Have you ever heard someone say, ‘You sing when you talk’ or ‘The way he talks is really choppy’? Speakers of a different language or of another variety of the same language are often perceived as having a different ‘melody’ or rhythm and fluency to their speech. Global attributes of the way we speak are used by others to determine whether we are happy, tense, or sick. All of these aspects of spoken language constitute part of prosody. However, these are considered ‘paralinguistic’ aspects of prosody because they do not convey a linguistic contrast such as the one between a statement and a question, which in many languages are distinguished only by the intonation contour. In this chapter, we will examine only the linguistic aspects of prosody including lexical prosody (stress and tone), intonation, and fluency. We will also discuss how cross-linguistic prosodic differences may impact the degree of perceived foreign accent that an L2 speaker may have.

What is special about prosody?

In previous chapters, we devoted our attention to the acquisition of vowels (Chapter 4), consonants (Chapters 5 and 6), and sequences (Chapter 7), reviewing how researchers have applied the various theories discussed in Chapter 2 that have been proposed to account first and foremost for cross-linguistic influence and well-attested developmental patterns. You may have noticed that these theories make no direct reference to the acquisition of prosodic features such as lexical stress and tone, rhythm, intonation, and fluency, even though languages differ as much with respect to these properties as to segmentals and, thus, suprasegmentals also need to be acquired by non-native speakers. In spite of this, none of the theories of L2 phonology to date make explicit predictions about the acquisition of prosody. However, as we will discuss in §8.4, some researchers have extrapolated the predictions of theories conceived to model the acquisition of segments. Lacking a comprehensive theory that includes prosody, the goal of this chapter is to discuss the main themes that characterize the acquisition of suprasegmentals, to offer an overview of the on-going research on L2 prosody, and to provide tools for the analysis of this particular aspect of spoken language.

Varios rasgos del español hablado en los EE.UU. lo distinguen del español hablado en otros países. Este capítulo se centra en las estructuras del español que adquieren los hablantes de español criados en los EE.UU. Comúnmente, se hace referencia a estos bilingües como hablantes de herencia del español, término cuya definición más citada viene de Guadalupe Valdés (2000):

Se incluye en este grupo a los individuos que pertenecen a la G2, G3 o más. También están incluidos los llamados G1.5 que llegaron a los EE.UU. entre los seis y 12 años de edad (véase el Capítulo 2). Nótese que en la definición de Valdés, con la que estamos de acuerdo, todos los hablantes de herencia saben al menos algo de español y también del inglés. Es decir, tienen algo de proficiencia en el español, aunque el nivel puede variar mucho. Aparte del grado de proficiencia en las dos lenguas, otros factores que varían entre los hablantes de herencia son el dialecto de español de su familia (véase el Capítulo 3), el uso de los dos idiomas en la vida cotidiana (Capítulo 2), el nivel de escolarización recibido en español y en inglés (Capítulo 8) y la edad de adquisición del inglés (este capítulo). Empezamos con una exploración de los diferentes patrones de adquisición bilingüe, para después pasar a describir varias partes del sistema lingüístico del español de los hispanohablantes de herencia.

Factores en la adquisición de una lengua minoritaria

Se estima que más del 50 por ciento de las personas en el mundo son bi- o multilingües (Grosjean 2010), pero hay diferentes maneras en las cuales una persona puede llegar a ser bilingüe o multilingüe. En esta sección, exploramos el papel de la edad, los patrones del input lingüístico, la concentración local de hablantes en la lengua y el orden de nacimiento, como factores relevantes.

Las conexiones entre la lengua y la identidad han sido objeto de estudio durante mucho tiempo. En este capítulo nos enfocamos en las conexiones entre el empleo de la lengua española y las identidades de los grupos hispanohablantes en los Estados Unidos. Primero, ofrecemos un breve resumen de varias aproximaciones teóricas al estudio de la identidad, antes de pasar a contemplar varias manifestaciones de identidades hispanas/latinas en los EE.UU. y el papel que juega el español en su ejecución. Se notará cierto grado de solapamiento con los temas del Capítulo 7 (el español en la vida pública) y del Capítulo 8 (el español en la educación).

