Copropraxia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Copropraxia is involuntarily performing obscene or forbidden gestures. Copropraxia

comes from the Greek κόπρος meaning "feces" and πράξις meaning "action".
Copropraxia is a rare characteristic of Tourette syndrome.

A related term is coprolalia, referring to involuntary swearing.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copropraxia
Echolalia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the Something for Kate album, see Echolalia (album).

Echolalia is the repetition of vocalizations made by another person. A 1983 report

indicated that up to 75% of verbal people with autism have some form of echolalia,[1]
but it may also be present in Tourette syndrome, developmental disability, schizophrenia
and, occasionally, other forms of psychopathology. When done involuntarily, it is
considered a tic.

The word "echolalia" is derived from the Greek "echo", meaning "to repeat", and "lalia",
meaning "a speaking," from lalein "to speak, prattle," of onomatopoeic origin.

Definition of Echolalia

Echolalia: The involuntary parrotlike repetition (echoing) of a word or phrase just spoken
by another person. Echolalia is a feature of schizophrenia (especially the catatonic form),
Tourette syndrome, and some other disorders. From echo + the Greek lalia, a form of
speech.
http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=26315

Echopraxia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Echopraxia is the involuntary repetition or imitation of the observed movements of

another. Even though it is considered a tic, it is a behaviour characteristic of some people
with autism, Tourette syndrome, schizophrenia (especially catatonic schizophrenia), some
forms of clinical depression and some other neurological disorders.

Etymology: Greek "echo (repetition)" and "praxia (action)".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echopraxia

Echolalia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the Something for Kate album, see Echolalia (album).
Echolalia is the repetition of vocalizations made by another person. A 1983 report
indicated that up to 75% of verbal people with autism have some form of echolalia,[1]
but it may also be present in Tourette syndrome, developmental disability, schizophrenia
and, occasionally, other forms of psychopathology. When done involuntarily, it is
considered a tic.

The word "echolalia" is derived from the Greek "echo", meaning "to repeat", and "lalia",
meaning "a speaking," from lalein "to speak, prattle," of onomatopoeic origin.

^ Prizant, B.M. (1983). Echolalia of autistic individuals: Assessment and intervention

issues. Seminars in Speech and Language, 4, 63-77. Summarized from Heffner, Gary J.
Echolalia and Autism, The Autism Home Page: Echolalia Facts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echolalia

Coprolalia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Coprolalia is involuntary swearing or the involuntary utterance of obscene words or

socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks. Coprolalia comes from the Greek κόπρος
meaning "feces" and λαλία meaning "babbling, meaningless talk", from lalein, "to
talk".[1] The term is often used as a clinomorphism, with 'compulsive profanity'
inaccurately referred to as being Tourette syndrome.

Related terms are copropraxia, performing obscene or forbidden gestures,[2] and

coprographia, making obscene writings or drawings.
Characteristics

Coprolalia encompasses words and phrases that are culturally taboo or generally
unsuitable for acceptable social use, when used out of context. The term is not used to
describe contextual swearing. It is usually expressed out of social or emotional context,
and may be spoken in a louder tone or different cadence or pitch than normal
conversation. It can be a single word, or complex phrases. A person with coprolalia may
repeat the word mentally rather than saying it out loud; these subvocalizations can be
very distressing.[4]

Coprolalia is an occasional but rare characteristic of Tourette syndrome, although it is not

required for a diagnosis of Tourette's. In Tourette syndrome, compulsive swearing can be
uncontrollable and undesired by the person uttering the phrases. Involuntary outbursts,
such as racial or ethnic slurs in the company of those most offended by such remarks, can
be particularly embarrassing. The phrases uttered by a person with coprolalia do not
necessarily reflect the thoughts or opinions of the person.[4]

Coprolalia is also a rare symptom of other psychiatric disorders,[5] such as Lesch-Nyhan

syndrome.[6]

[edit]
Prevalence

According to the Tourette Syndrome Association, fewer than 15% of Tourette syndrome
patients exhibit coprolalia, but it tends to attract more attention than any other
symptom.[7] There is a paucity of epidemiological studies of Tourette syndrome;
ascertainment bias affects clinical studies. Studies on people with Tourette's often "came
from tertiary referral samples, the sickest of the sick".[8] Further, the criteria for a
diagnosis of Tourette's were changed in 2000, when the impairment criteria was removed
from the DSM-IV-TR for all tic disorders,[9] resulting in increased diagnoses of milder
cases. Further, many clinical studies suffer from small sample size. These factors
combine to render older estimates of coprolalia—biased towards clinical populations of
the more severe cases—outdated. An international, multi-site database of 3,500
individuals with Tourette syndrome drawn from clinical samples found 14% of patients
with Tourette's accompanied by comorbid conditions had coprolalia, while only 6% of
those with uncomplicated ("pure") Tourette's had coprolalia. The same study found that
the chance of having coprolalia increased linearly with the number of comorbid
conditions: patients with four or five other conditions—in addition to tics—were four to
six times more likely to have coprolalia than persons with only Tourette's.[10] One study
of a general pediatric practice found an 8% rate of coprolalia in children with Tourette
syndrome, while another study found 60% in a tertiary referral center (where typically
more severe cases are referred).[11] A more recent Brazilian study of 44 patients with
Tourette syndrome found a 14% rate of coprolalia;[12] a Costa Rican study of 85 subjects
found 20% had coprolalia;[13] a Chilean study of 70 patients found an 8.5% rate of
coprolalia;[14] older studies in Japan reported a 4% incidence of coprolalia;[15] and a
still older clinical study in Brasil found 28% of 32 patients had coprolalia.[16]
Considering the methodological issues affecting all of these reports, the consensus of the
Tourette Syndrome Association is that the actual number is below 15 percent.

[edit]
Treatment

Some patients have been treated by injecting botulinum toxin near the vocal cords. This
does not prevent the vocalizations, but the partial paralysis that results helps to control
the volume of any outbursts.[17][18][19]

[edit]
Perception

The entertainment industry often depicts those with Tourette syndrome as being social
misfits whose only tic is coprolalia, which has furthered stigmatization and the public's
misunderstanding of those with Tourette's. The coprolalic symptoms of Tourette's are also
fodder for radio and television talk shows.[20]

Notes
^ Coprolalia. Dictionary.com, Accessed 30 October 2006.
^ Schapiro NA. "Dude, you don't have Tourette's": Tourette's syndrome, beyond the tics.
Pediatr Nurs. 2002 May-Jun;28(3):243-6, 249-53. PMID 12087644
^ Linguistics 210 Semantics (pdf). Semantic features and Tourette’s Syndrome. Retrieved
on November 21, 2006. While this source defines coprographia, it makes
misrepresentations about copro phenomena in relation to Tourette's: they are not
common, and not required for diagnosis.
^ a b Cohen, J.E. and Levi-Pearl, S. Understanding Coprolalia - A misunderstood
symptom. Available from the Tourette Syndrome Association, Accessed 30 October 2006.
^ Singer C. Tourette syndrome. Coprolalia and other coprophenomena. Neurol Clin. 1997
May;15(2):299-308. PMID 9115463
^ Jinnah, HA. Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome. eMedicine.com (August 29, 2006). Accessed 28
October 2006.
^ Tourette Syndrome Association. Tourette Syndrome FAQ. Accessed 6 October 2006.
^ Swerdlow, NR. Tourette Syndrome: Current Controversies and the Battlefield
Landscape. Curr Neurol Neurosci Rep. 2005, 5:329–31. PMID 16131414
^ What is DSM-IV-TR? Accessed 29 September 2006.
^ Freeman RD, Fast DK, Burd L, Kerbeshian J, Robertson MM, Sandor P. An
international perspective on Tourette syndrome: selected findings from 3,500 individuals
in 22 countries. Dev Med Child Neurol. 2000 Jul;42(7):436-47. PMID 10972415
^ Singer C. Tourette syndrome. Coprolalia and other coprophenomena. Neurol Clin. 1997
May;15(2):299-308. PMID 9115463
^ Teive HA, Germiniani FM, Della Coletta MV, Werneck LC. Tics and Tourette
syndrome: clinical evaluation of 44 cases. Arq Neuropsiquiatr. 2001 Sep;59(3-B):725-8.
PMID 11593273
^ Mathews CA, Herrera Amighetti LD, Lowe TL, van de Wetering BJ, Freimer NB, Reus
VI. Cultural influences on diagnosis and perception of Tourette syndrome in Costa Rica. J
Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2001 Apr;40(4):456-63. PMID 11314572
^ Miranda M, Menendez P, David P, Troncoso M, Hernandez M, Chana P. [Tics disease
(Gilles de la Tourette syndrome): clinical characteristics of 70 patients] Rev Med Chil.
1999 Dec;127(12):1480-6. Spanish. PMID 10835756
^ Kano Y, Ohta M, Nagai Y. Tourette syndrome in Japan: a nationwide questionnaire
survey of psychiatrists and pediatricians. Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 1998 Aug;52(4):407-
11. PMID 9766689
^ Cardoso F, Veado CC, de Oliveira JT. A Brazilian cohort of patients with Tourette's
syndrome. J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 1996 Feb;60(2):209-12. PMID 8708658
^ Scott BL, Jankovic J, Donovan DT. Botulinum toxin injection into vocal cord in the
treatment of malignant coprolalia associated with Tourette's syndrome. Mov Disord. 1996
Jul;11(4):431-3. PMID 8813224
^ Jankovic J. Botulinum toxin in the treatment of dystonic tics. Mov Disord. 1994
May;9(3):347-9. PMID 8041378
^ Kwak CH, Hanna PA, Jankovic J. Botulinum toxin in the treatment of tics. Arch
Neurol. 2000 Aug;57(8):1190-3. PMID 10927800
^ Tourette Syndrome Association. Oprah and Dr. Laura - Conflicting Messages on
Tourette Syndrome. Oprah Educates; Dr. Laura Fosters Myth of TS as "Cursing
Disorder". (May 31, 2001). Accessed 6 October 2001.* Tourette Syndrome Association.
Letter of response to Dr. Phil. Accessed 8 May 2006.* Tourette Syndrome Association.
Letter of response to Garrison Keillor radio show. Accessed 8 May 2006.* Born, Matt.
Tourette's man 'exploited by Big Brother' Accessed 22 May 2006.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprolalia

Tourette syndrome
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the Nirvana song, see tourette's (song). For the band, see Tourettes (band).
Tourette syndromeClassification & external resources

Georges Gilles de la Tourette (1859 – 1904)

ICD-10 F95.2
ICD-9 307.23
OMIM 137580
DiseasesDB 5220
MedlinePlus 000733
eMedicine med/3107 neuro/664
MeSH D005879

Tourette syndrome (also called Tourette's syndrome, Tourette's disorder, Gilles de la

Tourette syndrome, GTS or, more commonly, simply Tourette's or TS) is an inherited
neurological disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by the presence of multiple
physical (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic; these tics characteristically wax
and wane. Tourette's is defined as part of a spectrum of tic disorders, which includes
transient and chronic tics.

