Transcript for:
Linguistics Overview

this video will cover the entire first year Linguistics course so we're going to talk about properties of language go through phonetics phology syntax semantics morphology and pragmatics if you want any further follow-up videos feel free to check out the Tre tutor YouTube channel I have a full course on syntax as well as some videos on semantics and phenology so Linguistics is the study of how language works it is not about speaking languages it is about understanding languages so there's several components that we'll go through in this course the first one being phonetics which is all about the speech sounds you make then phology which is how speech sounds group up into syllables as well as change depending on when they're placed in a sentence or word morphology looking at the parts of words syntax looking at how words form sentences and then semantics and pragmatics talking about meaning where semantics is quite literal and pragmatics is a little bit more non-literal and how it's used in conversation so there are several properties of language so all languages have these properties the first one is creativity and that is that we can produce new words or sentences that we've never uttered before or heard before and we can understand them so for example this sentence the dog that snorted my girlfriend's new blouse bought four bottles of champagne you've probably never heard that sentence before but you understand what it means you understand that you have a subject that is doing something so it's a dog dog that snorted the girlfriend's new blouse you know that new blouse is part of what the girlfriend owns and you know that something can buy four bottles of champagne so all of these parts individually you understand and because you understand those parts you can put them into a sentence and understand the full meaning of a sentence every language also has generality which means that we have grammars for sounds words and sentences normally when you think of grammar you think of sentence structure but actually it can be with sound structure too so for example with the word plant we can break it up into its components we have the onset which are the consonants that occur at the beginning of a syllable we have the nucleus which is the vowel sound that the syllable is built around and then we have what's called a Koda which are our remaining consonants so when you ask yourself well how do you make a rhyme with the word plant well you need to consider the nucleus and the Koda together so to rhyme with plant you need something that ends with ant so like rant or something like that and then when you think about word structure or sentence structure you might think of a nonsense sentence like colorless green ideas sleep furiously we know that sleep is a verb furiously is an adverb that's going to form what's called a predicate and then you have a subject in the sentence which would be colorless green ideas ideas meaning the main noun and then colorless and green are modifying that noun to create a bigger subject so we'll understand how these different structures are come to be when we get to those sections in phology and in syntax now languages also exhibit parity and that means that all grammars are considered equal there is no language that is more or less complex overall so even though individual components of language like phology might be more complex in some languages that may make up for the fact that those other languages have a more complex syntax or morphology or uh more cognitive load required for pragmatics so we say all grammars are equal and other words we don't want to think of a single language as being like the simplest language on Earth because it's probably far from that next we have some Universal rules for languages so this is the concept of universality and these are features that all languages share so for example every spoken language on Earth has at least three vowels that's just a fact of languages linguists have yet defined a language that just has two or less vowels in it and also all languages have nouns and verbs that's another fact so uh nouns and verbs may not be the exact terms that they use they may use the term substantive for things that uh are s enally objects or things in the real world and then just predicates for the action so you might see that term instead substantives and predicates but there are some languages that have been considered to not have a distinction between nouns and verbs but upon careful analysis we find that actually they do have those two separate categories and there are hints at that so in a follow-up course that may be gone into into more depth now one of the last properties is mutability and that is that languages change over time so on the left here is English but this isn't Modern English this is much older English uh I don't know if this is Old English or Middle English but regardless it doesn't really matter but because we can see significant language change uh you may speak English and not really understand what this means which is Perfectly Natural that's because language changes over time right now we are in the skibidi Riz era of language at least when I record that Riz has been around for probably a year and a half and skibidi is like 3 to four months old at this point um but you know language changes over time and there's nothing wrong with that if people got skibby RZ from Ohio we just accept that as a natural part of language so if we think about the properties of language what do these statements Express creativity generality parity universality or mutability so number one all languages must have at least three Val vowels and at least five consonants so this is just an extension of a universal fact that we saw before there are always more consonants than vowels in a language and at the very least a language must have three vowels and five consonants second the word cool is now used less often than lit by young adults and this was in 2022 when that fact happened so what is this well this isn't creativity this isn't generality this is not parity but this is an instance of mutability so back in 2022 lit was used more often than cool and now this has changed I think more people are using cool again because cool just has a longer staying power than words like lit so those were the basic properties of language and it's important to know that when we do Linguistics we are descriptivists so we believe in describing the way that language works because we approach language as a science we're not here to put in our own views and tell people how to speak or what to say instead we collect data from speakers of a language who grew up speaking that language so uh L1 speakers we call them and we just simply analyze what people say we are not prescriptivists so we don't prescribe language to people we simply describe it so uh as you see in the comic below I'm sure at some point in your K to 12 years you've said can I go to the bathroom and then your teacher responds and they say yeah you can but may you and then you have to rephrase your question which is just absurd because can and may they're synonymous in its use in that context so we're not prescribing or telling people what to say we're just trying to figure out what people say and then why and theoretically explain it so if we think about some of these statements we can classify them as descriptivist or prescriptivist statements so for example number one you shouldn't say ain't because it's non-standard this is a prescriptivist type of statement so this isn't something that we want to say as linguists we would simply describe the fact that some people do say ain't and that it is a substitute for is not so the key word that gives us away is shouldn't when we prescribe a judgment we use words like should or could two when English speakers pronounce p it has a greater puff of air at the beginning of a stressed word now this is just a fact we're simply just describing something so this is something a descriptivist would say they've taken a look at all the ways that English speakers pronounce the P sound and then they've made a finding from that and that finding is just a statement number three there is no Modern English word clacka goop in use now this is a descriptivist statement as well because we're simply describing language now after this video maybe it is a word that is going to be in use in which case it would still be a descriptivist statement but it just be incorrect at that point so there's no judgment here we're not telling people not to say a certain sound or not to say a certain word we're simply describing the fact that it's not in use right now so let's begin with phonetic which is the smallest parts of speech that we can look at the sound so phonetics in an intal Linguistics course usually covers description classification and transcription of sounds so there's a diagram to the left that shows all the different parts of the mouth you will become familiar with this over time but instead of just learning the biology of the mouth we're going to learn sounds and biology together piece by piece so what you see here in the list are what are called places of Art articulation and these are spots in the mouth where sounds are made now in English we do not use all of these spots but across all languages in the world you will see use of each of these places at least uh at the epig glotus sorry that the glot isn't above so right above the fairings there these are where sounds are made above that point typically all right so there's several different areas of phonetics the first one we're going to focus on in this intro course is articulatory phonetics and this is just how the sounds are made by the vocal organs so sounds in your oral cavity sounds in your nasal cavity the manner that air flows out of your mouth whether your vocal colds are vibrating or not and there are some other areas which are acoustic phonetics and auditory phonetics which would usually be in a follow-up course and acoustic phonetics is going to discover some of the properties of speech through a computer so you're taking a look at the actual properties like the sound waves the volume um if you look at spectrographs of sounds what frequency certain vowels are made at and then in auditory phonetics this is a little bit more on the psycholinguistic side but this is taking a look at how people perceive sounds so for example if we take a sound and let me just draw a little vowel chart here there's a sound oo in the back and there's a sound at the front so he's are pronounced E and O now if I pronounce a sound for you e people will hear them differently so if you're an English speaker you probably heard e as closer to an U than you did an e but in actuality what I did was I made an e sound and I rounded my lips so in terms of phonetics it's actually closer to e than it is to U but if you're an English speaker you probably heard it as o well if you're a French speaker you definitely heard it closer to e and that's just because of the way that our perceptual phonetics are organized in our mind as we learn a first language so for English speakers the fact that this sound is a round sound means that it's going to be interpreted closer to O because the only round sounds that we have in English are at the back while in French it's perfectly fine to have rounded uh front vowels and mid vowels so in days uh for example for eggs uh they have a mid rounded vowel at the front there as well this will make more sense as we learn more phonetics but that's just a little description of what auditory phonetics might study so speech is segmented into individual sounds and those sounds are called phones so a single phone is a singular way of pronouncing something now phones will have modifications to them depending on what extra little things are going on in the mouth but for the most part we'll just use the basic sounds so for example in the word dogs we have four sounds we have d a g and the to make the S to make the word dogs in fact the G and the Z are sometimes produced simultaneously so some people might even consider this to be three sounds D now in a case of thought we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 seven letters for the word thought but if we actually think about the sounds that we're making making a th sound we're making an a sound and we're making a t sound so those seven letters are being transformed into three sounds now what we see on the right here in these square brackets is called the International Phonetic Alphabet the IPA and the idea here is that one symbol equals one sound so if you see this symbol this is always a th sound and this is specifically the th sound in the word Thistle and not the th sound in the wordthe that would be a different symbol that looks like a little Delta so one sound has one symbol and you're going to be hearing differences and sounds that you might not have considered before so this is a chart of all the consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet you can find these charts online just by typing IPA Linguistics or IPA phonetics and there are interactive charts where you can click on the sounds and hear them but I will Circle the ones that we are going to learn for English because these are the ones that we have in English so as I go through you're going to see that there's quite a few sounds that we have in English and then quite a few sounds that we don't so if I look at all of these I've circled maybe 20 or so consonant sounds and there's still about 20 or so that English doesn't have that other languages do now if you're looking at this chart what a gray Square means is that it's impossible to make those sounds just according to the biological articulators and if we have a white square this means that it's possible but it's unaccounted for in any natural language so what this means is that if we look at the chart and we say okay uh forget what these terms mean at the moment but we have a bilabial sound and it's a tap or flap it is possible to make but right now we don't know of any languages that actually use those for speech so we don't have a symbol for it but in the future if we find one that uses it then we would have a symbol and we'd be able to transcribe that sound so the goals of the IPA are pretty straightforward we want to transcribe all of our spe sounds in every single language this means that if you hear something from any speaker in the world you should be able to put that on paper using the IPA to get an accurate pronunciation that someone else could read and understand and second of all is to get each sound with a different symbol now it's important to know that spelling is not relevant for determining the symbol so we're not doing this based off letters we're doing this based off the sounds that we hear and this is known as the true alphabetic principle so for example in the words jump badge and judge we see a j sound several times so J is represented by a j and jump J is represented by a dge and badge and in judge we see both but this is the same sound in every case it's just spelled in different ways so we want to be using this symbol here to represent that J sound so that way if you see this in a dictionary or you're studying another language if you see this symbol J you know exactly what sound it makes it makes J there is no confusing uh no confusion there so if we wanted to spell judge in a way that any speaker could understand and pronounce if they knew the IPA then we could do something like this and this vowel here just makes that a sound judge so that would be how we pronounce the word judge okay so what you can do at home and you can post it in the comments if you want probably going to have to post several comments throughout the video considering how long it is you can think of a pair of words that belong in each of these categories so maybe a pair with an identical sound but with different spelling so two words that have a similar sound but with different spelling so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pick a word like women and I'm going to focus on this o sound which is I and then the word WI which has the same sound whether it's women or wi it's both an i sound in this case but in one case it's spelled with an O and the other with an i so again spelling doesn't matter it has the same sound uh two a pair with two different sounds with the same spelling I'm going to come to these two words we saw the word thought before but there's an interesting one which is though so if we remove that t suddenly this o u makes an o sound so we would transcribe it like this while o u g in thought makes an a sound which we would write with a lowercase a there that's the IPA symbol so we're just removing one letter but suddenly the sound is changing so English spelling is not a good prediction of what sounds you're actually supposed to make when you speak and what about some words with letters that don't have any sound so uh th and though and thought will leave behind but what about a word like gome gnome that g is not making any sound at all it's not gnome it's just gnome and it's the same thing with a word like knife that K is not making a sound in Modern English so it's a silent letter it has no sound associated with it even if you think of words like life what is this e doing at the end well it's telling us that I should be pronounced I in the English word but that letter doesn't actually have a sound associated with it so it's not Lifey or lifea or leaa it's just life that e is silent so as we get into sounds we should know a little bit about our speech organs now it's important to know that we do not have any specialized organs just for speech and what I mean by that is of course we have organs that are used for speech but their primary function is biological and one of their secondary functions is to use for speech so in other words we've adapted those organs to be used for communication purposes so for example what the lungs are doing is they're taking in oxygen so uh O2 comes in or just O oxygen whatever I'm not a chemist and then uh carbon dioxide comes out CO2 comes out so that's their primary fun function but in terms of what it's doing for speech is it's giving us air that we use to make our sounds because if we couldn't shoot air out of our mouth while we speak then we wouldn't be making any audible noises the larynx consists of the epig glotus superlotus vocal cord glotus and sub glotus it's this little area down in here and in speech it is used to produce voicing so in other words the difference between an S sound and a zed sound is just whether your vocal folds are vibrating or not so if you hold your thumb and your index finger and you put it around the front of your throat and you make the sound s and Z you'll notice when you make Z that you'll feel vibration in your fingers while if you make S you're not going to feel any vibration at all so it is your vocal chords your vocal folds that are vibrating that are causing that difference between s and zip and your glotus is the area around or I should say in between your vocal folds where air is passing through so we'll take a look at a diagram in a bit and hopefully it'll make a little bit more sense about why vibration occurs so when we take a look at voiceless and voice diagrams here this is a top down look through your neck so you can see the glaus here this is the front of your neck and this is the back and we see what are called aroid cartilages right here so I will write that there aroid cartilage and what happens in a voiceless sound is they're pretty loose so as air flows up uh through your glaus out of your mouth these vocal folds which I'll color in red right here are pretty loose so they're not vibrating as air goes through but in voice sounds you're going to have vibrations so what happens is these aroid cartilages tighten up so they kind of pull forward these vocal folds get really really close together and then when air comes through air is coming through at such a high turbulence and the vocal folds are so tight that they begin to vibrate this is like a guitar string so if you were to pluck a guitar string when it's loose it wouldn't vibrate but if you were to uh strike it while it's tight it would vibrate quite a lot and instead of using your finger to pluck it instead the vocal folds are being plucked by air essentially so there's some sound con sound contrast you can hear like H and high h- doesn't have any vibration the p and laap p p p you might get some vibration at the end when the vowel comes out but just the P itself is not vibrating F and T and Fort if you make that F sound and hold it you're not going to feel any vibrations and the K in light doesn't have any vibrations either in comparison we have d d d has some vibration the G and G has some vibration if you hold an l sound you'll feel the vibration on your throat and same with Liv V that V sound has some vibration too so when you learn voiceless and voice sounds it is a good idea to learn some of them in pairs so for example p and B are the same sound except one is voiced you write VD and P is voiceless which you write BLS same with the TD contrast and kg so these are all very similar sounds that only differ in voicing some do not have voiceless counterparts like L and R uh it's just R but upside down it's the spefic specific symbol that we use and then there's other contrasts like f andv and SN Z and so on so we'll learn all of these now instead of learning the symbols first and learning whether they're voiceless or voiced it's best just to play around with your throat and feel it to see if these sounds are voiceless or voiced so try it yourself now in massive when you feel your throat you do not feel any vibration at all this is voiceless and I'll give you the symbol for this it is just s in the case of flavor if you hold that you definitely feel a vibration so this is voiced and we use an upside down R to make this R sound that's the symbol for it turnip there's definitely no vibration on the P sound so this is voiceless and we just use the letter P for that and then for the verb use us this one has vibration this is voiced and we use a z symbol for this because this is the z sound use if you think of use as a noun then things are a little bit different because if you say use suddenly this is voiceless and we would use the S symbol for that because that is the S sound voiceless use compared to use so the difference between a noun and a verb in this case is whether or not the sound is voiceless or voiced now we're going to segment our vocal tract into two different cavities so the vocal tract will be everything above the larynx so consider it from this area up and our vocal tract is used to shape sounds so in other words the tongue and the lips are going to do things to change the sound that we output and we could even let air through our nose to produce certain sounds so everything that comes out of the mouth is considered the oral cavity and if it comes out of the nose then things are going through the nasal cavity oh let's ask ourselves are these questions nasal or not so when we look at these certain sounds like C and or Z we have to ask if air is coming out of our noes and one way to check this is just to see if you can pronounce the sound with your mouth completely closed so sack now I got to let air out of my mouth so this is an oral sound is coming out of the mouth in the case of flaming I can keep my mouth close no air is coming out in fact if I put my fingers in front of my nose flaming you can kind of feel air come out of your nose so this is a nasal sound and we use this symbol it's an N with a little hook and that's represent that NG sound we have in English about [Music] turn you can hear the nasality in it so this is a nasal sound and this is just an N symbol and finally for use or use air is clearly coming out of my mouth here this is an oral sound and depending on whether this is a noun or a verb it'll either be S or Z sack in the first one is just a k for our symbol now now we're going to learn the consonants before we learn the vowels and when we learn consonants we want to be able to describe each sound and symbol so we have three different dimensions that we can describe them on we've already talked about voicing but we'll review it anyway and there's also the place that the sound is taking place so in other words which articulators in your mouth are shaping the sound is it at your lips like both lips is it your bottom lip and top teeth is it the little Ridge um in your mouth mouth is it right behind the teeth is it more towards the back of the mouth that's going to be the place and then the manner of articulation is going to tell us what the air flow is doing as it comes out of our vocal tract either oral or nasal cavity so you can think about three dimensions there's the vocal fold vibration there's the place that the sound is being shaped and there's the way that the air flow is coming out so for voiceless sounds these are sounds like ttk sfh so TF and the voice sounds have that vibration so b d and then also every single vowel that we have in English is going to be voiced as well so whenever you have a vowel you don't have to worry about asking if it's voiceless or voiced it's going to be voiced there are some languages that do have voiceless vowels but usually in very specific circumstances so if you go back to the IPA chart which you're going to see in each box is usually a separation the one on the left is the voiceless sound and the one on the right is the voiced sound so as we go through the different places of articulation we'll also point out the contrast between voiceless and voiced and as you use them more as you think about them more and feel your throat more you'll become more familiar with these sounds and it'll become quite second nature so we're going to illustrate a lot of these with face diagrams and if we want to check whether or not a sound is voiceless or voiced in our face diagram representation we're looking at this little line down here if it's wavy that means that it's voiced if it's a straight line this will mean that it's voiceless so this is just going to be a way to indicate on face diagrams whether or not a sound is voiceless or voiced and this is not a bad way in order to see the sounds and think about them if you can't visually imagine them inside your own mind so the place of articulation is the second dimension that we'll take a look at and when you learn these sounds it is very important that you produce the Sounds in your mouth and you think about them and you try to feel where your tongue is and what your lips are doing because the best way to learn phonetics is not to memorize things it is to use your mouth as a cheat sheet and to really understand how the sounds are being made so take time with sounds and consciously try to feel what is happening in your mouth so the first place of articulation ER is the Bal sound so in other words by meaning to and labial meaning lips sure there are jokes you can make with the word Leal but we will not say them here okay so we have three bilabial sounds in English one is the P sound and this is a a voiceless sound so pitch happy flap pan there will be some differences in how it's pronounced uh for example in Pitch it's a little bit more Airy than in happy and in flap it's not really released compared to pitch we're happy um but we'll talk about those differences a little bit later we have P's voice counterpart B so this one is voiced in words like bar Rubble job or Butler there's usually just one way to pronounce this although at the end of a word like job you may not release the B so it may just be like job with no release of air afterwards and then we have a nasal sound so this is voiced as well anything that comes out of your nose is voice so minus Hammer Wham is that M sound so these are the three bilabial sounds and you'll usually denote them by having two closed lips at the front of your diagram there are more bilabial sounds but these are just the ones in English now we have two labio Dental sounds in English so Leo meaning lip again and dental meaning tooth so this is bottom lip and upper teeth so we have F and v f is the voiceless version and V is the voiced version so in flavor half Ruff that F sound f f you can feel your bottom lip touching your top teeth and same with Venus lives save it's the same as F it's just that your vocal folds are vibrating so if you know F you know V if you know V you know F just feel your throat and you can feel that difference inter Dental is exactly what You' think it would mean Dental meaning teeth and Inter meaning in between so we have a voiceless version and a voiced version now in English both of these are just th sounds but there is a difference so in think bath ethereal these are voiceless you do not feel any vibration in your throat when you say it but when you say this or though or father you can feel vibration there so we have two different sounds here we have the Theta symbol for the voiceless one it's the same as it's pronounced in Theta or Theta depending how you want to say it and then we have what's called e for the voiced one which looks like a Delta with a little squiggle through it and uh this one to me kind of looks like a d I also know that D is a voice sound so that's just how I initially remembered it when I first learned these sounds we have a lot of different alvear sounds and this is your hard Ridge that is right behind your teeth so if you put your tongue up against the back of your teeth and you drag it back eventually you're going to feel it start to move up that hard Ridge right before you start to move up is what's called your alve Ridge so uh t d n l the S and Z these are sounds that you make at that Ridge so T and du are voiceless and voiced counterparts so t as in trade mat and falter you can not feel any vibration in your throat and then the D version which is voice for durable tide made usually represented with the d letter in English now we have a nasal sound which is a vo or n noise Noggin ban we have air coming through our nose when we pronounce the n Sound and then we have L which is also a voice sound in light fall and tremble there is a difference in the way that you pronounced L at the beginning and end of a syllable uh light really comes off that alvea Ridge while fall if you pronounce that like an English speaker uh you'll have your tongue bunched up a little bit at the back as well when you produce fall so it would be the same in tremble it's at the end of a syllable so we would have that little uh bunching up at the back but these are still L sounds now we have SZ and R as well so s is the voiceless version of Z so s would be straight Mass rancid and Z would be made zebra present so you can feel that vibration in your vocal fold sometimes s makes z sound so we don't want to be trusting our letters we want to be trusting our pronunciation and finally we also have R which is voiced so in running far attacker we use an upside down R for this the reason is because a right side up r a regular R is actually a Trill so this is what they would have in Spanish when you have a word like uh pedal with two RS I can't really do trills but uh if you think of a traditional Spanish r that is what the upside right R is now we have four post alvear sounds two voiceless voiced pair so the first two are sh and and your tongue isn't really touching the alve ridge or behind it but it's a little bit further behind the alve sounds and it's pretty close it's causing a lot of turbulence so in the case of shrimp bash and lashing this is usually the sh letters in English uh sometimes they appear in other letter formats but think of your typical uh this is your integral sign and this is also called Ash now we have a z sound which is Just sh but with vocal fold vibration so treasure Azure vision and this looks like a z with a little curve on it and this is called egge I don't know how you spell egge but that is my guess for how you would spell it we have another voiceless voiced pair we see the J from before badge jump and fragile but we also have that CH version that is voiceless like chirp batch chump so these two are combinations of other sounds so the voiceless CH is a combination of T and Sh and if you pronounce those both simultaneously you get CH you get that CH sound and with badge and judge it's like doing a du followed by a immediately so we need the T on top to symbolize that this is one sound and we have one palal sound so this is kind of like in the dead center of your mouth near the top this is the Y sound we use the J symbol for it so words like young yes and yearn that is y y y this one's a little bit harder to feel but you'll feel the center of your tongue being pushed towards the top of your mouth but not quite touching young and I should mention this one is voiced as well now in terms of our verer sounds which are almost the final sounds we have we have CG and N T and G are voiceless and voice counterparts so kick call toan while G has that vibration and gone Grumble and bag and finally we have in which is voiced it's a nasal sound and this represents that n G sound and occasionally sounds before the letter K or G so running hitting ink if you say ink you can feel that at the back of your mouth uh right up against the vum there so ink if it were alve like a regular n it would be in in and we don't say that that's a little bit difficult to say we say in with in at the back now our final two sounds are H and the glottal stop uh the glottal stop is considered to be bo I believe and the H is voiceless so it's a little bit hard to hear the guttle stop because basically it's no air coming out so uh oh it's that middle sound between uh and O uh oh or even if you say the word button button button uh there's like that little pause there button Mountain it's that little space where you're not really pronouncing anything basically air is getting trapped behind the glaus like where your vocal folds are like the vocal folds are shut tight air is trapped behind and then it's released now with h happy aha uhhuh these are voiceless sounds and this is just air coming out of your vocal for folds like a steady stream so just a quick check we take a look at some of these underlined sounds what is the place of articulation where we're making them and feel where they are in your mouth try not to rely too much on the examples so in America C where is that being made well that's being made towards the back this is a verer sound your tongue is pushed up against your vum H and this would be the K symbol in Canada D du du this is at your alvea Ridge you can fill your tongue at that Hard little Ridge there before it starts to go upwards in your mouth and this is just a du Sound New England England GL this is at the back as well right where the K is and this would just be our G sound so this is also verer and finally for Washington it's not quite at the alv ridge it's a little bit further behind so we call this a post alvear sound and if we want to know the symbol for this this is Ash this is our integral sign so those are where the different sounds are being produced in our mouths now we can put things together and describe each sound with a symbol a voicing and a place so I encourage you to try this and this is the best way in order to build up your knowledge is just to do this a bunch of times and really start to feel where the sounds are in your mouth tell become second nature so trick TT this is a voiceless sound there's no vibration in the throat and this is alve because it's being made at that Hard Ridge and