#10 Daily Journal

Beautiful Wednesday
I woke up too lately this morning..
But i did not leave my class, advance listening.
I got number 4 to practice, it was the best number than other..I hope it could make my mark better. Amin

On the Origin of Language

In the Western world the study of language began as a philosophical inquiry into origins.¹ The Greeks (Third and Fourth Century B.C.) initiated the study of language essentially to explain its origin. The Conventionalists hypothesized that the relationship between the form of language (i.e., primarily the sounds and words) and meaning was essentially arbitrary, a convention of society. The naturalists hypothesized that the form of a word (i.e., its sounds) had a natural association with its referent in the real world. Only certain sound combinations (words or parts of words), however, were directly associated as an imitation of an object, its sound or an idea directly associated as an imitation of an object (e.g., kookaburra).

In an effort to explain how most of language, which is not so directly relatable to meaning, derived from an onomatopoeic beginning, the discipline of etymology began. Through studying the derivational history of words (etymology) the naturalists intended to demonstrate that the origin of all of language was ultimately relatable to words which directly reflected the meanings of their referents.

The first philosophical forum on language eventually developed into a discussion on the regularity of language patterns. Two basic theoretical positions emerged as explanatory frameworks for language, that which opted for irregularity and that which insisted that language was essentially regular. From the pre-eminence of the latter position it became popular to explain the irregularities of language on the basis that language somehow became corrupted with improper usage through time; this theoretical position regarded the older forms of language to be the purer forms.

By the Nineteenth Century there was a severe reaction to the highly speculative nature of the philosophizing about the original language of man which had characterized much of the study of language up until then. The interest was still historical, but the goal was not so idealistic. It was a romantic era of a rediscovery of the national past; the mother tongues of nations and families of nations rather than the mother tongue of the whole human race became the focus of attention. The romantic nationalism was a definite influence, but perhaps a more basic cause of the more realistic goal was the reaction to previous unscientific speculations. The felt need was to take a more scientific approach by analyzing empirical data. Thus was ushered in the period of systematic comparison of languages for the purpose of reconstructing the historical past.

During the Nineteenth Century largely under the leadership of German scholars an impressive amount of detailed scholarly work was done. Building on Sir William Jones' discovery that Sanskrit was genetically related to Latin and Greek and other European languages as well, these early historical linguists began to develop principles of language comparison. The availability of historical data not only made possible advances in the reconstruction of the original Indo-European language² (proto Indo-European), it also enabled linguists to describe the processes of change by which the proto-language developed into the diversity of the many Indo-European languages.

The German based 'neo-grammarian' school is known for its contribution to the study of sound change in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. The neo-grammarians, through meticulous analysis of historical text material, demonstrated the striking regularity of sound change. Hermann Paul (1846 -- 1921), the foremost theoretician of the neo-grammarians, identified convenience as the central mechanism of sound change; within the framework of convenience he categorized three types of sound changes under the mode of 'mispronunciation.'³ Leonard Bloomfield (1887-- 1949) was an early American structuralist who extended the neo-grammarian position with greater detail. He catalogued the mechanisms of sound change as two types: stabilizing vs. deteriorating or simplifying mechanisms. He documented at least three stabilizing changes characterized as reformation and compensatory processes. In the simplifying category Bloomfield documented no less than eleven processes of sound change.

Detailed documentation by the neo-grammarians of various processes of language change, especially those of sound change, contributed greatly to the statement of two basic principles of language change, 1) the process of streamlining and 2) the process of restructuring. Martinet, one of the most eminent historical linguists in the Twentieth Century, is credited with formulating these two principles of language change. He refers to the restructuring process, which maintains adequate communication, as being in conflict with the streamlining process which manifests (in language) the human tendency toward reducing effort to a minimum.

Linguistic evolution may be regarded as governed by the permanent conflict between man's communicative needs and his tendency to reduce to a minimum his mental and physical activity. Here as elsewhere, human behavior is subject to the law of least effort. (Martinet 1964:167).

The law of least effort effects a relentless streamlining of the status quo, reducing complexity and redundancy, which in turn eventually leads to restructuring adjustments in the various systems of language to help maintain an acceptable level of communication. The restructuring principle could be termed the law of conservation of communication.

It would be misleading to imply that Hermann Paul was not interested in the origin of language; the question of origin certainly interested Paul as it still does linguists today. The essential difference between modern linguistics (the past 175 years) and that of the two previous millennia is that linguistics has moved from the purely philosophical realm to that of the empirical sciences. Linguists are still intrigued with the question of origins but their speculations on the origin of language must be based on observable facts about language.

Two important basic principles of language must be mentioned, the streamlining effect of least effort and the compensatory maintenance of communication, or restructuring; two observations that relate to these are worth noting.

a) Primitive languages: No group of human beings today, even those living in a stone-age culture, speak what could be conceived of as a primitive language. Furthermore, no known language in all of history was in any sense primitive. Elgin remarks, 'The most ancient languages for which we have written texts -- Sanskrit, for example -- are often far more intricate and complicated in their grammatical forms than many contemporary languages.' (Elgin 1973: 44) This, of course, is no surprise to us if the inevitable processes of simplification observable today have consistently been operating for all or most of human history (this is in itself of course indeterminate, but we can at least conclude that simple material cultures do not imply simple languages).

b) Creativity of language: The vocabulary may be considered to be the most creative area of language and even here, 'For the most part, people tend to re-adapt existing lexical material rather than create entirely new material.' (Langacker 1967:186). Apart from re-adapting and extending existing vocabulary items from within a particular language, words or parts of words are commonly borrowed from other languages. A language seldom exhibits creativity in the sense of inventing new and unique forms.

The English pronoun system illustrates the two basic principles in action today. The oldest English pronoun system distinguished three numbers (singular, dual, plural) for each of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd persons. Today standard English distinguishes only singular and plural. The previously 'extravagant' system has been streamlined by neutralizing the difference between duality and plurality. In addition, with the 2nd person 'you' the singular-plural distinction has been lost, resulting in unacceptable ambiguity (ineffective communication) at times. (One of the first times I asked the girl who is now my wife for a date I ended up taking a whole carload of people on an outing because she wasn't sure whether I meant 'you-singular' or ‘you-plural’; I was too embarrassed to expressly exclude everyone else who was there at the time. As far as I was concerned, that was an unacceptable ambiguity!) The restructuring presently going on in English to remedy this situation involves adding particles from elsewhere in the grammar into the pronoun system. A new 2nd-person-plural pronoun is being formed in the northeastern United States by adding the normal noun pluralizer "s" to the pronoun "you" resulting in the plural "yous" (pronounced the same as "ewes"). The much-publicized "Southern dialect" has restructured the system in another way. A phrase-level quantifier "all" has been added in a contacted form of "you-all" resulting in "y'all." In both cases the restructuring process is clearly adaptive rather than innovative.