Tourette's was once considered a rare and bizarre syndrome, most often associated with
the exclamation of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks
(coprolalia). However, this symptom is present in only a small minority of people with
Tourette's.[1] Tourette's is no longer considered a rare condition, but it may not always be
correctly identified because most cases are classified as mild. As many as one in a
hundred people may have Tourette's or tic disorders,[2][3] with the more common tics of
eye blinking, coughing, throat clearing, sniffing, and facial movements. People with
Tourette's have normal life expectancy and intelligence. The severity of the tics decreases
for most children as they pass through adolescence, and extreme Tourette's in adulthood
is a rarity. Notable individuals with Tourette's are found in all walks of life.[4]

Genetic and environmental factors each play a role in the etiology of Tourette's, but the
exact causes are unknown. In most cases, medication is unnecessary. There is no effective
medication for every case of tics, but there are medications and therapies that can help
when their use is warranted. Explanation and reassurance alone are often sufficient
treatment;[5] education is an important part of any treatment plan.[6]

The eponym was bestowed by Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93) on behalf of his resident,
Georges Albert Édouard Brutus Gilles de la Tourette (1859–1904), a French physician
and neurologist, who published an account of nine patients with Tourette's in 1885.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourette_syndrome

Classification

Tics are sudden, repetitive, stereotyped, nonrhythmic, involuntary movements (motor

tics) and utterances (phonic tics) that involve discrete muscle groups.[7] Motor tics are
movement-based tics, while phonic tics are involuntary sounds produced by moving air
through the nose, mouth, or throat.

Tourette's is one of several tic disorders, which are classified by the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) according to type (motor or phonic tics)
and duration (transient or chronic). Transient tic disorder consists of multiple motor tics,
phonic tics or both, with a duration of between four weeks and twelve months. Chronic
tic disorder is either single or multiple, motor or phonic tics (but not both), which are
present for more than a year.[7] Tourette's is diagnosed when multiple motor tics, and at
least one phonic tic, are present for more than a year.[8] Tic disorders are defined
similarly by the World Health Organization (ICD-10 codes).[9]

Although Tourette's is the more severe expression of the spectrum of tic disorders,[10]
most cases are mild.[11] The severity of symptoms varies widely among people with
Tourette's, and mild cases may be undetected.[7]

[edit]
Characteristics

Tics are movements or sounds "that occur intermittently and unpredictably out of a
background of normal motor activity",[12] having the appearance of "normal behaviors
gone wrong."[13] The tics associated with Tourette's constantly change in number,
frequency, severity and anatomical location. Waxing and waning—the ongoing increase
and decrease in severity and frequency of tics—occurs differently in each individual. Tics
also occur in "bouts of bouts", which vary for each person.[7]

Coprolalia (the spontaneous utterance of socially objectionable or taboo words or

phrases) is the most publicized symptom of Tourette's, but it is not required for a
diagnosis of Tourette's. According to the Tourette Syndrome Association, fewer than 15%
of Tourette's patients exhibit coprolalia.[14] Echolalia (repeating the words of others) and
palilalia (repeating one's own words) occur in a minority of cases,[7] while the most
common initial motor and vocal tics are, respectively, eye blinking and throat
clearing.[15]
Video clips of tics
HBO documentary video clip
CBS News video clip
News10 video clip
From the TSA, an adult with tics
In contrast to the stereotyped movements of other movement disorders (e.g. choreas,
dystonias, myoclonus, and dyskinesias), the tics of Tourette's are temporarily suppressible
and preceded by a premonitory urge.[16] Immediately preceding tic onset, most
individuals with Tourette's are aware of an urge[17] that is similar to the need to sneeze
or scratch an itch. Individuals describe the need to tic as a buildup of tension[18] which
they consciously choose to release, as if they "had to do it".[19] Examples of the
premonitory urge are the feeling of having something in one's throat, or a localized
discomfort in the shoulders, leading to the need to clear one's throat or shrug the
shoulders. The actual tic may be felt as relieving this tension or sensation, similar to
scratching an itch. Another example is blinking to relieve an uncomfortable sensation in
the eye. These urges and sensations, preceding the expression of the movement or
vocalization as a tic, are referred to as "premonitory sensory phenomena". Published
descriptions of the tics of Tourette's identify sensory phenomena as the core symptom of
the syndrome, even though they are not included in the diagnostic criteria.[20][21]

Tics are described as semi-voluntary or "unvoluntary",[12] because they are not strictly
involuntary—they may be experienced as a voluntary response to the unwanted,
premonitory urge. A unique aspect of tics, relative to other movement disorders, is that
they are suppressible yet irresistible;[13] they are experienced as an irresistible urge that
must eventually be expressed.[12] People with Tourette's are sometimes able to suppress
their tics to some extent for limited periods of time, but doing so often results in an
explosion of tics afterward.[5] People with Tourette's may seek a secluded spot to release
their symptoms, or there may be a marked increase in tics, after a period of suppression at
school or at work.[13]

Some people with Tourette's may not be aware of the premonitory urge. Children may be
less aware of the premonitory urge associated with tics than are adults, but their
awareness tends to increase with maturity.[12] They may have tics for several years
before becoming aware of premonitory urges. Children may suppress tics while in the
doctor's office, so they may need to be observed while they are not aware they are being
watched.[22] The ability to suppress tics varies among individuals, and may be more
developed in adults than children.

Although there is no such thing as a "typical" case of Tourette syndrome,[5] the condition
follows a fairly reliable course in terms of the age of onset and the history of the severity
of symptoms. Tics may appear up to the age of eighteen, but the most typical age of onset
is from five to seven.[7] The ages of highest tic severity are eight to twelve (average ten),
with tics steadily declining for most patients as they pass through adolescence.[23] The
most common, first-presenting tics are eye blinking, facial movements, sniffing and
throat clearing. Initial tics present most frequently in midline body regions where there
are many muscles, usually the head, neck and facial region.[5] This can be contrasted
with the stereotyped movements of other disorders (such as stims and stereotypies of the
autism spectrum disorders), which typically have an earlier age of onset, are more
symmetrical, rhythmical and bilateral, and involve the extremities (e.g., flapping the
hands).[24] Tics that appear early in the course of the condition are frequently confused
with other conditions, such as allergies, asthma, and vision problems: pediatricians,
allergists and ophthalmologists are typically the first to see a child with tics.[7]

Among patients whose symptoms are severe enough to warrant referral to clinics,
obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD) are often associated with Tourette's. Not all persons with Tourette's have ADHD
or OCD or other comorbid conditions (co-occurring diagnoses other than Tourette's),
although in clinical populations, a high percentage of patients presenting for care do have
ADHD.[25] One author reports that a ten-year overview of patient records revealed about
40% of patients with Tourette's have "TS-only" or "pure TS", referring to Tourette
syndrome in the absence of ADHD, OCD and other disorders.[26] Another author reports
that 57% of 656 patients presenting with tic disorders had uncomplicated tics, while 43%
had tics plus comorbid conditions.[13] "Full-blown Tourette's" is a term used to describe
patients who have significant comorbid conditions in addition to tics.[13]

[edit]
Causes
Main article: Causes and origins of Tourette syndrome

The exact cause of Tourette's is unknown, but it is well established that both genetic and
environmental factors are involved.[27] Genetic studies have proved that the
overwhelming majority of cases of Tourette's are inherited, although the exact mode of
inheritance is not yet known,[28] and no gene has been identified.[5] In some cases, tics
may not be inherited; these cases are identified as "sporadic" Tourette syndrome (also
known as tourettism) because a genetic link is missing.[29]

Brain structures implicated in Tourette's syndrome

A person with Tourette's has about a 50% chance of passing the gene(s) to one of his or
her children, but Tourette's is a condition of variable expression and incomplete
penetrance.[30] Thus, not everyone who inherits the genetic vulnerability will show
symptoms; even close family members may show different severities of symptoms, or no
symptoms at all. The gene(s) may express as Tourette's, as a milder tic disorder (transient
or chronic tics), or as obsessive compulsive symptoms without tics. Only a minority of
the children who inherit the gene(s) have symptoms severe enough to require medical
attention.[14] Gender appears to have a role in the expression of the genetic vulnerability;
males are more likely than females to express tics.[22]

Non-genetic, environmental, infectious, or psychosocial factors—while not causing

Tourette's—can influence its severity.[5] Autoimmune processes may affect tic onset and
exacerbation in some cases. The unproven and contentious hypothesis that Pediatric
Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections
(PANDAS) plays a role in the onset of tic disorders and OCD is a current focus of
research.[31][32]
The exact mechanism affecting the inherited vulnerability to Tourette's has not been
established, and the precise etiology is unknown. Tics are believed to result from
dysfunction in cortical and subcortical regions, the thalamus, basal ganglia and frontal
cortex.[27] Neuroanatomic models implicate failures in circuits connecting the brain's
cortex and subcortex,[5] and imaging techniques implicate the basal ganglia and frontal
cortex.[33]

Some forms of OCD may be genetically linked to Tourette's.[34] A subset of OCD is

thought to be etiologically related to Tourette's and may be a different expression of the
same factors that are important for the expression of tics.[35] The genetic relationship of
ADHD to Tourette syndrome, however, has not been fully established.[26]

[edit]
Diagnosis

According to the revised fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), Tourette’s Disorder may be diagnosed when a person
exhibits both multiple motor and one or more vocal tics (although these do not need to be
concurrent) over the period of a year, with no more than three consecutive tic-free
months. The previous DSM-IV included a requirement for "marked distress or significant
impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning", but this
requirement was removed in the most recent update of the manual, in recognition that
clinicians see patients who meet all the other criterion for Tourette's, but do not have
distress or impairment.[36] The onset must have occurred before the age of 18, and
cannot be attributed to the "direct physiological effects of a substance or a general
medical condition".[8] Hence, other medical conditions that include tics or tic-like
movements—such as autism or other causes of tourettism—must be ruled out before
conferring a Tourette's diagnosis.