this is just the T symbol in cat up that's a voiceless sound it is made with your two lips so this is bilabial and this is just the P sound now in leure or Leisure doesn't really matter what the vowel is it's it's voice we can feel the vibration and this is where that sh sound is it's a little bit behind the alvea ridge so this is considered a post aler sound and if we remember the symbol for this this is the Z with a little curl at the bottom this is z now in the case of mapping ears coming out of our nose this is voice we've got vibrations too is made with your tongue against your VM in the back so this is a verer sound and this is the n with a little hook on it uh this is also written as angma if you want to give a name to this sound finally in wither [Music] withth this is voiced it's made with our tongue between our two teeth our top and bottom teeth so this is going to be interdental and the symbol we have for this is is our little Delta with a squiggle through it so we're now able to describe sounds in terms of voicing and place we just have to learn about manner when we talk about manner of articulation we're talking about what the air flow is doing as it goes through the vocal tract so either through the oral cavity or the nasal cavity so if we take a look at these two diagrams on the page you'll notice that if we draw air flow from our lungs out of our mouth on the left diagram we get some closure some stoppage of air before it's released well if we compare the one on the right side then we can see that actually the air can continuously flow out through a very narrow P passageway so what we would say is that the sound on the left is representative of a stop where air is held before released while the one on the right would be an example of a frickative in other words there's a little bit of frication there while the air is continuously escaping outside of your mouth so we'll go through each of the manners of articulation and show the sounds that represent each of those so the first one is stop and this is when we have air that gets blocked behind an articulator in the mouth before it's released so in the left one this is a bilabial stop and these are stops B laal because the air is being held right behind the lips right before it's released so these are the sounds p and B and also m in this case although m is a little bit special we'll talk about that in just a moment in the middle diagram we see air being held right behind the alve ridge so these are sounds like T and d and n will also be a special case now in the third example we can see it's voiced and as air tries to get through it's being held great behind the vum here but it has an escape Passage through the nose so this is an example of a nasal stop in this case and we can have Veer stops where we don't have it going through the nasal cavity in other words K and G but we do have that Ang sound which is what this diagram represents so when we think about stops we shouldn't be thinking about it whether air is continuously leaving our mouth or nose but rather the fact that air is being stopped in the oral tract so the fact that air is being stopped in this position behind the vum does mean it's a stop but the fact that it's going through the nose it's being redirected makes it a nasal stop so it's going to be the same with M and with n in both of these cases you'll still have air being stopped inside your oral cavity but air will also Escape through the nasal passage at the same time which means that you can hold those sounds so all of the English stops are listed below the only one we haven't shown is the glottal stop and that's because the stop is being uh made right where your vocal folds are right behind the glotus there so it's a little bit hard to show that in a face diagram uh when you actually have a glottal stop now the second one is a frickative so this is where airflow is turbulent and continuous leaving the oral cavity so uh we what we don't have listed here are the labio dental ones F andv but we do have S and Zed on the left diagram there in fact if I'm being perfect I really shouldn't cross my Z's there so air is continuously coming out between the tongue and the alve ridge now these are turbulent so there's a very tight constriction there and what this means is that the air pressure inside of your mouth is going to be more dense than the air pressure outside of your mouth so the fact that you have that difference in air pressure is what's causing that frication what's causing that noisiness so that's snz in the left one in the middle we have palal alvear so we have the sh and Z Sounds and then on the right we have our interdental our th and the sounds so in the face diagram for the in Dental it's a little bit hard to see but there is space between your teeth and between your tongue and your teeth where air can come out but the air pressure inside is much denser than the air pressure outside of your mouth so with h h is going to be down at the bottom where your glotus is and for the fnv sounds you would have the lower lip and the top teeth with a little bit of space in between it would look a lot like the interdental one but the lip would be facing upwards in that case now we have africat so you can think of an africat as a combination of a stop and frive it begins as a stop and then immediately releases into a fricative so even when you think about how the sounds are formed in the symbol it's basically a stop plus a frive with a tie bar above to say that these are simultaneously being made so it's a little bit hard in a face diagram to show these uh here's an attempt on the right where the black is where the tongue starts so right behind the alve Ridge and then it quickly moves up to release so you can hold these sounds a little bit but it does start to sound like that sh sound at the end or with J it does sound like J at the end of it because that is where the tongue ends up so you can think of an affricate as a combination of a stop and frive at the same time and other languages will have other africat so for example German will have the p and f africat f f and something like Greek would have the p and the S together like in Psychology which would be pronounced something like Pia you can hear that PS at the beginning uh Japanese would also have an example of a TS together like in the word tsunami so in English we would write tsunami and we'd probably pronounce it without the T but in Japanese you would pronounce it with the T as one sound with the S tsunami now we have a couple special sounds called liquids these are kind of like fricatives but the air flow is much Freer so lateral liquids we just have one which is the L and we call this lateral because when we make this sound the tongue is making contact with your alvea Ridge here so the tongue looks a little bit like this if I were to draw it um but air is flowing through the sides of the tongue so you don't have any turbulence there and the pressure inside and outside of your mouth is pretty equal in the case of the rodic liquid which is R it's very similar to L except the tongue is going to Bunch up a little bit in the back it's going to look a little weird with that diagram um but with Ric liquids you get a little bit of tongue bunching at the end and air is Flowing pretty continuously you don't hear any turbulence when you hear ER the air flow is pretty similar uh inside and outside of the mouth now the last manner of articulation are Glides and these are some sometimes called semivowels they're basically consonant sounds that are nearly indistinguishable from their vowel counterparts so we have two we have the voiced labio Glide W so labio here is for the rounded lips and verer is the place where uh you also have some tongue action so in a word like watch or ooo or whimper uh this is a Glide it is very very similar to the vowel sound o in fact if you were to change the W to an U and go wimper wimper You' probably hear it as a w if you're an English speaker and then we have our voiced palal Glide y so in yes yearn and value the Y sound is kind of hidden between the L and the U so if we were to actually write this out Valu we don't say Valu or Val we say v u and we get that Y sound right before our o sound so uh this is very similar to The Sound e in terms of its actual pronunciation and articulation so you can think of these semivowels or Glides as being like very quickly articulated there's not really contact with any point at the top of your mouth so it does behave a little bit more like a vowel than a consonant in some ways okay and then Glides are the perfect transition into talking about vowels so constants had three ways that we could describe them with voicing place and Manner and with vowels these are all made inside your mouth and it's all about what the tongue is doing so you'll see a box like this and this is usually top teeth bottom teeth and then we have our little Ridge up here and then we have space for our tongue and then our vocal folds are somewhere down there so the vowel space just tells you where your tongue is in relation to the sounds that you're making and we can talk about height so we can talk about how high your tongue is it's either going to be high mid or low we can talk about the depth whether it's going to be front Central or back we can talk about the roundedness of of your lips so what your lips are doing are going to be important as well if they're rounded or if they're just spread and we would call spread lips unrounded and then also how tense your tongue is so whether it's LAX or tense and how you can think of it as if your tongue is pushing an extreme boundary so it's going pretty close to either the bottom top front or back of your mouth then it's going to be tense if it's somewhere in the middle then it'll be LAX so one way to hear this is the difference between the sounds e and I so in the words beat and bit they're very close to the same pronunciation the same place in the mouth beat and bit the only difference is with beat your tongue is tense and in bit your tongue is not as tense in other words it's a little bit more towards the center than with e but not that significantly so we have a few simple vowels in English we have about nine of them and then we have combinations of vowels which are div thonks so these ones take a little bit of memorization because some of these are hard to feel in the mouth but the more you practice and the more you feel them the easier it becomes so here are our four English front vowels and if we were to draw the little diagram on here I'll just label where these are so e is high in front I is also high in front but it's not tense so it's very close e is mid and LAX as well so it's not quite on the extreme boundary here but it is a little bit closer to the center than something like just a regular e which would be a and then we have a which is low front unrounded and LAX so you'll notice in English that all of our front vowels are um unrounded we do not have any rounded front vowels so here are the sounds the high front unrounded tense fowel makes an e sound like as in beat cleat or Retreat the I high front unrounded LAX also is represented with an i in many cases so bit Rift or fliping I is the sound you're looking for Epsilon our mid-front unrounded LAX vowel is the e sound as in bet or threat or de and then a which is a combination of A and E you can write it in one Fell Swoop I see some people do it like two separate letters but you can just have fun with the little squiggle there and this is our low front unrounded LAX vowel as in bat stab and rafter now we have five more that are not front these are our mid and our back vowels so a is our first one it's a regular a but it's important that we write it like this we do not want to write it with a little hat above because that is a different sound that some English speakers have but Western Canadian English speakers do not so in the case of Bot father watch this is the a sound now in your dialect it might also be represented by this vowel and that's more like an or as in b father watch compared to just bot so if you can hear the difference between bot which is the A and bought which is that or sound now we have the carrot which is our mid Central unrounded LAX vowel these are in words like butt and fluff and tough they make the uh sound uhuh we have ooh this is our high back rounded tense vowel so as in boot shoot or tribute we'll hear a little Glide before the oo in tribute but we do hear that ooh sound we have uh which is our high back rounded LAX so the U and the uh are sorry the U and the U are very similar one is Tense one is black so book look and Shook and then we have our schah and this is a very special sound it appears in many places pretty much whenever we have an unstressed syllable we hear awah and this is the mid Central unrounded reduced vowel so we don't call this LAX or tense we call it reduced so in words like Canada about toughen you might be wondering why does an a a sound make a an or an about or tough we have an e there is because all of these are unstressed syllables so Canada is stressed about the bout is stressed toughen tough is stressed so most vowels in syllables that are not stressed are reduced to schwas so we don't say Canada we say can about tough the vowel is usually pretty short and it's not as enunciated if you try to compare it to other vowel sounds now in terms of the chart where all of these sounds are if we draw this out U and uh are pretty close in the top right uh we have the schah which is dead center as well as uh which is in the same position but it's LAX rather than reduced and then we also have our a sound which is going to be in the back or lower right right side so back and down low back would be the official way of saying all right now we do have one case this is the schwar so it's a schah with a little tick at the end so you can think of this as a Ric vowel so kind of like the r sound but it's more vowel like so for example in fur the sound that we make in fur is so this is a vowel sound we're not doing a vowel plus consonant we're not saying Fair far Fair we're just making one sound fur so we would use this vowel to describe those ER sounds in stressed syllables same with the world world this is just one vowel sound followed by an l and a d but that vowel uh has a little bit of R coloring on it so in unstressed syllables we'd still use the schah and R but in stress we want to use the schwar symbol so if we were to draw a little diagram of where our vowels are in English we would see this chart now in the official IPA chart a is a little bit higher than just low but English speakers tend to pronounce the a a little bit lower and the uh sound is a little bit more back than how English speakers produce it so for English speakers it's probably about in this spot right here but it's closer to Mid Central than it is to midback so that's why we have the descriptions that we have and that's why the IPA charts might be a little bit different than how we actually describe them and it's because English speakers still do produce these vowels just in slightly different positions so here's a quick check you can try this yourself we want to listen to the vowel sound and then pick the symbol that represents it so with trust this is a trust uh uh uh this is a stress syllable so we don't have awah here but we have the carrot we have a trust in the case of black a a this is our low front unrounded vowel so this is going to be a the ash symbol I don't think I gave a name for this earlier but we call this ash now in the case of tempting we have e tempting this is our midf front unrounded vowel this is our Epsilon e so if you want want to give this a name it's just Epsilon and then for seat we have e e that's the sound we're making that is the high front unrounded tense vowel just the lowercase letter I receit okay now we have five more vowels to talk about and these are dip thongs so these are vowels with movement in other words they start at a particular location and then they move slightly as they're being pronounced so these are vowel sounds like a i ow O and oi so o and a are a little bit hard to feel the movement but if you make sounds like I ow oi you can feel your tongue move in your mouth as you're pronouncing them but these are all diff thongs uh just because you can't feel the difference between a and o when you're producing them does not mean they're not dip lungs you do have some tongue movement there so here are some examples uh bait stay and payment is a so this is our e sound transferring to e we do not have e on its own as a vowel in English so we only ever use this as part of a div thong uh but Spanish for example will have this vowel sound in a word like ESI now we have Al so again we have a different starting sound here this is a with a hat and that's because it starts a little bit more Central than our regular a so ow compared to a yeah we don't say a we don't say about we say about so that a is starting a little bit more Central than our regular a so about trousers Mouse this is our ow sound for I we see that same beginning sound with a and this is I bite style fly so we can see it starts at a and then it moves to the a position as it closes I now we have o and oi at this point if you understand what the last characters are and what the beginning ones are you can probably reason out what these are supposed to sound like but for o we have words like boat crowbar showing this starts at the O position and then it moves up a little bit to the uh Crow Boat Show and finally we have oi so this one is probably the least frequent of all the dip thongs in eng English so oil exploit turmoil um but you can definitely feel some movement there when you say oi o it starts at the back and then it moves to the front we don't have any nice descriptions for these what some linguists will do is they'll describe dip thongs by their first and second positions independently um however it's usually just common practice to not give these any formal descriptions and just call these dip thongs and people can figure them out based on where they're starting and where they're ending so let's check these words to see what di thongs we have so impolite steroids flowers and disarray so an impolite I I we start at the A and then it transitions to I so I impolite in the case of steroids well it's pretty much spelled exactly how it's pronounced in this case so this is the oi case starts at the back goes to the front for flowers this is ow ow so we start uh Central low and then we move high back to get ow and then for disarray this is the a sound we start at the front mid and then we move up very slightly to it to end it disarray a a so the more you practice with these the better you'll be I suggest looking at a bunch of different words listing to the sounds quite carefully and then trying to give them descriptions if you need any confirmation on your pels you can always type them in the comments and I can take a look at them and see if you've got it correct dictionaries are also another good way to check your pronunciation just make sure you're looking at IPA transcription rather than any other type of transcription that dictionary sometimes use so this is our final vowel chart for English anything with a circle is a tense vowel and we also have our diff thongs in there based on where they start so the diff thongs as an a i al oi and O are positioned in their initial positions rather than where they end up but uh as you can imagine taking a look at these we have five 7 9 10 14 different vowel sounds and in English we only have five letters to represent all of these different vowel sounds so you can imagine why English can be quite difficult to learn when you're just reading because it's not necessarily always predictable which vowel sound you should be using based on the letter because we have 14 different sounds that have to be represented by five different letters so now that we understand Place Manner and voicing for consonants as well as our descriptions for vowels we can now transcribe entire words into the IPA so here are six examples with light light three sounds l i cheese this is also three sounds this is our africat CH vowel sound e and then our final sound Z in the case of Jupiter we have a little bit more we have J and then because R is unstressed we would write a schah plus an r in this case there will be some linguists and textbooks out there that instead of writing this they write an r with a little line underneath and this just means that it is a cabic r and this is a phonological change that some people incorporate into their transcriptions so Jupiter in other words it just goes straight to an R sound and the r is behaving like a vowel in a syllable now we have three more words on the right these have schwas in them so in the case of derve derive the stress syllable is RVE so this uh sound becomes awah it becomes reduced so in our translation we get d r i v in other words five sounds for derive in the word massage we see a very similar thing here Sage is our stress syllable so even though we have an A in our word massage it is still pronounced with awah massage massage it's quite quick compared to the a in massage so we have M S A and Z as our five sounds and now in the case of salmon we see that the SA and Silent L would be the stress syllable salmon and that would mean that even though we have an o in our writing for the second syllable it will be reduced so it's stamin and this is also a case where we have a silent letter so even though we have the L in spelling we do not pronounce it when we speak this word so let's see if you can transcribe the following two words terrifying and attention it's a little bit difficult but I'm sure with enough practice you can do it so you can pause it try yourself and here are the solutions so with terrifying we start with a t and then we get our e terrifying so e that's an Epsilon R sound which is our upside down R terrifying terrifying this could be an I at this point or it could be awah whether you say terrifying or terrifying uh then we have an F after our Y sound is making our I dip thong so terfy and then we have in so I and so I and so this is our transcription for terrifying it might look a little bit weird that you have two vowels back to back starting different syllables well I is the nucleus of one syllable and it is starting the other one that is okay because again we're just pronouncing these separately so ter riff bying now what about attention attention it's not attention it's attention so we're starting with awah here uh and we get t e so a ten then what do we do with chin atten atten this is a CH sound so attent and then n it is going to be unstressed at the end so we get awah and an uh for a tension so when we think about the stress syllable here it is t uh tension which is which means that our other vowel sounds are going to be reduced either to awah or in some cases they might be maintained as an i if uh you are saying it with a little bit more anunciation although attention is a little weird attention some people might say attention where you have that a sound so sometimes there could be variation between the schw and the is sound depending on how fast you're speaking and how much you're enunciating your sounds so that's it as far as sounds go you now know all the consonants and vowels in English but let's talk about some super segmentals in other words these are properties above the level of speech segments so these might be properties that affect individual vowels or affect syllables so we have pitch length and stress uh pitch is just high to low frequency so my pitch is pretty low but it can also be a little bit higher and Pitch can break down into two different types one is tone and one is intonation a tone is usually on a syllable by syllable level and can affect the meaning of words while intonation is going to change an utterance in its meaning so it's not about changing the meaning of the words but maybe changing whether you're asking a question or just saying a regular statement length is about how long a consonant or vowel is when you produce it some languages care about length English does not and then stress would be the most prominent syllable in a word so we've already been talking a little bit about stress when it comes to identifying schwas in your speech so the greatest example for toen would be Mandarin or cantones and this is where we have different pronunciation of a certain vowel depending on the pitch in your voice and that pitch is going to affect the meaning so as an English speaker I would go through each of these five five examples and say ma ma ma ma ma but uh we need to have specific tones on these words in order for Mandarin speakers to actually understand what we're talking about so we have a high tone like ma we have a rising tone that's high like ma we have a low Rising so it goes down and up as an ma we have a high falling one so one that starts high that goes low ma ma and then we just have a neutral tone ma which would indicate a question so what some linguists do instead of writing high high Rising low rising or using these symbols they might also use numbers so for example uh High tone would be a 55 so it's usually on a one two 3 four five scale the first number is where it starts and the second number is where it ends so this is a high high it's a 55 while hemp a high Rising might start at three and go to five so starts mid goes High uh with horse this is low Rising so it kind of goes from 2 to four uh from high falling this would start at five and go down to a three or a two and then for any particle indicating a question neutral would just be a standard 33 or perhaps even lower so those are another way that you can represent tones although in English we don't need to care about these as much now here are some examples of intonation and we have two different types of Contour that we talk about one is terminal contour and one is non-terminal contour and you can see these in the diagrams to the right so terminal Contour is when the pitch goes down at the end of a sentence so in English we do this when we ask or when we just say regular statements so people ask me silly questions you can see it go down at the end now non-terminal Contour is when the pitch goes up at the end so when we ask questions we do this so what are you talking about out that can go up and even in some commands like when you say leave it can go higher usually most of my sentences end with a low Contour oh that's just a consequence of autism in some case I have difficulties controlling my pitch and intonation but for most regular speakers with questions and commands it goes up and with statements it goes down although there is this new trend if you listen to a lot of Tik toks where even regular statements will end on kind of a high tone like people ask me silly questions it's a regular statement but sometimes people phrase it as if it's a question because they use non-terminal Contour so you might hear a difference in there just based on you know the type of media that you're listening to and what speakers are doing now length is another one that we don't consider too much in English but if you think about Japanese length is actually going to make a difference in the word that is being produced so for for example we have two words here and so in the first word if we make the E longer this means here and the specific form would mean the past but if we make this shorter and just say in fact in some cases this vowel is even uh devoiced so it's voiceless it's shorter and it means North so how long you hold a sound is going to determine which meaning you're selecting when you're speaking now in English sometimes it just happens naturally it's not going to affect the meaning of what we say but if we have two of the same sound back to back instead of pronouncing the sound twice we might just lengthen it so in a phrase like let's ban news uh let's ban news I'm holding that n I'm not pronouncing it twice so what we would do is we' write the N once and then put a little colon beside it to mean that it is lengthened so even if you see the example above with K and K we have the little colon there in the first example to symbolize that the sound is longer than usual now there is no set length for any of these sounds so if you compare and ask what about e and e how long should we expect them to be there's no concrete answer for this across languages the only difference is that this is going to be longer it could be 100 milliseconds 150 milliseconds 25 milliseconds it's uncertain it's going to vary speaker by speaker and the standard length is going to vary by language so it just has to be longer now stress primary stress is really what we want to focus on and there's a couple different ways that we can represent this in our transcriptions or with our words so we say the most prominent syllable in a word has primary stress usually the vowel is a little bit longer and it's usually not reduced so if we pronounce the word explanation explanation that nay is getting primary stress it's the longest and most prominent syllable in the word and if it's difficult to hear we can try putting primary stress on different syllables and see if that sounds weird so explanation explanation that's a little bit weird explanation explanation that is very weird and explanation explanation that's also a little bit weird so if we say explanation that is the most natural way to say it so n has primary stress now in regular writing we can symbolize this with a little accent an up Accent on the vowel but in our IPA transcription we usually use this little apostrophe like symbol before the syllable that is stressed so explanation nay is stressed so we put the little apostrophy before it if we have secondary stress like in the case of explanation we do have a little bit of secondary stress two syllables away we do the little apostrophe but it would be on the bottom I'm not quite sure what the name of that symbol is but you can think of primary up top and secondary on the bottom if you have two syllables we use that symbol there the sigma in Greek writing for syllable now in the case of telegraphic we can hear primary stress on graph telegraphic and in insurmountable we can hear primary stress on Mount insurmountable insurmountable it's not insurmountable it's not ins surmountable it's not insurmountable and it's definitely not insurmountable so primary stress is on Mound there and again we can see in both of these transcriptions that we have our primary stress right before that syllable so what stress can do in English sometimes not always this is not a hard and fast rule but it can serve as a grammatical function so we have some contrasts in words where we have a noun form form and a verb form and in the noun form in two syllable words we put stress on the first syllable so if we were to do our little sigmas here we'd put stress on the first and in the verb form we would put stress on the second so uh announcing a recall versus recalling something so you can hear a little bit of a difference there uh another one another example might be the word record is it record or is it record so if it's record then it's a noun and this is talking about a physical disc that plays music so that's a record but if we talk about recording this is now a verb and here is an example of a microphone and then someone speaking into it that's my picture of a human so secondary stress or not secondary stress primary stress on the second syllable would give us record which is the verb oh see if you can identify primary stress in the following words we won't transcribe them we'll just put the little accent above the vowel in the stressed syllable so in one is it cupcake or cupcake well it's cupcake stress on the first syllable what about amazing amazing that is stressed on the second syllable it's not amazing or amazing it's amazing uh what about repeatable well this is in repeat repeatable the second one it's repeatable and finally stuffing St so stuffing our first syllable has that primary stress so at this point we've learned enough phonetics and we can now start talking about phology which is about how we group sounds into syllables and also about different changes in sounds depending on how fast we speak we're going to start with phono tactics which is the allowable clusters of sounds that we can produce in a specific language then move into phones and alphones which are really the differences between how we perceive sounds and how we actually produce them depending on certain environments move into phonological processes to give names to these different changes and alterations that we make and then end with phonological features and rules which is probably one of the most difficult parts of phology however if you practice a lot with the sounds it becomes a lot easier so as you brush up on those phonetics and produce those sounds pay attention to what your airflow is doing what your voicing is doing and all that kind of stuff and phonological features becomes a lot more intuitive so phonotactics is the acceptable sequences of sound in a language and this is part of your competence so this is part of what you know as a speaker of a language so as an English speaker you can take a look at these two words tweebs and TK and determine whether or not these words could be acceptable English words or not so tweebs is probably not a word that is used in English but it's totally fine to say tweebs we know that we can do TW at the beginning of a syllable we can put an e as a vowel sound and then end in a bz sound but in the case of T this is a little bit harder for English speakers to pronounce and that's because we can't typically do TL at the beginning of a syllable uh but everything else is okay so we can do the E and we can do the irk sound at the end but the t is a little weird so we'd say no this is not a permissible English word it violates our phonotactics so here are some examples of some syllable or word onsets in English we call these onsets if they occur at the beginning of a word or syllable that's what onset means so we can see that we have some gaps in some places so for instance we can do PL and PR but we can't do pu now some kids when they first learn English might say things like P instead of play um but adults don't ever use the p in words to start them an English as far as I'm aware now in the T cases we can do TR and t as in tre and twin but we can't do that TL cluster at the beginning and we can separate them into separate syllables for instance if we do the word bootleg then we can do a t and an L side by side but we can't start a syllable with TL so we can't just have a word that's like we can say it if we pronounce it well enough but we know it's not an English word now in the case of C whether it's CL C or qu we can do them all Club crab quick all of these are acceptable now the general rule is that if you can do a two consonant cluster back to back then you can typically add an s in front of it and this is true except for one case so we can do PL and PR so we can do splur and spr like as in split and Sprite we can't do pu so it makes no sense that we could do sp like if we can't do the simpler version then we can't do the more complicated version it's the same with SL we can't do T so we can't do SL in fact I can't even pronounce that uh TR is fine so Str is fine now what we don't find in English is any St sounds so like swing like we don't say things like that maybe kids do but adults don't so although we have the TW we don't have St and with our K we have CL C and qu so we have SC scr and squ as well as in Scara scream and squeal some of these might be a little bit more rare than others but these are all permissible sounds in English now let's contrast this with Spanish so Spanish doesn't have the r that we have so we've removed that but if you take a look at this phonotactics chart we see Plaza poto clava Quadro so we can do five out of the six but what we can never do in Spanish is we can never add an S to the beginning of the cluster so Spanish does not allow what we call SCC clusters with an S sound and then two consonants we can do some CC clusters but we can't do SEC so when you think about phono tactics you have to remember that these are language specific and that is why learning another language can be so difficult because when you want to learn a language like Spanish um let's say you have the word um eseal what a typical English speaker would do when first learning Spanish is they would go a SP Al but Spanish can't do it Spanish can't do sp so what actually happens in Spanish is when they pronounce it they go is C is SPAC out so they don't put the SP together they separate it into different syllables because that's that's what their phono tactics allows them to do so this is a case of language interference when English speakers learn Spanish because they aren't adhering to Spanish phono tactics they have to learn Spanish phono tactics so here's some examples of sounds that other languages have that English does not in Bantu they can start syllables with NT so they can say something like I can't really say it Bulgarian does vuk vuk VN at the beginning Tibetan allows our in sound or NG sound our V nasal at the beginning of a syllable as inju uh we do not have any words in English that start with and in Russian it allows an FP at the beginning that is also palatalized so uh if you say a word like peak in English although we would transcribe it as p i k for Peak uh you might notice that your tongue is a little bit more towards the pallet when you pronounce that first P Peak and that is what's happening with f and P so they'd say it's like I can't really pronounce it but that would be bird so if you're learning one of these languages you have to get comfortable with pronouncing new syllable onsets that you might not have in English or your native language now some of these differences that we see like why don't we have words uh like fled or cruel well we might also ask why don't we have question words like tbal or Schult and these are all gaps so when we miss a word in a language we call it a gap in other words there's like a gap in our dictionary or our vocabulary or our lexicon and there are accidental gaps and systematic gaps so if it's accidental what that means is that the word could exist according to the phono tactics but it doesn't so fle cruel and Ward the L are all sounds that we are all words that we could have in English but we just don't have them because no one has invented them yet systematic apps are words that don't exist because the phono tactic says that they can't exist so slal we can't do that TL so we're not going to have that word in English um m m we don't have words that start with m in English and we also don't have words that end in lrb so M thorb it's really difficult to say and same with we cannot start a syllable or word in English with f and so therefore this is a systematic Gap the language cannot account for them because the phono tactics does not allow it so with these fake words let's see if these fake words are gaps that are accidental or systematic according to English phonotactics so usually the best thing to do is to try to pronounce it and if it's easy to pronounce then it's an accidental Gap if it's very difficult to pronounce then it's usually systematic so Salida Salida this is an accidental Gap we could have this as an English word because it doesn't violate any phono tactics consonant vowel consonant vowel consonant vowel consonant vowel consonant vowel that's fine what about the second one ruing ruing well it's not too bad at the beginning because we can do rough and leak but we can't do this K and cluster at the end because the phono tactics is not allow us to end words in knen we can end in NK but we can't end in knen so in this case it is systematic now what about the last one majiko majiko well this might sound Japanese to you but it could be an English word u magiko magiko you know however you want to pronounce it the English phono tactics allows it it's just that we don't have it so this is accidental so if we take a look at these three words we could have two of these as English words but the second one would not be accepted by English speakers as an English sounding word so now let's see how we can take our funel tactics and knowledge of vowels and consonants and group things up into syllables now we have a pretty good intuition about syllables if you are a native speaker of a language for example in elementary school you probably learn to clap to sound like instrumental would be four claps instrumental uh so we would know this has four syllables in fact the fact that kids can do this without any linguistic training tells us that syllables do in fact ex exist so what about marketable marketable marketable this is going to be for syllables now what about this last one well if we take a look at the first two we might guess that it's the amount of vowels that we have that determines how many syllables we have like as an instrumental marketable these both have four vowels and therefore four syllables and it's not quite right but it's also not quite wrong so in Q if we go by the vowel count we would see there are four vowels there but if we say Q it's just one syllable cute so it's not about how many vowels there are in the word but how many vowel sounds there are in the word that's going to tell us how many syllables they are so if we transcribe the word q it's KY Q we have just one vowel in there so this is going to be one syllable now I just mentioned that kids can do this without any linguistic training which tells us that we do have syllables but we could figure out how syllables work in different ways like we could ask speakers how they feel about syllables or what they think syllables are and get data from there we could record audio files and we could look at how the sounds are progressing to break things up into syllables or we can again investigate children and see how they play with syllables because there's an interesting thing that happens here so if you consider pigl some of you who have grown up in english- speaking countries have probably played around with Pig Latin a little bit it's a little game that children play where they take words in English and they transform them a little bit to create new sounds so for example riddle becomes itay eat becomes eat a and the general idea behind this if you ask a child how to explain this they'll say you take the beginning of the word if it's a consonant and you put it at the end and then add a to it so in the case of riddle you take the beginning R you put it to the end of the word and add an a sound to get itay in the case of eat there is no consonant at the beginning so you don't move it to the end you just add a to the end in fact there's some versions of pig Latin where you'd add yay so eat yay rather than eat a now the question is what do kids do with a word like strength and it's pretty systematic what children will always do with a word like strength is they'll do an stray so they'll take the Str at the beginning and they'll move it to the end rather than saying trength say and just moving the first letter now this is interesting because this means that children understand that syllables exists and there's different components to them so if we transcribe this we get stra so we have seven Sounds here and from this we can gather there are basically three parts there's a rhyming part so there's the part where the syllable is hosted which is the nucleus there's something called the Koda which takes an extra consonants these two nucleus and Koda join together to form a rhyme so if we wanted to rhyme with strength we'd have to find another word that end in an and then everything at the beginning is considered an onset and the onset joins in with the rhyme to create a complete syllable so what children are doing is subconsciously without knowing anything about syllable structure how syllables are formed theoretically they're able to take the full onset and they're able to move it to a new syllable and add a to it in order to make a new word so children are aware of onsets even without any formal training which leads us to believe that onsets do in fact exist in language which gives us the different components of our syllable so this is the general structure of a syllable a syllable is just any phological unit composed of one or more segments and it must contain a nucleus so the general idea is in a word like steals first we have to transcribe it because we're dealing with sounds not with spelling the vowels are going to be the nuclei of our syllables the Koda is going to be any leftover consonants the nucleus and Koda formed together to make the rhyme it's spelled r m some textbooks will also spell this typically with rhyme are H yme and the constants at the beginning form are onset so all of these must adhere to phono tactics so when you take a look at onsets and kodas you have to remember to consider the phono tactics of the language that you're looking at this means that syllable structures in different languages might look slightly different they'll have all the same components but the ways that the sounds uh break up into onsets and codas might differ so our top symbol is called a syllable this is Sigma you want the Greek letter for it the Greek pronunciation but they both start with s so that's what we use for syllables so how do we construct a syllable structure the first thing we're going to do is with any case of words we're going to transcribe them into IPA because we need to be dealing with sounds in order to get the correct syllable structure so extreme would be e c s t t r e and M now based on how many vowels we have we should be having two syllables e and Street what about in the case of amazing but we have a and so according to how many vowels we have we should have one two three syllables or if we say amazing that's exactly what we get so once we have everything transcribed into IPA here are the steps we're going to take first every single vowel is going to get a nucleus so in extreme we're going to have two syllables so we need two nuclei and those nuclei are going to build into a rhyme which can take a Koda at some point and that rhyme will eventually form with an onset form a syllable so this is how I would start the diagram for extreme if we do the same thing with amazing uh is a nucleus that builds into a that builds into a syllable a is the same thing dip thongs are just one sound so they both are underneath the nucleus and an i it would be the same thing so this is our first step after transcribing our word into IPA our next step is to form onsets now we always form onsets before codiv and how we can form onsets is by thinking about the longest acceptable sequence of consonants that can be in an onset and this is called the maximum onset principle also known as the mop so if we think about the word extreme we can ask ourselves okay we have this cluster of consonants here asstr can we start a word with kstr and the answer is no there's no word in English that allows at the beginning of a word so the K cannot be part of an onset what about the Str Str stra well yeah we can say stream that's totally fine or strength so the St and R together are going to form the onset of our second syllable and that will connect up to the syllable boundary now in the case of e in our first syllable there's no consonants to the left of the nucleus so we don't have an onset to consider now what about in amazing well it's pretty similar in this case uh we take a look at our cluster of consonants to the left of every nucleus so yeah we can start a word with M that's fine so M can be an onset uh same with z for Zing Z can be an onset so we can stick that under the onset of the third syllable now at this point all we have left are some consonants with no places to go so this is where we go with step four and we introduce those strangling consonants as codas so in the case of extreme we have e and we have a k stranded there so K is going to be the Cod of the first syllable and in stream we have the M hanging out so it's going to be the Koda of the second syllable and then once we've completed all of our syllables in our structure we usually connect them together to form a prootic word otherwise known as a word you might even see a PR word up there to mean prootic word rather than power word or something like that but we'll just use WD for word and that just tells us that our syllables are linked into forming one coherent word now in the case of amazing all we have is the n which is a straggler on the right so we'll fit that into the syllable to its left to get uh May zing and these three will join together to form a word so that is how we can form syllable structures in English so as we can see here we have our final syllable structures for these two words e stream and amazing these might take a little bit to get used to but it's it's a very systematic process so if you can do it for one word you can do it for pretty much any English word out there there might be some cases that are a little bit more complex where aoda and onset are basically shared by the same sound we won't get into that but if you take a Linguistics course you may see some problem sets where that happens but that typically Waits until a second course in phology so let's see if you can create syllable structures for the words foxes and informative so you can pause it try it yourself but first what we're going to do is transcribe the word so foxes f a z so we have six sounds there for foxes what we're going to do is we're going to give each vowel a nucleus rhyme and syllable spine because that is where syllables are being hosted then we'll take a look to the left of each of our nuclei and take a look at all the consonant see if they can form a word at the beginning so in the case of foxes the first syllable yeah we can start a word with the letter F sound F that's fine what about well we can't start a word in English with KS so K and S aren't going to be an onset together but we can start with s just on its own so s is going to be the onset of our second syllable and now that we have all of our onsets built we can now dump the remaining sounds into codes in the syllables to the left so foxes and these two join together to create a word now what about in a case like informative well it's going to be very similar we're just going to have to transcribe this informative you might notice here that I'm just using a regular o in informative and that's usually because when o appears before L or R it is not a dip thong it is shortened and it's just the o in this case but there's nothing wrong with writing informative so we're going to do the same thing every single vowel sound is going to get a nucleus which builds up into a rhyme and a syllable so we can just fill out all of these in this case informative informative so we should have four syllables which if we build our spines we can see exactly that now we're going to build up some onsets so I doesn't have anything to the left but o has an NF can we start a word with NF in English no we can't say like but we can do F on its own so f is going to be the onset and then for formative we can ask ourselves the same thing can we do RM at the beginning of a word in English the answer is no but we can do just m so we can stick M into the onset of our third syllable and then with tiv we just have a t to attach so we can attach t as an onset now that all of our onsets are built we can now dump our remaining consonants into Coda positions to get the syllable structure in formative and we can join all of these together to create a prootic word so that's how we can do syllable structures in English hopefully at this point you're able to do that and we can now move into other aspects of phology like sor it I'm just going to briefly talk about sority but we can also think about syllables having different levels of sority in other words how loud a sound can be and how uh how the air flows from inside to outside of your mouth generally the higher sority the more equal the air pressure is inside and outside your mouth and the idea is that syllables start with low sority Peak at a high sority and then go down so in a case like plan H has lower sority than o which has lower sority than a but a has higher sority than n so it's like the syllable is just a peak of sority and that's why when we have the word like lean or Lan it doesn't quite work in English because L has a higher sority than P so this should be a syllable if we want to produce it we need to put some vowel in between to make it sound a little bit better and then Pon would be its syllable so we don't just have one steady Peak here therefore the word is going to be invalid in multi multi- syllabic words you would end up having multiple different Peaks uh like let's say you had LA and then n down here plan net something like that the senority sorry the sority isn't quite perfect there but it does get the idea across of having two different Peaks and the vowels should be each of those Peaks so if I actually red do this according to the Chart if I look at PL for Planet it would be a one it would be a three a five a two a five and a one so our sority would look a little bit like this and you can very clearly see two peaks corresponding to two syllables when we talk about phones in the language we're talking about phones that are contrastive to speakers of that language for example there may be different ways that we produce an N or a p in different words for examply for example in the words tenth and Noise We have an n Sound in each of these but they're pronounced differently the n in tenth is a little bit more forward it's right behind the teeth while in noise it's a little bit further back at your alvea Ridge now English speakers are not going to notice this difference at all they'll just interpret them as n and we use the slashy brackets to mean that we have a phone name while the specific phones that we use to describe the different NS such as regular n and a dental n in the case of tenth are in our square brackets so you can think of a phon name as being a broad transcription and phones or alones as we'll learn that terminology being a more specific or narrow transcription similarly in the words pitch happy and map these are all pronounced slightly differently we have pitch with a little bit of air coming out of it happy which is just a regular p and map which has some closure at the end so the fact that we produce them in different ways doesn't change the fact that we hear them as just n's or P's in fact speakers of other languages where these sounds are contrastive may actually hear the difference better than English speakers so how do we know know which sounds are contrastive in a language well we look for minimal Pairs and the definition is pretty simple we need to have two words that differ in exactly one sound and the two words have different meanings so for example run and done they're spelled a little bit differently three letters versus four letters but if we look at the phonetic transcription run and done the only thing that changes is the r and the D and they have different meanings therefore r& D are contrast of phones for English speakers in other words we we interpret them as different sounds in the case of swim and slim again we have two different meanings with just one change in sound so this tells us that W and L are contrastive in other words they are their own phones in a language so we can analyze other languages by checking for minimal pairs to see if sounds are contrastive so for example we might ask ask ourselves is the glottal frickative and the glottal stop uh do they form any minimal pairs into GC in other words are they distinct sounds so what we can do is we can take a look at some transcriptions of words and we can check to see if we have any minimal pairs so what I do see and if I label them I'll label one and five right off the bat kahone and Kon differ in exactly one sound which is the H and the guttle stop and they have different meanings therefore we have a minimal pair and we can say that H and the glottal stop are separate phones other words speakers of Dalal hear them as different sounds it's going to be the same with two Hari and four AR which is very difficult to pronounce a glottal stop intentionally at the beginning of a word but we see there's a one- sound difference between the H and the glottal stop at the beginning of the word which is some more evidence that H and the glal stop are distinct phones now you might look at to flow into pant which would be three and six and say hey we have a minimal pair here because the first one is separate but this is not actually true and that is because to flow is missing a sound that to pant has so these are what we call near minimal Pairs and we don't necessarily want to use near minimal pairs as evidence unless we don't have any direct minimal pairs to look at so in tal based on the data we found so far the glal furtive and the glal stop are phone names they're separate phone names so they're contrastive sounds and speakers of tala will hear them and interpret them as being different sounds now I said that there's some variation in how we pronounce certain sounds and these are what are called aloon Alo just literally comes from the Greek word for other and then phones would be sounds so you can think of them as other ways to pronounce a phon name so for example with n in English we pronounce it at least a couple different ways we just have a regular n as intent and then we have an N which is closer to the teeth before inter dentals so tenth for example so if you ever see a TH or the and then you have an n Sound before it what's going to happen is that n Sound is going to be Dental high it's going to be closer to the back teeth now when a phon name can be pronounced in multiple different ways we call them each of those different pronunciations an alfone and usually they're in complimentary distribution so what that means is that the environments are completely predictable and if you know what the environment is then you know which version of that phone name you're going to be pronouncing so for example with the 10th case it only occurs before inter dentals and the regular n is going to occur everywhere else so in other words we are never ever going to see a situation where we have a regular n followed by a sound for example that will never happen it will always be dentalized before that so if we were to take a look at a little diagram for these two sounds the n and the subscripts don't quite line up nicely on PDFs but if we take a look at these regular n is right at the alve Ridge and the dental n is with the tongue just behind the teeth so these are little variations in sounds that native English speakers will produce when they're pronouncing words where the N occurs before Theta or the e sound there so how do we find alones especially in English and then in other languages as well well we can take a look at a data set and then work on a specific process for figuring this out so we'll run through it step by step and I'll go through each step as we explain it rather than showing you everything at once so the question we're going to ask are du and the triller separate phones or alphones of the same phon in toolic and to do this we're going to have a data set here with a bunch of words I don't want to focus on the words yet instead let's just look at a step-by-step process in order to determine if we have separate phon names or alones of the same phon name so the first thing we want to do is search for for minimal pairs if we can find a minimal pair with the and R then we can claim their separate phon names and we don't need to do anything else so I will tell you based on the construction of the data set that we are not going to find any minimal pairs here you may find minimal pairs for other sounds like T and the gladle stop but you're not going to find any for D and R so you can try your best to find one but you're not going to so if you don't find one we move to step two and then we're going to start our alfone journey so what we're going to do is we're going to write out a little environment chart so these are the two sounds that we're focusing on duh and the trill and we're going to do some special coding figure out where these occur in a sentence or shouldn't say in a sentence in a word so we're going to use a couple things whenever we see an underline this is the sound that we are investigating if we see a little hashtag symbol this is going to be a word boundary so just those little notation on the side and then we'll show how we can do this in our uh little chart here so I'm basically going to underline every single time I see a D in our data set and we're going to record all of the environments that they incur in so in other words the sound to the left left and the sound to the right so if we take a look and I'm going to number these 1 2 3 four five at least the first five let's take a look at number one in well it's occurring at the beginning of a word so I'm going to put the blank there to mean that that's where the D is that's the sound that we're looking at it occurs at the beginning of a word so put a little hashtag to the left to mean that to the left there's the word boundary and then afterwards we have ah so that's the environment in the first word in fact in the second word it's the same environment so we're not going to repeat it twice in the third word we see something slightly different we see D occurring at the beginning of a word but it's before an oo sound so we write that as a new environment in four we just see the same thing as we did in one and two so we're not going to repeat that in five we see something different we see a d between an n and an U so an n and a u so we're going to put an N to the left our underline to represent where the D is and then a u to the right if we continue on this and we can label the rest 6 7 8 9 and 10 when we look at six and N it's going to be the same thing as the first one we found and then in 10 it's also between an n and U so normally we don't write the numbers where we found these I'm just writing it for illustrative purposes so these are all the environments where D is occurring it's at the beginning of a word before onu or it sandwiched between an n and an U so now we're going to do the exact same thing for our Trill our R sound so I'm going to do this one in blue and well we can start writing out some environments so in word for we see it occurring between two a sounds so again that underline is just representing the r in five we see it between two ooh sounds in seven we see it between an A and an ooh in eight it's between on on we've already done that one and that is everything so now we have two different environment charts for our sounds now what are we going to do with this well we're going to try to find a pattern and the idea is is that all but one alofone will have a nice way to describe it and we're going to have one that's left over that just doesn't have a nice way to describe it and that's what's going to be called the elsewhere condition and that's going to be the default phoning you can think about it as the alofone that occurs in the most environments so when I take a look at each of these I'm looking for patterns with sounds like vowels or consonants maybe things that occur at the beginning or ends of words maybe some features like U being a frickative or being a stop and when we talk about features it'll be a little bit easier to start identifying those but with this simple pattern what I see for R our Trill is that it always occurs between two vowel sounds so this is my guess on what the environment is now in order to make sure I have the right one I need to make sure that this never ever occurs for other alones in other words we we're not going to see D we're not going to see any other alone of r that is in between two vowels and we don't see that we see D at the beginning of a word for the a and u case and then in our third case we see it between an n and a u n is not a vowel so we never see D between two vowels but we do see R so what this means is that we can write out some environments for these we can say that R has a nice description of being between two vowels and D is going to be elsewhere so what that means is when we draw our little phon name chart for this D is going to be our phone name that's the one that occurs in the most environments it splits up into two alones D and the trill and then for the alfone for the trill it's between two vowels which we can signal with Vore V and for D we would call this elsewhere now the important thing to remember from this It's always important to remember whatever the elsewhere condition is is what the phon name is going to would be so we can have a final chart that looks like this again I just used Vore V in the previous one but it's perfectly fine to just write between vowels in English words which is probably a little bit more descriptive and a little bit more helpful than using symbolic terminology so when you draw your complete chart you should have a line for the phone names all of the alones coming out of them and then all of the environments listed where at least or should I say only one of them should say elsewhere and should cover it should cover every other spot or environment that that sound can occur in so in English these would be distinct sounds distinct phones but in talag they're considered just to be the same sound speakers will hear them as a D sound so let's try another data set and see if B and P B and P are separate phon names or if they're alones of the same phony and in English we know these are separate we hear B and differently so let's see if swampy cre does the same so I'm just going to underline be's in green and I'm going to underline P's in red okay so the first thing we should be doing is looking for minimal pairs but all the words are very different so we're not going to find any minimal pairs here so let's take a look at two sounds let's do p and let's do B and let's do some environments so let's do B first in the first word asab it is between two vowels a and a we're just going to ignore length we're not going to write it so the a with the colon after we'll just reduce it to a in the fourth word mebeat we see it between two e sounds and in wabos we see it between an A and an O so you could include length if we want but typically in an introductory Linguistics course you're not going to get a case where length actually matters for determining whether something is an alfone or separate phon names okay so if I'm taking a guess of what B is right now I already see an environment for this it's probably the same thing as what we just saw between two vowels but let's just double check so in asab he is occurring at the end of the word after an A so we put the word boundary to the right uh and the second word it's occurring at the beginning before an A in the third word it's occurring between an S and A W and in the fifth word p it's occurring at the beginning of a word before an e now there is no nice way to characterize where p is occurring so this is definitely going to be the elsewhere environment and I say that because we can't say it's just at the beginning of a word we can't say it's just at the end of the word we can't say it occurs before or after vowels because it also occurs between two consonants there's just no nice pattern there so if we're going to draw an environment chart for this we're going to say that P is the main phon and then it's spoken as p and B in two different environments B occurs in between vowels and P occurs elsewhere so this means in swampy cre p and B are interpreted to be the exact same sound and the environment will predict which form occurs now we do have to be careful about one thing which is free variation so free variation can sometimes look like a minimal pair but it's missing the one important quality about minimal pairs which is that the words have to have different meanings so if we take a look at pronunciations for some of these words like either or either we can say either either or we can say either so it is a minimal pair in a sense because it differs by just one sound but both of these have the exact same meaning which means they're in free variation which means that speakers can choose which one they want to say and both are valid you might also think about potato potato so it rather be potato or potato depending if you're uh North American English if you're British English same with economics or economics you'll hear both different ways you can choose between e or E these look like minimal pairs but they're not because they both have the same meaning which would be economics so let's take a look at some alphones in English so one distinction we make is with L sounds so we have a light L which is like L and then we have a dark L which is a little bit more towards the back with some tongue raising oh now where are these urren English is actually dependent on the syllable so when we have an L in the onset of a syllable it's just a light L it's a regular alvear L but when L occurs in the Koda of a syllable or at the end of the word like in Fall Trail or Milo we do that valorization at the back so it becomes a realized dark l and that's its predictable environment so if we were to draw a chart for this we would just have our regular L which has two alphones the alvear L and the dark L the dark L is going to occur in kodas and L the regular one we can say onsets because there's really only two positions or because it's the more common one we can call this elsewhere so that's one type of alfone that we have in English we also have nasalized vowels and this one is interesting too because it also relies on syllables so for example when we say a word like Pat and Pan the a in Pat doesn't have any airf flow through your nasal passage but in pan a there is some air flow through your nasal cavity now this is because the vowel is occurring in the same syllable as the nasal and in order to prepare for the nasal to be produced the nasal cavity will open up with the vum essentially allowing air to flow through the nasal cavity so we indicate this with a little squiggle above our vowels to say it's nasalized so when we take a look a look at words like pan and fend and simple we see some nasalization in those vowels but if we compare it with something like stamina mellow or Slimmer we don't get that opening into our nasal cavity we don't that nasalization and that's because these vowels are split from the next one or they're split from the nasal in the following syllable in the case of Mello e is occurring afterwards so it's not getting any nasalization there so we could do a bunch of different minimal Pairs and a bunch of different environment charts for these um however it's easier just to say that vowels in general have two alep phon it has the regular one and then it has the nasalized one nasalized when it precedes a nasal in the Koda of the same syllable and it's just a regular vowel and anywhere else another really common alfone that we have in English are aspirated