¿Qué es la identidad?

La identidad es una afiliación que los seres humanos adquirimos a partir de las interacciones que tenemos con otros individuos y con otros grupos de individuos. Es decir, la identidad es un fenómeno social. Debemos recordar que los individuos no vivimos solos; participamos en diferentes grupos que forman nuestra identidad y nuestra conexión a un grupo social (Tajfel y Turner 1986). Algunas de estas agrupaciones sociales a las que pertenecemos son nuestra familia nuclear o extendida, los compañeros de trabajo o de estudio, los amigos del mismo sexo o edad o del mismo barrio, iglesia o pueblo, los amigos con los que compartimos la práctica de un deporte o de alguna otra actividad, etc. La membresía a estos grupos se refleja en nuestra manera de vestir, las personas con las que socializamos, así como la manera de hablar. La identidad es por lo tanto una práctica social.

Como hemos visto en los capítulos anteriores, la población latina de los EE.UU. es diversa y compleja. En el siglo xxi, la población de origen hispano se vuelve cada vez más heterogénea. Si antes se solía enfatizar que Nueva York tenía muchos puertorriqueños, Los Ángeles muchos mexicanos y Miami muchos cubanos, ahora hace falta reconceptualizar el perfil hispanohablante de estos y otros lugares (como hemos visto en los capítulos anteriores), ya que ahora conviven por todo el país altos números de hispanohablantes de varias procedencias. Esto da lugar a que sus maneras de hablar español estén en contacto. En este capítulo, presentamos los estudios realizados hasta ahora sobre este fenómeno. Primero, repasamos lo que es un dialecto (vs. una lengua) y unos principios generales sobre el contacto entre diferentes dialectos.

El dialecto vs. la lengua

Entendemos dialecto como una variedad de una lengua que tiene rasgos lingüísticos propios de una región geográfica, por ejemplo, del Caribe, Andalucía, México central. Estos rasgos se pueden encontrar en todos los niveles de la lengua, como el léxico, la morfosintaxis y la fonología. Es importante reconocer que todos hablamos un dialecto de nuestra lengua; no es el caso que algunos hablen la “lengua” mientras que otros hablen un “dialecto” de esa lengua. Es decir, nadie habla “el inglés”; todos los angloparlantes hablan cierto dialecto del inglés que pertenece a cierta región, como el inglés de los Estados Unidos, el inglés de Jamaica o el inglés de Irlanda.

A native English speaker will rarely confuse the words pay and bay, yet, if your native language is Spanish (or one of many other languages) and you hear these words in isolation, each time you encounter bay, you may understand pay. Why is this? In simple terms, because Spanish /p/ is produced very similarly to English /b/. In this chapter, we will explore this and other issues in the context of the L2 acquisition of stops, which belong to the larger manner category of obstruents. The goal of this chapter is to review the research that has been conducted on the acquisition of obstruents, keeping our usual focus on Germanic and Romance languages. Given that we will try to present the current state of knowledge as closely as possible, we will discuss stops first, as they have been the focus of the majority of obstruent studies, and then move on to examining studies undertaken on the acquisition of fricatives. Although one would normally expect affricates to be equally represented in this chapter, very little research has been done on these consonants, and, as such, we will touch on them only briefly.

This chapter begins with a phonological comparison of the Germanic (chiefly English) and Romance systems (§5.1), followed by a presentation of the phonetic characteristics of stops (VOT, duration, F0 patterns at consonant release, and relative duration of preceding vowels, among others; §5.2). The discussion of voicing patterns will also include the approximantization of the Spanish voiced /b,d,g/ series, and the difficulty that this phonological alternation poses for L2 learners (§5.3). The second part of the chapter will discuss the acquisition of fricatives. Once we have presented the phonology and phonetics of these consonants (§5.4.1), we will concentrate on the acquisition of fricative voicing and place (§5.5.1), and then touch on the acquisition of linguistically and sociolinguistically conditioned variation (§5.5.3). The last section (§5.5.4) will present suggestions for topics for future studies such as the acquisition of dorsal fricatives. This chapter features tutorials on VOT measurement and place of articulation analysis as well as various lab exercises on the acquisition of stop and fricative phonemes and allophones.