There are no specific medical or screening tests that can be used in diagnosing
Tourette's.[7] The diagnosis is made based on observation of the individual's symptoms
and family history, and after ruling out secondary causes of tic disorders.[14] In patients
with a typical onset and a family history of tics or obsessive–compulsive disorder, a basic
physical and neurological examination may be sufficient.[10]

If a physician believes that there may be another condition present that could explain tics,
tests may be ordered as necessary to rule out that condition. An example of this is when
diagnostic confusion between tics and seizure activity exists, which would call for an
EEG, or if there are symptoms that indicate an MRI to rule out brain abnormalities.[37]
TSH levels can be measured to rule out hypothyroidism, which can be a cause of tics.
Brain imaging studies are not usually warranted.[37] In teenagers and adults presenting
with a sudden onset of tics and other behavioral symptoms, a urine drug screen for
cocaine and stimulants might be necessary. If a family history of liver disease is present,
serum copper and ceruloplasmin levels can rule out Wilson's disease.[10] However, most
cases are diagnosed by merely observing a history of tics.[5][14]
Secondary causes of tics (not related to inherited Tourette syndrome) are commonly
referred to as tourettism.[29] Dystonias, choreas, other genetic conditions, and secondary
causes of tics should be ruled out in the differential diagnosis for Tourette syndrome.[10]
Other conditions that may manifest tics or stereotyped movements include developmental
disorders, autism spectrum disorders,[38] and stereotypic movement disorder;[39][40]
other genetic conditions such as Huntington's disease, neuroacanthocytosis,
Hallervorden-Spatz syndrome, idiopathic dystonia, Duchenne muscular dystrophy,
Wilson's disease, Sydenham's chorea and tuberous sclerosis. Other possibilities include
chromosomal disorders such as Down syndrome, Klinefelter's syndrome, XYY syndrome
and fragile X syndrome. Acquired causes of tics include drug-induced tics, head trauma,
encephalitis, stroke, and carbon monoxide poisoning.[10][29] The symptoms of Lesch-
Nyhan syndrome may also be confused with Tourette syndrome.[24] Most of these
conditions are rarer than tic disorders, and a thorough history and examination may be
enough to rule them out, without medical or screening tests.[5]

[edit]
Screening

Although not all people with Tourette's have comorbid conditions, most Tourette's
patients presenting for clinical care at specialty referral centers may exhibit symptoms of
other conditions along with their motor and phonic tics.[26] Associated conditions
include attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD or ADHD), obsessive–compulsive
disorder (OCD), learning disabilities and sleep disorders.[2] Disruptive behaviors,
impaired functioning, or cognitive impairment in patients with comorbid Tourette's and
ADHD may be accounted for by the comorbid ADHD, highlighting the importance of
identifying and treating comorbid conditions.[25][41] Disruption from tics is commonly
overshadowed by comorbid conditions that present greater interference to the child.[5]
Tic disorders in the absence of ADHD do not appear to be associated with disruptive
behavior or functional impairment,[3] while impairment in school, family, or peer
relations is greater in patients who have more comorbid conditions and often determines
whether therapy is needed.[13]

Because comorbid conditions such as OCD and ADHD can be more impairing than tics,
these conditions are included in an evaluation of patients presenting with tics. "It is
critical to note that the comorbid conditions may determine functional status more
strongly than the tic disorder."[5] The initial assessment of a patient referred for a tic
disorder should include a thorough evaluation, including a family history of tics, ADHD,
obsessive–compulsive symptoms, and other chronic medical, psychiatric and
neurological conditions. Children and adolescents with TS who have learning difficulties
are candidates for psychoeducational testing, particularly if the child also has ADHD.[37]
Undiagnosed comorbid conditions may result in functional impairment, and it is
necessary to identify and treat these conditions to improve functioning. Complications
may include depression, sleep problems, social discomfort and self-injury.[10]

[edit]
Management
Main article: Treatment of Tourette syndrome

Clonidine (or the clonidine patch) is one of the medications typically tried first when
medication is needed for Tourette's.

The treatment of Tourette's focuses on identifying and helping the individual manage the
most troubling or impairing symptoms.[5] Most cases of Tourette's are mild, and do not
require pharmacological treatment;[11] instead, psychobehavioral therapy, education, and
reassurance may be sufficient.[42] Treatments, where warranted, can be divided into
those that target tics and comorbid conditions, which, when present, are often a larger
source of impairment than the tics themselves.[37] Not all people with tics have
comorbid conditions,[26] but when those conditions are present, they often take treatment
priority.

There is no cure for Tourette's and no medication that works universally for all
individuals without significant adverse effects. Knowledge, education and understanding
are uppermost in management plans for tic disorders.[5] The management of the
symptoms of Tourette's may include pharmacological, behavioral and psychological
therapies. While pharmacological intervention is reserved for more severe symptoms,
other treatments (such as supportive psychotherapy or cognitive behavioral therapy) may
help to avoid or ameliorate depression and social isolation, and to improve family
support. Educating a patient, family, and surrounding community (such as friends, school,
and church) is a key treatment strategy.[5]

Space-filling representation of a haloperidol molecule. Haloperidol is an antipsychotic

medication sometimes used to treat severe cases of Tourette's.

Medication is available to help when symptoms interfere with functioning.[14] The

classes of medication with the most proven efficacy in treating tics—typical and atypical
neuroleptics including risperidone (trade name[43] Risperdal), ziprasidone (Geodon),
haloperidol (Haldol), pimozide (Orap) and fluphenazine (Prolixin)—can have long-term
and short-term adverse effects.[37] The antihypertensive agents clonidine (trade name
Catapres) and guanfacine (Tenex) are also used to treat tics; studies show variable
efficacy, but a lower side effect profile than the neuroleptics.[1] Stimulants and other
medications may be useful in treating ADHD when it co-occurs with tic disorders. Drugs
from several other classes of medications can be used when stimulant trials fail, including
guanfacine (trade name Tenex), atomoxetine (Strattera) and tricyclics. Clomipramine
(Anafranil), a tricyclic antidepressant, and SSRIs—a class of antidepressants including
fluoxetine (Prozac), sertraline (Zoloft), and fluvoxamine (Luvox)—may be prescribed
when a Tourette's patient also has symptoms of obsessive–compulsive disorder.[37]

Because children with tics often present to physicians when their tics are most severe,
and because of the waxing and waning nature of tics, it is recommended that medication
not be started immediately or changed often.[5] Frequently, the tics subside with
explanation, reassurance, understanding of the condition and a supportive
environment.[5] When medication is used, the goal is not to eliminate symptoms: it
should be used at the lowest possible dose that manages symptoms without adverse
effects, given that these may be more disturbing than the symptoms for which they were
prescribed.[5]

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a useful treatment when OCD is present,[44] and
there is increasing evidence supporting the use of habit reversal in the treatment of
tics.[45] Relaxation techniques, such as exercise, yoga or meditation, may be useful in
relieving the stress that may aggravate tics, but the majority of behavioral interventions
(such as relaxation training and biofeedback, with the exception of habit reversal) have
not been systematically evaluated and are not empirically supported therapies for
Tourette's.[46]

[edit]
Prognosis

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) circa 1772. Johnson wrote A Dictionary of the English
Language in 1747, and was a prolific writer, poet, and critic who had Tourette syndrome.

Tourette syndrome is a spectrum disorder—its severity ranges over a spectrum from mild
to severe. The majority of cases are mild and require no treatment.[11] In these cases, the
impact of symptoms on the individual may be mild, to the extent that casual observers
might not know of their condition. The overall prognosis is positive, but a minority of
children with Tourette syndrome have severe symptoms that persist into adulthood.[27] A
study of 46 subjects at 19 years of age found that the symptoms of 80% had minimum to
mild impact on their overall functioning, and that the other 20% experienced at least a
moderate impact on their overall functioning.[7] The rare minority of severe cases can
inhibit or prevent individuals from holding a job or having a fulfilling social life. In a
follow-up study of thirty-one adults with Tourette's, all patients completed high school,
52% finished at least two years of college, and 71% were full-time employed or were
pursuing higher education.[47]

Regardless of symptom severity, individuals with Tourette's can expect to live a normal
life span. Although the symptoms may be lifelong and chronic for some, the condition is
not degenerative or life-threatening. Intelligence is normal in those with Tourette's,
although there may be learning disabilities.[14] There is no reliable means of predicting
the outcome for a particular individual. The gene or genes associated with Tourette's have
not been identified, and there is no potential "cure".[14]

Several studies have demonstrated that the condition in most children improves with
maturity. Tics may be at their highest severity at the time that they are diagnosed, and
often improve with understanding of the condition by individuals and their families and
friends. The statistical age of highest tic severity is typically between eight and twelve,
with most individuals experiencing steadily declining tic severity as they pass through
adolescence. One study showed no correlation with tic severity and the onset of puberty,
in contrast with the popular belief that tics increase at puberty. In many cases, a complete
remission of tic symptoms occurs after adolescence.[23][48] However, a study using
videotape to record tics in adults found that, although tics diminished in comparison with
childhood, and all measures of tic severity improved by adulthood, 90% of adults still had
tics. Half of the adults who considered themselves tic-free still displayed evidence of
tics.[47]

It is not uncommon for the parents of affected children to be unaware that they, too, may
have had tics as children. Because Tourette's tends to subside with maturity, and because
milder cases of Tourette's are now more likely to be recognized, the first realization that a
parent had tics as a child may not come until their offspring is diagnosed. It is not
uncommon for several members of a family to be diagnosed together, as parents bringing
children to a physician for an evaluation of tics become aware that they, too, had tics as a
child.

Children with Tourette's may suffer socially if their tics are viewed as "bizarre". If a child
has disabling tics, or tics that interfere with social or academic functioning, supportive
psychotherapy or school accommodations can be helpful.[14] Because comorbid
conditions (such as ADHD or OCD) can cause greater impact on overall functioning than
tics, a thorough evaluation for comorbidity is called for when symptoms and impairment
warrant.[10]

A supportive environment and family generally gives those with Tourette's the skills to
manage the disorder.[49][50] People with Tourette's may learn to camouflage socially
inappropriate tics or to channel the energy of their tics into a functional endeavor.
Accomplished musicians, athletes, public speakers, and professionals from all walks of
life are found among people with Tourette's. Outcomes in adulthood are associated more
with the perceived significance of having severe tics as a child than with the actual
severity of the tics. A person who was misunderstood, punished, or teased at home or at
school will fare worse than children who enjoyed an understanding and supportive
environment.[7]

A controlled study on a small group of individuals with Tourette's found that young
people with the syndrome have greater cognitive control over movements than their age-
matched controls, possibly because the need to suppress tics results in a more efficient
control over inhibitory movements, a skill that confers an advantage when switching
between tasks. Children with Tourette's (in the absence of comorbid ADHD) performed
more accurately on a goal-oriented eye-movement task, requiring active inhibition of
automatic eye movements, and they made fewer errors than their unaffected peers,
suggesting compensatory changes in the brain resulting in greater cognitive control.[51]