stops so p t and K are pronounced with a little puff of air which is symbolized with an H superscript when the voiceless stop occurs at the beginning of a stressed syllable it has to be the first sound in the stressed syllable so in pal or payment or Empower there's a little puff of air on those P's when it's being pronounced but in happy Taps and spit you don't get that same burst of air so for voiceless stops we essentially have a phoning P that can occur either as a regular P or an aspirated p in the different environments that are listed above and that's going to be the same thing for T and K now when voiceless stops or voiced stops occur either at the end of a word or it occurs before another stop rective affricate or liquid it's closed so it's not fully released another words we're not making the sound releasing the sound then moving on to the next consonant we're just making that sound as we close our mouth and then the next sound is coming as we open our mouth and we indicate this with a little uh half box to the top right of it so picture rapure stickler com and bad MAP catness so it's not catness map bad it's just bad map catness in fact I might even be very difficult to hear on the microphone if it's not picking up those sounds as I'm closing my mouth I believe this is the last one I have and these are devoice liquids and Glides so when we have y w or and it's occurring after a voiceless consonant it is going to be devoiced in other words it's not quite voiceless but it doesn't vibrate as much or as quickly as it does in other positions so pure quick proud clay flight quiet uh these are all cases where those liquids and Glides are being devoiced so we symbolize that by putting a little circle underneath each of those sounds so those are just some examples of alphones that we have in English that you were probably never aware of so when we have a bunch of patterns like let's say we have all of our vowels doing a certain thing or all of our voice less stops it makes sense to group them together as a unit rather than saying well p and t and K does this but it's better just to say well voiceless stops do this so in swampy cre we did an exercise where we found that P has two different alphones B and p b between vowels and P elsewhere but if we take a look at all of the voiceless stops in swampy cre we see a very similar pattern where the voiceless stop becomes voiced between vowels and it stays voiceless in every other position so what we want to do is we want to generalize this and say okay as a general rule voiceless stops become voiced between vowels and this is specifically in swampy Creek and it's a nice General way to capture what is happening without having to draw very specific environment charts for a bunch of independent sounds and this concept is actually quite important for features which we're going to see in probably about 20 minutes or so but before we get into features we want to talk about phological processes because a lot of these alific changes can be classified depending on what they're doing so we have five main types of phonological processes which are assimilation where two sounds become more alike dissimilation where sounds become less alike we don't really see that too much in English deletion where we remove a sound athesis where we add a sound sound and metathesis where we swap sounds so we're going to take a look at each of these in turn with examples from English and other languages so the first one is assimilation so one sound might become more similar to a sound that comes after it or even before it and a really common one across languages that we see in English is nasal Place assimilation so in other words when we pronounce nasals specifically the n Sound it like to change depending on its neighbor to the right so although the word input is spelled with an N there's a p after it and the p is a bilabial sound so what happens is that babiess on the P gets transferred to the n and then when we speak it quickly in speech we say input input we say it with an M that's how it's pronounced by most speakers in the case of ink ink we don't say ink we say ink with a Veer and because the K is verer so that verness gets transferred over to the N behind it and it is now a verer nasal when it's pronounced we do the same thing with f and v in English so in a word like emphasis emphasis it's not an M that's produced with your two lips no because the f is labio dental and that n or M wants to become very similar to that sound it's also very close so that M actually becomes a labiod dental nasal emphasis emphasis if you say it slowly you'll be able to feel that your lower lip is touching your top teeth as the nasal is produced emphasis so the M with a little hook on it is the laod dental nasal Now dissimilation isn't really one that we have in English too often I know there are specific examples where some speakers do it but it's not common enough that it's something that I remember off the top of my head or that is frequently posted in linguistics resources so in Greek what happens is when two fricatives occur back to back what happens is the second one typically the second one will change to a stop so in the case of fio where we have an X here and this symbolizes a voiceless veative so imagine K but in affricative form something like it's very difficult for me to do because I don't have it my languages that I speak but that's difficult for Greek speakers to pronounce too so instead it changes that Friv to a stomp in this case so that way we don't have two fricatives back to back so it maintains its voicelessness and its Ferness but it changes from a perative to a stop to make the sound scolio so we see that change there from an x uh a voiceless Veer furtive to the voiceless wheer stop now deletion occurs quite often in English and it's why some words can be pronounced with two or three syllables and then alternatively with a syllable less and we delete schwas a lot in speech so for example with words like parade corrode suppose if we speak quickly enough we typically just say pray crode suppose so we just completely delete that schah to begin with and then we're just left with one syllable because if we delete a SWAT we're deleting a vowel which means we're going to have one less syllable in the word it's just a faster way to talk now aenescens you'll put in an extra sound just to make that transition a little bit easier so in the case of something you'll hear a lot of people say something something you can very hear you can very clearly hear a p there or in the case of warmth that's a little bit difficult to say so people will say warmth warmth and they'll put a p sound in there uh with tenth what we do sometimes is say tenth tenth you kind of hear a closed T right before the th sound but we add in these extra sounds this is known as athesis in order to make those sound transitions a little bit easier and it's predictable which one we get the nasal is going to choose which voiceless stop gets put in so if we're sticking something after an N it's going to be a t after an M it's going to be a p if we have an Ang sound we're going to add a k after and our last one is metathesis now this is something that kids typically do not so much adults but you do hear it sometimes and this is when sounds AR swapped so a really common one in English that like children and adults will do is the word prescription prescription it'll be pronounced as perscription in other words the r and the uh are going to swap positions when it's pronounced uh what kids will do is something like spaghetti they might say petti petti in fact that g in petti might actually be pronounced as a k just because having a voiceless frickative followed by a voice stop can be quite difficult to pronounce and an interesting case in the word of foliage some people just pronounce foliage is foilage in other words they take that e sound and the o sound and they combine them together and put them before the L and I think what happens here is people in their mind they just have this word in their head written as foilage um but it's actually foliage but these are examples of metathesis so let's see if we can take a look at some of these changes and figure out which type of phological process is occurring so for example in stain to Spain what is happening well we have a t changing to a p now in terms of what this might be what do we notice about s& t well these are both alvear sounds now what about SNP well now we have an alvear sound and a bilabial sound so the t is becoming less similar to S it's becoming a p so this is an example of dissimilation we don't want to have two alve sounds back to back so one of them changes to be bilabial different what about in the second case of flage to fool Mage well here we're just swapping the positions of the L and the o sound so this is going to be metathesis what about in the last one strance to stance strance to stance well we're missing a sound in our new word so this just a case of deletion or deleting a sound in order to make it pronounceable a little bit easier now you shouldn't be thinking about English in this case because these are not things that we typically do in English but you should be thinking about like possibilities for different languages around the world especially when it comes to phonotactic constraints okay what about in this Russian example so we have t and D being alphones in other words uh we would have a base form which I think is going to be D in this case if I know my Russian well at all is going to have two alphones one is going to be du and one is going to be T so we're given that information and now we're just checking to see which process is occurring so what I might do is look at the sound and then look at the following one so I see TP DB DV TF and DM now what do we notice about these pairs is that D is always occurring before voiced sounds and T is always occurring between or before voiceless sounds so this is a case of assimilation because the T D is being chosen based on the following sound it's becoming more like the sound after it in terms of voicing now one last example here we have Spanish and this happens very common when Spanish people learn how to speak English they end up bringing their Pho tactics along with them so instead of saying ski you might hear them say a ski and instead of saying School you might hear them say a school so what's happening here is we're adding an a sound to the beginning of the word to break up these syllables so that way the phonotactics is allowed according to Spanish phono tactics anyway so this is an example of athesis so this is how we can take a look at phological processes and classify them according to the type that they are when we talk about phonological processes it is very rare that a phonological process will apply to just one sound in a language normally it applies to a natural class of sounds and a natural class is just any group of sounds that share some similar feature now this means that we're going to need to think more carefully about our sounds and go beyond phonetic description but once we understand the features of sounds we can then form groups so for example PT and K would be the natural class of English voiceless stops ptk bdg and the glottal stop included would be just the natural class of English stops now there are some cases where phonetic descriptions Aren't Enough For example the sounds and J form a natural class but if we take a look at their descriptions two of them are alve four of them are post alve so there's no commonality there uh some are voice some are voiceless there's no commonality there and then four figuratives and two are africat so there's no commonality there but actually these all have a very similar feature in that they're all considered to be strident sounds and strident sounds are your noisy fra Dives and africat so if we have features then we can capture this natural class with a feature like stride and se but with just descriptions we're not going to be able to get at that so there are a lot of features out there and features are essentially plus or minus properties that certain sounds have and every feature is exactly one property of sound so if we take a look at the feature specification for T we're going to see a lot of different words here and features and we'll understand them all in detail one by one learning to ask yes or no questions to identify whether something is plus or minus so for example T is a consonantal sound it is not cabic it's not sonant it is not voiced the glotus is not spread the glotus is not constricted this is not a continuent sound this is not a nasal sound this is not a sound with a delayed release this is not a sound with lateral air flow it is a cornal sound this is a place of articulation and under the cornal specification this is an anterior sound which means it's a little bit more forward than other cornal sounds so if you didn't understand that that's fine but we'll learn all of these features one by one sorted into different classifications so the first one is going to be the major class features and these will help distinguish between our consonants Glides and vowels now consonants can be broken up into three categories which are obstr nasals and liquids and obrin is a term that captures oral stops fricatives and africat so whenever you hear the word obrant think of your oral stops your fricatives and your africat so basically anything that's not a nasal liquid glider vowel so there's a few major class features one is continental and this just asks is there obstruction in the vocal tract so is the sound a consonant that's the question you can ask so plus consonantal sounds are going to be consonants like PT k s Z SH and ch also nasals like n and M and then sounds that are minus consonantal will be your Glides vowels and sounds like H and the glottal stop and that's because this obstruction or H and the glottal stop does not occur in the vocal tract but occurs down in the glotus now syllabic sounds help differentiate our consonant and Glides from vowels so can the sound act as a nucleus of a syllable and this is usually reserved for vowels so vowels are plus syllabic while anything that's a consonant or Glide will be minus cabic last one is sonant and there's two ways you can think about this in an intro textbook a lot of the time you'll be given this pneumonic which is like is the sound singable so you can hum nasals you can hold liquids you can kind of sing Glides and you can definitely sing vowels while oberin you're stops figuratives and africat can't be sung it can't be whole held now to me that's a difficult way of explaining things so I like to think about the air pressure discussion so if these are your teeth if there is more air pressure inside the mouth then there is air pressure outside of the mouth so let's just do something like this so we can see that okay yeah this is a face if that looks like a a rabid dog or something uh if there's more air pressure inside the mouth than outside the mouth then it is minus sonant so when you think about your stops where air is being held or your fricatives where it's more air pressure inside than outside causing that turbulence or you think about africat that start as a stop and release into a fricative these are all minus sonant sounds with nasals liquids Glides and vowels there is equal air pressure inside and outside the mouth so these are Plus sonant so I think this is the only major class feature that really requires some sort of memorization if you're not comfortable with feeling the air pressure differences inside and outside of your mouth now we also have lenal features so these are things that your glaus is doing so Voice is pretty straightforward is the sound voiced if it's a voice sound it's plus voice if it's a voiceless sound it is minus voice it's it's just that straightforward we have two more specific ones which is spread glotus and constricted glotus now spread glotus is asking whether or not there's aspiration so when you take a look at aspirated p t and K that occur at the beginning of stress syllables those are plus spread glaus and also the H because if we're making a frive our vocal folds are going to be open as air comes out of it every other sound is going to be minus spread glaus so you can really just learn the ones that are plus spread glaus and everything else minus constricted glotus is asking if the glotus is closed and the only sound that we have in English that does this is our glottal stop everything else is going to be minus constricted glotus so let's fill out some feature matricies for these sets of sounds so if we have any sort of vowel out there how would we assign pluses and minuses well vowels are not consonantal they are cabic because you can insert them as a nucleus of a syllable and they're sonant because they have equal air pressure inside and outside the mouth another words there's a lot of space inside your mouth because your tongue is the only thing moving around and it's not impeding any air flow now what about Glides okay Glides are not Continental they don't have that obstruction in the vocal tract there's still quite a bit of room it's a lot like a typical vowel like e or or U when you think of Y or W they're also not syllabic so we can't make a syllable around a Glide we need a vowel sound to form a syllable but they are sonant so the air pressure is very similar to a vowel like e or o equal air pressure inside and outside the mouth so these are plus sonant so if you want to know the differences between vowels and Glides in terms of features it's really just a difference in the cabic feature the consonant and sonant are going to be the same between both of them now what about aspirated voiceless stops well it's a voiceless stop so they're going to be Continental uh they're consonant so they can't be a peak of a nucleus so it's going to be minus cavic stops have different air pressure inside and outside the mouth so these are minus sonant now in terms of spread glaus and constricted glotus these are aspirated stops so these have a puff of air when you them so these are plus spread glotus but it's not constricted glotus it is going to be minus constricted glotus because we're not looking at the glottal stop there so those are some minor feature matrices at this point that cover three different types of natural classes now we have some manner features so these are all about the different manners of articulation so basically about air flow so continuent is asking whether there's continuous air air flow through the oral cavity very specifically the oral cavity so sounds that are plus continuent would be your fricatives liquids Glides and vowels and sounds that are minus continuent would be your oral stops as expected also nasal stops so even though air flow continues out of the nasal cavity there is obstruction in the oral cavity for nasal stops so they are minus continuent and then africat they start basically as a stop so they're minus continuous now the nasal feature is what talks about air flow through the nasal cavity so sounds that are plus nasal would be your nasal stops or even the nasalized vowels that we saw before like in pin for example with the little Tia above it every other sound is going to be minus nasal now we have two more Manor features one is delayed release so delayed release is basically letting us know whether or not we have an affricate sound so is the closure of a sound released slowly well you can think of it as CH and J when you start the sound it begins as a stop and then it releases slowly into a frickative so that's what the plus delayed release feature is capturing everything else is going to be minus delayed release now in terms of our last feature here lateral we're asking whether air flows through the sides of the tongue or not so in English we have L and then we also have our dark L AS Plus lateral sounds and everything else will be minus lateral so let's think about some of our manner features for these groups of sounds if we're dealing with m n and n we can ask ourselves is it continuent well remember continuent is about the oral cavity and it is blocked in the oral cavity we're closing our lips to make an M touching the alvea ridge to make n or touching the vum to make so these are all minus continuent sounds they are however nasal sounds so when we talk about nasal stops these are plus nasal minus continuent sounds now what about L well we can hold it in the mouth so this will be continuent it's not nasal we don't have any air going through our nasal cavity and it is a lateral sound because air is flowing through the sides of the tongue now in terms of CH and J these are going to be minus continuent sounds even though you can hold them at the end for that beginning bit has obstruction in your oral cavity and that is what the delayed release is doing here this is plus delayed release as we release into a frickative towards the end of the sound now we have some place features and place features are a little bit more General than what we use in our phonetic description and they relate to the the bottom articulators of your mouth so we have labial sounds that include Bilo Lao dental and labio Veer sounds we have coronal sounds which involve the tip of the tongue so these are interdental sounds Dental sounds alular sounds and post alular sounds and then we have dorsal which uses the back of the tongue or the middle of the tongue for paler Leo sounds as well as vowels and if you look at other languages this also includes ular and Fingal sounds so this a nice little diagram of what you could use to remember how these Place features are used so if the bottom lip is used then it's going to be a labial sound if the tip of the tongue or the front of the tongue is used it's a cornal sound and if the middle or back of the tongue is used it is a dorsal sound not that all vowels are going to be dorsal as well so if a sound is labial cornal or dorsal there will be other features that come along with it so the first one is round now round sounds are sounds where the lips are rounded so w o o these are examples of our rounded sounds in English and every other bilabial Lao Dent or labio Veer sound is going to be minus round in this case so PB the Lao Dental m is minus round so if if we use a round feature that means it is going to be a labial feature so if a sound like let's say we have t we know this is going to be a coronal sound so in terms of our features we don't actually consider writing about plus or minus round because we only consider the round feature when a sound is labial now coronal features have a couple of them the first one is anterior so the question is is the tongue touching or in front of the alve ridge so you can think of a little line right here at your alve Ridge everything to the left of it is plus anterior and everything to the right of it is minus anterior so anterior just meaning towards the front in this case so inter dentals and alvear will be plus anterior and post alvers and palatals will be minus anterior the second one we have is strident so this is asked if the cornal frive or africat is noisy so the natural class we saw a little bit before J are plus strident sounds and our other two sounds that are coronal like th and th these are not as noisy these don't have as intense turbulence as the other strident sounds and the last one are dorsal features so with dorsal features you can think of them as typically relating to vowels so we have high low and back and we can draw these on the diagram to show what features are which so if a feature is in the top row it is plus high if it is in the middle or bottom so mid or low sounds these ones are minus high now in terms of low the lowest sounds are plus low and then high and mid sounds are going to be minus slow so if we want to capture the middle column sorry the middle row in terms of our sounds like for instance E A we want to take a look at this natural class these would be minus low and also minus High while if we're taking a look at low sounds we just need plus low if we just take a look at high sounds we need plus high now the one confusing feature is probably back so back is actually everything thing that is Central or back so our mid Central vowels are considered to be plus back while only our front vowels are considered to be minus back there is no plus or minus front feature and that's because there are no natural classes that seem to Target uh well that they don't seem to require a plus front so in other words there's not going to be anything that is plus back and minus front in the middle that we would need to disambiguate we can just get all the natural classes that undergo phonological processes with minus back and plus back as well as high and low features if necessary now I should mention in terms of high and back we're just looking at vowels here but if you think about sounds like C and these are all pronounced very close to where U is pronounced so these sounds are considered plus high and plus back so when you think about the verer sounds these are plus high and plus back think of them just having the same spe feature specifications as something like o in terms of height and backness now there's two more which is tense and reduced so tense is just asking is the vowel tense I think that's pretty straightforward if you understand the phonetic descriptions and then we have the reduced feature asking is the vowel reduced so in other words is it awah so if it's awah yeah it's plus reduced if it's anything else then it's going to be minus reduced so let's think about these dorsal Sounds here K like I said before these are going to be plus high and plus back that captures it if we want to add that specification in we would also say minus low it does not make sense to talk about tenseness or reduced for consonants because consonants cannot be tense that is a feature of vowels and same with reduced uh qualities a consonant is not going to be reduced so let's try some exercises let's figure out the spe feature specifications for U and Z so o is going to be labial and dorsal it's a vowel but it uses the lips for rounding so we don't write plus or minus around labial or dorsal we just include them as unary features so either they're there or they're not because U is rounded it is going to be plus round in terms of the vowel chart if we think about where o is placed it is in the ey back so this is going to be plus High plus back minus low U is a tense vowel so it's plus tense and because it's a vowel we know it can be the peak of a nucleus so sorry the peak of a syllable so it can be plus cavic and it's plus sonant because there's equal air pressure inside and outside the mouth now in terms of this is a cornal sound this uses the tip of your tongue to pronounce and this is a noisy sound so it's plus strident it is at the alve ridge so we're going to say it's plus anterior it's Continental obviously because it's a consonant there's obstruction in the oral tract so this is plus Continental it is not a nasal sound it's minus nasal it is not a cabic sound it cannot act as the nucleus of a syllable it is not sonant the noisiness from Z occurs because there is more air pressure inside the mouth than outside so it's minorant this is a voiced sound and it's continuent you can hold this and air continuously flows outside of the oral cavity so I've been doing this for a long time I've known these phological features for what like 13 years at this point so it's going to be fast for me to do it but I do not memorize any of these things I never have what I did was I tried to understand the questions that you ask for these sounds produce the sounds really think about them drop pictures look at the IPA chart of necessary and then work out whether the feature is plus or minus if you go through the memorization route there are charts online that show every single feature for every single sound it it is too much to memorize and it's going to be a lot easier if you just understand the sounds you'll understand everything better and if you're taking exams in a real course you'll perform much better if you just understand the questions to ask and understand how to produce the sounds so now that we have natural classes we can talk about formal rules so a rule is just a formal representation of a phological process and there's two ways that we can write this we can say that X changes to Y so this arrow is changes to we have a slashy bracket that means in the environment of and then we have a on the left with an underscore and then B on the right so this would mean mean that your sound X is between A and B whatever sounds or features those could be and it changes to Y after uh the phonological process occurs that's one way of writing it this is the typical convention for writing these types of rules however if you're familiar with Computing science and you understand what a context sensitive grammar is then you might be more familiar with the style like this where a XB becomes a y B so in other words A and B the environment around it is staying the same but there's a change in that middle sound X to come to become some other sound y now A and B can be empty so they don't have to actually have things there but let's see some of these rules in Pro in action so let's say we have a rule that says that p p becomes B when preceding a voice consonant so how we would write this is we'd say p the P sound becomes B so we have the arrow here that says becomes and then we're listing an environment the underscore is where the sound occurs and it means that after that sound we have a class of plus consonantal plus voiced sounds so any voiced consonant that comes after P will make it change to B so we can see some changes here in the case of hepu well we see a z a voice consonant coming after the P so that would change the B B heu in the case of laba B is a voice consonant sound p is not so that P is going to change to a b and we'd basically be doubling up on the B's labba what if we have a rule that says b becomes V when between two vowels okay so B is becoming V we have our environment symbol this is where the sound is occurring so it's occurring between two things which are minus consonantal plus Sant plus cabic so on each side these indicate vowels now I'm showing this with a feature Matrix because we just learn that and we use features when rules get more complicated but it's also perfectly fine to write B becomes V in the environment between two vowels so Vore V looks kind of like a sad face so this would describe the following changes kbop the B is between two vowels so would change to a v to make heop in the case of saboa well B is between a and o this other B is between O and U so those would change to v's and we get sa obviously these are not English words but this is an example of how it could be applied so our goal is to really just understand what rules are saying depending on the course you're in you may have to produce these rules but for the most part usually just understanding is good enough so let's say that we have a rule like this minus syllabic plus consonantal and minus sonant sounds so this is a natural class of sounds rather than just one specific sound changing becomes nothing so this is the empty set symbol this means it's basically being deleted and it says in the environment of the sound occurs here and it's at the end of a word so we have our word boundry there so what is this saying this is saying that consonantal sounds are deleted at the end of a word so our natural class of consonants becomes nothing when it's at end of word which means that with our examples below we might have bead well we have a d here at the end of a word so it just say pronounced as B in the case of pip you know we have a p at the end of the word so it's deleted and it just becomes fodi so we have a couple practice exercises so the first one is saying that nothing becomes something so this is a case of athesis we're adding a sound so nothing becomes a dorsal minus High minus low minus back plus tense sound so when I think about the vowel chart what I'm saying here is it's not and if I draw something like this it is not high so it's not these sounds it is not low it's not these sounds uh it's not back so it's not going to be these sounds and it's going to be tense so in the vowel chart this would just be the sound a so this is the Spanish sound that we do not have on its own in English so basically we're adding the sound a in a specific environment so this is at the beginning of a word before two consonants so minus cabic minus sarant plus consonant is just describing consonants so when we at the beginning of the word and we have two consonants what's going to happen is we're going to add a to those two consonants before it so you can think about this case like being ski a Spanish person tries to speak this word they might say a ski so it's making that change there because we have an S and A K which are consonantal sounds back to back and it's at the beginning of a word so we add a to it here's another example again looking at natural classes so minus salvic plus Continental minus sonant minus nasal minus continuent plus voice and plus anterior sounds become plus nasal before nasal stops so it's minus syllabic because these can't be uh the peak of a syllable but when I see plus consonantal plus nasal these are just nasal stops so what is this natural class at the beginning trying to tell us well minus cabic plus consonantal minus sonant is telling us consonant minus nasal and minus continuent together are basically telling us that these are oral Stops Plus our africat so basically just not going to be nasals and uh going to be obster in that case it's plus voice so these are going to be our voiced oral stops africat and they're coronal ones so specifically we're not looking at bilabial or V ones and we're looking at plus anterior ones so if my understanding is correct I'm talking specifically about the sounds du and J in this case these would be our voiced oral stops and africat that are coronal and plus anterior so being at the alvea ridge or between the two teeth and we're saying that these become nasal before nasal stops okay so this might be a little bit weird but there's nothing wrong with posing a rule that changes these sounds to be somewhat nasalized it is odd but if we're just trying to understand what the rule is saying then that's exactly what is happening so our last example here is going to be plus cabic minus Continental minus round so what does this mean this is going to to be well specifically these are going to be labial sounds because we have minus round in there so we're looking at we're okay labial it could be dorsal as well because we're taking a look at cabic sounds so we'll include that there okay so we're looking at our unrounded vowels essentially unrounded vowels plus our Glides in this case and these are becoming plus round so basically they're becoming rounded vowels and in which environment it's between two labial consonants so it would be between things like PB and M in these cases as well as F or V so if we have something like p i b this is going to change to be rounded which would be p and then the Y symbol and B so PE to PE and that would be another example of understanding a rule so that is it for phology we will now start talking about intro syntax so syntax is the study of sentence structure what we want to be able to do by the end of the section is take a look at declarative English sentences and be able to diagram how they are formed into different word categories and phrases so for example this structure may be a little bit scary at