Many linguists, apparently including Martinet, believe that the two opposing principles equalize each other. Langacker states, 'Just as there are no primitive languages, there are no 'corrupt' languages. Languages change, but they do not decay.' (Langacker 1973:17) This is a difficult point to verify. Support for this claim seems to have been well documented in a historical review of the sound system of Spanish. While sounds have changed, the number of distinctive features in the system have remained fairly constant; from the viewpoint of information processing the overall process of change has not altered the potential for communication. Many of Bloomfield's examples of simplification due to sound change appear to affect syntactic categories and vocabulary. The loss of noun case endings in English is a case in point. The relative complexity of communication potential of the resulting system is difficult to evaluate. While the case ending functions of identifying subjects, objects, etc. have been shifted to another level in grammar (word order on the clause level now usually identifies the subject and object) it is difficult to judge how the two systems compare in efficiency of communication. Some questions to be asked would be, 'What happened to previous functions of word order in clauses?', 'Is word order now overloaded with the jobs of case-role encoding and the indicating of old and new information in a discourse?', 'Is focus involved?'

Language is fantastically complex. Its built-in means of combining and recombining (nesting) of its various levels has suggested to many leading linguists that language is theoretically infinite though not practically so in everyday usage. It almost sounds too complex to be able to detect any significant leveling out of language any more than one could detect by observation that the sun is burning itself out.

As far as I am aware no linguist seriously purports that the restructuring process of language overrides the streamlining process resulting in a qualitative positive development of language. If we decide that language did originally develop, possibly evolving from animal communication, we can only do so assuming evolution to be a universally valid principle. This type of a priori reasoning was the basic fallacy of pre-Nineteenth Century 'speculative grammar' which was pre-scientific in the modern sense of the word.

Furthermore, the observable data neither indicate that such a period of pre-historic development even existed, nor do they suggest a cause of the subsequent state of equilibrium or process of simplification that would have to have come into operation at some time after such a pre-historic development. Noam Chomsky, one of the most prominent linguists of this century, has indicated that human language and animal communication are not even comparable entities, they are so different.

Either the streamlining and restructuring processes balance each other or the streamlining process is gradually reducing language to a limited system of over-generalities. Either human languages have always existed with essentially the potential they exhibit now or they once exhibited greater potential for precise communication than they now do.

Labov, a prominent contemporary sociolinguist, comments on these two processes in his effort to understand the place of language in an evolutionary framework:

It is plain to most linguists that the 'destroy and rebuild' theory of linguistic evolution is equivalent to claiming that the whole process is dysfunctional. For the systematic part is the destructive one, and the analogical re-shaping seems to be making the best of a bad job. And if the principle of least effort is the evil genius behind the destruction, we can only look at language change as a kind of massive testimony to original sin. (Labov 1973: 245)

In the remainder of his thesis Labov does not provide any relevant alternative to the dysfunctional role of language change. He does not deny that language change results in diversification of languages and not in overall complexity or adaptive radiation. He rather looks for functional evolutionary result in the development of human society. Thus he suggests that language diversity provides relative cultural isolation, maintaining cultural pluralism which presumably promotes the evolution of human society. But he cannot provide a functional role for language change purely within the development of language. Language development seems to be dominated by a dysfunctional (non-evolutionary) process. Conclusion:

Regardless of how we might attempt to fit language into the broader picture, looking at language by itself there is no evidence that language is the product of any positive developmental process. Language is in a state of consistent change which at best seems to maintain a state of equilibrium.

__________________________________
¹ The Indian tradition antedates the work of the Greeks. Panini (Fourth Century B.C.) culminated the work of his predecessors with a grammatical description of Sanskrit which has been acclaimed as being the most detailed and comprehensive grammar ever done. The Indians were more interested in an accurate accounting of Sanskrit rather than answering philosophical questions.
² Work in the Nineteenth Century was based essentially on the classical languages (Latin and Greek) and the then-oldest-attested Indo-European language, Sanskrit. Hittite was identified as an older Indo-European language subsequent to the uncovering of Hittite inscriptions in the 1870's about 150 kilometers east of Ankara, Turkey. Hittite became extinct by 1200 B.C.
³ Mispronunciation or changed pronunciations were caused by convenience not to be confused with laziness, neglect, or some natural ease of pronunciation of individual sounds. Instead, mispronunciation is an effect involving the assimilation of sounds and the influence of the symmetry (pattern pressure) of the entire sound system. These changes were not considered to be deteriorative in the sense of 'corrupting' language as linguists of earlier periods had suggested.

#9 Daily Journal

Tuesday is better that last day
I woke up at 3:00 a.m to do my homework because i over slept quickly. I also ate some foods because i did not take dinner. Then i went to campus alone because my friend was sick. After arrived, i continued doing my homework. But suddenly my chairman said that my lecturer for structure would not come. All of my friends were happy because we did not finish our homework yet. So far, this day was not really bad

#8 Daily Journal

Monday,
Last night, i drank a cup of coffee to make my mind staying with doing my home work and reading a book because there was a test. In fact, nothing...I felt, i was so unlucky. Sometimes i got angry, but i did not know why and for whom.

#7 Daily Journal

Nice Sunday ^_^
i woke up too late this morning..luckily, i could do my prefer. Then i did my usual activities like take a bath, have breakfast, and etc. I remembered, i had promised to my friend to do our power point. Then i went home to continue my homework. By the way, this day is not bad.

#6 Daily Journal

Saturday,
i just felt lonely because no one in my boarding house.
but i did some activities like edit my photos and did my homework.
Nothing special...

#5 Daily Journal

Pretty Friday
This day, i just had a class, it was SEA. In that class, we discussed what story that we will perform. We decided not to perform drama classical like senior's performance. We just choose between comedy or musical drama. Both of them are my favorite kinds of drama. Okay, i can not continue this because i am so hungry and i would like to buy something that make me full. See You......

Phonetic

Phonetics (from the Greek: φωνή, phōnē, "sound, voice") is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign.^[1] It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs (phones): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status. Phonology, on the other hand, is concerned with the abstract, grammatical characterization of systems of sounds or signs.

The field of phonetics is a multiple layered subject of linguistics that focuses on speech. In the case of oral languages there are three basic areas of study:

• Articulatory phonetics: the study of the production of speech sounds by the articulatory and vocal tract by the speaker
• Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical transmission of speech sounds from the speaker to the listener

• Auditory phonetics: the study of the reception and perception of speech sounds by the listener

History

Phonetics was studied as early as 500 BC in ancient India, with Pāṇini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BC treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification. The Ancient Greeks are credited as the first to base a writing system on a phonetic alphabet. Modern phonetics began with Alexander Melville Bell, whose Visible Speech (1867) introduced a system of precise notation for writing down speech sounds.^[2]

Phonetic transcription

The International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA) is used as the basis for the phonetic transcription of speech. It is based on the Latin alphabet and is able to transcribe most features of speech such as consonants, vowels, and suprasegmental features. Every documented phoneme available within the known languages in the world is assigned its own corresponding symbol.

The difference between phonetics and phonology

Phonology concerns itself with systems of phonem, abstract cognitive units of speech sound or sign which distinguish the words of a language. Phonetics, on the other hand, concerns itself with the production, transmission, and perception of the physical phenomena which are abstracted in the mind to constitute these speech sounds or signs.

Using an Edison phonograph, Ludimar Hermann investigated the spectral properties of vowels and consonants. It was in these papers that the term formant was first introduced. Hermann also played back vowel recordings made with the Edison phonograph at different speeds in order to test Willis' and Wheatstone's theories of vowel production.

Relation to phonology

In contrast to phonetics, phonology is the study of how sounds and gestures pattern in and across languages, relating such concerns with other levels and aspects of language. Phonetics deals with the articulatory and acoustic properties of speech sounds, how they are produced, and how they are perceived. As part of this investigation, phoneticians may concern themselves with the physical properties of meaningful sound contrasts or the social meaning encoded in the speech signal (e.g. gender, sexuality, ethnicity, etc.). However, a substantial portion of research in phonetics is not concerned with the meaningful elements in the speech signal.

While it is widely agreed that phonology is grounded in phonetics, phonology is a distinct branch of linguistics, concerned with sounds and gestures as abstract units (e.g., features, phonemes, mora, syllables, etc.) and their conditioned variation (via, e.g., allophonic rules, constraints, or derivational rules).^[3] Phonology relates to phonetics via the set of distinctive features, which map the abstract representations of speech units to articulatory gestures, acoustic signals, and/or perceptual representations.^[4][5][6]

Subfields

Phonetics as a research discipline has three main branches:

• articulatory phonetics is concerned with the articulation of speech: The position, shape, and movement of articulators or speech organs, such as the lips, tongue, and vocal folds.
• acoustic phonetics is concerned with acoustics of speech: The spectro-temporal properties of the sound waves produced by speech, such as their frequency, amplitude, and harmonic structure.
• auditory phonetics is concerned with speech perception: the perception, categorization, and recognition of speech sounds and the role of the auditory system and the brain in the same.

Types of notational systems

Most phonetic transcription is based on the assumption that linguistic sounds are segmentable into discrete units that can be represented by symbols.

This section requires expansion.

Alphabetic

IPA

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is one of the most popular and well-known phonetic alphabets. It was originally created by primarily British language teachers, with later efforts from European phoneticians and linguists. It has changed from its earlier intention as a tool of foreign language pedagogy to a practical alphabet of linguists. It is currently becoming the most often seen alphabet in the field of phonetics.

Most American dictionaries for native English-speakers—American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Webster's Third New International Dictionary—employ respelling systems based on the English alphabet, with diacritical marks over the vowels and stress marks.^[1] (See Wikipedia:United States dictionary transcription for a generic version.)

Another commonly encountered alphabetic tradition was originally created for the transcription of Native American and European languages, and is still commonly used by linguists of Slavic, Indic, Uralic, Semitic, and Caucasian languages. This is sometimes labeled the Americanist phonetic alphabet, but this is misleading because it has always been widely used for languages outside the Americas. The difference between these alphabets and IPA is small, although often the specially created characters of the IPA are often abandoned in favour of already existing characters with diacritics (e.g. many characters are borrowed from Eastern European orthographies) or digraphs.

There are also extended versions of the IPA, for example: extIPA, VoQs, and Luciano Canepari's ^canIPA.

Aspects of alphabetic transcription

Other alphabets, such as Hangul, may have their own phonetic extensions. There also exist featural phonetic transcription systems, such as Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech and its derivatives.

The International Phonetic Association recommends that a phonetic transcription should be enclosed in square brackets "[ ]". A transcription that specifically denotes only phonological contrasts may be enclosed in slashes "/ /" instead. If one is in doubt, it is best to use brackets, for by setting off a transcription with slashes one makes a theoretical claim that every symbol within is phonemically contrastive for the language being transcribed.

Phonetic transcriptions try to objectively capture the actual pronunciation of a word, whereas phonemic transcriptions are model-dependent. For example, in The Sound Pattern of English, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle transcribed the English word night phonemically as /nixt/. In this model, the phoneme /x/ is never realized as [x], but shows its presence by "lengthening" the preceding vowel. The preceding vowel in this case is the phoneme /i/, which is pronounced [aɪ] when "long". So phonemic /nixt/ is equivalent to phonetic [naɪt], but underlying this analysis is the belief that historical sounds such as the gh in night may remain in a word long after they have ceased to be pronounced, or that a phoneme may exist in a language without ever being directly expressed. (This was later rejected by both Chomsky and Halle.)

For phonetic transcriptions, there is flexibility in how closely sounds may be transcribed. A transcription that gives only a basic idea of the sounds of a language in the broadest terms is called a broad transcription; in some cases this may be equivalent to a phonemic transcription (only without any theoretical claims). A close transcription, indicating precise details of the sounds, is called a narrow transcription. These are not binary choices, but the ends of a continuum, with many possibilities in between. All are enclosed in brackets.

For example, in some dialects the English word pretzel in a narrow transcription would be [ˈpʰɹ̥ʷɛʔt.sɫ̩], which notes several phonetic features that may not be evident even to a native speaker. An example of a broad transcription is [ˈpʰɹɛt.sɫ̩], which only indicates some of the easier to hear features. A yet broader transcription would be [ˈpɹɛt.sl]. Here every symbol represents an unambiguous speech sound, but without going into any unnecessary detail. None of these transcriptions make any claims about the phonemic status of the sounds. Instead, they represent certain ways in which it is possible to produce the sounds that make up the word.

There are also several possibilities in how to transcribe this word phonemically, but here the differences are generally not of precision, but of analysis. For example, pretzel could be /ˈprɛt.sl̩/ or /ˈpret.səl/. The special symbol for English r is not used, for it is not meaningful to distinguish it from a rolled r. The differences in the letter e reflect claims as to what the essential difference is between the vowels of pretzel and pray; there are half a dozen ideas in the literature as to what this may be. The second transcription claims that there are two vowels in the word, even if they can't both be heard, while the first claims there is only one.

However, phonemic transcriptions may also be broad or narrow, or perhaps it would be better to say abstract vs. concrete. They may show a fair amount of phonetic detail, usually of a phoneme's most common allophone, but because they are abstract symbols they do not need to resemble any sound at all directly. Phonemic symbols will frequently be chosen to avoid diacritics as much as possible, under a 'one sound one symbol' policy, or may even be restricted to the ASCII symbols of a typical keyboard. For example, the English word church may be transcribed as /t͡ʃɝːt͡ʃ/, a close approximation of its actual pronunciation, or more abstractly as /crc/, which is easier to type. Phonemic symbols should always be explained, especially when they are as divergent from actual /crc/.

Occasionally a transcription will be enclosed in pipes ("| |"). This goes beyond phonology into morphological analysis. For example, the words pets and beds could be transcribed phonetically as [pʰɛʔts] and [b̥ɛdz] (in a fairly narrow transcription), and phonemically as /pets/ and /bedz/. Because /s/ and /z/ are separate phonemes in English, they receive separate symbols in the phonemic analysis. However, you probably recognize that underneath this, they represent the same plural ending. This can be indicated with the pipe notation. If you believe the plural ending is essentially an s, as English spelling would suggest, the words can be transcribed |pets| and |beds|. If, as most linguists would probably suggest, it is essentially a z, these would be |petz| and |bedz|.

To avoid confusion with IPA symbols, it may be desirable to specify when native orthography is being used, so that, for example, the English word jet is not read as "yet". This is done with angle brackets or chevrons: ⟨jet⟩. It is also common to italicize such words, but the chevrons indicate specifically that they are in the original language's orthography, and not in English transliteration.

Iconic

Visible Speech

In iconic phonetic notation, the shapes of the phonetic characters are designed so that they visually represent the position of articulators in the vocal tract. This is unlike alphabetic notation, where the correspondence between character shape and articulator position is arbitrary. This notation is potentially more flexible than alphabetic notation in showing more shades of pronunciation (MacMahon 1996:838–841). An example of iconic phonetic notation is the Visible Speech system, created by Scottish phonetician, Alexander Melville Bell (Ellis 1869:15).