[edit]
Epidemiology

Tourette syndrome has historically been described as a rare disorder, with about 5 to 10
people in 10,000 having the condition.[5][10] However, multiple studies published since
2000 demonstrate that the prevalence is much higher than previously thought, and that
Tourette syndrome can no longer be considered rare. Contemporary prevalence estimates
range from 1 to 3 per 1,000[52] to 10 per 1,000;[53] the latter yields an estimate of
530,000 school-age children with Tourette's in the United States, based on 2000 US
census data.[3]

A large, community-based study suggested that over 19% of school-age children have
tics, with almost 4% of children in regular education fulfilling the diagnostic criteria for
Tourette syndrome. The children with tic disorders in that study were usually
undiagnosed.[54] As many as 1 in 100 people may experience some form of tic disorder,
which includes transient tics, chronic tics, or Tourette syndrome.[2] Tourette syndrome is
found among all social, racial and ethnic groups,[2][55] and males are affected 3 to 4
times more often than females.[5]

Tourette syndrome is frequently misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed, partly because of the

wide expression of severity, ranging from mild (the majority of cases) or moderate, to
severe (the rare, but more widely-recognized and publicized cases). Because the tics of
Tourette syndrome tend to remit or subside with maturity, such that a diagnosis may no
longer be warranted for many adults, prevalence rates in pediatric populations are higher
than those in adult populations.[23]

Mild cases of Tourette syndrome are less likely to come to tertiary or clinical attention,
raising the possibility of ascertainment bias in referred populations. There are few broad-
based population studies, and most older epidemiological studies of Tourette's were based
on individuals referred to specialty clinics.[1][56] Children with milder symptoms are not
likely to be referred to specialty clinics, so most studies of Tourette's patients have an
inherent bias towards more severe cases.[1][57] Epidemiologic methods are vulnerable to
errors, because of the variance in symptom severity and because symptoms are not
always recognized by the patient or family.[58]

[edit]
History and research directions
Main article: History of Tourette syndrome

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) was a French neurologist and professor who bestowed
the eponym for Tourette syndrome on behalf of his resident, Georges Albert Édouard
Brutus Gilles de la Tourette. Charcot is shown here during a lesson with a "hysterical"
woman patient at the Salpêtrière hospital.

A thorough history of Tourette syndrome is published in Kushner's A Cursing Brain? :

The Histories of Tourette Syndrome.[59] A French doctor, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard,
reported the first case of Tourette syndrome in 1825,[60] describing Marquise de
Dampierre, an important woman of nobility in her time.[11] Jean-Martin Charcot, an
influential French physician, assigned his resident Georges Albert Édouard Brutus Gilles
de la Tourette, a French physician and neurologist, to study patients at the Salpêtrière
Hospital, with the goal of defining an illness distinct from hysteria and from chorea.[22]
In 1885, Gilles de la Tourette published an account of nine patients, Study of a Nervous
Affliction, concluding that a new clinical category should be defined.[61] The eponym
was later bestowed by Charcot after and on behalf of Gilles de la Tourette.[22][62]

Little progress was made over the next century in explaining or treating tics, and a
psychogenic view prevailed well into the 20th century.[22] The possibility that movement
disorders, including Tourette syndrome, might have an organic origin was raised when an
encephalitis epidemic from 1918–1926 led to a subsequent epidemic of tic disorders.[63]

During the 1960s and 1970s, as the beneficial effects of haloperidol (Haldol) on tics
became known, the psychoanalytic approach to Tourette syndrome was questioned.[64]
The turning point came in 1965, when Dr. Arthur K. Shapiro—described as "the father of
modern tic disorder research"[65]—treated a Tourette’s patient with haloperidol, and
published a paper criticizing the psychoanalytic approach.[63]

Since the 1990s, a more neutral view of Tourette's has emerged, in which biological
vulnerability and adverse environmental events are seen to interact.[5][22] In 2000, the
American Psychiatric Association published the DSM-IV-TR, revising the text of DSM-
IV to no longer require that symptoms of tic disorders cause distress or impair
functioning.[66]

Findings since 1999 have advanced TS science in the areas of genetics, neuroimaging,
neurophysiology, and neuropathology. Questions remain regarding how best to classify
Tourette syndrome, and how closely Tourette's is related to other movement disorders or
psychiatric disorders. Good epidemiologic data is still lacking, and available treatments
are not risk free and not always well tolerated.[67] High-profile media coverage focuses
on treatments that do not have established safety or efficacy e.g., deep brain stimulation,
and alternative therapies involving unstudied efficacy and side effects are pursued by
many parents.[31]

[edit]
Cultural references
Main article: Sociological and cultural aspects of Tourette syndrome

Discussions with adults who have Tourette's reveal that not everyone wants treatment or a
"cure", especially if that means they may "lose" something else in the process.[68][69]
Some people believe that there may be latent advantages associated with genetic
vulnerability to the syndrome.[69] Cognitive control may be enhanced in young people
with Tourette's because the need to suppress tics results in a more efficient control of
inhibitions.[70] There is evidence to support the clinical lore that children with "TS-only"
(Tourette's in the absence of comorbid conditions) are unusually gifted:
neuropsychological studies have identified advantages in children with TS-only.[26][71]
One study found that children with TS-only are faster than the average for their age group
on timed motor coordination.[72]
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1777, aged twenty-one. Speculation that he may have had
Tourette's is not based on reliable evidence.

Notable individuals with Tourette syndrome are found in all walks of life, including
musicians, athletes and authors. The best-known example of a person who may have used
obsessive–compulsive traits to advantage is Dr Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century English
man of letters, who had Tourette syndrome as clearly evidenced by the writings of James
Boswell.[73] Johnson wrote A Dictionary of the English Language in 1747, and was a
prolific writer, poet, and critic.

Some authors have speculated that Mozart may have had Tourette's. Benjamin Simkin, a
medical doctor, argued that Mozart had Tourette syndrome.[74][75] Simkin is an
endocrinologist[74]—not a psychiatrist or a neurologist, the medical fields which
specialize in the neurological disorder. His claim was picked up by newspapers
worldwide, causing an international sensation, and internet websites have fueled the
speculation.[76] However, no Tourette's expert or organization has presented credible
evidence to show that this was the case,[76] and noted neurologist and author Oliver
Sacks published an editorial disputing Simkin's claim.[77]

The entertainment industry often depicts those with Tourette syndrome as social misfits
whose only tic is coprolalia, which has furthered stigmatization and the public's
misunderstanding of those with Tourette's.[78] The coprolalic symptoms of Tourette's are
also fodder for radio and television talk shows such as Dr. Phil and Garrison Keillor's
Prairie Home Companion;[79] the British media has profiled two people with coprolalia
—Pete Bennett of Big Brother and John Davidson of television documentaries John's Not
Mad (1989), The Boy Can't Help It (2000), and Tourette de France (2007).[80]

Notes
^ a b c d Schapiro NA. "Dude, you don't have Tourette's": Tourette's syndrome, beyond
the tics. Pediatr Nurs. 2002 May-Jun;28(3):243–6, 249-53. PMID 12087644 Full text
(free registration required).
^ a b c d National Institutes of Health (NIH). Tourette Syndrome Fact Sheet Accessed
May 14, 2007.
^ a b c Scahill L, Williams S, Schwab-Stone M, Applegate J, Leckman JF. Disruptive
behavior problems in a community sample of children with tic disorders. Adv Neurol.
2006;99:184-90. PMID 16536365
^ Tourette Syndrome Association. Portraits of adults with TS. Accessed 4 January 2007.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Zinner (2000).
^ Peterson BS, Cohen DJ. The Treatment of Tourette's Syndrome: Multimodal,
Developmental Intervention. J Clin Psychiatry. 1998;59 Suppl 1:62–72; discussion 73–4.
PMID 9448671 Full text, archived May 25, 1998. Quote: "Because of the understanding
and hope that it provides, education is also the single most important treatment modality
that we have in TS."
^ a b c d e f g h i j Leckman JF, Bloch MH, King RA, Scahill L. Phenomenology of tics
and natural history of tic disorders. Adv Neurol. 2006;99:1–16. PMID 16536348
^ a b Behavenet. Tourette's disorder. Accessed May 14, 2007.
^ World Health Organization. ICD Version 2006. Accessed 25 October 2006.
^ a b c d e f g h Bagheri, Kerbeshian & Burd (1999).
^ a b c d Tourette Syndrome Association. What is Tourette syndrome?, archived May 24,
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^ a b c d The Tourette Syndrome Classification Study Group. Definitions and
classification of tic disorders. Arch Neurol. 1993 Oct;50(10):1013–16. PMID 8215958
Full text, archived April 26, 2006.
^ a b c d e f Dure LS 4th, DeWolfe J. Treatment of tics. Adv Neurol. 2006;99:191-96.
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^ a b c d e f g h Tourette Syndrome Association. Tourette Syndrome: Frequently Asked
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^ Malone DA Jr, Pandya MM. Behavioral neurosurgery. Adv Neurol. 2006;99:241-47.
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^ Cohen AJ, Leckman JF. Sensory phenomena associated with Gilles de la Tourette's
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^ a b c d e f Black, KJ. Tourette Syndrome and Other Tic Disorders. eMedicine (March
22, 2006). Accessed 27 June 2006.
^ a b c Leckman JF, Zhang H, Vitale A, et al. Course of tic severity in Tourette syndrome:
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[edit]
References
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourette_syndrome

Language Acquisition
Steven Pinker
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Chapter to appear in L. R. Gleitman, M. Liberman, and D. N. Osherson (Eds.),
An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd Ed. Volume 1: Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
NONFINAL VERSION: PLEASE DO NOTE QUOTE.

Preparation of the chapter was supported by NIH grant HD 18381 and NSF grant BNS
91-09766, and by the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT.

1 Introduction
Language acquisition is one of the central topics in cognitive science. Every theory of
cognition has tried to explain it; probably no other topic has aroused such controversy.
Possessing a language is the quintessentially human trait: all normal humans speak, no
nonhuman animal does. Language is the main vehicle by which we know about other
people's thoughts, and the two must be intimately related. Every time we speak we are
revealing something about language, so the facts of language structure are easy to come
by; these data hint at a system of extraordinary complexity. Nonetheless, learning a first
language is something every child does successfully, in a matter of a few years and
without the need for formal lessons. With language so close to the core of what it means
to be human, it is not surprising that children's acquisition of language has received so
much attention. Anyone with strong views about the human mind would like to show that
children's first few steps are steps in the right direction.
Language acquisition is not only inherently interesting; studying it is one way to look for
concrete answers to questions that permeate cognitive science:

Modularity. Do children learn language using a "mental organ," some of whose principles
of organization are not shared with other cognitive systems such as perception, motor
control, and reasoning (Chomsky, 1975, 1991; Fodor, 1983)? Or is language acquisition
just another problem to be solved by general intelligence, in this case, the problem of
how to communicate with other humans over the auditory channel (Putnam, 1971; Bates,
1989)?

