e.g. “The horse raced past the barn fell.” means “the horse that was raced past the barn fell.”

5.    the minimal attachment theory: It would be inefficient for people to assume all these infinite structures until they get some positive evidence for one of them. And if they arbitrarily choice one of the possibilities, they are most likely to choose the simplest. The idea is that people initially construct the simplest (or least complex) syntactic structure when interpreting the structure of sentences. This is called the minimal attachment theory.

       6.2.4       Semantics and sentence memory

1.    Assimilation theory: Assimilation theory refers to language (sound, word, syntax, etc.) change or process by which features of one element change to match those of another that precedes or follows.

2.    Context effect: Context effect helps people recognize a word more readily when the preceding words provide an appropriate context for it.

3.    Inference in context: Inference in context refers to any conclusion drawn from a set of propositions, from something someone has said, and so on. It includes things that, while not following logically, are implied in an ordinary sense.

       6.2.5       Basic processes in reading

1.    Perceptual span: The perceptual span is the range of letters from which useful information is extracted. The perceptual span varies depending on factors such as the size of the print, the complexity of the text, and so on. It is typically the case, however, that the perceptual span encompasses about three or four letters to the left of fixation and some fifteen letters to the right of fixation.

2.    The immediacy assumption: The reader is supposed to carry out the processes required to understand each word and its relationship to previous words in the sentence as soon as that word is encountered.

6.3   Discourse / text interpretations

1.    General context effects: General context effects occur when our general knowledge about the world influences language comprehension.

2.    Specific context effects: Specific context effects involve information obtained from earlier parts of a discourse.

6.3.1       Schemata and inference drawing

              1.    Schemata refers to packets of stored knowledge. Its features are as follows:

(1)   Schemata can vary considerably in the information they contain, from the very simple to the very complex.

(2)   Schemata are frequently organized hierarchically; e.g. in addition to a rather general restaurant schema or script, we probably also have more specific restaurant schemata for different kinds of restaurant (e.g. fast-food places, up-market French restaurant, and so on.)

(3)   Schemata operate in a top-down or conceptually driven way to facilitate interpretation of environmental stimuli.

2.    The inferences which people draw are stored in long-term memory along with information about the sentences actually presented. As a result, they will sometimes mistakenly believe on a subsequent memory test that they previously heard or saw an inference.

       6.3.2       Story structure

1.    Story structure refers to the way in which various parts of story are arranged or organized.

2.    A macroproposition refers to the general proposition used to form an overall macrostructure of the story.

6.4   Language production

       6.4.1       Speech production

                     1.    Five different levels of representation involved in speaking a sentence:

(1)   The massage-level representation: this is an abstract, pre-linguistic representation of the idea or ideas that the speaker wants to communicate.

(2)   The functional-level representation: this is an outline of the proposed utterance having grammatical structure; in other words, the slots for nouns, adjectives, and so on are allocated, but there are no actual words to fill the slots.

(3)   The positional-level representation: this differs from the functional level representation in that it incorporates the words of the sentence that is to be produced.

(4)   The phonetic-level representation: this indicates some of the necessary information about the ways in which words in the intended sentences are pronounced.

(5)   The articulatory-level representation: this is the final representation, and contains a set of instructions for articulating the words in the sentence in the correct order.

2.    Spoonerism / slip of the tongue: Spoonerism refers to the fact that the initial letter or letters of two words are transposed.

3.    Anticipation error: An anticipation error occurs when a word is spoken earlier in the sentence than it should be. E.g. the sentence “The school is at school.” is wrong. The correct form should be “The boy is at school.”

4.    Exchange error: An exchange error refers to the fact that two items within a sentence are swapped. E.g. the sentence “This is the happiest life of my day.” is wrong. The correct form should be “This is the happiest day of my life.”

5.    Morpheme-exchange error: A morpheme-exchange error refers to the fact that the roots or basic forms of two words are switched leaving the grammatical structure unchanged. E.g. the sentence “He has already trunked two packs.” is wrong. The correct form should be “He has already packed two trunks.”

       6.4.2       Written language

1.    Writing process: According to Hayes and Flower (1986), writing consists of three interrelated processes:

(1)   The planning process, which involves producing ideas and arranging them into a writing plan appropriate to the writer’s goals.

(2)   The sentence generation process, which translates the writing plan into actual sentences that can be written down.

(3)   The revision process, which involves an evaluation of what has been written so far; this evaluation can encompass individual words at one extreme or the overall structure of the writing at the other extreme.

                     2.    The strategic knowledge and the knowledge-telling theory

The strategic knowledge is knowledge of the methods used in constructing a writing plan in order to make it coherent and well-organized. The knowledge-telling strategy means that children simply write down everything they can think of that is relevant to a topic without organizing the information in any way, because they often lack the strategic knowledge.

