Home and house may have the same denotation, but differ in connotations..

Bloomfield on meaning: Bloomfield says we postulate distinctive vs nondistinctive fatures of situations, but since our study ordinarly concerns only the distinctive feature or distinctive, and speak simply of forms and meanings, ignoring the existence of nondistinctive features. But speakers utter forms when there is no obvious, contemporary empirical stimulus.

The fundamental assmption of linguistics.

 To Bloomfield, the difference seemed largely verbal: The mentalist in practice defines meanings exactly as does the mechanist in terms of actual situations...and wherever this seems to add anything of the hearer´s response. Bloomfield decides that the fundamental assumption of linguistics´is:

In certain communities (speech-communities) some speech-utterances are alike as to form and meaning.

Bloomfield´s conclusion.

The apparent clarity of speech-forms is bought at the cost of rationality there are no actual synonyms; homonymy is undecidable; the linguist cannot define meanings extralinguistically but, accepting them from science or common knoeledge can do so intralinguistically with precision this is the notion of substitutes wich by definition share class-meaning of the substitute-type and meaning of the mode of substitute wich give rise to the specially accurate form of speech wich we call mathematics.

Sub-linguistic communication uses linguistic forms in which the ordinary meaning of the forms play o part. Hypostasis is closely related to quitation, the repetition of a speech, and like onomatopocia, consists in deviations from the ordinary tie-up of phonetic form with dictionary meaning, wich still shows considerable complexity but there i no grater bore than the enumeration and classification of thes metaphors. Dictionaries are meant to restrain connotations, science dispenses with them.

Grammatical forms

Descriptive Structuralism is frequently referref to as Binarist. This orientation is its strengh and weakness. Its weakness is identical with that of plato´s techique of the Division: in the conceptual world, we rarely know enough about any pair to establish exclusive values beyond the most generic, in the empirical world, fatual relations are just as complex

Stable States.

Synchorinc linguistic description proceeds on the counter-factual assumptions of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, signaled through linguistic forms containing a discrete number of combinable phonemic contrast. Experience shows the fundamental assuption of linguistics must be modified: in a speech-community some utterances are alike or partly alike i sound and meaning.

Basic and Modified Meaning

The meaning of morpheme is a sememe, constant, definite, discrete from all other semmemes; the linguistic can only analyze the signals, not the signalled, so that is why linguistics must start from the phonetics, not the semantics of language. The total stock of morphemes is a language´s lexicon. But it is not the total stock of its signals.

So  grammatical forms can be grouped into three grat classes: a form uttered alone appears in some sentene type; forms uterred together as constituents of a complex form make up a cosntruction by the grammatical features by wich they are combined, and forms spoken as substitutes for a whole class are substitutions.

Sentence types.

Sentences relate throught order, position and within a sentence are distinguised by modulation, paratactic arrangement, and features of selection.

Languages show full and minor sentence type distinguished by taxemes of selection. Favorite forms are uually full; commonly distingued are actor-action and commands. Languages vary as to favorite sentence-types. Bipartite favorites are commonly called predications, with an object-like-subject and predicate.

Words

Since the word is free form, freedom of ocurrence largely determines our actitude toward parts of a language.

Boderline cases include cmpound words and uniterruptible phrase-words. Word-unity is aprocumately secured i languages in variuos ways, including stress, freedom from insertation, ability to be uttered alone, vowel harmony within th word but not acrooss words, permisible brevity or lengh, and restictions on mdulations or phonetic modifications for compounds.

Syntax

Grammar deals with construction under morphology and syntaz, and syntax takes as its constructions those in wich name od the immediate constituets is a bound form. The freeforms of a lenguage appear in larger free forms, arra ged by taxemes of modulatio, phonetic modification, seletion and order. Any meaningful recurrent set of such taxmes is a syntactic construction.

Forms resultant from Free Forms.

Free forms combining can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of wich the forms-class of one member may be determinative of the phrase{s grammatical behavior: in such a case, the constuction is called endocentic, otherwise, it is exocentric when the phare or construction does ot follow the grammatical behavior of either constituent. This can distinguish coordinate and subordinate constructions.

Order

Is most important in languages, grammatically and or stylistically.

Parts of Speech.

IE is peciar in having many parts of speech. Most languages show a smaller number, and in such languages, syntactic formclasses tend to appear in phrases rather than words.

Disagreement or confusion about elemetal or can pass unnoticed in seeming agreements at higher levels, or lead to reasonable suspicion that some quite literally do not know what they are talking about.

Binarism revisited.

Ambiguos or inadequate elements in cobination compound ambiguity or inadequancy. Clarity about the ambiguity or limitation of elements allows us to evaluate their manipulation.

9.29 Order is most important in languages, grammatically and/or stylistically. French has a complicated and rigid system of ordering certain substitute (conjunct) accompaniments of its verbs.

9.30 Parts of Speech.  IE is peculiar in having many parts of speech. Most languages show a smaller number, and in such languages, syntactic form classes tend to appear in phrases rather than words: Chinese is the classic example (198-199). In Tagalog, the ´parts of speech´ are, as in Chinese, full word and particle.