Human Uniqueness. A related question is whether language is unique to humans. At first

glance the answer seems obvious. Other animals communication with a fixed repertoire
of symbols, or with analogue variation like the mercury in a thermometer. But none
appears to have the combinatorial rule system of human language, in which symbols are
permuted into an unlimited set of combinations, each with a determinate meaning. On the
other hand, many other claims about human uniqueness, such as that humans were the
only animals to use tools or to fabricate them, have turned out to be false. Some
researchers have thought that apes have the capacity for language but never profited from
a humanlike cultural milieu in which language was taught, and they have thus tried to
teach apes language-like systems. Whether they have succeeded, and whether human
children are really "taught" language themselves, are questions we will soon come to.

Language and Thought. Is language simply grafted on top of cognition as a way of

sticking communicable labels onto thoughts (Fodor, 1975; Piaget, 1926)? Or does
learning a language somehow mean learning to think in that language? A famous
hypothesis, outlined by Benjamin Whorf (1956), asserts that the categories and relations
that we use to understand the world come from our particular language, so that speakers
of different languages conceptualize the world in different ways. Language acquisition,
then, would be learning to think, not just learning to talk.

This is an intriguing hypothesis, but virtually all modern cognitive scientists believe it is
false (see Pinker, 1994a). Babies can think before they can talk (Chapter X). Cognitive
psychology has shown that people think not just in words but in images (see Chapter X)
and abstract logical propositions (see the chapter by Larson). And linguistics has shown
that human languages are too ambiguous and schematic to use as a medium of internal
computation: when people think about "spring," surely they are not confused as to
whether they are thinking about a season or something that goes "boing" -- and if one
word can correspond to two thoughts, thoughts can't be words.
But language acquisition has a unique contribution to make to this issue. As we shall see,
it is virtually impossible to show how children could learn a language unless you assume
they have a considerable amount of nonlinguistic cognitive machinery in place before
they start.

Learning and Innateness. All humans talk but no house pets or house plants do, no matter
how pampered, so heredity must be involved in language. But a child growing up in
Japan speaks Japanese whereas the same child brought up in California would speak
English, so the environment is also crucial. Thus there is no question about whether
heredity or environment is involved in language, or even whether one or the other is
"more important." Instead, language acquisition might be our best hope of finding out
how heredity and environment interact. We know that adult language is intricately
complex, and we know that children become adults. Therefore something in the child's
mind must be capable of attaining that complexity. Any theory that posits too little innate
structure, so that its hypothetical child ends up speaking something less than a real
language, must be false. The same is true for any theory that posits too much innate
structure, so that the hypothetical child can acquire English but not, say, Bantu or
Vietnamese.

And not only do we know about the output of language acquisition, we know a fair
amount about the input to it, namely, parent's speech to their children. So even if
language acquisition, like all cognitive processes, is essentially a "black box," we know
enough about its input and output to be able to make precise guesses about its contents.

The scientific study of language acquisition began around the same time as the birth of
cognitive science, in the late 1950's. We can see now why that is not a coincidence. The
historical catalyst was Noam Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior (Chomsky,
1959). At that time, Anglo-American natural science, social science, and philosophy had
come to a virtual consensus about the answers to the questions listed above. The mind
consisted of sensorimotor abilities plus a few simple laws of learning governing gradual
changes in an organism's behavioral repertoire. Therefore language must be learned, it
cannot be a module, and thinking must be a form of verbal behavior, since verbal
behavior is the prime manifestation of "thought" that can be observed externally.
Chomsky argued that language acquisition falsified these beliefs in a single stroke:
children learn languages that are governed by highly subtle and abstract principles, and
they do so without explicit instruction or any other environmental clues to the nature of
such principles. Hence language acquisition depends on an innate, species-specific
module that is distinct from general intelligence. Much of the debate in language
acquisition has attempted to test this once-revolutionary, and still controversial, collection
of ideas. The implications extend to the rest of human cognition.

2 The Biology of Language Acquisition

Human language is made possible by special adaptations of the human mind and body
that occurred in the course of human evolution, and which are put to use by children in
acquiring their mother tongue.
2.1 Evolution of Language
Most obviously, the shape of the human vocal tract seems to have been modified in
evolution for the demands of speech. Our larynxes are low in our throats, and our vocal
tracts have a sharp right angle bend that creates two independently-modifiable resonant
cavities (the mouth and the pharynx or throat) that defines a large two-dimensional range
of vowel sounds (see the chapter by Liberman). But it comes at a sacrifice of efficiency
for breathing, swallowing, and chewing (Lieberman, 1984). Before the invention of the
Heimlich maneuver, choking on food was a common cause of accidental death in
humans, causing 6,000 deaths a year in the United States. The evolutionary selective
advantages for language must have been very large to outweigh such a disadvantage.
It is tempting to think that if language evolved by gradual Darwinian natural selection,
we must be able to find some precursor of it in our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. In
several famous and controversial demonstrations, chimpanzees have been taught some
hand-signs based on American Sign Language, to manipulate colored switches or tokens,
and to understand some spoken commands (Gardner & Gardner, 1969; Premack &
Premack, 1983; Savage-Rumbaugh, 1991). Whether one wants to call their abilities
"language" is not really a scientific question, but a matter of definition: how far we are
willing to stretch the meaning of the word "language".

The scientific question is whether the chimps' abilities are homologous to human
language -- that is, whether the two systems show the same basic organization owing to
descent from a single system in their common ancestor. For example, biologists don't
debate whether the wing-like structures of gliding rodents may be called "genuine wings"
or something else (a boring question of definitions). It's clear that these structures are not
homologous to the wings of bats, because they have a fundamentally different anatomical
plan, reflecting a different evolutionary history. Bats' wings are modifications of the
hands of the common mammalian ancestor; flying squirrels' wings are modifications of
its rib cage. The two structures are merely analogous: similar in function.

Though artificial chimp signaling systems have some analogies to human language (e.g.,
use in communication, combinations of more basic signals), it seems unlikely that they
are homologous. Chimpanzees require massive regimented teaching sequences contrived
by humans to acquire quite rudimentary abilities, mostly limited to a small number of
signs, strung together in repetitive, quasi-random sequences, used with the intent of
requesting food or tickling (Terrace, Petitto, Sanders, & Bever, 1979; Seidenberg &
Petitto, 1979, 1987; Seidenberg, 1986; Wallman, 1992; Pinker, 1994a). This contrasts
sharply with human children, who pick up thousands of words spontaneously, combine
them in structured sequences where every word has a determinate role, respect the word
order of the adult language, and use sentences for a variety of purposes such as
commenting on interesting objects.

This lack of homology does not, by the way, cast doubt on a gradualistic Darwinian
account of language evolution. Humans did not evolve directly from chimpanzees. Both
derived from common ancestor, probably around 6-7 million years ago. This leaves about
300,000 generations in which language could have evolved gradually in the lineage
leading to humans, after it split off from the lineage leading to chimpanzees. Presumably
language evolved in the human lineage for two reasons: our ancestors developed
technology and knowledge of the local environment in their lifetimes, and were involved
in extensive reciprocal cooperation. This allowed them to benefit by sharing hard-won
knowledge with their kin and exchanging it with their neighbors (Pinker & Bloom, 1990).

2.2 Dissociations between Language and General Intelligence

Humans evolved brain circuitry, mostly in the left hemisphere surrounding the sylvian
fissure, that appears to be designed for language, though how exactly their internal wiring
gives rise to rules of language is unknown (see the Chapter by Zurif). The brain
mechanisms underlying language are not just those allowing us to be smart in general.
Strokes often leave adults with catastrophic losses in language (see the Chapter by Zurif,
and Pinker, 1994a), though not necessarily impaired in other aspects of intelligence, such
as those measured on the nonverbal parts of IQ tests. Similarly, there is an inherited set of
syndromes called Specific Language Impairment (Gopnik and Crago, 1993; Tallal, Ross,
& Curtiss, 1989) which is marked by delayed onset of language, difficulties in
articulation in childhood, and lasting difficulties in understanding, producing, and
judging grammatical sentences. By definition, Specifically Language Impaired people
show such deficits despite the absence of cognitive problems like retardation, sensory
problems like hearing loss, or social problems like autism.
More interestingly, there are syndromes showing the opposite dissociation, where intact
language coexists with severe retardation. These cases show that language development
does not depend on fully functioning general intelligence. One example comes from
children with Spina Bifida, a malformation of the vertebrae that leaves the spinal cord
unprotected, often resulting in hydrocephalus, an increase in pressure in the cerebrospinal
fluid filling the ventricles (large cavities) of the brain, distending the brain from within.
Hydrocephalic children occasionally end up significantly retarded but can carry on long,
articulate, and fully grammatical conversations, in which they earnestly recount vivid
events that are, in fact, products of their imaginations (Cromer, 1992; Curtiss, 1989;
Pinker, 1994a). Another example is Williams Syndrome, an inherited condition involving
physical abnormalities, significant retardation (the average IQ is about 50), incompetence
at simple everyday tasks (tying shoelaces, finding one's way, adding two numbers, and
retrieving items from a cupboard), social warmth and gregariousness, and fluent,
articulate language abilities (Bellugi, et al., 1990).

2.3 Maturation of the Language System

As the chapter by Newport and Gleitman suggests, the maturation of language circuits
during a child's early years may be a driving force underlying the course of language
acquisition (Pinker, 1994, Chapter 9; Bates, Thal, & Janowsky, 1992; Locke, 1992;
Huttenlocher, 1990). Before birth, virtually all the neurons (nerve cells) are formed, and
they migrate into their proper locations in the brain. But head size, brain weight, and
thickness of the cerebral cortex (gray matter), where the synapses (junctions) subserving
mental computation take place, continue to increase rapidly in the year after birth. Long-
distance connections (white matter) are not complete until nine months, and they
continue to grow their speed-inducing myelin insulation throughout childhood. Synapses
continue to develop, peaking in number between nine months and two years (depending
on the brain region), at which point the child has 50% more synapses than the adult.
Metabolic activity in the brain reaches adult levels by nine to ten months, and soon
exceeds it, peaking around the age of four. In addition, huge numbers of neurons die in
utero, and the dying continues during the first two years before leveling off at age seven.
Synapses wither from the age of two through the rest of childhood and into adolescence,
when the brain's metabolic rate falls back to adult levels. Perhaps linguistic milestones
like babbling, first words, and grammar require minimum levels of brain size, long-
distance connections, or extra synapses, particularly in the language centers of the brain.
Similarly, one can conjecture that these changes are responsible for the decline in the
ability to learn a language over the lifespan. The language learning circuitry of the brain
is more plastic in childhood; children learn or recover language when the left hemisphere
of the brain is damaged or even surgically removed (though not quite at normal levels),
but comparable damage in an adult usually leads to permanent aphasia (Curtiss, 1989;
Lenneberg, 1967). Most adults never master a foreign language, especially the
phonology, giving rise to what we call a "foreign accent." Their development often
fossilizes into permanent error patterns that no teaching or correction can undo. There are
great individual differences, which depend on effort, attitudes, amount of exposure,
quality of teaching, and plain talent.