PREVIEW

In this chapter you will first learn to segment words into their smallest meaningful parts, their morphemes. Different types of morphemes will then be distinguished on a number of dimensions. The classes arising from such distinctions are useful because they allow us to formulate generalizations about the properties shared by the members of these classes and the restrictions they are subject to. A second type of generalization covered in this chapter concerns the patterns and rules which underlie the formation of complex lexemes, i.e. words that are made up of more than two lexical morphemes. This is the realm of word-formation. You will be introduced to the range of word-formation patterns that can be used to form new words with the help of existing words and morphemes, including compounding, i.e. the joining of two or more words to form a new complex lexeme (e.g. interest rate, washing-machine or watertight), prefixation, yielding words such as disagree, unjust or ex-minister, and suffixation (e.g. agreement, justify, ministerial). Further word-formation patterns, which are less regular and transparent, include conversion (hammer N → to hammer V or empty Adj → to empty V), back-formation (e.g.to sightsee ← sightseeing; to burgle ← burglar), blending (e.g. infotainment ← information + entertainment), clipping (e.g. ad ← advertisement, phone ← telephone), and the formation of acronyms or initialisms from fixed sequences of words (URL ← unique resource locator; NATO ← North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

INTRODUCTION

Generally speaking, the linguistic discipline of morphology – the term is derived from the Greek word morphos meaning ‘form’ – examines the internal makeup and structure of words as well as the patterns and principles underlying their composition. In doing so, morphology straddles the traditional boundary between grammar (i.e. the rule-based, productive component of a language) and the lexicon (i.e. the idiosyncratic, rote-learned component). Morphology looks at both sides of linguistic signs, i.e. at the form and the meaning, combining the two perspectives in order to analyse and describe both the component parts of words and the principles underlying the composition of words.

Unlike phonology, morphology does not analyse words in terms of syllables but in terms of morphemes, i.e. components of words that are carriers of meanings.

Exploring Language and Linguistics is designed to meet the needs of undergraduate students approaching linguistics for the first time. As teachers of first-year linguistics courses ourselves, we have always welcomed students from a range of academic backgrounds. The key challenge for instructors on introductory-level linguistics/English language modules is to introduce a wide range of topics, approaches and concepts in an accessible manner to students with little or no prior experience of studying language. Meanwhile, the key challenge for students lies in their ability to understand and then apply their learning to real-world settings. Our volume seeks to address these challenges with writing which is concise, accessible and richly illustrated with examples. We make no assumptions about prior experience with grammar or with learning foreign languages. In this book, we aim to provide readers with a thorough grounding in the terminology and techniques of linguistic description, as well as taking them forward into more specialist fields in the subject.

Linguistics is a developing subject, and new areas of enquiry are opening up. This book features chapters on language and ideology, media discourse, including a discussion of the language of computer-mediated discourse in social media, and clinical linguistics. Such wide but detailed coverage of developing areas makes this book stand out from other textbooks in linguistics.

The textbook is aimed at readers who are likely to be first-year undergraduates taking their first course in linguistics. Our students have told us that what excites them about the subject are the many applications to real-world problems. Each of these chapters is written by an expert in the field and will contain introductory as well as more challenging material. The first eight chapters introduce readers to the different levels of linguistic analysis: sound (phonetics and phonology), grammar (morphology, grammar, syntax), meaning (semantics and pragmatics) and structure beyond the sentence (discourse analysis). These chapters will all be preparatory reading for approaching the subsequent chapters, as students will be required to bring this body of knowledge to the study of applications of linguistics. The order in which the chapters are presented suggests the order of reading, but they may be read in any order.

