Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

(b) Fire … open … matches … light matches … naughty boy … ha,

ha, shut the door … knife … water … tablets … shut [pointing to

high shelf] up

Analyse and evaluate the errors in these responses, determine the

type of aphasia in (a) and (b) and justify your choice by outlining how these two types differ from one another.

4.

Below are a number of sentences produced by a four-year-old

American boy with SLI called JC (with their adult counterparts

shown in parentheses). Identify the errors he makes in each of the

sentences, and discuss the nature of these errors.

(a) That me friend (That’s my friend)

(b) When I go ice-skate, me fall (When I go ice-skating, I fall)

Syntactic disorders

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(c) Me have different puzzle (I have a different puzzle)

(d) Took it off, then he eat it (He took it off, then he ate it)

(e) Me daddy like mustard (My daddy likes mustard)

(f) Why her need this? (Why’s she need this/Why does she need this?)

(g) Me teacher make cake (My teacher made a cake)

(i) He lost him duck (He lost his duck)

(j) Long time ago, I have a big eye (A long time ago, I had a swollen

eye)

(k) It look like a lobster (It looks like a lobster)

(l) He got old one (He’s got an old one)

5.

Consider the following somewhat simplified data from a German SLI

child (age seven years, five months):

(a) *Ich das Buch les-en

I

the book read-infinitive

(b) Paul soll

das Buch lesen

Paul should the book read

(c) *Maria das Buch les-en

Maria the book read-infinitive

(d) Das Buch ist auf dem Schrank

The book is on the cupboard

(e) *Wenn Maria das Buch les-en,

ich geh-en.

if

Maria the book read-inf., I

go-inf.

The * indicates that a string produced by the child is ill-formed in adult

German.

(i) Characterise the linguistic impairment(s) illustrated in these

examples by providing tree diagrams for sentences (a) to (e).

(ii) Does this child have genuine word-order problems? (HINT: ana-

lyse the form of the verbs in connection with their position in the

sentence.)

(iii) Sketch some goals for language therapy based on your linguistic

analysis.

27

Using sentences

In our introduction (pp. 2–3), we drew a fundamental distinction between competence and performance, identifying the latter with the perception and production of speech and other forms of language, and suggesting that its study falls in the domain of psycholinguistics. We have now seen ample illustration of what this study involves and the insights that it can provide. In the introduction to part III of the book

(section 17), we briefly alluded to conversations and other extended sorts of text, and a moment’s thought should be sufficient to persuade us that here we meet a rather different, more familiar, notion of performance that we all indulge in on a daily basis without being subject to the psycholinguist’s experimental investigations. We all use language in a wide range of communicative contexts, and it would be remiss of us not to include discussion of some of the issues that arise if we adopt this broader perspective in an introductory book of this nature. In what follows, we introduce some of the core ideas in pragmatics, and we begin by looking at one rather obvious way in which context plays an important role in understanding aspects of language.

Context and pronouns

In sections 12 and 23, we introduced some of the key notions of meaning or semantics, including that of the truth conditions for a sentence: a sentence such as every sheep snores is true if and only if for every one of the sheep under consideration it is true that it snores, otherwise the sentence is false. Truth conditions are seen by many as providing the core of the meaning of a sentence, but the examples we used to illustrate this notion earlier were carefully chosen so as to avoid any explicit reference to the context in which a sentence might be used.

In many cases, however, it is easy to see that we can begin to formulate appropriate truth conditions only by taking this context into account.

Suppose that John owns a cat, but Mary doesn’t. If John utters (502), then his utterance will be true, but an utterance of the same sentence by Mary will express a falsehood:

(502)

I own a cat

The reason for this shift in truth value is clear: the pronoun I refers to whoever happens to utter the sentence, and we can make this explicit in terms of truth conditions as in (503):

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Using sentences

389

(503) a.

Where the speaker of ‘I own a cat’ is John, ‘I own a cat’ is true if and only if John owns a cat.

b.

Where the speaker of ‘I own a cat’ is Mary, ‘I own a cat’ is true if and only if Mary owns a cat.

Another way of thinking about this is to draw a distinction between a sentence, an utterance and a proposition. A sentence is a (grammatical) string of words.

When a sentence is spoken or written on an occasion, we have an utterance (of that sentence). Sentences are abstract objects which exist outside of time and place.

Utterances are concrete manifestations of sentences and each utterance is unique.

A proposition is the meaning expressed by (some utterance) of the sentence. To get a complete specification of the proposition expressed by an utterance of a sentence containing a pronoun, such as (502), we need to take into account an aspect of the context, namely, the identity of the person making the utterance. This is summed up in (504) for the example introduced above:

(504)

Utterance

Sentence

Proposition

Truth-value

1. Mary: ‘I own a cat’

I own a cat

Mary owns a cat

False

2. John: ‘I own a cat’

I own a cat

John owns a cat

True

Words like personal pronouns, which require context for their interpretation, are known as deictic words (from the Ancient Greek word meaning ‘point’). This

term itself originates with another type of deictic word, the demonstratives this

‘near to the speaker’ and that ‘distant from the speaker’, and it is noteworthy that we often accompany such words with a pointing gesture. Some languages (for

instance, Spanish) have a third demonstrative which is used to refer to an entity that is near the addressee and other languages have more complex systems.

Inflectional categories can be deictic too. For instance, the tense category is sensitive to the context of utterance: if John says ‘Mary is writing a letter’ when in fact she has already finished, then the proposition expressed by John’s utterance of that sentence is false; if, however, she were still writing the letter, the expressed proposition would be true. Equally, if John had said ‘Mary was writing a letter’ in circumstances where she had finished, the expressed proposition would have been true (exercises 1 and 2).

Topic/focus

A quite distinct sense in which context is important in understanding

the structure of language and the interpretation of sentences in use is illustrated in

(505):

(505)

speaker a: Who has written two books on linguistics?

speaker b: MARY has written two books on linguistics.

The capital letters on MARY indicate that this word is pronounced with more

emphasis: it’s slightly louder and relatively longer than the accompanying words

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senten ces

and it starts at high pitch and falls rapidly to low pitch. In fact, the rest of B’s utterance in (505) is completely redundant and could easily be omitted. Now consider (506), a slight variant on (505) in which speaker B emphasises a different word: (506)