End of Chapter 6

Chapter 7 Language, Culture and Society

[The textbook form of this chapter seems very twisted for me. So I changed the structure of the notes, using some questions to guide the whole chapter. – icywarmtea]

7.1   Language and culture

       1.    The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

What the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests is like this: our language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express our unique ways of understanding the world. Following this argument, two important points could be captured in the theory. On the one hand, language may determine our thinking patterns; on the other hand, similarity between language is relative, the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualization of the world will be. For this reason, this hypothesis has alternatively been referred to as linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. This hypothesis has two versions: a strong and a weak version. The strong version of the theory refers to the claim the original hypothesis suggests, emphasizing the decisive role of language as the shaper of our thinking patterns. The weak version, however, is a modified type of its original theory, suggesting that there is a correlation between language, culture, and thought, but the cross-cultural differences thus produced in our ways of thinking are relative, rather than categorical.

       2.    Context of situation

              (1)   The relevant features of the participants: persons, personalities:

                     a.     The verbal action of the participants

                     b.    The non-verbal action of the participants

              (2)   The relevant objects

              (3)   The effects of the verbal action

3.    Speech community: Speech community refers to a group of people who form a community, e.g. a village, a region, a nation, and who have at least one speech variety in common.

4.    Gender difference: Gender difference is the difference in a speech between men and women.

5.    Linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity: Linguistic determinism is one of the two points in S-W hypothesis, i.e. language determines thought. Linguistic relativity is the other point: there is no limit to the structural diversity of languages.

6.    Ethnography of communication: The study of place of language in culture and society. Language is not studied in isolation but within a social or cultural setting. Ethnography of communication studies, e.g. how people in a particular group or community communicate with each other and how the social relationships between these people affect the type of language they use.

7.    Cross-cultural communication: An exchange of ideas, information, etc. between persons from different cultural backgrounds.

8.    What are the aims of teaching culture in language class?

       There are at least three objectives for us to teach culture in our class:

       (1)   To get the students familiar with cultural differences;

(2)   To help the students transcend their own culture and see things as the members of the target culture will;

(3)   To emphasize the inseparability of understanding language and culture through various classroom practices.

All this lead to a belief that a good understanding of structural things in some cases has much to do with a conscious understanding of the cultural background of the target language from language learners. In other words, a successful master of a given language has much to do with an understanding of that culture, because language and culture are correlated with each other at different levels of linguistic structure.

7.2   Language and society

1.    How many social factors are believed to influence our language behaviors in a social context?

The following social factors are believed to influence our language behaviors in a social context:

       (1)   Class;

       (2)   Gender;

       (3)   Age;

       (4)   Ethnic identity;

       (5)   Education background;

       (6)   Occupation;

       (7)   Religious belief.

2.    What are the sociolinguistic study of society and the sociolinguistic study of language>

If we want to know more about a given society or community by examining the linguistic behavior of its members, we are doing a sociolinguistic study of society. That is to say, we are doing sociolinguistics at a macro level of investigation. At this level of discussion things that we are interested in include bilingualism or multilingualism, language attitude, language choice, language maintenance and shift, language planning and standardization, vernacular language education, etc.

On the other hand, if we want to know more about some linguistic variations in language use by turning to potential socio-cultural factors for a description and explanation, we are doing a sociolinguistic study of language. Consequently, we are more interested in examining micro linguistic phenomena such as structural variants, address forms, gender differences, discourse analysis, Pidgin and Creole languages, and other more language-related issues.

       3.    What are vernacular, Pidgin and Creole?

Vernacular refers to the native language of a country, not of a foreign origin or learned formation; or the indigenous language or dialect of a region.

Pidgin is a mixed or blended language used by people who speak different languages for restricted purposes such as trading. Pidgins arose as a result of mixing two languages such as a Chinese dialect and English, an African dialect and French, etc.

Creole is a pidgin that has become the primary language of a speech community, and is acquired by the children of that community as their native language.

       4.    What is discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis refers to the study of how sentences in spoken and written language form larger meaningful units such as paragraphs, conversation, interviews, etc. Analysis of spoken discourse is sometimes called conversational analysis. Some linguistics use the term text linguistics for the study of written discourse. Recent analyses have been carried out on discourse in the classroom. Such analyses can be useful in finding out bout the effectiveness of teaching methods and the types of teacher-student relationships.

       5.    What are bilingualism, diglossia, and multilingualism?

Bilingualism refers to the use of at least two languages either by an individual or by a group of speakers, such as the inhabitants of a particular region or a nation. Bilingualism is common in the province of Quebec in Canada where both English and French are spoken, and parts of Wales, where both Welsh and English are spoken.

When two languages or language varieties exist side by side in a community and each one is used for different purposes, this is called diglossia. Usually, one is a more standard variety called the high variety, which is sued in government, the media, education, and for religious services. The other one is usually a non-prestige variety called the low variety, which is used in the family, with friends, when shopping, etc.

Multilingualism refers to the use of three or more languages by an individual or by a group of speakers such as the inhabitants of a particular region or a nation. Multilingualism is common in Malaysia, Singapore, Israel, etc.

7.3   Summary

       (Omit.)

End of Chapter 7

Chapter 8 Language in Use

What is pragmatics? What’s the difference between pragmatics and semantics?

       Pragmatics is the study of the use of language in communication, particularly the relationships between sentences and the contexts and situations in which they are used. Pragmatics includes the study of

       (1)   How the interpretation and use of utterances depends on knowledge of the real world;