The properties of human language

This lecture presents linguistics as scientific study of world languages, defines language, and explains its use in communication and culture, while showing it as a creative yet bounded, changing system.

Explore what linguistics studies by examining language boundaries, idiolects, and dialects, and how mutual intelligibility and labels shape our understanding of language families.

Explore how linguists define grammar as the boundaries of language, contrast descriptive with prescriptive rules, and examine grammatical vs communicative competence and key branches like phonetics, syntax, and sociolinguistics.

Explore the distinction between sounds and letters and learn to transcribe language sounds using the international phonetic alphabet, focusing on articulatory phonetics and key articulators.

Describe English consonants by place and manner of articulation and voicing, and analyze vowels by height, backness, rounding, and tense lax contrasts, including diphthongs.

Describe aspiration in English sounds at syllable starts and syllabic consonants. Group stops, fricatives, nasals, approximants, and sibilants to explain phonology boundaries.

Learn to describe sounds across languages beyond English using the IPA, including places of articulation, globalized consonants (ejectives, plosives, clicks), rare uvular, pharyngeal, retroflex consonants, and pitch, length, and stress.

Explain how phones coarticulate and undergo assimilation or dissimilation, insert or delete sounds, nasalize vowels, and reveal voicing changes such as flapping and glottal stops in English.

Explore the relationship between phonetics and phonology and examine three core units—features, segments, and syllables—along with key terms like minimal pair, phoneme, allophone, complementary distribution, and natural classes.

Explore how phonology organizes the set of phones in a language, contrasts voice and voiceless sounds, and defines where sounds can occur, shaping the grammar you already know.

Explore how phonology organizes sounds into features, phones, syllables, and phonemes; learn about contrastive sounds, minimal pairs, and allophones.

Explain complementary distribution and how allophones of a phoneme occupy distinct environments. Show English p and t variants—aspirated, unaspirated, flap, glottal stop—illustrating minimal pairs and allophones.

This lecture explains writing phonological rules to map phonemes to allophones using environments, word boundaries, and natural classes, with features like plus or minus voice for English consonants and vowels.

Explore morphology as the study of word parts and its relation to linguistics, phonetics, and phonology, and define terms such as morphine, alamar, suffix, prefix, Stamm, root, inflection, and derivation.

Explore morphology as the study of meaning groups and word formation. Identify free and bound morphemes and the lexicon, the mental dictionary of meanings.

Explore morphology part two: distinguish independent morphemes as words from bound affixes, identify prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes, and analyze roots and stems with examples.

Examine affixes—prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes, and infixes—and how derivation, inflection, and compounding create word meaning and grammatical categories in English and other languages, including endo centric and eccentric compounds.

Explore how words are formed in English through internal change, inflection, affixation, compounding, reduplication, clipping, blends, back formation, conversion, acronyms, and onomatopoeia.

Explore the definition of syntax in linguistics, key terms like grammatical categories, constituent, phrase, and sentence, and how mental knowledge relates to actual usage.

Explore grammatical categories in English, including eight parts of speech—noun, verb, adjective, determiner, adverb, preposition, coordinator or conjunction, and subordinate—along with open versus closed classes and distribution.

Explore how syntax organizes words into structured patterns via generative grammar and universal grammar, using merge, move, and x-bar theory to derive sentences across languages.

Explore the X-bar syntax template, learn how every sentence and phrase follows a constituent structure, identify heads, specifiers, complements, and traditional subject-predicate roles through examples.

Explore semantics as a subfield of linguistics with interdisciplinary links to logic, math, and philosophy, and learn core ideas about word meaning, paraphrase, entailment, denotation, connotation, and metaphor.

Explore how semantics studies meaning, distinguishing form from content, and how words relate in the mental lexicon through polysemy, synonyms, antonyms, and lexical ambiguity.

Examine how sentence meaning builds from word meanings through paraphrase, entailment, and contradiction, and distinguish connotation, denotation, extension, and the concept of intention.

Explore how meaning is organized in semantics through fuzzy concepts, graded concepts, metaphor, and idiolect, with examples like tall, prototypical birds, and spatial metaphors.

Explore pragmatics and contextual meaning in language by examining concepts like opposition, face, face work, common ground, and implicature, through Grice's influential theory.

Explore pragmatics as the study of meaning in context, covering utterances, propositions, common ground, cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions, and conversational and conventional implicatures.

Gricean pragmatics treats language use as designed for optimal communication. It centers the co-operative principle and four maxims—quality, quantity, relation, and manner—and examines presupposition tests.

Explore speech acts as actions that change the world through form, authorization, and audience awareness within social space. Cover types like requests, commands, naming, warnings, and threats, plus face work.

Explore historical linguistics by examining how languages change, the comparative method, and what it means for language families, with a focus on the history of English.

Explore how languages group by genetic inheritance, typological traits, and contact. See how language changes occur regularly across phonetics, phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics, with emphasis on English history.

Explore common historical sound changes—assimilation, dissimilation, nasalization, insertion, deletion, and weakening—and learn the comparative method to reconstruct ancestral phonology from cognates.

Using the comparative method, this lecture explains how Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, and Athabaskan languages relate and descend from ancestors. It notes language isolates and that proto world is not provable.

Explore language typology and the place of universals in linguistics by examining core typologies across the world's languages, focusing on morphology, alignment, and word order.

Explore typology as the study of language types and universal grammar, showing how languages are classified by features like vowels, consonants, morphology, alignment, and word order.

Explain how morphemes attach to words and compare isolating languages, synthetic languages, fusional languages, and polysynthetic patterns using the index of synthesis and the index of fusion.

Explore typological alignment patterns in languages, including nominative-accusative, ergative absolutive, active-inactive, and direct inverse, by examining s, a, and o, case marking, and transitivity.

Explore word order as a key constituent order parameter, covering all six possible orders from svo to osv. Use Hebrew, Japanese, and English to show how fronting shifts emphasis.