9.31 Binarism revisited.  Ambiguous or inadequate elements in combination compound ambiguity or inadequacy. Clarity about the ambiguity or limitation of elements allows us to evaluate their manipulation. The calculation of ± combinations for pairs showed what an arbitrary system is not, as we have been using that term: ´a finite number of elements in a finite number of combinations´, since all combinations are displayed. Systematicity comes from constraints on random combination. Collections are random in the sense that they display, as a state, process or action, any combination as equally likely.

9.32 Structure, Pattern, Design. The columns can be viewed as patterns or forms: Column A shows what columns I-IV have in common. Column I-IV define themselves and each other by their selection of a conventional restriction upon column A; they can be viewed as four different games, four different form, four distinct ways of organizing the same material.

 9.33 Apriori vs A posteori. Two expressions often used to disparage others´work and invite approbation of one´s own are a priori (usually bad) and a posteriori (usually good). With reference to this schema, they can be illustrated: By simply stipulating or procedure beforehand the form of these games, we operate a priori; our procedure may be said to have resulted, not from experience, but from (a) some vantage prior to (priori) or independent of, experience. We could say we deduced some of the patterns latent in, intelligible about, selected from, column A, as from something given.

9.34 Rationalist and Empiricist. Bloomfield insisted that the only useful generalization about language was an inductive generalization (20). Language studies are distinguished from each other as employing predominantly inductive or deductive approaches. The a priori or deductive approach has been said to impose structure upon data; the a posteriori or inductive approach is claimed to discover structure in data.

Rationalists accuse empiricists of assuming that there are such things as bare facts. They see legitimate data as facts suspected of realizing rationally determinate patterns like colummn A.

Rationalists see statistical summaries of blind findings as representing disjointed collections, instead of the real unit-elephant one can see. Real unit elephants are beyond the empirical disciveries of a blind investigator, individually, or in a group: space and time conspire to keep the constituents of the unity as discrete objects of distinct empirical observations. What counts as data and evidence for their goal dictates a method that makes it impossible in principle to discover real unit-elephants. To ´take someone´s word for it´is to accept subjective experience instead of empirical evidence.

9.35 Binarism and constituency. The + - combinations in any of the columns above can be described exactly to anyone´s satisfactio, empirically or rationally. For some, structural description was synonymous with linguistic science. It guaranteed, perhaps constituted, the autonomy of linguistics as a science. It was to involve no disputed psychological or other theories. It might support or undermine some theory, but its findings were empirical, objective, public, falsifiable, independent, scientific.

9.36 Valid. What is of linguistic interest about columns I-IV is the fact that these are the formulate for symbolic logical representation of some familiar structures in language.

Recognizing that ambiguity arises from assigning interpretations to these elements, rather than from their relationships, we can evaluate their manipulation.

9.37 Correct. Truth is not popularly distinguished from validity, but validity can be viewed as subsuming true and correct. E.g. statements are true, calculations correct: the correct mathematical mean for families might be 3 1/2 persons, but cannot be true of a real family. Validity is often said to be a formal consideration, truth a material matter, and pre-symbolic work distinguished material from formal logic on that basis. Ambiguity results when formal and material aspects are confused.

9.38 Suggestive Symbols. Formulations using parentheses and various kind of brackets are not as easy a Platonic either-or tree. Trees show everything noted at a single glance; parentheses and brackets require left-to-right processing with careful, repeated checks to be sure of what the scope of inclusion is. Bloomfield´s insight into the isomorphism of linguistic form, form-classes, substitutes and mathematical clarity (147) is relevant here. Unity or equality can be expressed in many complex ways: mathematical operations can cancel each other, and the most complicated results, divided etc. by themeselves, return us to unity.

The use of symbolic notation is no guarantee of validity, truth, not even of relevance, only of ready internal clarity and simplicity in calculating: this is a powerful tool.

9.39 Notation and Insight. Notation may accidentally supply insight from the perspective it forces upon us. One convention uses the symbol v- for disjunction. There is a difference between expressing disjunction as He is my father or mother and He is either my father or my mother.

9.40 Form-classes and lexicon. Some elements of language have meaning, some merely distinguish meanings; meanings are of various types, and the lexicon and grammar deal with two distinct ones.

Bloomfield ridiculed the ´person, place or thing´definition of Noun because for over a century science had been telling us that fire is a process or action, not a thing. Of course. But knowing better need not lead to a change of linguistic habits, as Bloomfield´s own use of nominal forms like action and process in his uncomprehending rejection shows.

The Modistae´s effor was to distinguish (a) from (b) from (c), yet relate the differences of concrete things from signals from concrete concepts.

9.41 Written Records. The other chapters of Bloomfield´s book are only tinged with his originality as he surveyed the findings of predecessors and contemporary linguists. There is not an idle word in it. But the facts are two many to recount.