Analphabetic

Another type of phonetic notation that is more precise than alphabetic notation is analphabetic phonetic notation. Instead of both the alphabetic and iconic notational types' general principle of using one symbol per sound, analphabetic notation uses long sequences of symbols to precisely describe the component features of an articulatory gesture (MacMahon 1996:842–844). This type of notation is reminiscent of the notation used in chemical formulas to denote the composition of chemical compounds. Although more descriptive than alphabetic notation, analphabetic notation is less practical for many purposes (e.g. for descriptive linguists doing fieldwork or for speech pathologists impressionistically transcribing speech disorders). As a result, this type of notation is uncommon.

Two examples of this type were developed by the Danish Otto Jespersen (1889) and American Kenneth Pike (1943). Pike's system, which is part of a larger goal of scientific description of phonetics, is particularly interesting in its challenge against the descriptional method of the phoneticians who created alphabetic systems like the IPA. An example of Pike's system can be demonstrated by the following. A syllabic voiced alveolar nasal consonant (/n̩/ in IPA) is notated as

MaIlDeCVoeIpvnnAPpaatdtltnransnsfSpvavdtlvtnransssfTpgagdtlwvtitvransnsfSrpFSs

In Pike's notation there are 5 main components (which are indicated using the example above):

1. M - manner of production (i.e., MaIlDe)
2. C - manner of controlling (i.e., CVoeIpvnn)
3. description of stricture (i.e., what APpaatdtltnransnsfSpvavdtlvtnransssfTpgagdtlwvtitvransnsf)
4. S - segment type (i.e., Srp)
5. F - phonetic function (i.e., FSs)

The components of the notational hierarchy of this consonant are explained below:

M = productive mechanism a = air-stream mechanism I = initiator l = for lung air D = direction of the air stream e = egressive C = controlling mechanism V = valvate stricture o = oral stricture e = subvalvate esophageal stricture I = degree of air-stream interruption p = partial (continuants) v = nonfrictional n = nasal n = resonant nasal

(Rank of stricture) A = acme P = primary (Features of stricture) p = point of articulation a = alveolar a = articulator t = tongue tip d = degree of articulation t = in time l = long t = type of articulation n = normal r = relative strength a = of articulating movement n = normal s = of acoustic impression n = normal s = shape of articulator f = flat (Rank of stricture) S = secondary (Features of stricture) p = point of articulation v = velic a = articulator v = velic d = degree of articulation t = in time l = long v = with cavity friction t = type of articulation n = normal r = relative strength a = of articulating movement n = normal s = of acoustic impression s = soft s = shape of articulator f = flat (Rank of stricture) T = tertiary (Features of stricture) p = point of articulation g = glottal a = articulator g = vocal folds d = degree of articulation t = in time l = long w = wide v = with cavity friction t = type of articulation i = iterative t = trill v = vibratory trill r = relative strength a = of articulating movement n = normal s = of acoustic impression n = normal s = shape of articulator f = flat

S = segmental type r = real p = perceptual F = function phonetically S = of the segment in the syllable s = syllabic contoi

 
 

#4 Daily Journal

How unlucky i am :(
i started today with praying for My Allah. I hoped this day was easy to pass especially in campus. On the other hand, that was just a wish...not being real. Maybe Allah wanted to me being more diligent and careful to finish all of my home work. Although i got it, i never forgot saying Thanks For Allah, i learned this day with a little smile

Syntax

The syntax of a language is the set of rules that language uses to combine words and morphemes to create sentences. For example, in some languages adjectives come before the noun, and in others after the noun. Some languages use prepositions, others use postpositions. In some, the verb is at the beginning of the sentence, in others it is at the end, and in others still it is somewhere in the middle. But rules such as these only scrape the surface!

We start with a basic classification of words, the parts of speech (aka lexical categories): Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and so forth. These then combine into phrases.

A noun phrase consists of a noun and all its modifiers - i.e. determinants, adjectives, and any clauses or prepositional phrases that modify the noun. (We will get to clauses in a bit.) Traditionally, the noun is called the head of the noun phrase,  because it determines the syntactic function of the phrase - that is, the phrase acts as if it were a noun.  Examples: "Bob", "the cat in the hat", "a whole other problem", "the man who came to dinner", etc.

Some linguists use the term argument to refer to noun phrases, especially to the subject and the object in a sentence.

A verb phrase consists of a verb and all its modifiers - i.e. adverbs, auxiliary verbs, prepositional phrases, and adverbial clauses.  Most linguists would also include noun phrases such as the object and complements, in the definition of a verb phrase. The verb is, of course, the head of the verb phrase. Examples: "stop!", "walk carefully", "will soon greatly regret", "came in the middle of the night", "hurt his pride", "put out the cat", etc.

Just to make things more complicated, some linguists use the term predicate, which overlaps with "verb phrase".

A prepositional phrase consists of a preposition (which is the head of the prepositional phrase, of course) and a noun phrase. If the language uses postpositions, we call it a postpositional phrase. Together, they are called adpositional phrases.

Finally, there are adjectival phrases and adverbial phrases. If you say "that man is full of bull", "full of bull" (an adjective "full" followed by a prepositional phrase "of bull") is an adjective phrase. Similarly, in "he walked very slowly", "very slowly" (an adverb "slowly" preceded by a modifier "very") is an adverbial phrase.

Complements are words or phrases (and sometimes even clauses) that tell us more about a noun or a noun phrase, but do so by means of a verb. For example, in the sentence "he looks sick", "sick" modifies "he", but uses the verb "looks" to make the connection.  In "we painted the town red", "red" modifies "town" by means of the verb "painted". In "I am in a good mood", "in a good mood" modifies "I", by means of the verb "am".

As you can see by the examples, the most common verb used to link a complement to a noun is the verb "to be" - known in linguistics as a copula. Other copulas include "become", "seems", "turned", "appears", etc. The copula with a noun complement ("he is the king") is sometimes called a predicate nominal.  The copula with an adjective ("he is stupid") is sometimes called a predicate adjective.

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Clauses

A clause is a set of words that includes at least a verb and probably a subject noun. In some cases and languages, the subject may be implied. A sentence is actually a clause.  But a sentence can have more than one clause: There may be a main clause (or independent clause) and one or more subordinate clauses.  This kind of sentence is called a complex sentence.

Subordinate clauses come in several forms:

An adverbial clause is one which modifies the main clause in the manner of an adverb. They are typically introduced by subordinating conjunctions. For example:

I am not afraid of the dog, because it is very small.
If they lose weight too quickly, they will regain it afterwards.
I'm running so that the rhinos don't catch me.
He wrote when his mother asked.
He is happy where he lives.
I wasn't allowed to do things as I wanted.

An adjectival clause (or relative clause) is one that modifies a noun phrase. They typically are introduced by a relative pronoun. For example:

The man who lived here went to New York.
The car that came from Italy is very fast.
The apple which fell from my bag is now inedible.

The noun phrase can also be the object of the adjectival clause, or even the object of a preposition. Notice how, in English, we often drop the relative pronoun:

The woman (whom) I love comes from France.
The robot (that) I built doesn't work.
Let's go to my house, which is nearby.