Many explanations have been advanced for children's superiority: they can exploit the
special ways that their mothers talk them, they make errors unself-consciously, they are
more motivated to communicate, they like to conform, they are not xenophobic or set in
their ways, and they have no first language to interfere. But some of these accounts are
unlikely, based on what we learn about how language acquisition works later in this
chapter. For example, children can learn a language without the special indulgent speech
from their mothers; they make few errors; and they get no feedback for the errors they do
make. And it can't be an across-the-board decline in learning. There is no evidence, for
example, that learning words (as opposed to phonology or grammar) declines in
adulthood.

The chapter by Newport and Gleitman shows how sheer age seems to play an important
role. Successful acquisition of language typically happens by 4 (as we shall see in the
next section), is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised
from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter. Maturational changes in the
brain, such as the decline in metabolic rate and number of neurons during the early school
age years, and the bottoming out of the number of synapses and metabolic rate around
puberty, are plausible causes. Thus, there may be a neurologically-determined "critical
period" for successful language acquisition, analogous to the critical periods documented
in visual development in mammals and in the acquisition of songs by some birds.

3 The Course of Language Acquisition

Although scholars have kept diaries of their children's speech for over a century (Charles
Darwin was one of the first), it was only after portable tape-recorders became available in
the late 1950's that children's spontaneous speech began to be analyzed systematically
within developmental psychology. These naturalistic studies of children's spontaneous
speech have become even more accessible now that they can be put into computer files
and can be disseminated and analyzed automatically (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985, 1990;
MacWhinney, 1991). They are complemented by experimental methods. In production
tasks, children utter sentences to describe pictures or scenes, in response to questions, or
to imitate target sentences. In comprehension tasks, they listen to sentences and then
point to pictures or act out events with toys. In judgement tasks, they indicate whether or
which sentences provided by an experimenter sound "silly" to them.
As the chapter by Werker shows, language acquisition begins very early in the human
lifespan, and begins, logically enough, with the acquisition of a language's sound
patterns. The main linguistic accomplishments during the first year of life are control of
the speech musculature and sensitivity to the phonetic distinctions used in the parents'
language. Interestingly, babies achieve these feats before they produce or understand
words, so their learning cannot depend on correlating sound with meaning. That is, they
cannot be listening for the difference in sound between a word they think means bit and a
word they think means beet, because they have learned neither word. They must be
sorting the sounds directly, somehow tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the
phonemes used in their language (Kuhl, et al., 1992). The module can then serve as the
front end of the system that learns words and grammar.

Shortly before their first birthday, babies begin to understand words, and around that
birthday, they start to produce them (see Clark, 1993; Ingram, 1989). Words are usually
produced in isolation; this one-word stage can last from two months to a year. Children's
first words are similar all over the planet. About half the words are for objects: food
(juice, cookie, body parts (eye, nose), clothing (diaper, sock), vehicles (car, boat), toys
(doll, block), household items (bottle, light, animals (dog, kitty), and people (dada, baby).
There are words for actions, motions, and routines, like (up, off, open, peekaboo, eat, and
go, and modifiers, like hot, allgone, more, dirty, and cold. Finally, there are routines used
in social interaction, like yes, no, want, bye-bye, and hi -- a few of which, like look at that
and what is that, are words in the sense of memorized chunks, though they are not single
words for the adult. Children differ in how much they name objects or engage in social
interaction using memorized routines, though all children do both.

Around 18 months, language changes in two ways. Vocabulary growth increases; the
child begins to learn words at a rate of one every two waking hours, and will keep
learning that rate or faster through adolescence (Clark, 1993; Pinker, 1994). And
primitive syntax begins, with two-word strings like the following:

All dry. All messy. All wet.

I sit. I shut. No bed.
No pee. See baby. See pretty.
More cereal. More hot. Hi Calico.
Other pocket. Boot off. Siren by.
Mail come. Airplane allgone. Bybebye car.
Our car. Papa away. Dry pants.

Our car. Papa away. Dry pants. Children's two-word combinations are highly similar
across cultures. Everywhere, children announce when objects appear, disappear, and
move about, point out their properties and owners, comment on people doing things and
seeing things, reject and request objects and activities, and ask about who, what, and
where. These sequences already reflect the language being acquired: in 95% of them, the
words are properly ordered (Braine, 1976; Brown, 1973; Pinker, 1984; Ingram, 1989).

Even before they put words together, babies can comprehend a sentence using its syntax.
For example, in one experiment, babies who spoke only in single words were seated in
front of two television screens, each of which featured a pair of adults dressed up as
Cookie Monster and Big Bird from Sesame Street. One screen showed Cookie Monster
tickling Big Bird; the other showed Big Bird tickling Cookie Monster. A voice-over said,
"OH LOOK!!! BIG BIRD IS TICKLING COOKIE MONSTER!! FIND BIG BIRD
TICKLING COOKIE MONSTER!!" (Or vice-versa.) The children must have understood
the meaning of the ordering of subject, verb, and object, because they looked more at the
screen that depicted the sentence in the voice-over (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1991).

Children's output seems to meet up with a bottleneck at the output end (Brown, 1973;
Bloom, 1970; Pinker, 1984). Their two- and three-word utterances look like samples
drawn from longer potential sentences expressing a complete and more complicated idea.
Roger Brown, one of the founders of the modern study of language development, noted
that although the three children he studied intensively never produced a sentence as
complicated as Mother gave John lunch in the kitchen, they did produce strings
containing all of its components, and in the correct order: (Brown, 1973, p. 205):

Agent Action Recipient Object Location

(Mother gave John lunch in the kitchen.)

Mommy fix.
Mommy pumpkin.
Baby table.
Give doggie.
Put light.
Put floor.
I ride horsie.
Tractor go floor.
Give doggie paper.
Put truck window.
Adam put it box.

Between the late two's and mid-three's, children's language blooms into fluent
grammatical conversation so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it, and
no one has worked out the exact sequence. Sentence length increases steadily, and
because grammar is a combinatorial system, the number of syntactic types increases
exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the thousands before the third birthday
(Ingram, 1989, p. 235; Brown, 1973; Limber, 1973; Pinker, 1984). For example, here are
snapshots of the development of one of Brown's longitudinal subjects, Adam, in the year
following his first word combinations at the age of 2 years and 3 months (Pinker, 1994a):
2;3: Play checkers. Big drum. I got horn.
2;4: See marching bear go? Screw part machine.

2;5: Now put boots on. Where wrench go? What that paper clip doing?

2;6: Write a piece a paper. What that egg doing? No, I don't want to sit seat.

2;7: Where piece a paper go? Dropped a rubber band. Rintintin don't fly, Mommy.

2;8: Let me get down with the boots on. How tiger be so healthy and

fly like kite? Joshua throw like a penguin.

2;9: Where Mommy keep her pocket book? Show you something funny.

2;10: Look at that train Ursula brought. You don't have paper. Do you want little bit,
Cromer?

2;11: Do want some pie on your face? Why you mixing baby chocolate? I said why not
you coming in? We going turn light on so you can't - see.

3;0: I going come in fourteen minutes. I going wear that to wedding. Those are not strong
mens. You dress me up like a baby elephant.

3;1: I like to play with something else. You know how to put it back together. I gon' make
it like a rocket to blast off with. You want - to give me some carrots and some beans?
Press the button and catch - it, sir. Why you put the pacifier in his mouth?

3;2: So it can't be cleaned? I broke my racing car. Do you know the light wents off?
When it's got a flat tire it's need a go to the station. I'm going to mail this so the letter
can't come off. I - want to have some espresso. Can I put my head in the mailbox so - the
mailman can know where I are and put me in the mailbox? Can I - keep the screwdriver
just like a carpenter keep the screwdriver?

Normal children can differ by a year or more in their rate of language development,
though the stages they pass through are generally the same regardless of how stretched
out or compressed. Adam's language development, for example, was relatively leisurely;
many children speak in complex sentences before they turn two.
During the grammar explosion, children's sentences are getting not only longer but more
complex, with fuller trees, because the children can embed one constituent inside another.
Whereas before they might have said Give doggie paper (a three-branch Verb Phrase) and
Big doggie (a two-branch Noun Phrase), they now say Give big doggie paper, with the
two-branch NP embedded inside the three-branch VP. The earlier sentences resembled
telegrams, missing unstressed function words like of, the, on, and does, as well as
inflections like -ed, -ing, and -s. By the 3's, children are using these function words more
often than they are omitting them, many in more than 90% of the sentences that require
them. A full range of sentence types flower -- questions with words like who, what and
where, relative clauses, comparatives, negations, complements, conjunctions, and
passives. These constructions appear to display the most, perhaps even all, of the
grammatical machinery needed to account for adult grammar.

Though many of the young 3-year-old's sentences are ungrammatical for one reason or
another, it is because there are many things that can go wrong in any single sentence.
When researchers focus on a single grammatical rule and count how often a child obeys it
and how often he or she versus flouts it, the results are very impressive: for just about
every rule that has been looked at, three-year olds obey it a majority of the time
(Stromswold, 1990; Pinker, 1984, 1989; Crain, 1992; Marcus, et al., 1992). As we have
seen, children rarely scramble word orders and, by the age of three, come to supply most
inflections and function words in sentences that require them. Though our ears perk up
when we hear errors like mens, wents, Can you broke those?, What he can ride in?, That's
a furniture, Button me the rest, and Going to see kitten, the errors occur in anywhere from
0.1% to 8% of the opportunities for making them; more than 90% of the time, the child is
on target. The next chapter follows one of those errors in detail.

Children do not seem to favor any particular kind of language (indeed, it would be
puzzling how any kind of language could survive if children did not easily learn it!).
They swiftly acquire free word order, SOV and VSO orders, rich systems of case and
agreement, strings of agglutinated suffixes, ergative case marking, and whatever else
their language throws at them, with no lag relative to their English-speaking counterparts.
Even grammatical gender, which many adults learning a second language find
mystifying, presents no problem: children acquiring language like French, German, and
Hebrew acquire gender marking quickly, make few errors, and never use the association
with maleness and femaleness as a false criterion (Levy, 1983). It is safe to say that
except for constructions that are rare, predominantly used in written language, or
mentally taxing even to an adult (like The horse that the elephant tickled kissed the pig),
all parts of all languages are acquired before the child turns four (Slobin, 1985/1992).