first for the small dog quickly ran to the store but we're going to learn how to label each individual word category and then how we can build them up into phrases in order to form a complete sentence so to do that we should probably understand what a sentence is and we'll take a look at the smallest possible sentence that we can have which is a sentence that has at least a subject and a predicate so the subject is simply who what the sentence is about you can usually ident identify subjects in sentences by replacing them with a pronoun like he she they or it and predicates are what the subject does feels or what it is so we have three example sentences here the first one is Pho sleeps now phto is the subject and sleeps is the predicate in the sentence we basically need two words to make a sentence in English so V is the subject here we can replace it with a word like he the old man with the suitcase left to Africa last week in this example the old man with the suitcase is our subject again we can replace this whole thing with the word he and then we get the phrase or sentence he left to Africa last week so left to Africa last week is the predicate it's telling us what the subject is doing then the third one a cold frigid old book lay tattered on the ground we can replace this whole subject object here with a word like it it lay tattered on the ground and lay tattered on the ground is the predicate that's describing what the cold frigid old book is doing so what this means is that if we want to create a sentence we at the very least can split it up into subject and predicate these are separate things and we'll keep them separate in our tree structures so let's practice identifying them so we'll underline the subject and then whatever is left is the predicate so dog had an accident I'm going to say Jenna's dog is the subject here because we can replace it with the word it it had an accident that means that had an accident and everything else is the predicate the bunny rabbit that is eating grass left me now we may think that the bunny rabbit is the subject here but if we write it here it that is eating grass left me that sounds a little weird that's not quite right instead it is the whole thing the bunny rabbit that is eating grass left me so we could say it left me and that would be fine so the object that we're thinking about the subject that we're thinking about in the real world is a bunny rabbit who is eating grass and for the third case one of the only people in the world that I know is coming to meet me so who or what are we talking about well we're talking about one of the only people in the world that I know and we could replace it with he so he is coming to meet me and that would be fine so whatever's left in this case is coming to meet me is the predicate so we don't want to be looking for just like a verb to figure out where the subject and predicate boundary is we want to be using a test like the It replacement or he she they replacement in order to make sure that the sentence is grammatical and that we've replaced the entire subject so we should also talk about some grammaticality judgments because what does it mean for a sentence to be grammatical well in general sentence is just grammatical if a first language speaker of that language accepts it as a possible sentence so for example I don't want to believe that froto is stealing my magazines that's perfectly grammatical to me it sounds fine the one which the with scooter ran the park towards this is not okay at all this is ungrammatical uh the one which is fine but then putting the afterward is a little weird we can't do that uh with scooter where missing a an article like a or the uh ran the park towards really towards should be before the park in this case so this just doesn't work for me and in some dialects the third sentence would be considered grammatical so I ain't wanting none of them people near me you hear so some people do talk like this so in like a standard Canadian or American dialect you might not expect it to be grammatical but there are some speakers out there who talk like this and we'd say it's grammatical for those speakers now let's talk about word categories so there's a couple different type of syntactic categories or word categories that we can look at the first one are lexical categories and these are just content words in a sentence so these are nouns adjectives verbs adverbs and prepositions and then we have non-lexical ones so these are functional words they're not content words they're usually introduced for grammatical purposes so when we learn these we're going to be focusing on Lex categories first and these can be determined by their meaning inflection and distribution when we talk about nouns adjectives verbs adverbs and prepositions we're not simply just talking about their meaning because some words can have uh the same word appear as multiple different categories depending on the context so if we just think about context then we can start thinking about the different possibilities of these words so for example in the sentence wrong rarely prospers wrong is acting as a noun here it's a subject but in the second sentence you wrong me and I'll sue you it's acting as a verb it's making a connection between you and me in the case of that tourist took the wrong road well wrong is describing the road it's an adjective in this case and when you say Edward often spells words wrong you're describing how the spelling happens well it spells incorrectly so just because we have a single word doesn't mean that it has a specific category we need to care about context in addition to meaning so for nouns these are the most straightforward ones in terms of meaning they're people places things and they also have abstract qualities like happiness or idea generally if you want to find a noun you can add a plural form or possessive form to it so in the case of kid we can make it kids idea ideas in the case of Jane saying multiple Janes might be weird but we can add that possessive apostrophe same with proper names like El Salvador El Salvador is government or something like that in terms of its distribution it usually occurs after determiners so words like the uh many or some or even after adjectives so in the case of the man and some students these are examples of determiners and they occur before the noun and in the case of a small workbook small the adjective is describing the noun nouns Ty come after when adjectives used attributively like in that case now adjectives are properties or attributes of nouns so what adjectives do is they describe nouns so quick green frothy wooden fastest Greener rich or poorest these are all examples of words that describe nouns and usually what we can do with these words is we can add a comparative suffix like er or even another word like more so we could do for example quicker or we could do more quick that might sound a little bit weird to some people but it's perfectly fine to me uh or we can do a superlative form so we could do quicker quickest uh more quick or even most quick now typically where it occurs is usually right before nouns but sometimes it occurs after linking verbs like is or feels or seems so for example in cute puppy cute is occurring before puppy it's described in it but in the case of Jane is sad or the cute boy is smart this is is kind of like an equals relationship so cute is describing boy but so is smart in this case so these are adjectives in both of those positions the ones where adjectives occur before nouns are called attributive adjectives and the ones where adjectives appear after a linking verb or is are considered predicative adjectives so if you ever hear those two terms that is what those mean now verbs we typically think of them as action words but they can be Sensations or States as well so run toss jump and allow these are usually like pretty common action words but things like is is another example of a verb or feels where you're feeling an internal feeling and not actually touching something so verbs have several different forms they have a past tense form a past participle form a present partip ipal form and a third person form what I mean by this is we can think of run we have the past tense ran we have the past participle had run I'll put commas in there uh we have the present participle is running and we have the third person singular runs so whenever you have a verb you can make these five different forms including the base form there and that will tell us that you have a verb if you take something like uh what's something that definitely cannot be a like happiness for example happiness is a noun but we don't have a past tense of Happiness we can't say had uh happiness or is happing or happiness is we don't have those forms in English and in terms of their distribution they normally start this the predicate after the subject although you can have adverbs or helping verbs called auxiliaries or modals before that and these are usually somewhere around adverbs so it's strict distribution is a little bit hard to pinpoint but it's usually the headword in a predicate it's like the most important idea in the predicate so he left left is our predicate that's going to be our verb they quickly ran here we have quickly it's an adverb modifying ran but ran is the main action there and for Martha eight slowly we see another case where the adverb is coming after this time now adverbs are words that modify verbs or they modify entire sentences we can think of the dis the distinction between adjectives and adverbs as being adjectives describe nouns and adverbs can describe everything else so some of these have comparative and superlative forms like quickest slower quieter harder hardest quietest and so on depending on their use um but most of the ejectives or sorry the adverbs that we have in English and in an ly we do have some cases like tomorrow or words like here and there that are adverbs that don't quite follow that pattern but in general if you want to determine whether something is an adverb you want to check the movement test so adverbs can appear immediately before after a verb but they can also be moved around to the beginning or end of a sentence so you can say quickly they ran or they quickly ran either position is fine and it describes the action of running or the whole sentence of them running in the case of Martha ate slowly we can put it after the verb but we could say slowly Martha at and that would be fine as well so we could move it to the beginning and that's going to be your best trick in order to determine what an adverb is now the last one is prepositions prepositions cannot be inflected so we don't have to worry about different forms of prepositions and their meanings are a little bit confusing I say confusing because there are so many different possible meanings for prepositions that it's not really helpful to use meaning as a diagnostic tool it's often better to use distribution and that is that prepositions always introduce noun phrases we'll learn what noun phrases are a little bit later in more detail but think about it as a noun with all of its descriptive words or modifiers so up the road up is introducing a noun phrase near Ben near is introducing a noun phrase at 500 a.m 5 a.m is a noun phrase and we have some other examples for nine months with binoculars like B didy next to him uh in each of these cases sometimes it is best to just understand some general prepositions and how they work and use those as Bas lines When comparing other ones so prepositions can be substituted with a limited amount of other prepositions depending on the context so if I have something like Road and I see a word like beside and I'm like hm is beside a preposition I don't know well I could use another preposition to see if it fits well up the road if I know that up is a preposition and beside is kind of doing the same thing it's talking about a location and it's introducing that noun phrase then I can say okay this is probably a preposition too so let's try determining the categories of the underlined words below so each time my dog runs away from me I quietly threaten him with destroying a small box of his two favorite snacks okay so time is a noun each time each is what's called a determiner and it's introducing the noun time dog is a noun in this case runs away runs is the action it's the verb here way is describing the direction that we're running so this is an adverb and what from is doing is from is introducing a noun phrase me or just a noun in this case specifically a pronoun so this is a preposition and this from is like always going to behave as a preposition uh I quietly threaten so quietly is describing how the threatening is happening so threaten is a verb and quietly is an adverb there uh him with destroying a small box of his two favorite snacks so with is a preposition uh you're doing it with something and then small box box is a noun small is describing that noun so this is going to be an adjective and then for favorite snacks snacks is another noun it's a thing in the world and favorite is describing those snacks so favorite is an adjective now that we understand some basic categories we can start thinking about constituents and then we can start building into structure so a constituent is just just any word or group of words that function as a unit so the most basic ones that you can think of that we've seen so far are our subject and our predicate so the subject is a constituent and the predicate is a constituent and basically if we draw a little tree structure we can pick up a node and anything that dangles underneath it is considered a constituent so my sister is a constituent bu a book is a constituent and if we pick up this thing just above a book then a book is a constituent now we need to figure out some ways in order to identify constituents that don't involve structure so the first type of constituents we're going to look at are phrases and these are groups of words that function as a unit so a phrase is a type of constituent and we're going to look specifically at five different types of phrases so noun phrases adjective phrases verb phrases adverb phrases and prepositional phrases these come from the lexical categories that we just learn so one important phrase terminology is head and we say that the head of a phrase determines its category now what this means is that let's say we have the word dog and we identify that it is a noun so we label it as n because we have a noun that needs to build up into a noun phrase so the noun dog is the head of the noun phrase so basically whenever we have a lexical category like noun verb adjective adverb or preposition we need to build it up into its respective phrase so run is a verb that needs to build into a verb phrase and we say the verb is the head the adjective builds into an adjective phrase and the adjective is a head and so on so what we're going to do is we're going to take these small phrases and build them up into bigger phrases so in order to know which phrases connect to which other phrases we need to employ constituency tests so if we want to do a constituency test we need to have a basic understanding of what the word categories are because if we want to claim that something is a noun phrase then we need to have a noun if we want to complain uh if we want to say that something is a verb phrase we need to have a verb in there we're going to learn several constituency tests and it's important to note that not all constituency tests work in every case so we need to employ several and see what the general outcome is of those tests and that's because language has some unique can special properties that are a little bit too complicated for an intro course that prevent some of the tests from working so the first one is the substitution test and we saw this when identifying subjects earlier so the idea is if you have some sort of phrase like an XP so that could be a noun phrase or a verb phrase we can replace it with another phrase of the same type so that means that if we have a noun phrase or we want to say that something's a noun phrase we can replace it with with a different noun phrase so what we do in this case is we learn some basic phrases that are always noun phrases or verb phrases or prepositional phrases and then we use those for substitution purposes to check to see if that's what we have in a sentence so what I mean by this is the kid in the pool said that he would leave at night so is this a constituent and I want to say that maybe this is a noun phrase so what I do know is that a single pronoun like he is a n phrase so if I can take the noun phrase he and substitute it in for that big thing there the kid in the pool then I can claim that yes it's a constituent because the whole thing can be replaced by a single word and I know it's a noun phrase because I've replaced something with something that I know is a noun phrase so pronouns are good to use for noun phrase tests with verb phrases we use something called did so and it might seem a little weird out of context but it is a verb phrase did so so the kid in the pool said that he would leave at nine so if I'm asking is said that he would leave at nine a constituent and I think it's a verb phrase because it starts with a verb then I could replace it with did so and when I do so it works so the kid in the pool did so we don't know the context based on just that but it's still grammatical to say that sentence so we could say therefore it's a verb phrase now for identifying prepositional phrases or adverb phrases you can typically use a substitution like then so this would work for prepositional phrases or adverb phrases uh it's going to depend on what the lexical categories are inside so in the sentence when we take a look at at nine if we think about the categories it's either a p or an N well those are the two things we have so the constituent could either be a prepositional phrase a noun phrase or neither of them so we can't say the kid in the pool said that he would leave he but that doesn't make sense we can't put a pronoun in there so it's not a noun phrase but we can replace it with a whole thing like then and then is a prepositional phrase or an adverb phrase depending on the context so that's the substitution test it's one of the most basic ones and it is the one that you'll probably use most often the second one is the movement test and some prepositional phrases almost all adverb phrases and topical noun phrases can be moved so in the case of they stopped at the corner if a group of words forms a constituent then that means it'll move together so at the corner they stopped that's fine that tells us that at the corner is a constituent because that whole group of words can move to the front of the sentence uh the corner they stopped at also seems all right so we could even say that the corner is is a constituent if we leave at at the end so just the corner they stopped at that's an example of topicalization and sometimes it's a little bit weird in speech to listen to here's another example quite early into the movie they fell asleep if I want to say that quite early into the movie as a constituent then if I can move it I can make that claim and with adverb phrases we can do that so they fell asleep quite early into the movie it moves therefore it's a constituent now the coordination test is kind of a tricky test and I say this because with coordination you can make almost anything sound okay but the idea is if you think you have a constituent that is some type of phrase you can join it with another word like and and another constituent of exactly the same type to form a bigger constituent of that type so what I mean by this we'll see this in an example is if we say the children will stop at the corner and I want to say that this is a verb phrase what I can do is I can introduce the word and in another verb phrase of my choosing and if it grammatically Mak sense in other words it's accepted by speakers then we can claim that stop at the corner in this case would be a verb phrase It's a constituent so the children will stop at the corner and look both ways so look both ways is a verb phrase stop at the corner is a verb phrase in this case I have a small book so we want to ask about a small book we could say I have a small book and a large coffee okay so a small book is a constituent he was pretty nice uh he was pretty nice and very sweet so I can coordinate these two together they're both adjective phrases therefore pretty nice is a constituent it's hard to make the coordination test fail now clefting is kind of like the movement test but this sounds a lot better with typical noun phrases than uh the other form of movement and that is we take a sentence and we transform it into an it was blank that structure so imagine we have the sentence I didn't see the man with the hat on the street and we're asking about the man on the hat is that a constituent well we can make an it was X structure or it was blank structure that did something and we can take that thing that we think is a constituent and fit it in and then just repeat the remainder of the sentence on its own so in the second line we have it was the man with with a hat that I didn't see on the street so we can move it into a Clift and it sounds grammatical therefore the man with a hat is a constituent we can do this with some adverb phrases and prepositional phrases too so I read the book quicker than usual so we want to make it it was blank that structure so we take quicker than usual stick it after it was and before that and then continue the rest of the sentence as normal it was quicker than usual that I read the book last night okay that works therefore quicker than us usual is a constituent Q&A test is a fun one too if you have a sentence you can ask questions about parts of the sentence and if you can ask a question about that part and you can respond with just those words then that means you have a constituent what I mean by that is I went to the store on my birthday so I want to ask is on my birthday a constituent so I can try to ask a question about it uh you went to the store when or or when did you go to the store and if you can respond just with those words that constituent on its own then yeah you have a constituent so you went to the store when oh on my birthday because I can respond with just on my birthday it's a constituent so uh second question you read what last night and I respond with a book about snails well therefore because I can respond with just a book about snails I know a book about snails is a constituent so let's do one exercise to check to see if some of these are constituents or not so we want to use at least two constituency tests the first one will be on the small key the second will be on I opened and the third one we're going to do is with the small key so what I'm going to do in each case is I'm going to start with the substitution test because it's easy I love it so I open the blue door with it okay substitution seems to say that that is fine fact let's just uh edit the style and make the text a little bit bigger so see if I can do that I'll just have to make the default Pawn bigger all right we're gonna do this no editing one take I open the blue door with it okay that works substitution Works uh what about coordination I open the blue door with the small key and I need another noun phrase the small key and the big Ladle doesn't make sense but it works so coordination Works uh it let's do a clefting test it was the small key that I open the blue door with and then I leave a little underline to show where those words are coming from so all three of those tests work which means the small key is a constituent what about I open the blue door with a small key so I opened as a constituent well we can't do substitution so it the blue door doesn't sound right uh opened is a verb so maybe we could do do so uh did so the blue door that doesn't quite sound right either so substitution doesn't seem to work uh what about clefting it was I opened that uh blank where the word is coming from the blue door with the small key okay that definitely does not work either so we'll put a star in front of it to mean it's ungrammatical if we do more tests we're going to see the same results it's not going to work out nicely so I opened is not a constituent and we should know that because I is the subject and opened starts the predicate so these should be split anyway finally I open the blue door with the small key okay so let's see what we can do in this case I open the blue door then okay that's fine so it's either a prepositional phrase or adverb phrase according to substitution uh I uh let's do colleting again it was with the small key that I opened the blue door okay clefting works too let's do something different let's ask a question uh how did you open the blue door and I might respond with an answer that is with the small key and that's fine which tells us that yes with the small key is a constituent now we didn't learn a whole lot about this sentence we just targeted a few parts but what we did see is that with the small key is a constituent so if I just write out some things we know with the small key is a constituent I'm going to say because with with is a preposition that's a prepositional phrasee and we also know the small key is a constituent and I'm going to say that that's going to be a noun phrase because the most important word is key we just have some other things to fit in there but we can already see a phrase being inserted into another phrase in other words a small key is a constituent contained within the bigger constituent with the small key so that's just a little bit about constituents now we can start getting into tree drawing now that we've identified constituents we can start building phrases and this is the general structure of what a phrase is there's a lot of information here but we'll go through it step by step so we already mentioned that a head X is going to build into a phrase of the same type an XP so if this is a noun head we're going to get a noun phrase now there are some ways that we can incorporate other words into a phrase for instance we have specifiers these specify a little bit more information about the head we have compliments these are phrases that are selected by the head in order to complete the phrase if you think of a preposition like into into needs something after it so that noun phrase that comes after it would be considered a compliment we can also insert modifiers in our sentence as well usually either directly to the left of the head or after the compliment so in General we can model grammar using phrase structure rules what this means is that we'll take some sort of phrase to the left of it so this is the bigger phrase for example an NP and it says that it branches out into two things an optional determiner and a now now how this looks in the diagram is the NP is on top and then it splits from left to right into those categories so in the case of the child child is a noun it's a Lexical Word so needs to build into its own phrase type and then we have a determiner being the specifier of the noun phrase in terms of adverb phrases we can add qualifiers before them so very quickly and we can say that an adverb phrase is built from an optional qualifier plus an adverb in terms of prepositional phrases we can add an optional qualifier as a specifier we have the preposition head building into the prepositional phrase and it takes a noun phrase complement which can then be broken down into more components so we'll learn what these categories like qual and D are and we'll learn how to build our structure step by step without needing these pesky phrase structure rules it's usually better to just understand how words come together rather than memorizing a bunch of different phrase structure rules so we'll start with adjective phrases and basically every single adjective is going to build into an adjective phrase now we can modify them with qualifiers as specified so qualifiers would be words like very ridiculously quite kind of a little these are words that specify how adjective or how adverb something has happened so how red is it how new is it how bright is it when we replace a word like oh very or it's quite new or it's a little red these answer how so these are qualifiers for adjective phrases noun phrase are built from noun heads so every noun will build into a noun phrase and they can take determiners as specifiers so determiners are your basic articles like the uh and an it could include possessive determiners like his or even some quantifiers like few many some each almost and every we'll also see demonstratives under here so words like this that those and these demonstr are sometimes treated a little bit differently in languages than just straight up determiners so that might be important to know but in most intro Linguistics courses you're not going to get into that much detail so in the case of some cat and most writers cat is the head of the noun phrase and it takes a determiner as a specifier and in most writers writers is the head of the noun phrase and it takes the determiner most as a specifier now we can also modify noun phrases with adjective phrases or even prepositional phrases and adverb phrases in the future but we'll just take a look at adjective phrase modification so in the case of rough edges we see two things we see an adjective and we see a noun this means we're going to need to build a noun phrase and an adjective phrase the only question is which order do they attach in well when an adjective phrase is describing a noun it is going to be a sister to it in the tree in other words it's going to connect under the noun phrase because the adjective phrase is modifying the noun phrase in the case of the latest release we see something with a determiner as well so the specifier in English is always on the leftmost part of a particular phrase the noun is release which is building into a noun phrase and takes that determiner specifier but we can also modify release by saying latest so this adjective phrase is next to the noun which means it is going to be describing it there's nothing wrong with having multiple adjective phrases in a noun phrase as well so in some grumpy old man we see grumpy as an adjective phrase we see old is an adjective phrase and both of these are describing man so they're going to be beside the noun or you could also think of it as directly underneath the noun phrase because the adjective phrase is modifying the noun there are some special cases where noun phrases don't have an N head they have pronouns instead some books will write them as Pro and others will write them as n with a subscript Pro you can take whichever approach you like uh if the end with a subscript Pro helps emphasize the fact that you have a noun phrase great but it's not necessary so pronouns fill in entire noun phrases if you have a pronoun it builds into a noun phrase and that's the only thing that is in the noun phrase so pronouns like I you he she they those are your typical ones but we can also have pronoun demonstratives like this in that like I want this or I want that and our wh words like what who where when and why are also considered pronouns now after talking about noun phrases it makes sense to talk about prepositional phrases so prepositions like onto and with and by are going to build into prepositional phrases like onto the bed with Jerry and we see in each case that it takes a noun phrase complement so in other words the preposition requires a noun phrase after it in order to be grammatical so the noun phrase is its complement and from there we can break down our noun phrases into smaller categories or phrases just like we did before so by the expensive bed if we just take a look inside this noun phrase you know how to do it already so it's just a preposition introducing a noun phrase and we can build these piece by piece now there are some cases where you can modify or I should say specify prepositional phrases with qualifiers so onto the bed or by the expensive bed we can say straight onto the bed or right by the expensive bed uh it's a little bit weird to say that these answer how something is being done or how onto something is you can think of it as like a proximity or directional kind of thing if it's straight onto the bed that means that it happened like immediately uh if you say right by the expensive bed this is uh kind of like a um what's the word for it kind of like a proximity thing going on this doesn't happen too often in English but this is an option and this is the only type of specifier or modifier that a prepositional phrase can take so let's do some practice with three phrases the cold Iceberg right into it and his icy very sweet frothy latte so with one the cold Iceberg this is going to be a noun phrase and I see three words under it I see the which is a determiner I see the adjective cold so it's going to be an adjective phrase that then breaks down into an adjective which is cold and then the head of this noun phrase is Iceberg so this is n and this is Iceberg so I took a top- down approach for this where I started with with the phrase that I knew but we can do a bottom up approach as well so if we think about right into it well we can do a tree in this fashion so we can start with all of our words at the bottom and we can label them one by one so into is a preposition it is a pronoun and write is a qualify in this case as a specifier to the prepositional phrase so the pronoun needs to build into a noun phrase the preposition needs to build into a prepositional phrase and how we can connect these is by saying well into is introducing it so the noun phrase it is a compliment and it takes a qualifier so because the qualifier is specifying information about the preposition it's going to be a sister to it in the tree or you can think of it as being directly underneath the prepositional phrase so that's our second structure now let's think about his icy very sweet proy log and let's do the bottom up approach again so his icy very sweet froy latte now we do not need to put commas when we do our syntactic trees so we just omit them so his will be a determiner because it's introducing some noun after it it's the specifier of the noun phrase for his latte icy is an adjective very sweet this is a a combination of qualifier and adjective broy is another adjective describing latte and Latte is the head noun so this is going to be a noun phrase because we could just basically replace the whole thing with it it's going to take a determiner as its specifier and now we need to connect all of these adjectives but we need to remember that all adjectives need to build up into adjective phrases so we can do that and when we think about the qualifier the qualifier is modifying an adjective it's modifying the adjective to the right so that adjective phrase sweet is going to include very and now we can attach all of our adjective phrases underneath the noun phrase head for the final structure for his icy very sweet proy latte now let's talk about adverb phrases and verb phrases so adverb phrases are just like adjective phrases they're an adverb head they build into an adverb phrase and they can take qualifiers as specifiers so again just ask like how quietly did something happen how abruptly did something happen how easily was it done okay very quietly so abruptly too easily so they do the same things as they do in adjective phrases in terms of these qualifiers now to talk about verb phrases we need to talk a little bit about transitivity because different verbs