The woman, of whom we speak, works at my office.
Your book, in which I wrote her name, is on the table.

Finally, adjectival clauses are sometimes introduced by a relative adverb. Notice how, if you drop the noun, the clause becomes an adverbial clause:

I eat in Paris, where I live. (I eat where I live.)
He will visit in July, when the weather is good. (He will visit when the weather is good.)
That's the reason why Juan left. (That's the reason Juan left; That's why Juan left.)

A noun clause is one which plays the part of a noun in the larger sentence.  They too are typically introduced by relative pronouns or adverbs. If you want to figure out if you are looking at a noun clause, substitute him, her, it, or them for relative word. If you still have a meaningful sentence, then the clause was a noun clause. Notice also that, if you were to add a noun before the relative pronoun or adverb, you change the clause into an adjectival clause:

I see where you are. (I see the place where you are.)
When I will depart, I just don't know. (The time when I will depart, I just don't know.)
I know who said that. (I know the person who said that.)
I heard what you said. (I heard the thing you said.)
I can guess which he's reading. (I can guess which book he's reading.)

There are also noun clauses that are introduced by a subordinating conjunction such as the English "that":

I know that you don't like me.
She thinks (that) I'm silly.
They were surprised that he could jump that high.

Finally, a sentence can have two or more main (independent) clauses, joined by coordinating conjuntions. This kind of sentence is called a compound sentence:

I want to sing and I want to dance, but I have no talent.
Either he goes or I go.

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Kinds of sentences

Most sentences are simple statements about the world or one's thoughts or feelings. These are called declarative sentences or just declarations. Most of the examples above a declarations.

Questions are a kind of sentence that often involves complications of syntax in many languages. First, there are three kinds of questions. The first is the yes/no question. In these examples, you can see some of the syntactical techniques we use in English, such adding "do", moving the verb, or adding a tag such as "did you?"

Are you going to town?
Do they like it?
You didn't forget, did you?

There are also choice questions, which require a simple answer selected from the options given in the question:

Do you want broccoli or cauliflower?
Should I wear my jacket or a sweater?

The final kind is the wh- question, which involves the use of interrogative words (pronouns and adverbs) such as who, what, which, when, where, how, how many, and why. These require a fuller answer:

Why are you going to town?
How many are going with you?
And when do you leave?

Another kind of sentence is the command. The usual kind involves the speaker telling someone else to do something, such as "pick up your clothes!". Commands may also involve exhortations to one's own group, such as in the sentence "let's go!" And commands can also blend into the question category of sentences when we make polite requests, such as "would you pass the tea, please?"

One common syntactic "trick" for commands is to drop the subject, which is understood.  In English, most commands are directed at "you", so why bother including that pronoun?  If the command is directed at "us", then we use "let us" before the verb. Other languages have other techniques, of course.

The last kind of sentence is the exclamation. This kind of sentence expresses an emotional reaction to the situation.  For example, "what a lovely day!" tells us not only that it's a lovely day, but that I am exceedingly pleased by it. Notice that this particular sentence does not contain a verb, and that is quite common in exclamations. In fact, many exclamations are single words: "crap!" "oy!" "weeee!" "hello!" etc.  These are called word-sentences, and the words are called sentence words.

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Phrase structure

Traditionally, linguists have several ways of diagramming the structure of a sentence.  One way is called phrase structure rules.  For example:

S -> NP VP

"A sentence is made up of a noun phrase and a verb phrase."

NP -> (Det) (AP) N (PP)

 "A noun phrase is composed of a noun plus optional determinantes, adjective phrases, and prepositional phrases."

VP  -> (Aux) V (NP) (PP) (AdvP)

"A verb phrase is composed of a verb plus optional auxiliary verbs, object noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and adverbial phrases."

AP -> (AdvP) A

"An adjective phrase is composed of an adjective and optional adverbial phrases."

PP -> Prep NP

"A prepositional phrase is composed of a preposition and a noun phrase."

AdvP -> (Adv) Adv

"An adverbial phrase is composed of an adverb and optional modifying adverbs."

These phrase structure rules can then be used to construct phrase trees.  Here's one of the most famous of these trees, concerning the famous linguist Chomsky's famous meaningless (but grammatical!) sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously":

In Chomsky's original theory, each language has a basic syntax - set of rules for the construction of basic sentences - and another set of rules for altering those basic sentences to fit particular uses. That second set of rules are called transformation rules, and they look a lot like the phrase structure rules we just discussed.  For example, in English, we can take a basic sentence like "He likes apples" and turn it into the question "does he like apples?" via certain rules. In English, we would take the auxiliary verb and move it to the beginning of the sentence. This is called subject-auxiliary reversal. If there is no auxiliary verb, we have to insert a "dummy" verb "do" and move that to the beginning of the sentence:

N1 V N2 => N1 Aux V N2

"Insert the auxiliary do in front of the verb."

N1 Aux V N2 => Aux N1 V N2

"Move the auxiliary do  to the front of the sentence."

To turn that same sentence into "what does he like?" we start with "he likes X". We perform the subject-auxiliary reversal to turn it into a question ("he does like X" followed by "does he like X?"). We substitute the interrogative pronoun "what" for X, then move it to the front of the sentence ("does he like what?" followed by "what does he like?"). This last step is called wh- movement:

N1 V N2 => N1 Aux V N2

"Add the auxiliary do in front of the verb."

N1 Aux V N2 => Aux N1 V N2

"Move the auxiliary do to the front of the sentence."

Aux N1 V N2 > Aux N1 V Pn

"Place the interrogative pronoun what  where the answer would be."

Aux N1 V Pn > Pn Aux N1 V

"Move the interrogative pronoun what  to the front of the sentence."

For obvious reasons, this theory was called transformational grammar. Since Chomsky, theories of syntax have been either (1) elaborations of transformational grammar or (2) alternatives to transformational grammar.

One interesting offshoot of Chomsky's original theories is the idea of universal grammar. This is the idea that all language begins with a single deep structure, the structure from which the transformations proceed. Furthermore, that deep structure is innate to the human brain in the form of a language acquisition device or LAD. The fact that other intelligent animals, such as the great apes, whales, dolphins, and elephants don't have anything close to the language capabilities of humans is said to be because they lack this evolutionary development. On the other hand, nothing quite as fully organized as the hypothetical LAD has been found in the human brain.

One family of alternative theories is called construction grammar (or CxG), which is strongly linked to developments in cognitive and cognitive developmental psychology. The basic idea here is that each language has a number of constructions a bit like Piaget's schemas. In fact, it postulates a whole taxonomy of these constructions - one for yes-no questions, one for simple commands, one for talking about how you feel about something, etc. etc. etc. So, instead of learning a list of transformations, we learn a list of constructions.  At the same time, when you learn a word, you also learn the kinds of constructions that word can fit in, in very much the same way that you learn implicitly that "cat" is a noun which therefore can be modified by adjectives and be the subject or object of a verb, and so on.  As a psychologist, I find construction grammar more appealing than transformational grammar.

Morphology

Morphology is the study of morphemes, obviously.  Morphemes are words, word stems, and affixes, basically the unit of language one up from phonemes. Although they are often understood as units of meaning, they are usually considered a part of a language's syntax or grammar.  It is specifically grammatical morphemes that this chapter will focus on.