PREVIEW

This chapter examines how language users employ aspects of context in the production and interpretation of utterances. Context pervades every aspect of language use, from the lexical choices that we make to the way in which we disambiguate linguistic expressions. Its pervasive character is such that it has been shown in recent years to permeate those aspects of meaning that were once thought to be strictly semantic in nature. In fact, the debates which take place at the semantics–pragmatics interface are some of the most contentious in modern linguistics. This chapter begins by delineating the contributions of semantics and pragmatics to this interface. A simple cleavage between these disciplines is neither possible nor desirable, it will be argued. The chapter will then turn to the notion of context. More often than not, context is alluded to, rather than directly examined, in discussions of pragmatics. Context will be characterized along social, physical, linguistic and epistemic aspects in this chapter. Several pragmatic concepts exemplify the influence of context on language meaning. These concepts include deixis, presupposition, speech acts and implicatures. Speech acts and implicatures reflect the influence on the development of pragmatics of the language philosophies of John L. Austin, John Searle and H. Paul Grice. The views of these philosophers of language will be briefly examined. By the end of the chapter, you will have an understanding of the significant contribution of pragmatics to the study of language meaning as well as the key concepts and ideas that have shaped this linguistic discipline.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter will introduce you to a key set of ideas and concepts that has come to define the discipline of pragmatics. Many of these ideas emerged from a dissatisfaction about how far semantics could take us in the study of language meaning. One of the earliest insights to shape the emerging discipline of pragmatics was the idea that linguistic utterances can do more than merely describe states of affairs in the world. Rather, utterances can be used to perform a range of actions such as issuing requests and warnings, undertaking promises and apologies and extending congratulations and threats to others. None of these speech acts are possible without permitting a role for language users in an account of meaning.

PREVIEW

The focus of the last chapter was on phonetics, examining the characteristics of speech sounds, how they are produced and their physical properties, along with important related issues such as tone and intonation, and the crucial distinction between (phonetic) transcription and (orthographic) spelling systems like English writing. In this chapter we turn to phonology, which focuses on the systematic organization of speech sounds. As we will see, there are systematic behaviours in the speech sounds of language that cannot be attributed to the phonetics alone. We will also see that some aspects of the sound system of language – for instance, native speakers’ intuitions about the relationships among the sounds of their language which may be at odds with phonetic reality – can be best understood at an abstract level of representation.

INTRODUCTION

In the previous chapter it was pointed out that phonetics deals with the characteristics of speech sounds themselves, while phonology deals with the organization of speech sounds into systems. There are aspects of the sound systems of human languages that cannot be explained by phonetics alone. Consider first the Greek word πτέρυγα [ˈptɛrɪɣɑ] > ‘wing’, the French word psychologie [psikɔlɔʒi] > ‘psychology’ and the German word Knie [kniː] ‘knee’ (and remember that the symbols in square brackets [] show how the words are pronounced). And now consider English: there are no words beginning with the sounds [pt], [ps] or [kn]. Since Greek, French and German are human languages, it cannot be the case that [pt], [ps] and [kn] are impossible (for human beings) to pronounce. Rather, it is a fact about the organization of the sound system of English that initial [pt], [ps] and [kn] are disallowed. Looking more closely, it is not really a fact about words, but a fact about syllables: English syllables do not begin with [pt], [ps] or [kn]. Recall from Chapter 2 that English spelling does not accurately represent how words are pronounced. There are words of English spelt with <pt>, <ps> and <kn>, as in pterodactyl, psychology and knee, but there are no words of English in which these sequences are routinely pronounced at the beginnings of words or even at the beginnings of syllables. In these cases only one of the initial consonants is pronounced: [tɛɹəˈdæktəɫ], [saɪˈkɔlɔʤiː], [niː].