have different requirements for what they want on subjects objects and IND direct objects so when you have an intransitive verb this means that you can include just a subject so if we say someone sleeps we can't say someone sleeps something else uh it's not transitive in this case it just has a subject so this is an intransitive verb sleeps eats can be the same thing we can have an intransitive verb eats for like I eat or Trevor eats when we have transitive verbs these take subjects and direct objects and some verbs can be both transitive and intransitive so two examples here would be X hit Y where X is the subject and Y is the direct object so X is the hitter and Y is the thing being hit and we could say like forever hits although to me it's a little weird so maybe not uh in the case of X smokes y though in this transitive verb someone smokes something so I don't know Ben smokes cigarettes for example but this is a case where we could have an intransitive version as well for this verb because it's perfectly fine to say someone smokes like X smokes it's a habit it's it's a general thing that goes on so that's a case where smokes would be intransitive compared to the transitive use x smokes y so same with eats we can have the transitive version of that too where it could be like she eats hamburgers so you could say x eats y fly where there is an eater and the thing being eaten so we shouldn't think of verbs as being specifically intransitive or transitive all the time we should always consider the context now ditransitive verbs have a subject a direct object and an indirect object there's two forms that we can pronounce our transitive verbs in ditransitive verbs we can either say x gave y to Z or we can say XG z y so I gave a book to Mary or I gave Mary a book The dire object in this case is the thing being given so let's call this the give the just just call this the given in this case and Z the indirect object is the recipient of the thing being given so the recipient is our indirect object and the direct object is the thing being given so if we say Mary gave sorry I gave Mary a book in the case of X gave z y Mary is the recipient and then the book is the thing being given so we do see the different order of indirect and direct object in our two different forms so when we build verb phrases the type of verb is going to determine what it looks like so in an intransitive verb it's just a verb that builds into a verb phrase we can add modifiers after but this is the basic structure for these in the case of transitive verbs the verb builds into a verb phrase but it also requires one noun phrase compliment which is its direct object also known as do for Di transitive verbs same thing the verb builds into a verb phrase that's not going to change but it requires two compliments for gives Cathy a book it would require an indirect object as well as a direct object so both of these are going to be complements of the verb so they'll be sisters in the tree structure relations now ver phrases can be modified by a lot of things adverb phrases prepositional phrases noun phrases of time so if we think about something like quickly left well we have our verb left with that builds into a verb phrase and the adverb phrase is modifying the verb so it's going to be below the VP if we say we walked at night same idea the verb builds into a verb phrase and it takes a prepositional phrase modifier so that'll be below the VP if you have a transitive verb you can still add modifiers to it so saw the movie this is going to be a verb phrase the noun phrase is the direct object it's a compliment but then we also can attach a modifier noun phrase like last week where last is a determiner and week is a noun so let's see if we can draw structures for these phrases ate faster smoothly walked into the cafeteria and sent my friend a secret letter so for eight faster uh this is going to be a verb phrase with the head eight and what is modifying the verb eight well it's the adverb faster so this is going to be an adverb phrase modifier because adverbs are a lexical category so they need to build into a phrase and then that is the adverb faster so that's how we can do eight faster let's do bottom up for smoothly walked into the cafeteria so smoothly walked into and I want to shorten cafeteria to Cafe not quite the same thing but we understand what it means so in terms of labeling smoothly is an adverb it's describing how the walking happened walked as the verb into is a preposition introducing a noun phrase consisting of a determiner and noun for the cafeteria so this is going to be a verb phrase the adverb needs to build up into an adverb phrase and it's modifying the verb so it's going to be under the VP uh the cafe well the cafe is going to form a noun phrase with the determiner the preposition into will form a prepositional phrase and take the noun phrase as its complement and then into the cafeteria is describing how or where the walking happened so that's going to be underneath the verb phrase as well so that's how we can draw a little tree structure or smoothly walked into the cafeteria now for sent my friend a secret letter we'll do this one top down something a little bit different this is a predicate so we're going to have a verb phrase the head verb is going to be sent and then we're sending something to someone so my friend is going to be one of the complement this is the indirect object consisting of the determiner my and the noun friend and what are we sending to them we're sending another noun phrase which is a secret letter so that's a noun phrase consisting of the determiner uh we have an adjective phrase that's going to build down into adjective secret and then we're going to also introduce the noun letter as the head of that down phrase so this is how a DI transitive verb would look like if we're drawing the tree structure from the top down so we're now going to introduce some other categories for instance conjunctions we talked a little bit about conjunctions in the coordination test but what conjunctions do is they take two phrases of the same type for example The Tortoise and the hair so two NPS and it combines them with a conjunction to form a bigger noun phrase so in other words it takes an XP it takes another XP of the same type we put and in between or any other conjunction and then we get that bigger version of that phrase includes both of those conjuncts so so another example would be at night or in the morning at night is a prepositional phrase in the morning is a prepositional phrase so we can join them together with a conjunction to get a bigger prepositional phrase now the conjunctions that we have are also known as The Fanboys acronym so for and nor but or yet so it's not a bad idea to memorize these uh there are other types of conjunctions that are similar as well so words like although for example which has a meaning that is very similar to an now we have noun phrases verb phrases and all the little phrases that modify these things so how do we build these together into a sentence well when we describe things earlier we basically just said an S sentence is a combination of a subject and predicate but we want to include tense as well because verbs can be present tense or past tense so we introduced this thing called a tense phrase the tense phrase has tense as its head it'll be either plus or minus past or contains something else which we'll talk about later and it takes a noun phrase subject as its specifier and it takes a verb phrase predicate as its complement and note that we're going to revise the verb phrase notion a little bit as well as the NP notion a little bit but in general you can think about them as being subject specifiers and predicate complements so so if we have sentences like your mother cooks really well and your mother cooked really well we can take a look at these piece by piece so on the left one your mother is just a noun phrase I mean your mother is much more than that I'm sure she's a lovely woman but in this case she's just a noun phrase so that's our subject and we have a verb phrase cooks really well so we can draw the structure for that we have our subject and predicate so we're going to join them together with a tense head and because we have Cooks this is not a past tense form we write minus past under T so that will build into a tense phrase that collects the subject and predicate as its daughters now in the case of your mother cooked really well we have the exact same structure the only difference is cooked is in past tense so now we have a Plus past feature under T but if you can draw individual phrases for noun phrases and verb phrases as well as adverb phrases and everything else then you can easily form them together into a sentence by using C and joining them up with the TP so let's see if we can draw syntactic trees for these sentences no visitor left in safe hands and my cute puppy is very happy so I'm going to do the first one bottom up so we'll do no visitor left in safe hands and then we'll build our structure up for the second one we'll do top down so the thing with doing things bottom up is we need to leave room for tense so usually we'll put tense right before the predicate so this is no visitor left in safe hands left is past tense so we'll write this as Plus past now when we label our categories for no visitor we're going to have to terminer a noun past is going to be a tense left is a verb in is a preposition and safe hands is our noun phrase consisting of the adjective safe and the noun hands so uh I'm going to build from right to left the adjective needs to build into an adjective phrase and that's going to modify the noun hands so say pans will be a noun phrase the preposition is introducing a noun phrase as its complement so the preposition builds into a PP with the NP on its right and left is introducing that prepositional phrase as a modifier so that will build into a verb phrase left in safe hands now when we include tense we're going to do this last first we'll do no visitor so visitor is a noun it needs to build into a noun phrase and it takes the determiner as its specifier so now to connect each of these subject on predicate we're going to take the subject as the specifier the verb phrase as the complement and then tense as its head so this is a tree structure for no visitor left in safe hands so we'll put this up in the top right and now we'll do this next one from the top down so what I know from the top down is that I'm going to have a tense phrase for my cute puppy is very happy my cute puppy will be a noun phrase subject we're going to have tense which is is so this is going to be minus past and then it's going to take a verb phrase as a compliment so my cute puppy is the noun phrase that consists of a determiner my it consists of an adjective phrase modifier which will break down into an adjective which is cute and then the head of the noun phrase is puppy so my cute puppy now we need to do is very happy so is is a verb and very happy is an adjective phrase so it's going to take the adjective phrase as a compliment uh with the qualifier very and the adjective head which is happy so this might look a little bit weird to you to see an adjective phrase as a complement to a verb but in the case of linking verbs we said that is is acting kind of like an equal sign and the adjective is describing the noun phrase so even though this might not look standard so far it is acceptable and those are the structures and categories of those phrases so we can't really do anything else now there's one more thing that can go under T which are models so they're I either labeled as t or are mod in some cases these are nine words that convey things about knowledge permissibility and ability meanings so our nine modals which are pretty helpful to memorize are can could will would shall should May might and must so these words do not have tense on them historically they had different tense forms like can and could were uh past and non-past but nowadays we don't consider these modals to have tense so they don't have tense and then the verb after it does not get any tense so it's always he will leave he will eat he will be in other words it's not in a tensed form so what we do is we put the modal underneath the T head it's kind of taking the place of tense so instead of adding Plus past or minus past under t uh we simply just put the modal and then we leave it at that now there's one more thing that we can add for our predicates which are auxiliaries so the predicate doesn't necessarily have to be a VP it can also be an auxiliary phrase and auxiliaries are like these helping verbs so we have several of them which we'll discuss uh very shortly but here are some examples so auxiliaries usually designate things like um we should get rid of the modals here because we don't want to consider these auxiliary categories although they are Tech technically auxiliaries uh they designate things like completion of an event continuation of an event and passive voice as well as emphasis so in the case of is leaving leave is the verb this is the action that you're taking but is is saying that it's ongoing for did leave did is adding emphasis to the fact that the leaving had happened for had left had is a perfect auxiliary that is telling us that the event has already completed and then will might and should our MO which are types of auxiliaries but we do not put them underneath the auxiliary label now we can have multiple of these auxiliaries back to back there is a specific order to them and we can see those soon it's very restricted so here's one example of an auxiliary winie the Pooh is eating honey so eating is the main verb this is what's happening we need the Poo eats honey but this is an ongoing action so is is an auxiliary that's going to form an auxiliary phrase and because the verb phrase comes after it in other words is is determining the form of the verb if we have is here we know it's going to be a progressive ing the verb phrase will be its complement so now when we think about TPS branching into predicates as complements we can think of this as being either a VP or auxiliary phrases if auxiliaries exist so there's three types there's Progressive perfective or perfect and passive we really shouldn't say perfective there is a difference between perfect and perfective but a lot of books will use them interchangeably perfect would be a more accurate description but perfective uh we'll go with that so Progressive auxiliaries are always be plus the verb with an ing ending so is eating are sleeping am running was uh smoking things like that uh the perfective auxiliary indicates completion and this is always had plus the verb with an Eed or en n or even an irregular form so some examples would be like had eaten had jumped uh or even in a regular form like had run in which case it's just the same as the regular one so had or have plus a verb gives us that perfective auxiliary now with passives this makes the subject or this makes the subject demoted in a sentence and it focuses on the object so this is when you have be plus the verb with the E Oran ending or also these irregular forms so in the case of was eaten are slept that doesn't make any sense uh are investigated um and so many other examples that I can't think of off the top of my head because my brain is uh not searching for verbs at the moment but if we have an auxiliary B and we have that Eden participle or IR regular form after it then we're looking at a passive so the little trick to remember these is B plus ing gives us Progressive had plus our e d and suffix is perfective and when we take B we combine both of these so B and the participle Ed and ending then we get a passive voice and there is a strict order that these have to occur in if they do occur so my general example that I would use would be might have been being bought might have been being bought might have being being bought okay so in this case uh it's it's not Supernatural for me to say something like this but this is the strict order it has to occur in first of all the tense or modal has to occur first then we would have the perfective if it exists then we'd have the progressive if it exists then we'd have the passive if it exists and then we'd have the voice so we can have t plus up to three auxiliary phrases before we actually get to the verb so let's draw some syntactic trees for these first one the marmalade was stolen so we're going to do this one bottom up and we'll do the second one top down so the marmalade was stolen we need to leave room for tense so that's Plus past and then we have was and stolen so uh the is a determiner marmalade is a noun past is tense was stolen so stolen by someone so this is an auxiliary the passive with a verb afterwards if we work right to left stolen is a verb phrase the auxiliary forms into an auxiliary phrase and takes the verb phrase as its compliment tense is going to build up into a tense phrase that takes the auxiliary phrase as the predicate complement and the marmalade will form a noun phrase as a subject and connect up to the tense phrase so that is the marmalade was stolen move that up to the top right and now we'll do one which is uh top down so I'm going to label things just a little bit in the sentence just so I know what kind of categories I'll need so must is a modal that'll be under T and then B wanting so this is an auxiliary plus the verb afterwards so when I think about the compliments I'm going to need to my tense phrase in this case I'm going to need every caterpillar which is a noun phrase I'm going to need my T head which is just must in this case there's no tense the modal is taking its place instead of a verb phrase as a complement I'm going to take an auxiliary phrase so that consists of the auxiliary B and then wanting is a verb phrase with a verb head wanting and you want something you want that noun phrase compliment direct object which is a friend so that's determiner plus noun for a friend now we just need to build our subject every caterpillar which is a combination of determiner and noun which is every plus the noun caterpillar so that's how we can draw trees with auxiliaries in them that's not too bad once you get a little bit of practice now ambiguous sentences so far our structures have been pretty straightforward it is obvious which types of words modify other words but there are some examples where we have certain phrases that uh have an option between what they modify so here's the comic one morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas and there's some ambiguity within my pajamas is this describing the elephant or is this describing how you're shooting it like are you wearing pajamas so this is prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity and there's two ways that we can attach the prepositional phrase in this case if the prepositional phrase is modifying the noun then it attaches underneath the noun phrase so the noun and prepositional phrase are sisters if the prepositional phrase is describing how the action is being done then it's going to be under the verb phrase as a modifier so sisters to the verb in this case so let's see these two in action where I shot an elephant in my pajamas if we want to say that I am the one wearing pajamas then I'm saying that I shot an elephant so this is the complement in this case this is the direct object and the prepositional phrase in my pajamas is acting as a modifier to the verb so this is forming a connection with the verb because it's directly underneath the VP now if I want to do I shot an elephant and the Elephant is the one wearing pajamas then this prepositional phrase is going to be under the NP because it's modifying the noun in the this case and when we think about the verb shot it is now shooting this entire noun phrase which is the direct object so the elephant is wearing pajamas and that is the thing that I am shooting so let's try one syntactic tree that shows both of their different options so Tim raced the dog with running shoes now what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a single structure that does not have with running shoes in it so we're going to just start with Tim race the dog so that's going to be a tense phrase that breaks into a noun phrase which is a noun Tim as far as tense goes it is raced so this would be Plus past this is going to take a verb phrase compliment with the verb uh raced and then what are we racing we're racing the noun phrase the dog which consists of a determiner and noun so when we think about with running shoes there's two places this can attach one place this can attach which I'll do in green is beside the noun phrase and this will tell us that the dog has running shoes on so that would be with as a preposition and then it takes the noun phrase uh which consists of an adjective phrase and a noun running shoes I'm not filling up the whole noun adjective phrase because I will run out of space here so that's one way we can attach it the other way we can attach it and I'll just use the power of technology to do this uh we could and I'll make it a different color we could just attach it next to the verb phrase if it is going to modify the verb so if we're saying that we did the racing with running shoes in other words Tim is the one with running shoes then we would attach it next to the VP so these are two possible structures that we have we should just have one of these prepositional phrases in here but if you're going with the red one then you're looking at verb modification if you're looking at the green one here you're looking at noun modification the last thing we want to do in syntax is talk about complement Clauses for structure so some verbs can take Clauses as complement you can think about them as little mini sentences so I know if you are watching me so if is what's called a complimentizer and what it does is it turns the following tense phrase into either a direct object a subject or a modifier so you are watching me is its own little mini clauser sentence if is introducing it so what no does is no takes a complimentizer phrase that has a complimentizer head and a tense phrase as its compliment so we have a couple other types of complimen tizers here are a couple other words that fit that description so Shawn believes that his tarov run will be good so his tarov run will be good is a little tense phrase and that is a complimentizer introducing it as a direct object Carlos investigated whether people lost their hair from stress same thing we can say people lost their hair from stress as its own Standalone sentence and whether is a complimentizer that's introducing that TP as the direct object of investigated basically so in terms of our structure we don't have to show an entire thing but we can see how this works so in the case of I know that something everything looks fine up until the verb phrase so I is a noun phrase subject T is minus past and the verb no builds into a verb phrase the difference is now instead of taking a noun phrase as a compliment we're taking a complimentizer phrase which takes a complimentizer head and then introduces the tense phrase as its compliment I know there might be some confusing about complimentizer or compliment complimentizer is a category and complement is essentially a function so here's a full sentence Sherry believed that a trip would be good so let's just focus on a trip would be good because this is its own tense phrase basically we're going to build the tense phrase for a trip would be good which is a noun phrase subject uh modal t would and then verb phrase be good and that tense phrase is introduced by a complimentizer c which builds into a complimentizer phrase and then the verb takes the complimentizer phrase as the direct object so if you can build a tense phrase then you can build a complimentizer phrase and implement it it looks scary because there's a lot more words but again we're just building piece by piece we build a smaller tense phrase and then we build our bigger tense phrase the smaller tense phrase and well really the CP is what is known as an embedded Clause so it's a clause that is an argument for something in the sentence so we can draw some three structures for these I will know whether you did it we'll do one bottom up and then the other two top down so I will know whether you did it now the things with WEA is that you can always put or not afterwards but we will not include it so I need to leave room for tent so for you did it well did is past it's just a main verb in this case it's not an auxiliary so let's label these categories I is a pronoun that needs to build into a noun phrase uh will goes under t no is a verb whether is a complimentizer introducing the tense phrase you did uh you is a pronoun it's going to have to build into a noun phrase past is tense did is the verb and then it is another pronoun that needs to build into a noun phrase so when we have multiple Clauses typically I like to build them from right to left when I do the bottom down so did it is the predicate of our inner TP so that's going to be a verb phrase that takes the noun phrase it as a compliment we have you did it so this is going to be a tense phrase that takes you the noun phrase as the subject specifier and the verb phrase as its complement weather is introducing this TP so this is going to be a complimentizer phrase that introduces the TP and no is taking the CP as its direct object so this will be a verb phrase that takes a complimentizer phrase to its right now we have I the subject will as tense and know whether you did it as the predicate of the big TP so we'll join these together under the higher TP so all we did in this case was we built our smaller Clause first and then we built our bigger one second so we will leave this one up and now I will do some of them top down so for I can believe that well what's happening here maybe I'm trying to be a little bit tricky so I is a noun phrase pronoun can is going to be a modal so that goes under T we have the verb phrase Believe it or sorry believe that I can believe that so we have believe now in this case that is not a complimentizer it's not introducing a TP after this is just a regular pronoun so this is a noun phrase that goes into the pronoun that so a little tricky but it's important to remember that just because you see the word that it does not mean that it's a complimentizer it can just be a pronoun okay for the last one Steve knows that Mary knows that I know okay this is going to kind of suck to draw a tree for because we're going to need a lot of space but I can do this kind of small so this will be a tense phrase with the noun phrase Steve as the subject uh for tense we have no so this will be minus past so that's going to take a verb phrase predicate with the head knows now we're introducing that Mary knows that I know so Mary knows that I know is a tense phrase on its own so we're going to be selecting the complimentizer phrase with the compliment that and then we're going to start another TP inside which would be Mary knows that I know so let's do this in Red so now we have a new tense phrase with the noun phrase subject Mary uh in terms of tense it's also going to be minus past because we just have NOS in this case so what does she know well that's the verb head in this case for nose and then we're going to have to introduce that I know so this is going to be another complimentizer phrase maybe I can move this up a little bit yeah I can move it up a little bit so that's going to take the complement which is that and then we need to finish the last TP underneath which we'll do in blue which is I know so this is another tense phrase which takes a noun phrase pronoun as a subject I in terms of tense it is going to be minus past because it's no and then the verb phase is just going to be a verb that is no so it looks scary but again we're just repeating the process where the complimentizer introduces a new tense phrase complimentizer introduces a new tense phrase and we're just building our tense phrases just like we have before so we didn't show this because it's kind of odd to have complimentizer phrases as subjects just at least in spoken English but you can have a CP subject so that you love me excites me so now instead of taking a noun phrase subject we simply take a complimentizer phrase as the specifier of the tense phrase that is our new subject so you love me is basically our subject here but we need to introduce it with a complimentizer to be grammatical so that you love me excites me so same thing as before we have our smaller TP we have the complimentizer introducing that TP to form a complimentizer phrase and that is being embedded in a bigger tense phrase so it's the same thing as if it were the complement of the verb it's just in a different position so the last thing we want to do in syntax is talk about complements and adjunct uh we've used the term modifiers for adjunct um but adjunct would be the more official term and in some theories of syntax which you would learn in a follow-up course you need to be able to distinguish between these two so in terms of compliments and modifiers Compliments are the things that are required by heads of other phrases so in English they always come after so for instance saw a dog verb if this is translative requires a noun phrase direct object devoured it this is a verb that requires a noun phrase direct object gave a hamster a wallet these are both compliments because gave is ditransitive so it needs an indirect object and it needs a direct object in the case of should go if you have a modal auxiliary in this case you need to have something that follows it so go would be the verb that is the complement to the modal now adjunct are a little bit different because ad junks can usually or almost always be removed so in the case of a happy day we don't need to say happy we can just say day it's still grammatical right into the wall we can just still just say into the wall surprisingly stupid we could just say stupid ad aake quickly we could just say Ad a cake so these are optional they modify other words and that makes them adjuncts so how can we test to see whether we have an adjunct or a compliment well there's a nice strict rule in English that Compliments are closer to the head than adjuncts so what this means means is if we have a case where we have both a compliment and an adjunct the compliment has to occur first so we can say saw a dog last night that's fine fact I'm going to just write adjunct here but we can't say uh saw last night a dog so we can't put our adjunct before the compliment that is ungrammatical if you have multiple adjuncts that means that you can move them around so there's no specific order that they need to be pronounced in so if we have in the morning last week that is fine but we can also say last week in the morning that is also okay so if you want to test for compliments and adjuncts you can see if you can swap them if you can swap both of them around then you have two adjuncts if you cannot swap them around that means that one of them is going to be a compliment and the other is an adjunct so let's check to see whether these underlined phrases so my Lamborghini new with it my parents truly alone and in the dark are compliments or adjuncts so in the first one B diesel stole my Lamborghini so stole is a verb it needs a direct object this is going to be a compliment how we can test it is to use a verb like quickly bin diesel stole quickly my Lamborghini it doesn't sound very good but stole my Lamborghini quickly sounds better so quickly is an adjunct that's just a standard one for verbs so so we know that if we want to introduce it it has to be after which tells us that my Lamborghini would be a compliment uh made a new show with it so new is describing show this a modifying word so this is going to be an adjunct we can also say a new good show or a good new show so it doesn't matter which order if we add in another ad now with it is also describing uh maid in this case if we're taking the typical interpretation so because this is modifying another verb with information this is going to be an adjunct but we could say I made a no I made a new show with it last night or I made a new show last night with it so if last night is an adjunct then we can swap those two around there's no issues okay it was my parents who were truly afraid of getting lost alone in the dark so was is going to be introducing a compliment for my parents we can't just say it was were truly afraid of getting lost alone in the dark we need that there uh and if we want to add an adjunct here it was knowingly my parents it was my parents knowingly who were truly afraid it's a little bit diff difficult with cleft constructions to really get that adjunct difference because we don't typically put adjunct after the was usually it's just the compliment that we introduce so incls after was you can think of it as like the direct object of was in this case Okay truly afraid so this is just modifying afraid how afraid was it well truly afraid so this is just going to be an adjunct you could say uh who were really truly afraid or truly really afraid really would be another adjunct and you can swap those around uh getting lost alone in the dark so getting a lost alone here in the dark getting lost alone in the dark here okay so if we do here we can swap them with in the dark getting lost here alone getting lost alone here okay so the order that alone in the dark and something like here which is another adjunct they don't need to be in any specific order so that tells us that these are all adjuncts otherwise if there was a fixed order for one of them then we' know it's a compliment so in the future what you'll do or maybe even in your intro course you'll learn about xar Theory and we extend our X heads up into an XP and add adun complement and specifiers in certain positions so for the new book of worms we have a bunch of these different functional levels or abstract levels and book would be the head the spe the position below the bar and beside the head indicates a complement when something is between two bar levels it indicates an adjunct and when something is below the phrase but next to a bar it indicates a specifier if you want this information I have syntax the complete course on the ttor YouTube channel it's about 3 hours and 35 minutes and it covers all of xar theory and a second course in syntax so if you are using this Theory feel free to take a look at that course and by the time you get about two hours into it you'll have a pretty good understanding of xar theory now we can move on to semantics which is very tightly related to syntax semantics is about the study of literal meaning and there's two different subfields of semantics that are used usually investigated one is truth conditional semantics which is very mathematical it is about determining how you can figure out the truth of a sentence depending on the meaning of its parts we are not going to focus on Truth conditional semantics instead we'll focus on lexical semantics which is about word and phrase meanings and their different properties so just an example of what truth conditional semantics is like imagine we have a sentence like Sam saw a movie we need to transform it into a logical notation and and then using that logical notation we motivate a tree structure where every single note on a tree has a meaning and they combine in certain ways to get new meanings so this is very technical we don't really have time to explain it I do have videos on semantics on the ttor YouTube channel if you are interested there's a full playlist um