9.42 Dialect Geography. Neatly fits his behavioral concept of Speech-Communities. Both dialect and genetic relationhip become clearer on a stimulus-response view of geographic and social contiguity. Neither he nor those whose work he reports on Phonetic Change offer explanations. The already obvious facts are covered by descriptive labels for observed changes (e.g. environmental phonetic assimilation, palatalization, compensatory lengthening and simplification). It may be a quasi-explanation to redescribe attested changes as results of a preference for one over another non-distinctive option which later becomes distinctive, possibly on the grounds of communicative efficiency or internal pattern pressure.

There is such a wealth of observational fact, that geat service is done by cataloguin, distinguish and labelling the various phenomena involved.

9.43 Borrowing. Cultural Borrowing, Intimate Borrowing and Dialect Borrowing follow this same approach, providing and objective way of describing linguistic and cultural contact, influence and evaluation.

One of the hopes of earlier work was for a linguistic typology which would justify assumptions about cultural inferiority or superiority. This could result from and historical demonstration that IE languages started from great, and had arrived at just about perfect, while less fortunate cultures could be registered somewhere on lower rungs of the ladder.

9.44 Bloomfield´s Conclusions. He concludes by saying that Linguistic findings are modest so far. But they share scientific method, therefore scientific promise. Language is the key for the ´understanding and control of human events´. The concept of understanding can be illuminated by behavioral description, but discussion of control by Behaviorists is as frightening to those convinced of the fragility of conditions permitting self-determination as it is paradoxical within the logic of Behaviorism.

9.45 Bloomfield´s influence. The objectivity Bloomfield advocated in his general writings and exemplified in particular descriptions has been of enormous influence. It was neither his discovery nor unique contribution, but the totality of his work inculcated such a healthy respect for fact over fancy among scholars, that other issues are submerged as unimportant. His taxonomy of lingustic facts with appropiate labels and hicrarchic relations has long been a solid frame into which novel language data can be reliably translated.

The predominantly descriptive goal Bloomfield set for Linguistics has been labelled mere taxonomy.

The goal is said to be explanation rather than more description. But without objective description, the need for, or possibility of, explanation does not exist.

American Structuralism

American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In insisting upon the necessity of treating each language as a more or less coherent and integrated system, both European and American linguists of this period tended to emphasize, if not to exaggerate, the structural uniqueness of individual languages. There was especially good reason to take this point of view given the conditions in which American linguistics developed from the end of the 19th century.

After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir (died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at home in anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of which disciplines has endured to the present day in many American universities. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism."

When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features of "post-Bloomfieldian" American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics.

Characteritics of american structuralism

Characteristics of American structuralist; almost complete negligence of semantics attempt to formulate a set of discovery procedures to sum up.

 Structuralism is based on the assumption that grammatical categories should be defined not in terms of meaning but in terms of distribution, and that the structure of each language should be described without reference to the alleged universality of such categories as tense, mood and parts of speech.

 Firstly, structural grammar describes everything that is found in a language instead of laying down rules; Secondly, structural grammar is empirical, aiming at objectivity in the sense that all definitions and statements should be verifiable or refutable.

The task of language study “Scholarship” has approached the study of language without actually entering upon it.  ”Not writing; not literature; not ‘good’ speech

 We can save ourselves this detour by turning at once to the observation of normal speech. We begin by observing an act of speech-utterance under very simple circumstances.”

Why not “writing”? Writing comes later than spoken language. Literacy was confined to a very few people. Written form doesn’t affect spoken form.

Why not “literature”? The limited concerns: certain persons; the content; the unusual features. Philologist: cultural and background significance. Linguist: the language of all persons alike.

 Why not ‘good speech’? “he observes all speech-forms alike.”

The history of American linguistics experienced in the first half of century XX, a radical theories of Leonard Bloomfield, who were ONE of the foundations of structuralism .Bloomfield was born on April 1, 1887 in Chicago. He began his university studying German philology at Harvard from 1909 to 1927 and had a teaching at several universities. Interested in the beginning of Indo-European languages, he soon extended his studies to other fields and, as of the main principles of behavioral psychology, formulated his theories in "An Introduction to the Study of Language" (1914, Introduction to the study of language). Then turned his attention to Amerindian languages, spoken by the indigenous peoples of America, which, being very different from Indo-European, we provided a new perspective on certain aspects of language. Bloomfield's masterpiece appeared in 1933 under the title of Language. After analyzing the speech as a phenomenon of response to certain stimuli, the linguist divided the book into four distinct parts: (1) phonics, (2) grammatical issues, (3) lexical problems, and (4) miscellaneous other topics, including which included diachronic linguistics is, studied in its evolution over time, and loans from language to language. He further stated that the study of language had to be empirical, accurate and objective, and considered that the aim of linguistics was the scientific elucidation of the tongue. This was necessary to determine its semantic structure, grammatical and phonological at a given time-synchronous-study through a descriptive process. This analysis rejected any interpretation of the meaning extra-linguistic perspective. In parallel, Bloomfield became interested in educational issues, and developed various systems for teaching reading and foreign languages. In 1940 he was appointed professor of linguistics at Yale and from that position he held until his death, created a school based on his theories, to be known as "distributionalist." Leonard Bloomfield died in New Haven Connecticut, USA on April 18 1949.

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