PREVIEW

This chapter explores how language, grammar and rhetoric can be employed as critical tools in text analysis, and in particular, in the analysis of literary texts. The logical point of departure in literary linguistics is that since prose and poetry are made up of words, phrases, clauses and sentences, the most appropriate way to analyse those texts is by means of linguistic frameworks. Just as an art critic might come to a balanced interpretation by observing and commenting on patterns of things like colour, depth and form, so the literary linguist can attain a grounded understanding of the textual object of investigation, as it were, by detecting and reporting on perceptible lexical, syntactic and discoursal patterns within a given context.

In this chapter, you will first be introduced to the historical background of literary linguistics as it developed in the twentieth century. Thereafter, we will consider some of the directions the field is taking today. Lastly, and moving on to a more practical side, you will be introduced to a range of literary linguistic tools and methods. The focus here will be on analysis up to and including the sentence level. It is here that we will be exploring the notion of foregrounding at the levels of language. The goal is to anchor our literary interpretations and evaluations in concrete linguistic description. By the end of the chapter, not only will you have acquired a firm knowledge of the history, tools and methods of literary linguistics, you will also be able to bring what you have learned to bear on your own literary linguistic analyses.

INTRODUCTION

The term ‘literary linguistics’ is often used interchangeably with ‘stylistics’. Literary linguistics does not engage solely in the analysis of literary texts, but in other discourse forms too, including political discourse, advertising discourse, legal discourse and even everyday conversation. The reason for this is that the notions of creativity and innovation in language are not just confined to the realm of literature. Just look at the world around you: the internet, the television, even the public texts on display on your university campus.

PREVIEW

This chapter examines the many ways in which language and communication can break down in children and adults. These so-called communication disorders are usually the result of illness, disease and injury. These medical and traumatic events can compromise speech and language or the ability to produce voice, and have their onset in the developmental period or childhood, or adulthood and later life. You will be introduced to various stages in the communication cycle, and the specific disorders that result when these stages are disrupted. By locating disorders at different points in this cycle, you will see that quite different processes are involved in communication disorders. Several clinical distinctions that are integral to the study of communication disorders and to the work of speech and language therapists will be examined. They include the distinction between a receptive and an expressive language disorder, a developmental and an acquired communication disorder and an important clinical distinction between a speech disorder and a language disorder. You will then see how these disorders are manifested in children and adults through a discussion of speech, language and voice in two developmental and two acquired communication disorders: cleft lip and palate, and specific language impairment in children, and aphasia and laryngectomy in adults. By the end of the chapter, you will have knowledge of an important clinical application of linguistics, as well as an awareness of the work of speech and language therapy.

INTRODUCTION

For a significant number of children and adults, speech and language skills are disordered to such an extent that they pose a significant barrier to effective communication. The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists estimates that 2.5 million people in the UK have a communication disorder. Of this number, some 800,000 people have a disorder that is so severe that it is hard for anyone outside their immediate families to understand them. In the US, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders estimates that one in every six Americans has some form of communication disorder. These large figures convey something of the extent of the burden of communication disorders on society as a whole. They should not, however, serve to distract from the personal impact of these disorders, an impact that is most often experienced as reduced quality of life as well as educational and occupational disadvantage.

PREVIEW

This chapter looks at the relationship between language and society. This means that we will be examining language in its social contexts – how it is actually used by people (rather than how grammarians may prescribe language ‘should’ be spoken). Sociolinguistics investigates how the language practices of one individual differ from situation to situation or how they differ within one community. This involves looking at the social characteristics of language users or speakers – such as social class, gender and sexuality – as well as the social context in which language use changes. We will also discuss how we can adapt our language to fit a situation and the people we are speaking with. We all have a verbal repertoire of speech styles and ways to use language, which allow us to switch, depending on the person we are talking to and the situation we are in, and we frequently do so without being aware of it. Issues such as language policy, language planning and education can also be included within sociolinguistics, although we will not be looking at these in this chapter.