It is in their morphology that we most clearly see the differences between languages that are isolating (such as Chinese, Indonesian, Krewol...), ones that are agglutinating (such as Turkish, Finnish, Tamil...), and ones that are inflexional (such as Russian, Latin, Arabic...).  Isolating languages use grammatical morphemes that are separate words.  Agglutinating languages use grammatical morphemes in the form of attached syllables called affixes.  Inflexional languages may go one step further and actually change the word at the phonemic level to express grammatical morphemes.

All languages are really mixed systems -- it's all a matter of proportions.  English, for example, uses all three methods:  To make the future tense of a verb, we use the particle will (I will see you); to make the past tense, we usually use the affix -ed (I changed it); but in many words, we change the word for the past (I see it becomes I saw it).  Looking at nouns, sometimes we make the plural with a particle (three head of cattle), sometimes with an affix (three cats), and sometimes by changing the word (three men).  But, because we still use a lot of non-syllable affixes (such as -ed, usually pronounced as d or t, and -s, usually pronounced as s or z, dependeing on context), English is still considered an inflexional language by most linguists.

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Affixes

Most languages, but especially agglutinating and inflexional ones, differentiate between the stem of the word, which carries the basic meaning, and various affixes or attachments that carry additional, often grammatical, meanings.  There are several kinds of affixes:

 Suffixes are attached to the end of the stem;
 Prefixes are attached to the front of the stem;
 Infixes are put in the middle of the word;
 Ablaut is a change in a vowel that carries extra meaning;
 Reduplication is a matter of doubling a syllable to do the same.

Suffixes are the most common, and English uses them.  For example, the past tense of most verbs is a matter of adding -ed to the stem; the present participle is made by adding -ing; the plural of a noun is made by adding -s.

Turkish is an example of an agglutinating language that makes extensive use of suffixes.  One example I found on the internet (Learning Practical Turkish) is the word terbiyesizliklerindenmis:

good manners	terbiye
without good manners, rude	terbiyesiz
rudeness	terbiyesizlik
their rudeness	terbiyesizlikleri
from their rudeness	terbiyesizliklerinden
I gather that it was from their rudeness	terbiyesizliklerindenmis

Note that a language doesn't necessarily need to be agglutinating to have long words.  German, for example, has Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, and English has Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis!

Although prefix languages are a bit rarer, they can be every bit as expansive.

Ablaut is common in English and its Germanic cousins.  For example, the past tense of sing is sang, and the past participle is sung.  The plural of goose is geese.  Ablaut seems to come from former suffixes that influenced the pronunciation of the vowel, then disappeared over time.  Goose-geese was once gos-gese, and before that gos-göse, and before that gos-gose.  The plural suffix -e caused the fronting of the vowel o to ö and then e.

Infixes are best illustrated by the Semitic languages, such as Arabic.  Many words in Arabic are composed of three consonants, and many of the grammatical variations are produced by altering the vowels between and around them.  For example, the root for writing is ktb:

to write	kataba
writing	kaatib
a book	kitaab
books	kutub
author	kattaab

Perhaps, thousands of years ago, some people began generalized from ablauts -- as if we were to start saying pan-pen (rather than pan-pans), following the pattern of man-men.

Irish (and other Celtic languages, such as Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton) are unusual in that it is the consonants that change in various situations, rather than the vowels.  Note that th is pronounced h, dt is pronounced d, ea is a, ch is as in loch, and bh is v.

		house	flat
		teach	árasán
my	mo	mo theach	m'árasán
your	do	do theach	d'árasán
his	a	a theach	a árasán
her	a	a teach	a hárasán
our	ar	ar dteach	ar n-árasán
your	bhur	bhur dteach	bhur n-árasán
their	a	a dteach	a n-árasán

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Nouns

Nouns are words that name or denote a person, thing, action, or quality.  They are “thing” words -- although “things” can include all sorts of abstract ideas that might otherwise look more like verbs or adjectives.  In various languages, they are marked, by affixes or particles, as to their number, gender, definiteness, and especially cases.

Definiteness concerns the extent to which we are talking about a specific thing or event, one that is known to the speakers, or about something less well defined, such as any old thing, or something not specific.

In English, the definite is marked by the article the.  It can also be marked by other words, such as this, that, my, yours, and so on.  The indefinite is marked by the article a or an, as well as the plural without an article, or words such as one, two, some, any, etc.  On the other hand, many languages don't use articles at all -- Latin, Russian, Hindi, and Chinese come to mind!

In a number of languages, the definite is marked with a suffix.  This is true of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Rumanian, Bulgarian, and Albanian, among others.  The Scandinavian languages are, of course, closely related, so we would expect them to share a feature like this.  But Rumanian, Bulgarian, and Albanian are only distantly related. It seems that they influenced each other, or perhaps there were people living in the Balkans in ancient times who influenced them all.

Number, of course, refers to how many of the item we are talking about.  There are three common numbers:  Singular, meaning one; plural, meaning more than one; and somewhat rarer, the dual, meaning two.  You can see the significance of the dual in our own use of words such as couple, pair, and so on.  Again, many languages do not mark the plural, much less the dual.

The most complex aspect of nouns is cases, also known as declensions.  Philosophers in ancient Greece and India were already discussing this as much as 2500 years ago!  Much of the terminology we still use today was invented during the Roman Empire, and reflects the cases used in Latin.

The first case is the nominative, roughly the subject of the sentence.  In many languages, it is the basic form, sometimes represented by the bare stem.  A second case is the vocative, which is the form used when calling out to someone, sort of like “Oh, Claudius!”  The rest of the cases are referred to as oblique or objective.  Languages that make many distinctions among the oblique cases use them in the same way that other languages use prepositions or postpositions.

Accusative -- the direct object of the verb:  He threw the ball.

Dative -- the indirect object:  He threw it to John.

Ablative -- expressed in English with the preposition from: He threw from first base.

Locative -- expressed in English with prepositions such as at or in:  We were at the hotdog stand in the stadium.

Genitive -- the possessive form, often expressed in English with the word of, but also with the case suffix ‘s:  It was John’s ball.

Instrumental -- expressed in English with prepositions like with:  He hit it with a bat.

Sociative -- also expressed in English with with, but now referring to people:  I went out with her.

There are many others.  A language in the Caucasus Mountains called Tassaran has 48 noun cases!  However, many linguists point out that cases should only refer to inflexional languages such as Latin.  Agglutinative languages such as Finnish can be better thought of as having postpositions that are attached to the noun, since they are very consistent and easy to recognize, unlike the cases in Latin.

Here is an example of the Russian word for country, singular and plural:

	singular	plural
nominative	strana	strany
accusative	stranu	strany
genitive	strany	stran
dative	strane	stranam
instrumental	stranoj	stranomi
locative	strane	stranax

This wouldn’t be such a strain, until you realize that there are several different declensions, and quite a few exceptions as well.

Compare that with an example of the word for man in Tamil, a Dravidian language of southern India:

	singular	plural
nominative	manitan	manitarkal
accusative	manitanai	manitarkalai
dative	manitanukku	manitarkalukku
sociative	manitanotu	manitarkalotu
genitive	manitanutaiya	manitarkalutaiya
instrumental	manitanal	manitarkalal
locative	manitanitam	manitarkalitam
ablative	manitanitamiruntu	manitarkalitamiruntu

Although there are even more cases, these endings are the same for all other nouns! And notice how the plural is just a matter of sticking kal inbetween the stem and the affix.