but for intro Linguistics typically this stuff is not taught so we'll start with thematic roles now when we have verbs like intransitive transitive or ditransitive verbs there are certain relationships that the verb has with its subject object and potentially indirect object for example when you have a verb like kicks you need a kicker and you need a kick e and there's certain requirements for the kickers and the kiys for example kickers have to be ages they have to be things that can actually kick and kiys just need to be things that can be kicked in the case of loves you need a lover and a lovey and for a sitter well if you have sits you're going to need a sitter so we can ask ourselves why does this sentence sound odd the small train loves chocolate well that's because in a case of loves we we need something animate typically unless we're using it in a metaphorical use but in terms of literal meaning it doesn't make sense to say the small train loves chocolate so we don't want to say it's ungrammatical because it follows all of our syntactic rules but we do want to say that there's some weird semantic violation happening here and that's because we expect a certain type of subject to exist so these are the different thematic roles that we can assign to NPS the first one is an agent so these are things that intentionally perform actions typically they're at the beginning of a sentence as a subject but they can be in a passive by phrase as well so for Winnie fought the bear Winnie is an agent because Winnie is the thing that can initiate the action of fighting in the case of Albert Einstein ate four apples a day we have our eater Albert Einstein who who can initiate the action of eating now experiencers can also exist as subjects so when we say Charles felt sad about his Discovery Charles here is an experiencer and we say he's an experiencer because a feeling is not something that you actively do you don't intentionally perform a feeling when you feel sad you simply experience that emotion or you experience that action for Spider-Man sensed a bad feeling same thing here we have an experiencer rather than an agent because when you sense something that's not something you actively do that's not something you actively initiate this is an experience of that action of sensing so when you think about agents or experiencers don't just think subjects you need to think about the actual meaning of what the verb is looking for now theme is the general argument for things that are affected by actions usually direct objects are themes and that's pretty set and St own for like most cases you'll encounter so for I push the boulder with all my might the boulder is the thing that is being pushed this is the theme Dr Oz considered real science an enemy the thing you're considering is the theme in this case so real science now we also have benef actives which appear in indirect object positions so the entity that benefits from an action I have a package for you so uh in terms of giving something you give a theme to a recipient or benefactive you might also see recipient some books distinguish between the two some don't uh if there is a distinction between the two you can think of recipients as being after two and benefactive as being after four so he wiped the tables clean for us the wiping the tables is done for a purpose for someone which is Us in this case so us would be the benefactive of this now in terms of Direction and location we have source and goal so source and goal are kind of like opposites of each other so sources are where things are coming from where the action is coming from and goals are where the action is going so when we say I traveled from Spain to Italy from Spain Spain in this case is the source that's where you're coming from and to Italy Italy is the goal that's where you're headed walked from the bookstore to get here so we're walking from a location we're walking from a source and I gave the ointment to dandruff Dan well uh in this case dandru Dan is the thing that is being transferred to it might even be better in this case to call it a recipient rather than a goal so the last one we'll talk about is instrument and this is what you perform an action with so I slash the body up with an axe so an axe is the tool you're using in in this case or I made a cake with several indeterminate ingredients in this case as well this is the tool that you're using in order to make a cake so when we have a verb in a particular context we can create what's called a thematic grid and what this does is this lists the Thematic roles in order from left to right that you see them in a sentence so for example in dive we can need an agent so the puppy Dove is an example for the case of devour we need an agent and a theme we need a subject and object we see the agent first which is a big monster then the verb devour and then the kid is a theme for the case of give and borrow we need different things here so agent theme and then we either want to say go or probably better is a recipient in this case so Susie gave a bucket to Charlie they're occurring in that order and for borrow we need an agent and a theme but we also include a source in this case because it is coming from someone so whenever we have a verb in a particular context we can assign it Theta rules so let's make thematic grids for each of these verbs so bot sent and fixed so in the case of Bot bot requires a buyer and a buay it requires an agent and requires a theme so we can say that the Theta grid for this is Agent and then theme okay what about in Harry sent a carrier pigeon to hog WS okay we need a sender which is an agent we need a theme which is the thing being sent and then we need a goal because that is where it's going so for the Theta grid for this we would have agent theme and then also our goal afterwards okay finally CJ fixed my computer for me CJ would be an agent in this case is fixing something which is a theme and who's it for it's for me so this is a benefactive so we would have an agent a theme and then we'd have the benefactive after that so you'll notice that a lot of transitive verbs in English are agent theme or experiencer theme uh that's just generally how verbs select their requirements for subjects and objects now let's talk about some word relations so we say that two words are homonyms if they have different meanings but either the same pronunciation or same spelling if it's the same pronunciation then we call them homophones homo just meaning same and then phones meaning sound and then homographs uh homo again meaning uh same and then graphs just meaning the way that we write things down so you can think of it as writing so same sound versus same writing so some examples of just homophones are two and two as in the number two and as well you can see they're pronounced exactly the same but they are spelled differently in the case of homographs tier and tear are spelled the same but their pronunciation is different so that's why we call these homographs now it is possible to have both so in band and band they're both being pronounced the exact same way but they have two different meanings one where we have a musician and one where a band is like a thin thin material like a rubber band for example synonymy and antomy are probably ones that you've learned very young two words are synonyms they have almost the same meaning it's very rare to have something that is completely synonymous because usually we pick words depending on the context or even the style that we're speaking in so two synonyms could be like happy and joyful they might have slightly different connotations and when they're used and how they're used but they're close enough same with smart and intelligent I think there's a difference between smart and intelligent but the concept is pretty similar so these are as close to synonyms as we're going to get and antonyms are just opposite so happy and sad smart and dumb hot and cold uh these ones I'm I'm pretty sure you know these what you might not know is hypony so we have hyper nimms and hyponyms and this is about the relationship between generality and specific so for example if we take a look at the chart over here on the right a plant is a category that holds things like flowers as well as other things like I don't know a bush for example and then flowers are things that is a more General category of specific items like crocus Rose fagonia daffodil and so on so the relationship we're talking about is the relationship between the specific one and the general one so we say the specific one is a hyponym of the general one for example cat is a hyponym of animal because cat is a type of animal computer is a hyponym of Technology because a computer is a type of technology so when you think of hyponyms you can just think of a similar rephrase which is just like a type of now hyperm are just the opposite direction hyperm would be like a more General case so human is a hyper of child human is a more General case than child child would be a young human and color is a hyperm of red now whenever you have a hyponym you can always reverse the order to make a hyper Nim relationship so we just call this hyponymy in general the last one is morony so this is one eye that I never heard of before before I took a Linguistics course and this is the a part of relationship as in a component of something so this isn't about the general or specificity of it this is whether or not an individual thing is the part of a whole so in the right we have a car diagram and we can say some things about car so for example wheel is a meronym of car in other words wheel is a part of a car your ey is a part of your face so we say I is a meronym of face petal would be a meronym of Rose because roses have petals and leg would be a meronym of dog as well as human as well as cat and a bunch of different things because legs are a component of what makes up uh a living mammal for the most part so let's take a look at these and figure out which type of relationship exists between each word so with course and course these are pronounced the same but they're spelled differently so they have the same pronunciation which means that this is a homophone specifically for same sound uh we could just say it's h honom in general but we can be specific so why not what about coar and fine so something is very rough versus something is more fine these are antonyms so this is antomy what about the enter key in a keyboard well if we draw a keyboard we have a bunch of different buttons and then we have our little Enter key so sometimes the enter key doesn't look like that sometimes it just looks like a straight bar and sometimes it looks like a vertical bar this is definitely an older style keyboard that I'm used to and I visualize in my head so an Enter key is a part of a keyboard so this is morony okay lastly sadness and emotion well sadness is a type of emotion therefore this is going to be hypony cuz when we think about what emotions are they encapture a a lot of different types and sadness is one of those types all right so now that we understand what homonyms are and things like that we can talk about ambiguity and the different types so there's three types of ambiguity the first one is lexical ambiguity and that is when a word basically is a homophone or um represents um homom between two different versions of the word so my bat is one of the best things in the world it is not clear to speakers whether you're talking about a baseball bat or an actual flying bat we need context and frequencies appearing these things in order to determine which one it is uh we'll just leave this at the bank and then head out well Bank could be the place where you deposit money or it could be a river bank it's going to depend on the context so until you understand what the context is it's a lexically ambiguous sentence now in each of these cases these are both just nouns and in terms of the structure it's not going to change anything the structure for either word you choose will be exactly the same it's just what bat refers to or what bank refers to under that node that is going to affect the meaning now structural ambiguity we saw a little bit with prepositional phrases but this is when we have more than one possible structure for a sentence so young men and women dominate the country now there's two ways to interpret this one is that it's just young men and then all women so we can see this in the left tree where young is just modifying men is just modifying one now and then young men forms with women to make a compound but there's a second way that we can interpret this and that is Young is modifying both men and women in which case we want to form a conjunction for men and women first and then we modify it with the adjective phrase so for structural ambiguity in this case it's just what is the adjective phrase modifying is it modifying a single noun or is it modifying an entire uh conjoined noun phrase last one is scope ambiguity and you'll see scope ambiguity with words like every and some when you have a subject and direct object that each use one of those different terms or you see them with numbers so if you have a number term in the subject and a number term in the direct object and they are well either similar or different we see scope ambiguity and what I mean by this is if we say four bodybuilders move two trucks there's different ways that we can distribute this either there's four bodybuilders and then each of those bodybuilders individually are going to be moving two different trucks so that would look like the diagram on the left so each bodybuilder is connected to two trucks which means that there's going to be eight trucks moved in total or it could be the case for four bodybuilders move two trucks that each of them were doing them together so four bodybuilders are moving the first truck and then four bodybuilders are moving the second truck so in total there would be two trucks so this is what scope ambiguity is it's a little bit hard to demonstrate syntactically what's happening without some knowledge in truth conditional semantics um but if you just remember the distribution of every and sum or numbers you're able to identify scope ambiguity so let's see what type of ambiguity is apparent in each of these sentences so every student loves some teacher so here's how we can do this we can say okay there's a bunch of different students out there and there's one particular teacher and every single student happens to like that one particular teacher or we can think about it as every student exists and for each of those students there's some particular teacher that they like and maybe two people like the same teacher that's okay too but there's two ways to interpret the sentence either every student individually loves some teacher or other or there's a particular teacher that every student loves and this is your example of scope ambiguity if you can draw a little diagram like this with two different interpretations of how the arrows go you're looking at scope ambiguity okay two I put the key behind the safe on top of the table this I want to argue is structural ambiguity now why because we have a prepositional phrase on top of the table now you're putting the key behind the safe on top of the table is on top of the table describing where the safe is or is it describing where the key is being placed so maybe the key is just on top of the table and also behind the safe or maybe it's just behind the safe which is on top of the table so maybe the key is on a box behind the safe on top of the table now for three my ex-girlfriend is looking for a match match could mean a physical thing that lights on fire when you strike it or it could be a partner so in this case this is lexicon ambiguity there is an uncertainty of what match could refer to so now we can talk about sentence relationships those were word relationships before now these are sentence relationships we say if two sentences have the same meaning then they're paraphrases so if we say Sarah greeted the police officer versus the police officer was greeted by Sarah the content and meaning of these sentences are exactly the same so these are paraphrases I scored a perfect mark on the test versus I scored 100% on the test a perfect Mark in most cases would be 100% so we're saying the exact same thing the content is the same so these are paraphrases and how we can identify paraphrases is by joining two sentences together into one and if it is a paraphrase we it sounds quite redundant Sarah greeted the police officer and the police officer was greeted by Sarah okay we just said the same thing twice this is redundent so that's how we can identify paraphrases for cont contradictions we're looking at sentences that both cannot be true at the same time so for example I am a married man and I am a bachelor if you're a married man by definition you're not a bachelor because a bachelor is an unmarried man so these two sentences together form a contradiction or I am an only child meaning you don't have any siblings and then you say I love my sister well a sister is a sibling so you can only be one of those two things so those are examples of contradictory sentences and if we combine them together then the sentence will always be false so I a married man and I am a bachelor that's not semantically okay because you can't be both we say a sentence is tlist if it's always true so in other words the content doesn't really matter it's just about the fact that given the sentence structure yeah of course whatever you say has to be true so if something is an animal it must be an animal okay yeah that's always true if you have an animal then by definition it's an animal will Master Greek or I will not master Greek okay like there is no in between either you've mastered it or you haven't this is always going to be true it's like saying well you'll get an A in this course or you won't get an A it's like well yeah that's given that's how you grade you either get an A or you get something else uh if I'm tall then if I'm smart I will be tall so this is saying if I'm tall then if I'm smart I will be tall well the condition is already that you're tall so it doesn't matter if you're smart after because of course you're going to be tall anyway you're already giving the condition of you being tall so these sentences are tlist they're always true anomalous sentences are just semantically weird that's the best way to put it these are not ungrammatical sentences but there's issues with thematic roles that make it weird so anomalous sentences are typically interpreted as metaphorical in a lot of cases so the classic example by Chomsky is colorless green ideas sleep furiously it doesn't make sense to have something that's colorless and green it doesn't make sense for an idea to have a color uh these ideas cannot sleep and then obviously you can't sleep furiously that's not that doesn't make sense so it's grammatical it follows all the structural rules of English but it just doesn't make sense uh rocks denied the plaint of a second chance we have an issue here with the word rocks like obviously rocks can't deny things especially in a court of law and the idea that was taller than me wasn't good well ideas don't have height so this is weird so these are all cases of semantic violations and these are anomalous so let's check to see if each sentence is contradictory or anomalous so one my personally employed Butler was sad that I didn't have any employees so we're saying that you employed a butler but you don't have any employees so this can't be a true sentence ever because if you didn't have employees you couldn't have a personally employed Butler so this is a contradiction what about the summer picked a fight with all the winter leaves well summer can't pick a fight and especially it can't pick a fight it with winter at least literally metaphorically this works but literally this sentence is anomalous because Summer isn't an agent summer can't actively fight something three Turtles hide in their mask there's nothing really wrong with this I mean this is kind of weird to say they hide in a mascot so maybe we'd want to say it's anomalous with a question mark for the most part there's nothing too strange about that now the last thing we really want to look at in terms of sentence relationships are entailment and entailment is when one sentence guarantees the truth of another sentence so you can think of I might say a bunch of statements and whatever entails from those statements is also true just by default so I own one dog one cat and no other pets that's sentence a that entails that you own two pets because if you add these things up one dog one cat and no other pets we get a total of two pets so B is entailed by a now in order to check for entailment we can take sentence a and we can take the negation of sentence B B combine them together and if we get a contradiction then we have entailment because it if a entails B then a should mean that b is true so if we're saying a is true but B is false then yeah we should get a contradiction so I own one dog one cat and no other pets and I do not own two pets this is a contradiction because we're saying one dog one cat that's two pets no other pets so it is exactly two but then they're saying that they don't own any pets well don't own two pets so we get our contradiction there which tells us that the first sentence entails the second so let's see if we can determine whether or not there's entailment in each example Kim will pass the test or fail the test does that mean necessarily that Kim will pass the test uh no because she could pass or fail the test so it doesn't mean she's going to pass the test because she could fail it what about in two I have a brown pen and a red pen entails that I have a brown pen yes this is entailment I'm saying I have two of these things so I can entail specifically that I have one of those things I own at least four chairs does that mean that I own at least two chairs and the answer is yes because if you own at least four then four is bigger than two so you own at least two as well so we could be a little bit more specific with these tests so I can show the first one with the contradiction test so we're going to take the first sentence which is Kim will pass the test or fail the test and Kim will not pass the test if we take a look at this sentence it's not a contradiction Kim will pass the test or fail the test but Kim will not pass the test that would imply that she's going to fail it so this is totally fine and because it's totally fine we're not looking at entailment but if we do the test for our bottom one here so uh I own at least four chairs but I do not own at least two chairs now this is very clearly a contradiction if we take the negative version of B Because if they own at least four then how do they not own at least two so that's it for semantics in the intro course we'll now move on to morphology which is our second last topic of this video so morphology is the study of words and word formation so for example we're going to take a look at different suffixes and prefixes to see how they change categories of root words we can take a look at how words are shortened or created we can draw structures for our words so that way if we have a word like activation we know that it's a noun but we can talk about its components and how it forms different categories as more aexes are added and we can also take a look at other languages to see what morphemes exist in those languages so the first thing we're going to do is take a look at some data sets and just like in phology we're going to use minimal pairs very religiously in order to figure out what morphemes are the difference is that minimal pairs in morphology are a little bit different and that is instead of having a difference in one sound we have a difference in one morphine so this is going to be either an AIX a root word or even some grammatical information like tense and we also need a difference in meaning so for example the two sentences below show a minimal pair I meet Johnny every week for dinner and I met Johnny every week for dinner now even though meet and met come from the same root word the difference is that they differ in whether they're past tense or present tense so one is minus past and one is Plus past that is one difference in meaning so I think most people can do a data set like this without much formal linguistic training but we're going to show how minimal pairs work here so we have a bunch of words on the left and then they English translations on the right and what we're doing is we're trying to figure out what each of these morphemes are in that language so we want to figure out with the morphes for tooth my your singular his her it's our inclusive our exclusive your plural and there are so we can look for some minimal pairs so what I would do is I'd look at two words and I'd be like okay uh we need to figure out the difference between my tooth and let's do his her or it it's tooth so in these cases we see something in common we see that tooth is in common in each of these in fact in every single case tooth has a common meaning in each of these so what that means is that in our translation or in that language that we're looking at originally whatever is in common should be tooth and in this case we can see that ngii whether it's pronounced ni Ori I'm not quite sure but we see that that's common in every single example so what that means is that ngii in this case is going to mean tooth now whatever is left over is what's going to be the other morphemes in our word so for the first one my tooth we still need something for my well it comes as a y at the end so Y is an AIX that means my what about in his her its tooth well actually let's do your singular tooth first so here we have MW at the end so mu so your singular tooth will be an AIX mu his her it's we see an N at the end so this is just a morphe n that means his her its in terms of our inclusive tooth that is an sh so our inclusive just means that the person who's saying it is included in the discussion as well as the person they're talking to our exclusive is a little bit different this is going to be M at the end and exclusive just means that the person that you're talking to is not included it's like if someone stands at the front of the class and says yeah we're taking a vacation they're probably talking about themselves and their family and not every student in the class okay for your tooth we see me at the end so this will be a suffix me and then for their tooth we see r at the end so that is the suffix for there now this is a very straightforward data set they do get more complicated but a lot of the intro Linguistics data sets that you're going to see are kind of like this so let's get into some more interesting stuff which are morphemes and words so morphemes are just the smallest unit of meaning so these are sounds that would put together have some sort of meaning attached to them and each of these morphemes are stored in our lexicon and the morphemes combined to form birds so we say that a morim is the minimal unit of meaning but a word is the minimal unit that can stand alone in a language so doesn't need a fixed position uh it can be used within a sentence as a standalone word so in the case of improbability probable is the word that we start with and it's an adjective but we can add some affixes to it so we can make improbable so by making the word improbable by attaching the AIX IM we get an adjective out of that and then we can attach the suffix it to get improbability which now becomes a noun so this AIX what it's doing doing is it's taking an adjective and it converts it to a noun while the case of AF uh m in this case it takes an adjective and it keeps it as an adjective so uh these are examples of morphemes and words so just to make it very clear IM probable and ity are all morphemes we have different types of morphemes we have fre morphemes and bound morphemes uh free morphemes can act as words so they can stand alone in a sentence like bake trust dog lie fall well bound morphemes need to attach to a free morphine or another Bound morphe in order to exist in a sentence so something like er as in runner well we can't just say ER on its own in a sentence we need to attach it to a PR morphine in the case of in maybe we have a word like lie and then we're going to change it to lying so we're adding that ing ing can't just stand on its own same with if Ed and anti uh these are all examples of morphemes that cannot stand on its own in a sentence in other words if they're not attached to something they don't really have any meaning that we use now when we think about words words can be simple or complex a simple word just has one morphine so a simple word consists of one three morphine and a complex word is Created from two or more morphemes now this can be an example of free Plus plus free it can be an example of free plus aound morphine or in some cases we even have words formed from two bound morphemes now of course we can have other things being attached to but this would be the minimum that we need in order to create a complex word so something like lover we have love plus we have our eer suffix we have mean plus we have our EST superlative suffix which makes it the most out of something the meanest out of a group soups we have soup as a base and we have our plural s for tried we have our verb try and then this we have the past tense Ed on it and for flowering we have the base word flower and then we're adding the progressive ing or even the jiren ing in this course in this case you're saying that you're flowering a garden or something to mean that you're creating a bunch of flowers in that Garden oh let's check these words and see if we can identify some morphemes so first of all sweet uh sweet can't be broken up into any individual meaning I know you might think oh it's formed with the word suit and the letter e but e on its own is not a morphine so it doesn't have any meaning that attaches to other words to form other words so in this case it's just a simple word that consists of one free morphine now in the case of untie what do we have here we have TI that's a verb and then we have un which is the undoing or reversal morphine so in this case this word is complex and in order from left to right it consists of a bound morphe and then it has a free morphine because taii can be used on its own but un cannot un has to attach to something what about in the case of mistreat well same thing here we have treat and then we have Miss which would mean to not treat well in this case so this is also going to be a complex word and this consists of a bound morphe Miss plus a free morphine now you might be thinking here too hold on a second we have a word like Miss with two s's that refers to um usually an unmarried woman but it can just be a polite term for a woman that you don't know who's younger uh but this is not meaning this is not the same meaning so we don't want to be saying that Miss in this case could be a free morphine because we have to consider the meaning of the morphine what is mistreat doing in Miss in terms of that morphine it's basically saying that you're not treating them well that is separate from a meaning uh that relates to a woman so when we have a morphine we need to identify either its meaning or what its function is in the case of mistreat uh it's not not changing the word category same with untie it's not changing the word category but we can assign some meaning to them in the case of some morphemes all they're going to do is change the category so let's make sure our terminology is on point here so we say that a word that is complex consists of a root and affixes so the root is the Lexical Word that gives the core meaning and affixes are going to modify the meaning or category from there so in the case of blackened black is what's known as our root that's where we're getting the main meaning of the word and then we have apex's n which turns black to Blacken which makes it a verb and then we have our Ed which is our past tense which would make it a past tense verb so we have different types of affixes uh prefixes occur before the root and suffixes occur after the root so prefixes being an example of Replay illegal inaccurate prehistory and suffixes being things like faithful government Kinder happiness now it can be noted that you can have multiple suffixes on a word or even prefixes so if I say something like faithfulness the root in this case is going to be Faith now the position or what type of AIC that we have is dependent on the position relative to the root so these are both going to be suffixes in this case because they come after the root so just because full comes before Nest does not mean that full is a prefix because it's about its comparison and position to the root now some languages will also have what are called infixes and circumf fixes so infixes take a root so in this case we have bil and tagal and we can add an AIX inside of that rout so boom which is just the past tense in this case so there's usually rules for how this is done but it's important that it breaks up a root so for example if we had something like this in English if we had a word like dog we don't have infixes really in English I mean we do have one type of infix which I can briefly talk about um but in order to have an infix we'd have to do something like adding I don't know let's say we wanted to say the dog maybe we do like do or something and putting the in between like that's what an infix would look like the one type of infix that we do have in English is let's take a word like absolutely we can break this up into ABS freaking lutely or ABS godamn lutely put whatever curse word we want in there and this is an example of an infix in English in fact this is like the only uh well it's one of two infixes that we have we also have another case like a word like speedometer where we have speed plus meter and then we're adding this little o in between in order to connect those words so that's another example but two very limited examples in English but we definitely don't have our circumf fixes and these are affixes that go around the root of the word they both need to appear together as a pair so in Malle Adil is fair but kadan is fairness now we can't just add K on its own and we can't just add on on its own both of these together form the AIX so that's why we call them a circumfix because they come in a pair where one occurs before the root and one occurs after the root you can almost think of it like a discontinuous morphine that it could be written like this for example now a little bit more terminology when it comes to our structural trees and that is the con ccept of a base so a base is a little bit different than a root uh what a base is is it's the form of the word that an AIX is attaching to so you can think that at each step of a derivation when you're making a new word the base is the originally formed word that you have at that point and it's taking an AIX so for example what we take reactivation Act is the base for if so act is acquiring if after then when we have active active is the base that takes eight afterwards so at each step we have a base in the case of activate well activate is going to be the base for re which is the AIX or prefix in this case that's attaching to it and then here we have our base reactivate that is taking the I and suffix to make reactivation so at each step we have a base that is different than the root because in this case the only root that we have is act that's the main Lexical Word that all of these