Linguistic Homework.

1/7/16

Put all your fingers to your thumbs and kind of curl them around your thumbs, then put both hands together tips to tips and take them apart a few times. That means “more.”

In Trader Joe’s a one year old boy was communicating with his caregiver with signs. The mother was describing how to make the signs.

Sign language is used with very young children as a way to communicate before they can articulate words with their mouth.

2) 1/8/16

“Chao shi” is for “chao ji shi chang” which means supermarket

My friend May showed me in “WeChat” the “Chao shi” in my hometown in China

“Chao shi” is the clipped form of “Chao ji shi chang” which is from English, “Supermarket”. “Super” is “chao ji”, “market” is “shi chang” in Chinese.

3) 1/8/16

Water

It rained yesterday. My husband said, “I don’t need to water the garden and save some water.”

“Water” is a noun such as “some water”; yet “water the garden”, the “water” is a verb a conversion from “water” - a noun.

4) 1/11/16

El is for Eleanor

One of my new students (in the pre-school where I work) just started her school recently. This student’s name is Eleanor, her father told us they called her El.

El for Eleanor, this is called “words clipping” which is one of the ways that how words are formed

5) 1/12/16

“Bokchoy” is from Chinese

Today I cooked bokchoy for dinner.

The word “bokchoy” is from Cantonese “ baahk-choi”, baahk means white, choi means vegetable. “bokchoy” is a borrowed word from Chinese.

6)1/13/ 16

Chinese “Wo gang chi guo zao can.” means “I just ate my breakfast.”

I was chatting in the “Wechat” with my friends in China, and they asked me if I ate my meal already.

Chinese does not have the inflectional morphemes for the verbs. Yet it uses other words to describe such as adding “guo” behind a verb meaning “did already”.

7) 1/ 16 / 16

Room - polysemy

My daughter wanted to move a big chair into her room. I said,” but there is not enough room in your room.”

Here “room” is polysemous, first room means space, second room is a structure room.

8) 1/ 17 / 16

“I hate to ask you to do this, but could you take the dog out when you get home?”

My husband asked this because he thought he would be home too late to walk the dog.

This is an example of negative face: the need to be free of imposition.

9) 1/ 18 / 16

You drank the whole bottle?

My husband is lately stuck with a drink drinking a lot of a drink called ICE, and my daughter started to drink it, too. She was drinking more and more, which I do not want her to do. Today, she drank the whole bottle of ICE. “You drank the whole bottle?” I asked.

Here she understands that, “drank the whole bottle” is “drank the whole bottle of ICE”. This is an example of metonymy, using a closely related word, in this case “bottle” to stand in for the drink itself. It is also an example of implicature. The meaning I was conveying was actually, “I can’t believe you drank all that, and I wish you wouldn’t.” She got it and realized she shouldn’t be drinking so much.

10) 1/ 22/ 16

I think… maybe

Today Juliet didn’t not come to school. My co-worker said, “I think Juliet is sick.”

“Maybe,” I said.

Both my co-worker and I were not really sure if Juliet was sick, “maybe” and “I think..” are examples of hedges related to concern regarding the quality maxim.

11) 1/28/ 16

“I am hungry.”

Once we got home from school. My 11 year-old daughter said to me, “Mom, I am bored. What can I do?” I answered: “Well, why don’t you finish your Chinese homework?” “But I am hungry,” my daughter replied.

My daughter did not answer my question, “yes” or “no”. Yet I could interpret as “No.” or “Not right now.” What she was saying, “I am hungry.” contains an implicature, in linguistic implicature is an additional conveyed meaning concerning my daughter’s feeling, “I don’t want to do the Chinese homework now.”

12) 1/ 29/ 16

Grandmother talking slowly with exaggerated pitch. “Let’s look out the window, and name what we see.”

On a train on the way to San Diego, a grandmother with her 2 or 3-year-old grandaughter.

The grandmother was using “caregiver speech”, it is characterized by simple sentence structures and a lot of repetition and paraphrasing, with reference largely restricted to the here and now. It is also called “motherese”. If this motherese helps the babies so much, we should talk to the babies more with the motherese.

13) 2/ 3 / 16

How are you doing? A thumbs up.

Lately, one of my co-worker is using her thumb to answer my question a lot. I figure out that thumbs up means “great’ “good”.

In linguistic, “thumbs up” is an emblem which is a signal meaning “things are good”, another one like put you right palm to your lips and quick take off with palms up meaning to give somebody a kiss. Emblems are signals which have the function like fixed phrases and do not depend on speech.

14) 2/ 7/16

Police officers are sometimes called cops.

I saw this word in the news and wondered about its derivation.

LA Times Feb 7, 2015

“Cop” comes from the British “Constable on Patrol,” so it is an acronym.

15) 2/10/17
“Bilingual Cameroon Teeters as English Speakers Protest Treatment”

Lawyers are protesting the fact that new laws are not translated into English. Teachers are protesting that the government is sending teachers with poor English skills to teach in the English-speaking areas.

Headline from NYT

These are reactions to language policy decisions made by the government in Yaounde,Cameroon, an area dominated by a French-speaking majority. Cameroon was split into English and French territories, but after independence in the early 1960s when the country unified, English was a minority language. Demonstrations have turned violent and protesters have been beaten and imprisoned. The government has shut down the internet in English-speaking areas. French is seen by the government as the prestige language.

16) 2/18/17 “A taxonomy of dishonesty: The press should call out politicians when they lie. But lying isn’t the same as talking nonsense.”

Article in The Economist by Johnson

The author points out that a “lie” and a “falsehood” are synonyms (but with subtle differences as normally the case with synonyms). Johnson questions whether Trump is actually lying if he doesn’t know the truth. He also points out that some verbs are “factive,” meaning that they can only be used when the information that follows is true. Whatever follows words like “admit” and “learn” is information that is presupposed to be true. “Lie” is a kind of anti-factive verb. Since it’s impossible to know what is in Trump’s mind, we can’t really know if he is purposely lying or just “talking nonsense” about things he doesn’t know about.

17) 2/28/17 Today I got a message that said: “The Amazon cloud is down, so Canvas isn’t working.” I realized that my mother would not understand that message at all even though she knows every word in the sentence.

SMC email message from Distance Education manager

This is a perfect example in the areas of semantics and pragmatics. Since Amazon and Canvas are capitalized, and this was in writing, I know that these are company names. Because of the context I am able to understand that our EMS, Canvas isn’t working because Amazon cloud, where the IT services are stored, managed and deployed, isn’t working properly = down.

18) 2/28/17 “When what you see isn’t what you hear” - The McGurk effect.

Today’s NY Times Science section D2

Psychologist Harry McGurk was watching a dubbed movie. He heard the sound “da” although actually the sound pronounced was “ba,” dubbed over “ga” and realized his brain made a miscalculation based on what he saw, not heard. We know that facial cues are important in understanding what people say