INTRODUCTION

We may think of languages as single entities – English, French and Yoruba for example – but things are not as simple as this. If we think specifically about English, we may think of the English used in education, law courts, on the media or the English that is taught to foreign speakers as ‘being’ English. But this is just one variety – in this case, Standard English. It is the English used in dictionaries and grammar books. Most people who speak English can understand other English speakers, but that is not to say that we all speak the same; consider the differences in the English spoken in the UK, USA, Canada, South Africa and India to name just a few examples. We pronounce words differently and use different words or grammatical constructions, but we are all speaking ‘English’.

The unique characteristics of the spoken language of an individual person are called a speaker's idiolect. Although everybody has a range of styles, also known as their verbal repertoire, we see that individuals tend to share their linguistic practices with others. This means there are groups of speakers who use language in a similar way, but differently from the standard form.

PREVIEW

This chapter explains the insights and techniques of historical linguistics, the study of how language changes over time. We begin with a brief explanation of the value of historical linguistics before going on in Section 10.2 to describe the background to its development. In Section 10.3 we examine some key explanations for why languages change over time. In so doing we discuss how changes come about and how they then spread throughout speech communities. Following this, we describe some of the types of change that languages go through. Here we focus particularly on change at the levels of phonology, grammar, lexis and semantics. We give examples of changes that have occurred at these levels of language and describe some influential theories that have sought to explain such developments. We then move on in Section 10.5 to describe some of the main techniques that historical linguists use to study language change. By the end of this chapter you should have a good knowledge of the variety of ways in which languages change, as well as an insight into the methods that linguists use to study such changes.

INTRODUCTION

Primarily, historical linguistics involves describing how and explaining why language changes over time. Much work has focused on sound change, such as the fact that Germanic languages, past and current, have the sound [t] at the beginning of the number ‘two’ (e.g. Gothic twai, English two, Dutch twee, German zwei (pronounced [tsvaɪ])),whereas other Indo-European languages past and current typically have [d] (e.g. Latin duos, Italian due, French deux, Spanish dos, etc.). But other linguistic areas – grammar, semantics and lexis – have also received significant attention, and most recently areas such as pragmatics have come into focus.

Why bother with historical linguistics? Importantly, it helps explain language that is used today. For example, why is it that when we say the English word knight we do not pronounce the <k>? Historical linguistic detective work has been able to establish that the <k> used to be pronounced. But that sound has been subject to a regular process of sound change, mapped out by historical linguists, until it reached the final endpoint of complete loss. Today's spelling simply retains the <k> as an archaeological relic.

PREVIEW

This chapter will summarize arguments in favour of an innate mechanism for language learning. This is not a general mechanism for learning, but is dedicated to language – the name given to the innate mechanism is Universal Grammar. Universal Grammar must be able to deal with the fact that languages differ quite dramatically in their structural properties, and that learning paths can vary for different languages. Evidence for an innate, language-specific mechanism comes from children's innovations during development, lack of negative evidence from caregivers, creation of signed languages and creoles, and first language learners who have various deficits in their cognitive abilities. We consider the need for a better integration of language acquisition theory with the theory of language processing.

INTRODUCTION

Chimpanzees are our closest relatives. Yet chimpanzees cannot learn a human language. With training, they can develop a repertoire of signs, and they can combine these signs in meaningful ways. But chimpanzees have never been shown to use the abstract structural relations between signs (words) that are characteristic of human language.

In this chapter, we argue that humans are equipped with an innate ability to construct a grammar, and that this ability is generally independent of intelligence. In order to make this argument, we need to examine what adult human languages are like – to tackle the issue of cross-linguistic variation. That is, we need to look at the samenesses and differences that human languages offer, and then to look at the challenges that the task of learning a first language poses. After that, we will examine the progress children make with learning different types of language, and the stages children typically pass through. Although the data from many languages is sparse, the conclusion we can draw is that roughly by age 3 years, the fundamentals of the language the child is learning have been acquired. The combination of the intricate complexity of adult languages and the seeming ease with which children get to grips with the fundamentals of their language forms a basic argument for an innate learning capacity. We will then consider in more detail the alternative(s) to the claim that language acquisition is possible only by virtue of human biology.