One interesting side issue: In most languages, the subject of an intransitive verb (he sits) is in the same form (i.e. the nominative) as the subject of a transitive verb (he sees him), and the object of a transitive verb is different (i.e. the accusative).  These languages are known as nominative-accusative languages. But there are also languages where the subject of an intransitive verb is in the same form as the object of a transitive verb (i.e. the absolutive), and the subject of a transitive verb is different (i.e. the ergative). In these languages, it would be as if we said he sees him but then him sits!  These are called ergative-absolutive languages.

Among the ergative-absolutive languages are Basque, the northern Caucasian languages, many Australian aborigine languages, Eskimo-Aleut, and many other languages of north and central America. They are all verb-first or verb-last languages.

Gender is perhaps the oddest noun variation.  It is called gender because it is -- loosely -- tied to the physical sex of people and animals.  Many languages differentiate between masculine nouns and feminine nouns, with different endings for each, and requiring different articles and adjective forms along with them.  French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese are examples.

Other languages, such as German, count three genders:  Masculine, feminine, and neuter.  Neuter presumably refers to things that don’t have a gender, but there is little consistency there.  In Dutch, there are two genders, but they are neuter and common, common deriving from what was originally masculine and feminine.  English nouns have no gender.

Many languages outside the European sphere differentiate between animate and inanimate, one referring to people, animals, and spirits, the other to things.  And there are many languages that make many differentiations:  Bantu languages, for example, have many noun categories, such as "long, thin things," "body parts," "places," and so on.

In Chinese, there is a strong isolating (non-affix) version of this:  When you want to indicate more than one of something, you must use a special word called a classifier between the number and the object.  This is analogous to the way we might say three head of cattle.

There are still more examples of noun variation:  Diminutives express smallness (dog becomes doggy, for example), and augmentatives express largeness.  Diminutives are often also used to express affection, and augmentatives sometimes express danger or evil.

Some languages have a variety of honorifics, often suffixes or prefixes that indicate status.  The Japanese -san is a well known example.  There are also affixes that indicate lowly status, and in some languages several different degrees of status!

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Pronouns

Pronouns are words that serve as place-holders for nouns.  Instead of referring to a person by his or her name, we use he or she; instead of naming something repeatedly, we refer to it as it.  Pronouns have many of the same variations as nouns, including gender, number, and case.  There are also three persons that are differentiated in most languages:  First refers to the person speaking or his/her group (I, me; we, us); Second person refers to the person spoken to or his/her group (you); And the third person refers to other people outside the conversation or to things (he, him, she, her, it, they, them). In English, for example...

	nominative	oblique	possessive (adjective)	possessive (pronomial)
first person singular	I	me	my	mine
second person singular	you		your	yours
third person singular male	he	him	his
third person singular female	she	her		hers
third person singular neuter	it		its
first person plural	we	us	our	ours
second person plural	you		your	yours
third person plural	they	them	their	theirs

("Oblique" is the name for a case that covers the objects of a verb or any preposition.)

For comparison, here's the Icelandic declension of the pronoun anyone:

		masculine	feminine	neuter
singular
	nominative	nokkur	nokkur	nokkurt
	accusative	nokkurn	nokkra	nokkurt
	dative	nokkrum	nokkurri	nokkru
	gentive	nokkurs	nokkurrar	nokkurs
plural
	nominative	nokkrir	nokkrar	nokkur
	accusative	nokkra	nokkrar	nokkur
	dative	nokkrum	nokkrum	nokkrum
	genitive	nokkurra	nokkura	nokkura

In some languages, there are two forms of the third person plural:  One is inclusive, and refers to the speaker and the listener together (Why don’t we go have a drink together sometime?); the other is exclusive, and refers to the speaker’s group distinct from the listener (We are going to beat your team!).

There are also pronouns that reflect the action back onto the subject -- appropriately named reflexive pronouns.  In English, they are often nicely marked with -self (myself, yourself, himself, etc.).  In many languages, there is a generic reflexive for the third person singular or even third person singular and plural.  In Spanish, for example, that function is performed by the single word se.

Politeness is often an issue with pronouns.  In many European languages, there is a distinction made between a familiar and a formal version of the second person singular.  In French, for example, you call your friends tu and your parents, teachers, or boss vous.  You don’t switch to tu until it is subtly agreed between the two of you that it is okay to “tutoyer.”  In some Asian languages, there is considerably more detail involved.

There are other kinds of pronouns besides the personal ones.  Demonstrative pronouns include this, that, these, and those.  Many languages have three sets of these, one for things nearby the speaker, one for things nearby the listener, and one for things away from either.

Indefinite pronouns include words such as someone, anyone, many, and so on.  Like the indefinite article, they don’t indicate precisely whom are what we are talking about.

Interrogative pronouns are used to ask question:  Who is that man?  Relative pronouns are used to connect a noun with a clause that gives more detail about the noun:  He is the one whom you saw yesterday.  As you can see, in English, these two groups of pronouns are often the same!

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Verbs

Verbs are words which express action taken by something, the state something is in or a change in that state, or an interaction between one thing and another.  Like nouns, there are many variations of verbs.

Transitive verbs are ones that have both a subject and an object: John hit the ball.  John is the subject and ball the object of the verb hit.  Intransitive verbs are ones that only have a subject: I laughed.  There is nothing that is laughed (except, I suppose, the laugh itself.)  Many verbs have an intermediate form called the reflexive, meaning that the subject is also the object:  I hurt myself.  As the example shows, reflexive verb forms often take a reflexive pronoun as their object!  But there are reflexive verbs that don’t: They got married.

The biggest issue with verb forms is conjugation.  In some languages, it is a fairly simple matter; in others, there are a huge variety of affixes.

Most familiar to Europeans are tenses.  Many languages differentiate between the past tense, the present tense, and the future tense.  Some languages also differentiate various details of timing, such as an immediate form, a proximate form (near in time), and a distal form (the distant past or future.)  Quite a few languages (Russian and Japanese included) only distingish past from "non-past."

In French, I sing goes through the following changes:

past (definite)	chantai
present	chante
future	chanterai

Aspect is actually much older, and seems to tie into our psychology as human beings.  The perfect aspect (as well as the similar completive or aorist) tells us that the action is finished, completed, “perfected.”  In English, it is represented by various forms of the word to have, followed by the past participle:  I had said (past perfect, aka pluperfect), I have said (present perfect), I will have said (future perfect).  As the last one suggests, by the time we reach a particular point in the future, my saying something will be over and done with.

There is a passive version of the perfect called the effective.  In English, an example might be He got seen.

The imperfect (aka durative or continuative) has an ongoing tone to it:  The action continues through the moment.  In English, we use a form of the verb to be followed by the present participle:  I was saying, I am saying, I will be saying.

There are a number of variations on the imperfect aspect.  The progressive -- I have been saying -- suggests that the action started a bit earlier and continues through the present.  The iterative (aka repetitive) -- I keep saying -- indicates that a single action is repeatedly performed.  And the inceptive (aka commencement) -- Let’s get going -- says to us that the action should get started.