4 Explaining Language Acquisition

How do we explain children's course of language acquisition -- most importantly, their
inevitable and early mastery? Several kinds of mechanisms are at work. As we saw in
section (), the brain changes after birth, and these maturational changes may govern the
onset, rate, and adult decline of language acquisition capacity. General changes in the
child's information processing abilities (attention, memory, short-term buffers for
acoustic input and articulatory output) could leave their mark as well. In the next chapter,
I show how a memory retrieval limitation -- children are less reliable at recalling that
broke is the past tense of break -- can account for a conspicuous and universal error
pattern, overregularizations like breaked (see also Marcus, et al., 1992).
Many other small effects have been documented where changes in information
processing abilities affect language development. For example, children selectively pick
up information at the ends of words (Slobin, 1973), and at the beginnings and ends of
sentences (Newport, et al, 1977), presumably because these are the parts of strings that
are best retained in short term memory. Similarly, the progressively widening bottleneck
for early word combinations presumably reflects a general increase in motor planning
capacity. Conceptual development (see Chapter X), too, might affect language
development: if a child has not yet mastered a difficult semantic distinction, such as the
complex temporal relations involved in John will have gone, he or she may be unable to
master the syntax of the construction dedicated to expressing it.

The complexity of a grammatical form has a demonstrable role in development: simpler

rules and forms appear in speech before more complex ones, all other things being equal.
For example, the plural marker -s in English (e.g. cats), which requires knowing only
whether the number of referents is singular or plural, is used consistently before the
present tense marker -s (he walks), which requires knowing whether the subject is
singular or plural and whether it is a first, second, or third person and whether the event is
in the present tense (Brown, 1973). Similarly, complex forms are sometimes first used in
simpler approximations. Russian contains one case marker for masculine nominative (i.e.,
a suffix on a masculine noun indicating that it is the subject of the sentence), one for
feminine nominative, one for masculine accusative (used to indicate that a noun is a
direct object), and one for feminine accusative. Children often use each marker with the
correct case, never using a nominative marker for accusative nouns or vice-versa, but
don't properly use the masculine and feminine variants with masculine and feminine
nouns (Slobin, 1985).

But these global trends do not explain the main event: how children succeed. Language
acquisition is so complex that one needs a precise framework for understanding what it
involves -- indeed, what learning in general involves.

4.1 Learnability Theory

What is language acquisition, in principle? A branch of theoretical computer science
called Learnability Theory attempts to answer this question (Gold, 1967; Osherson, Stob,
& Weinstein, 1985; Pinker, 1979). Learnability theory has defined learning as a scenario
involving four parts (the theory embraces all forms of learning, but I will use language as
the example):
A class of languages. One of them is the "target" language, to be - attained by the learner,
but the learner does not, of course, know - which it is. In the case of children, the class of
languages would - consist of the existing and possible human languages; the target -
language is the one spoken in their community.
An environment. This is the information in the world that the learner has to go on in
trying to acquire the language. In the case of children, it might include the sentences
parents utter, the context in which they utter them, feedback to the child (verbal or
nonverbal) in response to the child's own speech, and so on. Parental utterances can be a
random sample of the language, or they might have some special properties: they might
be ordered in certain ways, sentences might be repeated or only uttered once, and so on.
A learning strategy. The learner, using information in the environment, tries out
"hypotheses" about the target language. The learning strategy is the algorithm that creates
the hypotheses and determines whether they are consistent with the input information
from the environment. For children, it is the "grammar-forming" mechanism in their
brains; their "language acquisition device."
A success criterion. If we want to say that "learning" occurs, presumably it is because the
learners' hypotheses are not random, - but that by some time the hypotheses are related in
some systematic - way to the target language. Learners may arrive at a hypothesis -
identical to the target language after some fixed period of time; - they may arrive at an
approximation to it; they may waiver among a - set of hypotheses one of which is correct.
Theorems in learnability theory show how assumptions about any of the three
components imposes logical constraints on the fourth. It is not hard to show why learning
a language, on logical grounds alone, is so hard. Like all "induction problems" (uncertain
generalizations from instances), there are an infinite number of hypotheses consistent
with any finite sample of environmental information. Learnability theory shows which
induction problems are solvable and which are not.
A key factor is the role of negative evidence, or information about which strings of words
are not sentences in the language to be acquired. Human children might get such
information by being corrected every time they speak ungrammatically. If they aren't --
and as we shall see, they probably aren't -- the acquisition problem is all the harder.
Consider Figure 1, where languages are depicted as circles corresponding to sets of word
strings, and all the logical possibilities for how the child's language could differ from the
adult language are depicted. There are four possibilities. (a) The child's hypothesis
language (H) is disjoint from the language to be acquired (the "target language," T). That
would correspond to the state of child learning English who cannot say a single well-
formed English sentence. For example, the child might be able only to say things like we
breaked it, and we goed, never we broke it or we went. (b) The child's hypothesis and the
target language intersect. Here the child would be able to utter some English sentences,
like he went. However, he or she also uses strings of words that are not English, such as
we breaked it; and some sentences of English, such as we broke it, would still be outside
their abilities. (c) The child's hypothesis language is a subset of the target language. That
would mean that the child would have mastered some of English, but not all of it, but that
everything the child had mastered would be part of English. The child might not be able
to say we broke it, but he or she would be able to say some grammatical sentences, such
as we went; no errors such as she breaked it or we goed would occur. The final logical
possibility is (d), where The child's hypothesis language is a superset of the target
language. That would occur, for example, if the child could say we broke it, we went, we
breaked it and we goed.

In cases (a-c), the child can realize that the hypothesis is incorrect by hearing sentences
from parental "positive evidence," (indicated by the "+" symbol) that are in the target
language but not the hypothesized one: sentences such as we broke it. This is impossible
in case (d); negative evidence (such as corrections of the child's ungrammatical sentences
by his or her parents) would be needed. In other words, without negative evidence, if a
child guesses too large a language, the world can never tell him he's wrong.

This has several consequences. For one thing, the most general learning algorithm one
might conceive of -- one that is capable of hypothesizing any grammar, or any computer
program capable of generating a language -- is in trouble. Without negative evidence (and
even in many cases with it), there is no general-purpose, all-powerful learning machine; a
machine must in some sense "know" something about the constraints in the domain in
which it is learning.

More concretely, if children don't receive negative evidence (see Section ) we have a lot
of explaining to do, because overly large hypotheses are very easy for the child to make.
For example, children actually do go through stages in which they use two or more past
tense forms for a given verb, such as broke and breaked -- this case is discussed in detail
in my other chapter in this volume. They derive transitive verbs from intransitives too
freely: where an adult might say both The ice melted and I melted the ice, children also
can say The girl giggled and Don't giggle me! (Bowerman, 1982b; Pinker, 1989). In each
case they are in situation (d) in Figure 1, and unless their parents slip them some signal in
every case that lets them know they are not speaking properly, it is puzzling that they
eventually stop. That is, we would need to explain how they grow into adults who are
more restrictive in their speech -- or another way of putting is that it's puzzling that the
English language doesn't allow don't giggle me and she eated given that children are
tempted to grow up talking that way. If the world isn't telling children to stop, something
in their brains is, and we have to find out who or what is causing the change.

Let's now examine language acquisition in the human species by breaking it down into
the four elements that give a precise definition to learning: the target of learning, the
input, the degree of success, and the learning strategy.

5 What is Learned
To understand how X is learned, you first have to understand what X is. Linguistic theory
is thus an essential part of the study of language acquisition (see the Chapter by Lasnik).
Linguistic research tries do three things. First, it must characterize the facts of English,
and all the other languages whose acquisition we are interested in explaining. Second,
since children are not predisposed to learn English or any other language, linguistics has
to examine the structure of other languages. In particular, linguists characterize which
aspects of grammar are universal, prevalent, rare, and nonexistent across languages.
Contrary to early suspicions, languages do not vary arbitrarily and without limit; there is
by now a large catalogue of language universals, properties shared exactly, or in a small
number of variations, by all languages (see Comrie, 1981; Greenberg, 1978; Shopen,
1985). This obviously bears on what children's language acquisition mechanisms find
easy or hard to learn.
And one must go beyond a mere list of universals. Many universal properties of language
are not specific to language but are simply reflections of universals of human experience.
All languages have words for "water" and "foot" because all people need to refer to water
and feet; no language has a word a million syllables long because no person would have
time to say it. But others might be specific to the innate design of language itself. For
example, if a language has both derivational suffixes (which create new words from old
ones, like -ism) and inflectional suffixes (which modify a word to fit its role in the
sentence, like plural -s), then the derivational suffixes are always closer to the word stem
than the inflectional ones. For example, in English one can say Darwinisms (derivational
-ism closer to the stem than inflectional -s) but not Darwinsism. It is hard to think of a
reason how this law would fit in to any universal law of thought or memory: why would
the concept of two ideologies based on one Darwin should be thinkable, but the concept
of one ideology based on two Darwins (say, Charles and Erasmus) not be thinkable
(unless one reasons in a circle and declares that the mind must find -ism to be more
cognitively basic than the plural, because that's the order we see in language). Universals
like this, that are specifically linguistic, should be captured in a theory of Universal
Grammar (UG) (Chomsky, 1965, 1981, 1991). UG specifies the allowable mental
representations and operations that all languages are confined to use. The theory of
universal grammar is closely tied to the theory of the mental mechanisms children use in
acquiring language; their hypotheses about language must be couched in structures
sanctioned by UG.

To see how linguistic research can't be ignored in understanding language acquisition,

consider the sentences below. In each of the examples, a learner who heard the (a) and (b)
sentences could quite sensibly extract a general rule that, when applied to the (c)
sentence, yield version (d). Yet the result is an odd sentence that no one would say:

(a) John saw Mary with her best friend's husband.

(b) Who did John see Mary with?
(c) John saw Mary and her best friend's husband.
(d) *Who did John see Mary and?

(a) Irv drove the car into the garage.

(b) Irv drove the car.
(c) Irv put the car into the garage.
(d) *Irv put the car.

(a) I expect the fur to fly.

(b) I expect the fur will fly.
(c) The fur is expected to fly.
(d) *The fur is expected will fly.

(a) The baby seems to be asleep.

(b) The baby seems asleep.
(c) The baby seems to be sleeping.
(d) *The baby seems sleeping.

(a) John liked the pictures of Bill that Mary took.