affixes are attaching to so in our word trees we are just going to be combining bases plus affixes and when we do that we're going to get a new category out of it uh we typically label affixes as AF or AF some books will use prefix and suffix more specifically but we'll just be General with AF for AIX so what this means is a base like run would have a category which would be a verb it takes an AIX and from that we might get a new category we need to consider the context of the word and the form of the word so in the case of prehistory history is a noun we add an AIX pre to it and then we get prehistory which is also a n now sometimes we have to be careful about which way that we're adding affixes to our trees so for example in prehistoric I would argue that prehistory comes first now why I would say that is even though historic is a word and prehistory is a word when we think about what pre does is it takes a noun and it basically says before that noun so what pre likes to do is it likes to attach to nouns and form nouns that allows this noun to noun uh relationship going up our tree then what ick is going to do is it's going to take a noun and convert it to an adjective now it's a little weird if we were to do it the opposite way like let's imagine that we have historic which is going to be an adjective and then we want to add pre to it which is an affix well we know that pre typically changes nouns into nouns and gives that meaning to it it's kind of weird to add pre to an adjective oh that's when is preppy oh he's pre- sad like that's not what we do in English we don't add pre to adjectives so a little bit of knowledge and playing around with words to figure out what axes typically do can give you a hint of how they're combined to form word trees so let's see if we can draw word trees for the following words the first one is payment now this is only two morphemes pay and mint uh pay is a verb mint is an affix and and then what do we get with payment we get a noun and just to check to see that this is what typically happens we can think of other words that take me like govern government govern is a verb meant attaches to it and it becomes a noun okay what about dis obey so we have this and we have obey obey is a verb this is an affix and when we join them together we still get a verb so disobey meaning to not obey so this AIX really just means not and it just turns a verb into a verb that is the negation of it basically so what other examples could we have well it's not always going to work with every single AIX because a lot of these prefixes in English require like specific types of words um but we could think of words like allow to disallow something well allow is a verb and then disallow is also a verb okay let's do our last one here which is optional I'm going to delete the green text and then keep this up to the side and then put payback okay optional this one is tough for people because a lot of people think this is two morphemes option and O but it's actually three it's opt Y and then ol so to opt is a verb and the I and Al are affixes now when we combine these ones we have a very specific order we have to do it and that's because we can't do like these multiple branching things where uh we have Crossing branches so opt is going to form with Shun first to make option which is a noun and it combines with Al afterwards to make an adjective so those are some word trees now we just did these with aexes but we can do compounding as well so with a case like a Blackboard if we talk about a board that is black that's an adjective plus a noun but if we think about the compound word black board which could be green um we can see how it's formed so black is typically an adjective board is a noun and together they form the compound Blackboard after you form the compound you can start adding other affixes to it so blackboards to make it plural typically our Free morphemes Will merge together first and then aexes later there are some cases where this is not true but they're pretty rare so you can just go with the general assumption that compounds are made before affixes are added in the case of something like a medical college graduate student uh there's a few ways that we can analyze this we could analyze this as an individual word or we could think of it in syntactic structures with noun phrases and adjective phrases uh some morphologists just consider this a compound word so medical college graduate student would consist of medical and college forming a noun and then a graduate Plus student student forming a noun and the medical college and graduate student form together to make a noun in the case of pet food store pet food and store are all nouns and they combine together in order to make a compound noun but this interpretation is rather interesting because what this is saying is that this is a store that sells pet food so pet food is the modifier for store but we can actually do it the other way around too and get a slightly different meaning so what I mean by this is first we can say it's a food store and then we can combine it with pet after so what this is saying in this case is that this is a food store for pets it is a pet food store rather than a pet food store so you can think with these cases of compound words where you have like more than two words that are combining together or more than two morphemes I should say combining together uh the way that you combine them can change the meaning so for example even with the medical college graduate student we're saying this is a graduate student of a medical college but we could change the lines around a little bit here we could say actually uh we're saying it's a college graduate student and then afterwards we attach medical to it under the noun to make a medical call college graduate student so this is a college graduate student who happens to have the property of being medical so how we attach our words in compounds is going to change the meaning depending on whichever structure you CH uh you choose now there are a bunch of different types of affixes out there and we could list them all but that would be absolutely absurd to do in English so we're just going to learn two different classifications uh one are inflectional morphemes and these are morphemes that are purely indicating grammatical information we have eight of these in English that are completely inflectional and then we have derivational morphemes and these just change the meaning or category of a word and they don't indicate grammatical information and there are well over 500 of these in English so the best way to approach this is to learn what the eight inflectional morphemes are and then understand that if you don't see one of those eight inflectional morphemes it is deriv in a later morphology course you might think of this less as a binary choice of a morphine being purely inflectional or purely derivational and instead think of it on a Continuum but that's a little bit Advanced for an intro course so here are the eight morphemes that are inflectional in English and we'll go through each of these in turn this is just a nice summary slide there's two for nouns being the plural and the possessor there's four for verbs being third person singular present participle which which is the progressive past tense and past participle which would be your perfect and then two for adjectives and adverbs which are the comparative and superlative so plural most nouns can be pluralized with s or ES so cat to cats box to boxes semetary to cemeteries but we do see irregular nouns as well so for example the re n suffix in children this is the plural morphine for child sometimes there's what's called internal change from Goose to geese so the vowel sound is changing in it and sometimes we have what's called suppletion or partial suppletion where the word changes pretty substantially so person to people but again you can just think of the meaning of these you know that goose is singular you know that geese is plural so you can identify that geese has a plural inflection on it the generative is all about the possessive relationship as well as relationships that fall under possession there can be really specific ones if you get really into English grammar specifically but just knowing the general concept of possession is good enough to understand a generative and to singular nouns we add an apostrophe s so Jack's pencil or a bat's fangs and when we have plural nouns that end in an S we do not add an S after we just add the apostrophe so countryes governments is both plural and genitive in this case so uh in terms of verb inflections we have our third person singular morphine with s so this is when you have a pronoun like he or even a third person singular like the child when you're talking about a specific noun and we see an s that goes on the verb so he she it works compared to I work which does not have the inflection uh Rufus escapes or the company goes bankrupt you wouldn't say the company go bankrupt and you wouldn't say Ruf is escape you you need that third person singular form some verbs do have irregular ones so for example for have the third person singular version is has and for B the third person singular is is for our Progressive aspect which we call the present participle in terms of our inflectional labeling uh this occurs after your auxiliary is when it's an ongoing AC so we've learned this in syntax so basically if you see is working was being are driving or jogging uh this is the present participle inflection the regular past tense is just by adding Ed to words so it's typically what you see work to worked trust to trusted amount to amounted but you will see irregular past tense forms like B is was or were have is had eat is ate go changes form completely to went and do is did so each of these words on the bottom have that past tense inflection there's just no specific suffix or prefix that indicates it it's part of the word change and the last one is our perfect aspect so this occurs after our auxilary have or even after our passive was and this would say that an action has been completed relative to some point in time so you usually see an ed on these but in some cases you do see an En n such as in as eaten and we do have these irregular forms as well so for instance B you add an to it and you get being but there's some cases like we saw before which is like had run for example run just looks like a bare infinitive form but it's actually inflected for perfect in this case so we would label this as a past participle if we're giving it an inflection name now for adjectives and adverbs we have comparatives and superlatives comparatives look at two things so these are two things and it picks one as having the most of that quality so young to younger cute to cuter clums to clumsier uh we know that when we compare two things one can be younger or acter or clumsier than the other there are irregular forms as well so good becomes better bad becomes worse and little can become less you'll also see an inflection with the word more so more fun in this case more is a qualifier fun is an adjective and this qualifier has the comparative inflection built into it for the superlative just like the comparative we had EST so young to youngest cute to cutest clumsy to clumsiest and The Irregular forms for the comparative will also have irregular forms for the superlative like good to best bad to worst and little to least you'll see in this case something like most fun which again is a qualifier and an adjective and most would have that superlative built into it so this is used when we have three or more things and we want to identify which has the most of a certain quality who is the happiest who is the saddest so let's practice with inflections here which inflections appear on the underlined words below he was walking down the street without a care well was is going to be past tense and walking has that Progressive marker on it because we have the auxiliary B before it and an ing on the verb so we would say that this is a present participle in terms of its inflection have you slept yet well this one is interesting because we do have have so if we think about the declarative form you have slept yet or you just have slept because it's weird to say you have slept yet uh what we actually have here is not the past tense but the past participle because in that verb chain you have slept we have our perfect have plus our verb with that irregular ending which is the past participle form or have you been awake for 30 hours like me we see the plural inflection on here turning hour into hours okay three Deadpool is the greatest member of X Force so is well Deadpool is a name so this is a third person singular form of be and greatest is the superlative because we're saying out of at least two or more people Deadpool is the greatest of them okay fourth one the person who was sleeping here left without saying his goodbyes so sleeping well we have was sleeping so this is going to be a progressive which indicates that it is the present participle inflection so hopefully that wasn't too bad it was a little bit fast but with these ones once you've done syntax they're not too bad now derivational morphemes will change either the category of the word or the meaning of the word we're not going to learn a bunch I just have some examples down here like the meant suffix in government which changes a verb to a noun uh ant which H appears on words like inhabit to inhabitant this is also a verb to noun morim love to lovable this is a verb to adjective able morphe act to active again verb to adjective adding Ive to verbs work to worker this is a verb to noun and natural to Supernatural this one doesn't change the category of the word but it does change the meaning so this is like as in Beyond natural you can think of a synonym being Beyond so this is not inflectional it's not talking about grammatical information it's basically changing the lexical meaning of the word so let's see if we can identify inflectional or derivational morphemes here and the trick is in English inflectional morphemes are always suffixes so it when they appear as affixes so if you ever see a prefix in English it's going to be derivational so I was displeased with the service this just means not pleased so this is a derivational morphine Max sleeps every day at noon well we know this is our third person singular morphine so this one is inflectional she was instagramming her food every time so was instagramming that's an action that's a progressive action so this ing is the present participle this is inflectional are you really nuttier than me okay what is ly in this case it's taking an adjective real and then converting it into an adverb so because we have a category change this is going to be derivational and for the fifth one this is the shiniest Rock we're talking about which rock out of many is the shinest so this is the superlative and this is inflection now one more problem related to this this is kind of interesting I know this slide is very wordy but it's a very interesting problem so Appalachian English has this AIX a and it attaches to certain words and I'm going to give you some examples of sentences that are good or bad so in one they were a fishing by the bridge that's fine in three he was a hunting murderous grizzly bears in the backyard that's fine six I am a shooting my best that is fine too but two4 five and seven are not okay they like to fishing quite a bit that's not what people say he tried to shoot in them but he missed that's not what people say if he ain't as stupid I don't know what he is yeah people don't say that and they could have eat some fresh meat yeah they don't say that either so what is happening here what is a attaching to in the good examples well what I do see that it's attaching to is a verb so uh is attaching to a verb and it's attaching in a very specific place because when we say he tried a shooting num that doesn't work so what do we notice that's in common with all the good sentences were was am these are all forms of be and which type of be in particular the auxiliary it's the progressive in this case so actually in Appalachian English you can analyze this so-called prefix actually as a circumfix so a verbing is the present participle in Appalachian English of course they can say it without a but you can analyze this as a present participle which is inflectional so I did kind of lie when we said that English doesn't have circumf fixes some dialects do now let's talk about some word change so how do we create words and how do we classify those word changes so internal change is a general category that accounts for sound changes tone changes stress Chang changes uh basically anything to do with phonetic changes so for an example sing to sang we have a vowel change there in masi or sorry Masai we can see there's a change in tones so the first tone stays the same the last tone stays the same but the middle tones change to be high rather than low Spanish BBE to BBE we see a stress change so the primary syllable gets moved and in German goost to sure you can guess what word that means in English uh we see a vowel change there too so these are just word internal changes now there's suppletion which is a little bit more involved and suppletion is when an entire word changes so in English we have go to went the when you see suppletion basically the idea is that the new formed word is unpredictable based on its base so if you look at go and you have no idea what the past tense of go is you would not come up with the word went you would say go that would be the logical thing to come to so suppletion is when you have that unpredictable word form uh in French for have to had we have in Spanish and then German is to for is the r so in all of these cases the form that comes out from the base is unpredictable unless you know the language uh if it's partial suppletion then we would just have some of the word changing so one kind of questionable example is person to people it's kind of difficult to tell whether this is suppletion or partial suppletion but one of the important parts of the word which is p in this case is kept the same so I would argue this is more partial suppletion than full completion conversion is our most boring word change this is when you take a word and you don't really change anything perhaps the stress if it's multicab but the category changes so for example ink well you can ink something that's a verb but you can also use ink so it can be used as a verb or a noun started as a noun and then it became a verb after uh in the case of nouns coming from verbs run was a verb but now we can say I'm going for a run so in other words we're keeping the word exactly the same but we're using it in a different category uh dirty is an adjective but we could also say that you could dirty something like you could dirty the table by putting a bunch of stuff on it so it's kind of boring it's just the same word used as multiple different categories clipping is very common especially when it comes to giving people nicknames this is when you take a multi- syic word and then you just delete one or more syllables from it so I'm sure a lot of people didn't know that the word Zoo comes from Zoological Garden it is a clip of that so in other words we're taking some part of the word and we're just deleting it I'm sure you've heard of a fax machine before well it comes from fax simile machine so we're just removing that imily in the case reducing it to one syllable in the case of cellular telephone we're taking two words and clipping part of each so we're taking the UL off of cellular and the TA off a telephone and that gives us cell phone so that's just clipping we're removing parts of the word when we do blending we take two words and we smoosh them together so brother and romance becomes Bromance so we see a little bit of bro a little bit of romance we do see some connection between the vowel sounds so we get Bromance in the case of jeans plus leggings we get jeggings so what you'll notice about these words too when we blend them together is that they have the meanings of both of these and then if you want an example from talag to becomes toog so this is where you take oh you remove the a off tapa you remove the nag off the middle word and then you take it off the last word and you get tapsilog back formation feels a little bit like clipping sometimes but there's some interesting history when it comes to back formation and that is you have a word that is a longer form that looks like it has an AIX on it and then what people do is they remove that AIX to create the new form so for example historically self-destruction came first and it looks like this I suffix would attached to a verb in order to make it a noun so what people do is they remove that I and they create the word self-destruct which is a verb so instead of adding an AIX like you would expect what's actually happening is a word looks like it has an AIX on it and people remove it to pronounce a new word same with donation to donate donation was the original word we have that I suffix on it we remove it and then we get the verb donate here's an interesting change from English 150 years ago to now P used to be the singular of P but when we hear Zu at the end of nouns we typically think of them as plural so what people did was they removed the Z off P's because they wanted to make it sound more singular they wanted they thought it was singular if you removed that z sound and now we have p as the singular so back formation can be difficult to identify without some dictionary at least historical knowledge of the language but typically if you're in an exam situation or assignment situation and you have to pick between clipping and back formation clipping you're not really just removing one AIX you're removing a bunch of syllables uh with back formation you're removing something that looks like a typical AIX uh I think our last ones here are acronyms and initialisms so acronyms and initialisms look pretty similar but there is a difference linguistically acronyms take the first letter in a bunch of words and you can pronounce them as a word so an acronym can be pronounced as a word so the North Atlantic Treaty Organization can be pronounced as NATO it has a phonetic transcription that we can use NATO as for as soon as possible we can say ASAP so that's how we pronounce it ASAP initialisms again they look pretty similar but you do not pronounce them as a word you pronounce them each letter individually so for Prince Edward Island we don't call it pay we call it Pei for LMAO I think us older people say LMAO and then younger people say Lau so I mean really if you say l m AO it is an initialism if you say uh la ma in that transcription then it would be considered to be an acronym so it could change depending on how you pronounce it the generation the age and so on so let's ask ourselves how are these words created which method of word creation was used so if we take shark and tornado we get shark NATO this is a case of blending we blend two words together what about babysitter to babysit well we have this ER suffix on here it looks like that's an agentive suffix that turns a verb into a noun but actually babysitter came first so this is an example of back formation we're removing the ER to create a new word which is a verb babysit uh tuy to tuck Tucky okay here's an interesting one this is not English so what are we doing here well this is just regular affixation so we didn't explicitly label this as a word formation type but just adding an aex to a word is considered affixation and finally snipe as a verb to snipe as a noun uh nothing is changing except for the word category so this is just an example of conversion now there's one more thing in morphology that we need to talk about and that is the concept of alamor so sometimes a morphine can be pronounced in different ways depending on its environment and alamor are in complimentary distribution just like alones so the same process you'd use to identify alones would be used to identify allomorphs nothing is really changing if you can do phonological data sets with alphones you can do morphological data sets with allomorphs so one example is the plural morphine in English we pronounce this in three different ways we do is as in the case of boxes uh some people have this vowel here it's a high Central unrounded LAX vowel is uh some people use the schah in its pronunciation boxes this occurs after strident so sounds like uh s Z SH and J we use the regular s s after voiceless sound and we pronounce it as Z after voice sounds so which one is the most common well Z is the most common pronunciation of the plural which is funny because it's written with an S but it's mostly pronounced as Z so if we want to give a base morphine for this we want to actually say what the morphe is we'd say that it's Z as its base form and then it has different allomorphs and Z so if you want to analyze data sets with Alam morphy you just do the same thing you create an environment chart and then you look at morphes and sounds just like you would have before it's just instead of having just one sound in each box you're basically looking at all of the different forms of the alamore so as an example we can do this data set we're looking at the morphemes for da and T we want to see the environment of each so we can do an environment chart the first three words on the left have du the three words on the right have t so where does this happen well du occurs after an a at the end of a word uh it occurs after e at the end of a word and it occurs after U at the end of a word now what T is doing is it's occurring after an S at the end of the word it's occurring after P at the end of a word and it's occurring after k at the end of the word so we don't have a full data set here so we can't see all the nuances but we can definitely find power patterns for da and T and if I'm going to make a guess I'm going to say that t is occurring after voiceless sounds so when you have a voiceless sound you put T and then when you have a voice sound you put da so really if I want to do this with features uh plus voice because for du and then minus voice for T and I'm sure if we had something that ended in a g let's just make of a word like uh Mig or something Mig uh we would probably expect to see du after rather than T because G is voiced so that is it for morphology we're now going to move on to our very last subject which is pragmatics pragmatics will be a very short topic and it is the study of non-literal meaning so the meaning that you would get from conversations so here's some examples do you believe that we have a good teacher well I haven't failed yet B isn't answering A's question instead they're kind of skirting around around the issue they don't want to say that the teacher's bad they just want to mention that they haven't failed yet at this point so they're being nice by not being literal or here's another example did you say that you were made of iron yeah I'm a tough resilient person of course when someone asks if you're made of iron they don't mean that you're literally made of iron that they want is equality it's being used as a metaphor in this case so the first aspect of pragmatics which is very important is understanding implicature so implicature is when you have an implied meaning based on what you say but it's not necessarily entailed so it's always up to interpretation what the actual Viewpoint is but based on your knowledge of conversation and what people typically say you can guess what they mean so a asked do you want to get trash tonight and then B says I have a test tomorrow B doesn't want to say no because rejecting someone outright can be rude so instead they come up with an excuse which means that that they can't leave so the little plus arrow it's usually just one symbol means implication uh here's something you never want to see you never want to give a recommendation letter where someone just says John has a nice smile and great handwriting if you're writing a recommendation letter like this what you're really saying is that well there's no redeemable qualities for John I don't really have anything nice to say so I'm going to talk about his physical features rather than his actual capabilities as a graduate student so there's some implicature there that you'll see in some reference letters now all of this relates to crisis principle of cooperation which is how we figure out whether someone is trying to imply things and what he says is make your conversational contribution such as is required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk in which you are engaged what what this basically means is that when you have a conversation you should try to progress the conversation keep it on topic and say things that are truthful now we don't follow this all the time we flout some of what are called Grace's maxims in order to get that metaphorical meaning satire comedy or just general politeness implications so there's four maximums the maximum quantity quality Manner and relation quantity just says give as much information as required and no more quality would say say say things that are true or that you believe are true manner would be say things in a way that avoids obscurity and ambiguity and maximum relation is just saying when you have a conversation with someone you should be relevant to the conversation so the things you say should be relevant to what was just asked so when we float these maxims we create implicators now FL floating is US using it or us violating I don't want to say violate when we float a Maxim we're choosing to do so but we're still trying to be cooperative so we're intentionally creating an implicature that the other person should understand so here's an example where we FL the maximum relation I think Mrs Jenkins is the best teacher ever don't you and then be just says huh lovely weather for March isn't it like this is not relevant at all but if B says this the idea is that you know you don't really agree with a you don't want to make a comment on Mrs Jenkins so you're basically saying you don't agree but you don't want to comment on it and that implication should be picked up by a where that topic is then dropped or something else is said what about flouting the maximum of quality so talking about truthfulness Sir Isaac Newton had the brain the size of Jupiter well we know that's not true uh a human cannot have a brain the size of Jupiter because then every other human and thing around us would be orbiting around around that person's brain what we mean to say here is that Sir Isaac Newton was smart so what we can do when we violate the maxim of quality is we create metaphors so we're thing saying things that are not literally true but that mean something generally positive or negative about a person we can also flout the maximum manner for humor purposes so usually this is used for humor but I mean we can use it for other things too so I'm sure people know who DJ khed is and I think about DJ khed I think about DJ khed producing a series of sounds corresponding to a screeching trash can now obviously there's a more concise way to say this that he produces music I don't like or produces bad music if we're being uh subjective with our opinion um but the way that I'm saying this produced a series of sounds corresponding to a screeching trash can I'm clouting the maximum of manner for humor purposes I I don't want to explicitly say it's bad but I want to make a comparison because I think it's kind of funny so we have a couple exercises here and we want to ask which maxims were flouted to create these jokes so we have some jokes here so person a says does your dog bite uh B says no the dog that b owns bites a and then a says why did the dog just bite me then if you said your dog doesn't bite and then B responds well that's not my dog so this is floating quantity for sure because there's information being left out so when they say does your dog bite B just says no B doesn't say that's not my dog in this case in fact B isn't really interpreting a properly he treating them very literally in this case um but in this case by leaving out information we get some humor out of it because that information is then revealed later oh that's not my dog okay number two I know it's really funny when I explain the joke uh two how do you think that person died newbie well I think the blood is supposed to be inside the body so in a way this is definitely flouting some manner in this case because they're not directly answering exactly how they thought that person died in fact you might even argue that it is relation in this case although it is kind of related to the discussion it's not like they're going completely off topic uh in terms of quantity I mean there is some more information given than necessary so that could be argued to usually quantity and manner kind of are flouted hand inand but it's definitely not quality uh B is saying I think blood is supposed to be inside the body obviously that's a true statement so relation and quantity are questionable there but definitely manner for sure so that was the introduction to Linguistics course hopefully this is under 6 hours in the end oh it's it's been a long time since I've started recording this but if you are interested in some text documents on this there's two books that I kind of recommend uh one is free it's called Essentials of linguistics you can look at it online it's not that great but it is free uh it covers all of the information it's just that there's no exercises and the book is basically a transcription of videos some sections are better than others there's a lot of things that aren't necessar motivated and some of the sections on phonetics do not account for how Canadian speakers speak instead it's more or even American speakers it it's very much geared in its phonetic section towards uh Eastern North American speakers rather than Central and western North American speakers but what I do recommend and this is the book that my University uses is contemporary linguistic analysis by William alrady and John Aral archal uh it's fantastic everything is motivated well there's tons of examples a huge focus on languages other than English as well in the exercises and every single chapter has like 15 plus exercises that Target different things taught throughout the Throughout the chapter it it's a fantastic book and there's also information on General Linguistics there such as language acquisition uh historical Linguistics uh language revitalization writing systems um I believe even some neural Linguistics and psyching Linguistics in there so contemporary linguistic analysis it's not cheap I'm sure you can find it very cheap online somehow I won't tell you how but someone in the comments I'm sure will lead that information below so if you enjoyed this uh and you want a follow up on some stuff I do have some phology videos on the channel I have a syntax course that's a followup on the channel I have some mantics course that's follow up on the channel and uh the only ones I don't really have are phonetics or more ology I will never produce a phonetic series I think it's horribly boring that's just my personal opinion but morphology might come in the future if you're watching this like several months after the video came out it might already be up if you're watching the several years that the video came out and there's no morphology course uh yeah no excuse for that anyways I hope you enjoyed if you have any questions leave them in the comments below and uh yeah good luck in your linguistic studies