Finally, there is the simple (or indefinite) aspect.  This includes the usual tenses used as is:  I said, I say, I will say.  The simple past is often called the preterite.

Next up is mood or mode.  The basic form is the indicative:  We are saying something that happened, is happening, or will happen.  A version of the indicative is the stative, which indicates that someone or something is in a particular state, as opposed to taking a particular action:  He sits.

The next three are used when there is a degree of unreality involved, and are often blended together.  The optative (aka desiderative) indicates a desire or wish for something to happen.  In English, this is usually expressed with auxiliary (helper) verbs such as should or would, as well as with expressions such as I wish....

The conditional mood is used when the reality of one event depends on the reality of another:  I will go if you go.  English has the remnants of a conditional:  We say If I were to go... rather than If I was to go....  But it is rapidly going the way of the who-whom distinction!

The subjunctive mood is used when there is some doubt or uncertainty about the event.  Many languages have entire conjugations of subjunctive, in various tenses and aspects.  It was the bane of my high school French class.

There are other moods.  In Japanese, for example, there are provisional and tentative versions of verbs.  And many languages have the imperative: Do this!  In English this is expressed by leaving out the subject (you).

In French, the aspect and mood variations on I sing look like this:

imperfect	chantais
conditional	chanterais
present subjunctive	chante

Next, we have various voices.  The active voice is the basic one.  It is used when the subject performs an action.

The passive voice is used when the subject of the sentence is actually the object of the action.  In English, we use a form of to be with the past participle:  I was hit.

The causative is a voice used when the subject causes the object to perform an action, as in He made me do it.

When the causative is combined with the reflexive, it is called the dynamic: They married themselves!

Person is an aspect of verb forms in many languages.  Most commonly, there is an ending or other affix that indicates something about the subject (such as first, second, or third person, gender, and singular or plural).  In English, the only person ending left in almost all verbs is the -s in the third person singular of the present tense (he does, vs I, you, we, he, she, it, or they do).

There are languages (Basque comes to mind) where the direct object and even the indirect object is also included in the verb form.  Dakarzkizu, for example, means he brings them to you, while Zenekarzkidan means you brought them to me. (Kar is the piece of these words that is the equivalent to bring in English)

Here's a simple French conjugation, in the present tense, showing person:

	singular	plural
first person	chante	chantons
second person	chantes	chantez
third person	chante	chantent

In addition, some languages have variations that express various levels of politeness.  In Japanese, for example, Hon o katta means I bought a book -- but in a sort of abrupt, no nonsense way. Hon o kaimashita means I bought the book, but more politely expressed.

Another common verb variation is the negative.  In English, we use the word not after one of several auxiliary (see below) verbs.  There is a tendency, however, for many verbs to change in the negative, by combining with the not:  I can’t, I won’t, I don’t, I ain’t....  Although we can still see where they come from (and the apostrophe reminds us),  they are well on there way to becoming separate forms.

There are other languages where the verb changes when it is a part of a question.  In Irish, for example tá (to be) becomes an bhfuil in questions.

I can't move on without mentioning that in Hausa (a language of Nigeria), tense, aspect, etc., are indicated with variations of the subject pronoun, not the verb, as in these example of the word for he:

perfect	kin
future	záaki
predictive	kyâa
habitual	kíkàn
subjunctive	kì
continuous	kínàa

(It might surprise you to know that we are moving this way in English, too:  I'd, I've, I'll, etc.)

In isolating languages such as Chinese, or in languages moving strongly in that direction, such as English and French, many of the preceding variations are not done by adding endings or changing the verb.  They are done with auxiliary verbs.  In English, for example, we say He will sing, rather than Il chantera as in French.  In French, on the other hand, we often say Il a chanté instead of He sang.  These particular examples are called compound tenses, but they can also involve aspects and moods and so on.

Participles are forms of the verb that are often used in such compound verbs.  In English, we have two:  The past participle (which usually ends in -ed, just like the past tense) and the present participle (which ends in -ing).  Participles are also used as adjectives: He is a dancing fool.  He was a beaten man.  And they can even be used as nouns:  Help the down-trodden.  Winning is everything.  Note that the past participle is often referred to as the passive participle, and the present participle as the active participle.

Another form of the verb often used in compound verbs is the infinitive.  In English, we don't have a real infinitive form -- we just put to in front of it:  To sleep, perchance to dream....  And so we say He wants to run, a compound made with wants plus the infinitive of run.  In many languages, there is a special form.  In French, for example, it usually ends in -r, and is used as the dictionary form.

There are many forms of verbal nouns (gerunds) -- i.e. verbs used as nouns, with or without special endings.  The infinitive and the participles are examples.  But we can also use the verb as is in many languages -- English being the best example, since we do it all the time:  I dance and I go to the dance and I do a dance and I devote my life to the dance!

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Other Parts of Speech

Adjectives are words which modify nouns.  In many languages, adjectives have affixes that must agree with their nouns in case, number, gender, etc.

One peculiar feature of adjectives in many language is comparison:  There may be special forms of the adjective when you are using it to say that a noun is more or less of whatever quality the adjective expresses (the comparative form), or that is is the most or least of that quality (the superlative form).  In English, we still see special words like good/better/best, regular endings such as big/bigger/biggest, and analytic forms such as significant/more significant/most significant.

Adverbs are words or phrases which modify verbs, adjectives, or even other adverbs.  There are often special endings that differentiate adverbs from similar adjectives:  In English, adverbs often end in -ly; In French, they often end in -ment.

Sometimes, adverbs are used to ask questions or to introduce certain kinds of subordinate clauses which tell more about such things as when, where, and how the action will happen.  For example, when will you be going? and I will go when I am good and ready.

Numerals (or just numbers) often come in both adjective and adverbial forms.  In Shakespeare's time, we said three men, but it was done thrice.  Today, of course, the latter is analytic: It was done three times.

The simple form of numerals is the cardinal number, which indicates a certain quantity of something.  There is also the ordinal number, which indicates the position of something in a sequence: He was the third man.  We see a analytic construction more and more frequently today:  He was her number one man, or she was bachelorette number three.

Prepositions are words which can allow a noun to qualify another noun or a verb in a way that parallels adjectives or adverbs:  The man in the yard ran into the house.  Many languages -- Japanese, for example -- have postpositions instead of prepositions, but they serve the same purpose.  Noun cases are often a substitute for prepositions or postpositions, and may in fact have developed out of them.

Irish is interesting in that its prepositions ofen vary by person, just like verbs:  Here is the "conjugation" of the preposition roimh (before) (mh is pronounced w):

before me	romham
before you (singular)	romhat
before him	roimhe
before her	roimpi
before us	romhainn
before you (plural)	romhaibh
before them	rompu

Conjunctions are words that connect two parts of a sentence. There are two kinds of conjunctions.  The most familiar are the coordinating conjunctions, such as and, or, and but.  The second kind are the subordinating conjunctions (sometimes just called subordinators) such as if, because, so that, that, etc. These introduce certain kinds of subordinate clauses, such as I work so that I can feed my children and I think that she is lovely.

Finally, there are interjections.  Interjections are expressions of emotion -- not true words but rather vocal noises that reflect the feelings of the speaker:  Oh!  Huh?  Hey!  Shit!  The last one is, of course, also a regular word, but its use in this case has nothing to do with what it literally refers to.