welcome to a new series introduction to Linguistics I'm going to do a overview video just because I think with a course like introduction to Linguistics it's very Broad and I might as well show a little introduction of what we're going to be doing in this series so this is to be equivalent of a first semester in what I call linguistic analysis or contemporary linguistic analysis that is we look at the five main aspects of language which would be syntax semantics morphology phonetics and phenology and these are the only things that will be covered so if you're looking for historical sociol Linguistics or specifically discourse or something a little bit more advanced probably not yet the topic for you so what are these five things well we'll start with syntax and syntax is the structure of language so languages like English have a worded order for instance we would say I hit the ball and with this sentence we would have a subject which is I we have a verb which is hit and then we have the ball which is our object and we can classify this as an SVO language now all of these other different permutations of subject verb and objects like actually exist in other languages for instance as you'll see in the first introductory syntax video Japanese jaes is subject object verb there are other languages where the verb comes first and then an object subject and so on now with syntax because language has structures and our sentences have structures we can do a little bit more than just list word order in fact we can create trees with sentences so a sentence will consist of a noun phrase and a verb phrase for instance in this case the noun is going to be a in a verb phrase well we have a verb which is hit and then it has another noun phrase which would be the ball so the noun is ball and then it also has this thing called a determiner which is the word the which specifies exactly which ball we're talking about so we can use our hierarchical structure and we can draw a tree or a structure for language as well now of course this structure you see here isn't the most advanced we can get in fact this course won't cover what Advanced sentences look like but it'll cover the basics and that's enough for an introduction course we will then move on to semantics and we'll talk about the meaning of language we won't be looking at mathematical semantics but we'll be looking at things such as ambiguity so for instance if I say I bought a pen what is the first thing that comes comes to mind when you think of the sentence I bought a pen it's probably uh something that looks like this that's probably what it was what you didn't think probably was this sort of pen that holds a dog because you don't want it to escape at night so you probably didn't think of a little puppy being stuck behind a pen here this is my terrible drawing I don't even know what that is that's that's terrible but you probably didn't think of a pen like that so for instance when we say I bought a pen do we have to specify I bought an animal pen I bought a dog pen what exactly when I think I bought a dog pen do you think in fact a lot of people would think that you bought a pen that has dogs on it because how often do we use the word pen not that often so we have ambiguity like that we also have structural ambiguity so for instance um I like small cats and dogs so there are two ways that we could interpret the sentence I like small cats and dogs for instance we may have Mr Whiskers here and we might have a dog here which they look pretty similar but these are both small for I like small cats and dogs but another interpretation is that Mr Whiskers a small small so I like small cats but I also just like dogs so instead we get this huge dog and we say well how do we know what each of the meaning is that that's the dog by the way well again this is ambiguity and we can analyze this with semantics we'll also talk about presupposition so for instance if I say do you regret kicking the dog last night if you answer the question you just admitted to kicking the dog so we're presupposing some things there there's implication and some other things that we'll talk about but I won't cover it in the overview here after talking about semantics we will move on to morphology which we call sort of the structures of words now these are things that have meaning in fact they're the smallest unit of meaning so for instance if I say birds what is the smallest unit of meaning in here in fact there's two meanings well there's two separate meanings that we join together one of these is the word bird and we know what a bird looks like with another horrible drawing uh kind of looks like that has feathers that's a bird and then we have this extra marker here the s that simply has this old meaning of multiple so this implies Birds implies that there's a bird and there's more than one but let's take a look at another word say the the word pets now again we have pet and we have S but this s and this s in pets and birds these are different sounds interesting this is a zed sound and this is an S sound but we interpret them to mean the exact same thing when we hear them but why is it that these two different sounds are interpreted to have the exact same meaning of multiple well we'll look at that we'll look at that a little bit more in ology but what about say the word establishment this is a good word I like the word establishment this is going to be our last example for morphology here and this is interesting because establish is a verb but there's this suffix here this other morphine called meant and I would argue that most people you know this doesn't really have a meaning on its own but what happens when you take these two verbs and this meant suffix well not necessarily a suffix but they put together and they become a noun so this is a derivational morphine this meant morphine takes establish and turns it into a noun so we can also look at other words and other ways that put things together but this is probably the most interesting one out of the Bunch for morphology so after looking at words meaning of words structure of words we move on to phonetics and sort of an entirely different topic because now instead of looking at words and the parts and meaning we're just going to be looking at sounds so what is the difference between an S and a zed in fact I shouldn't write that Z right there I should write this Z to be linguistically sound what is the difference between these two sounds in fact do you even know what you do when you make these sounds when you go s or Z in your mouth do you know where your tongue is do you know the shape of your mouth do you know what part of your throat is working to make these sounds we're going to look at all the different sounds we make in English and we'll see that the difference between these two sounds specifically is simply the voice box in fact I use the voice box very Loosely here just to explain what it is at this point but more importantly these are vocal folds now what happens is when you make a zed sound you are simply making an S sound but your vocal folds are vibrating at the same time so you can change from an S to a zed just by vibrating your vocal folds and you'll see that a lot of sounds actually are paired just like this where the vibration of the vocal folds is the only thing that changes it in fact there's T's and D's make this distinction P's and B's are exactly the same K's and G's yeah all there is in these these pairs of sounds the only difference is that you're vibrating your vocal folds so that's pretty cool so we'll be looking at that then in our last topic we'll move on to phology and these are patterns of sounds so I'm I'm going to write out three words here the words are pay Bay and eBay now if I ask you let's take a look at the B's the P's and okay here's a question this B right here is it more similar to the b in eBay or more similar to the p in pay and the result you you might guess it because this is a I'm setting this question up in a way that's meant to trick you but you might be surprised that this B is more closely related to the sound that a p makes than the b in eBay now why is this well for one we're native English speakers so we don't notice a difference however when we transcribe these and we look at the properties the pay or the p and pay is aspirated it has this little H up here that we transcribe it with because we we have a puff of air now in English when we start sentences or we start utterances with a voiced sound like B it's actually transcribed as an unaspirated version of the voiceless sound so for instance B and P are pairs where B the only difference with a B is that you're vibrating a vocal cords for a p but we just don't aspirate it so we hear it as a b and we think we're making a b sound but we're actually just making an unaspirated P now languages like Korean can hear the difference between this p and this B however in English we don't notice a difference but for Koreans and other languages in the world this is a very noticeable difference but we interpret the two B's in eBay and Bay to be exactly the same so listen for a second eBay Bay pay if you listen really closely you can hear a difference in those two BS but it's difficult and requires training so a lot of the things we learn in phology you'll have to take for granted initially and through sort of listening carefully and tuning your ears you can hear the differences but if you say hold on a second this isn't right well these sounds are actually analyzed through computer software and if you record your own voice and know what to look for for sounds and sound waves and sound forms you can verify that yes these are the sounds you're actually making of course this assumes you're a western speaker or an English speaker um if you're in Britain or anywhere in the UK anywhere Southern United States these sounds might be a little bit different but for uh western Canada Northern Northwestern United States this is pretty accurate information so we're going to take a look at all five of these things we're going to cover the very basics of them we won't go too deep into each topic uh because this is a broad overview in fact if you are to go into more in depth uh that's the following courses when you take Linguistics usually each course will focus on one aspect phonetics and phology might be grouped up syntax and semantics might be grouped up but if I do continue to go on to more series each of these topics will be covered much more in depth as their own Series so hopefully you'll enjoy this and as always leave some comments down below so I can hear what you guys think about this what you guys want me to cover in the future and if you have any suggestions or concerns it's always great to hear them