(b) John liked Mary's pictures of Bill.
(c) John liked the pictures of himself that Mary took.
(d) *John liked Mary's pictures of himself.
The solution to the problem must be that children's learning mechanisms ultimately don't
allow them to make what would otherwise be a tempting generalization. For example, in
(1), constraints that prevent extraction of a single phrase out of a coordinate structure
(phrases joined by a word like and or or) would block would what otherwise be a natural
generalization from other examples of extraction, such as 1(a-b). The other examples
presents other puzzles that the theory of universal grammar, as part of a theory of
language acquisition, must solve. It is because of the subtlety of these examples, and the
abstractness of the principles of universal grammar that must be posited to explain them,
that Chomsky has claimed that the overall structure of language must be innate, based on
his paper-and-pencil examination of the facts of language alone.
6 Input
To understand how children learn language, we have to know what aspects of language
(from their parents or peers) they have access to.
6.1 Positive Evidence
Children clearly need some kind of linguistic input to acquire a language. There have
been occasional cases in history where abandoned children have somehow survived in
forests, such as Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron (subject of a film by Francois Truffaut).
Occasionally other modern children have grown up wild because depraved parents have
raised them silently in dark rooms and attics; the chapter by Newport and Gleitman
discuss some of those cases. The outcome is always the same: the children, when found,
are mute. Whatever innate grammatical abilities there are, they are too schematic to
generate concrete speech, words, and grammatical constructions on their own.
Children do not, however, need to hear a full-fledged language; as long as they are in a
community with other children, and have some source for individual words, they will
invent one on their own, often in a single generation. Children who grew up in
plantations and slave colonies were often exposed to a crude pidgin that served as the
lingua franca in these Babels of laborers. But they grew up to speak genuinely new
languages, expressive "creoles" with their own complex grammars (Bickerton, 1984; see
also the Chapter by Newport and Gleitman). The sign languages of the deaf arose in
similar ways. Indeed, they arise spontaneously and quickly wherever there is a
community of deaf children (Senghas, 1994; Kegl, 1994).

Children most definitely do need to hear an existing language to learn that language, of
course. Children with Japanese genes do not find Japanese any easier than English, or
vice-versa; they learn whichever language they are exposed to. The term "positive
evidence" refers to the information available to the child about which strings of words are
grammatical sentences of the target language.

By "grammatical," incidentally, linguists and psycholinguists mean only those sentences

that sound natural in colloquial speech, not necessarily those that would be deemed
"proper English" in formal written prose. Thus split infinitives, dangling participles,
slang, and so on, are "grammatical" in this sense (and indeed, are as logical, systematic,
expressive, and precise as "correct" written English, often more so; see Pinker, 1994a).
Similarly, elliptical utterances, such as when the question Where are you going? is
answered with To the store), count as grammatical. Ellipsis is not just random snipping
from sentences, but is governed by rules that are part of the grammar of one's language or
dialect. For example, the grammar of casual British English allows you to answer the
question Will he go? by saying He might do, whereas the grammar of American English
doesn't allow it.

Given this scientific definition of "grammatical," do we find that parents' speech counts
as "positive evidence"? That is, when a parent uses a sentence, can the child assume that
it is part of the language to be learned, or do parents use so many ungrammatical
sentences random fragments, slips of the tongue, hesitations, and false starts that the child
would have to take much of it with a grain of salt? Fortunately for the child, the vast
majority of the speech they hear during the language-learning years is fluent, complete,
and grammatically well-formed: 99.93%, according to one estimate (Newport, Gleitman,
& Gleitman, 1977). Indeed, this is true of conversation among adults in general (Labov,
1969).

Thus language acquisition is ordinarily driven by a grammatical sample of the target

language. Note that his is true even for forms of English that people unthinkingly call
"ungrammatical," "fractured," or "bad English," such as rural American English (e.g.,
them books; he don't; we ain't; they drug him away) and urban black English (e.g., She
walking; He be working; see the Chapter by Labov). These are not corrupted versions of
standard English; to a linguist they look just like different dialects, as rule-governed as
the southern-England dialect of English that, for historical reasons, became the standard
several centuries ago. Scientifically speaking, the grammar of working-class speech --
indeed, every human language system that has been studied -- is intricately complex,
though different languages are complex in different ways.

6.2 Negative Evidence

Negative evidence refers to information about which strings of words are not
grammatical sentences in the language, such as corrections or other forms of feedback
from a parent that tell the child that one of his or her utterances is ungrammatical. As
mentioned in Section ), it's very important for us to know whether children get and need
negative, because in the absence of negative evidence, any child who hypothesizes a rule
that generates a superset of the language will have no way of knowing that he or she is
wrong Gold, 1967; Pinker, 1979, 1989). If children don't get, or don't use, negative
evidence, they must have some mechanism that either avoids generating too large a
language the child would be conservative -- or that can recover from such overgeneration.
Roger Brown and Camille Hanlon (1970) attempted to test B. F. Skinner's behaviorist
claim that language learning depends on parents' reinforcement of children's grammatical
behaviors. Using transcripts of naturalistic parent-child dialogue, they divided children's
sentences into ones that were grammatically well-formed and ones that contained
grammatical errors. They then divided adults' responses to those sentences into ones that
expressed some kind of approval (e.g., "yes, that's good") and those that expressed some
kind of disapproval. They looked for a correlation, but failed to find one: parents did not
differentially express approval or disapproval to their children contingent on whether the
child's prior utterance was well-formed or not (approval depends, instead, on whether the
child's utterance was true). Brown and Hanlon also looked at children's well-formed and
badly-formed questions, and whether parents seemed to answer them appropriately, as if
they understood them, or with non sequiturs. They found parents do not understand their
children's well-formed questions better than their badly-formed ones.

Other studies (e.g. Hirsh-Pasek, Treiman, and Schneiderman, 1984; Demetras, Post, and
Snow, 1986; Penner, 1987; Bohannon & Stanowicz, 1988) have replicated that result, but
with a twist. Some have found small statistical contingencies between the grammaticality
of some children's sentence and the kind of follow-up given by their parents; for example,
whether the parent repeats the sentence verbatim, asks a follow-up question, or changes
the topic. But Marcus (1993) has found that these patterns fall far short of negative
evidence (reliable information about the grammatical status of any word string). Different
parents react in opposite ways to their children's ungrammatical sentences, and many
forms of ungrammaticality are not reacted to at all -- leaving a given child unable to
know what to make of any parental reaction. Even when a parent does react differentially,
a child would have to repeat a particular error, verbatim, hundreds of times to eliminate
the error, because the parent's reaction is only statistical: the feedback signals given to
ungrammatical signals are also given nearly as often to grammatical sentences.

Stromswold (1994) has an even more dramatic demonstration that parental feedback
cannot be crucial. She studied a child who, for unknown neurological reasons, was
congenitally unable to talk. He was a good listener, though, and when tested he was able
to understand complicated sentences perfectly, and to judge accurately whether a
sentence was grammatical or ungrammatical. The boy's abilities show that children
certainly do not need negative evidence to learn grammatical rules properly, even in the
unlikely event that their parents provided it.

These results, though of profound importance, should not be too surprising. Every
speaker of English judges sentences such as I dribbled the floor with paint and Ten
pounds was weighed by the boy and Who do you believe the claim that John saw? and
John asked Mary to look at himself to be ungrammatical. But it is unlikely that every
such speaker has at some point uttered these sentences and benefited from negative
feedback. The child must have some mental mechanisms that rule out vast numbers of
"reasonable" strings of words without any outside intervention.

6.3 Motherese
Parents and caretakers in most parts of the world modify their speech when talking to
young children, one example of how people in general use several "registers" in different
social settings. Speech to children is slower, shorter, in some ways (but not all) simpler,
higher-pitched, more exaggerated in intonation, more fluent and grammatically well-
formed, and more directed in content to the present situation, compared to speech among
adults (Snow & Ferguson, 1977). Many parents also expand their children's utterances
into full sentences, or offer sequences of paraphrases of a given sentence.
One should not, though, consider this speech register, sometimes called "Motherese," to
be a set of "language lessons." Though mother's speech may seem simple at first glance,
in many ways it is not. For example, speech to children is full of questions -- sometimes a
majority of the sentences. If you think questions are simple, just try to write a set of rules
that accounts for the following sentences and non-sentences:
He can go somewhere.
Where can he go?
*Where can he go somewhere?
*Where he can go?
*Where did he can go?

He went somewhere.
Where did he go?
He went WHERE?
*Where went he?
*Where did he went?
*Where he went?
*He did go WHERE?

He went home.
Why did he go home?
How come he went home?
*Why he went home?
*How come did he go home?
Linguists struggle over these facts (see the Chapters by Lasnik and Larson), some of the
most puzzling in the English language. But these are the constructions that infants are
bombarded with and that they master in their preschool years.
The chapter by Newport and Gleitman gives another reason for doubting that Motherese
is a set of language lessons. Children whose mothers use Motherese more consistently
don't pass through the milestones of language development any faster (Newport, et al,
1977). Furthermore, there are some communities with radically different ideas about
children's proper place in society. In some societies, for example, people tacitly assume
that that children aren't worth speaking to, and don't have anything to say that is worth
listening to. Such children learn to speak by overhearing streams of adult-to-adult speech
(Heath, 1983). In some communities in New Guinea, mothers consciously try to teach
their children language, but not in the style familiar to us, of talking to them indulgently.
Rather, they wait until a third party is present, and coach the child as to the proper,
adultlike sentences they should use (see Schieffelin & Eisenberg, 1981). Nonetheless,
those children, like all children, grow up to be fluent language speakers. It surely must
help children when their parents speak slowly, clearly, and succinctly to them, but their
success at learning can't be explained by any special grammar-unveiling properties of
parental babytalk.

6.4 Prosody
Parental speech is not a string of printed words on a ticker-tape, nor is it in a monotone
like science-fiction robots. Normal human speech has a pattern of melody, timing, and
stress called prosody. And motherese directed to young infants has a characteristic,
exaggerated prosody of its own: a rise and fall contour for approving, a set of sharp
staccato bursts for prohibiting, a rise pattern for directing attention, and smooth, low
legato murmurs for comforting. Fernald (1992) has shown that these patterns are very
widespread across language communities, and may be universal. The melodies seem to
attract the child's attention, mark the sounds as speech as opposed to stomach growlings
or other noises, and might distinguish statements, questions, and imperatives, delineate
major sentence boundaries, and highlight new words. When given a choice, babies prefer
to listen to speech with these properties than to speech intended for adults (Fernald, 1984,
1992; Hirsh-Pasek, Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss, & Kennedy, 1987).
In all speech, a number of prosodic properties of the speech wave, such as lengthening,
intonation, and pausing, are influenced by the syntactic structure of the sentence (Cooper
& Paccia-Cooper, 1980). Just listen to how you would say the word like in the sentence
The boy I like slept compared to The boy I saw likes sleds. In the first sentence, the word
like is at the boundary of a relative clause and is drawn out, exaggerated in intonation,
and followed by a pause; in the second, it is in the middle of a verb phrase and is
pronounced more quickly, uniformly in intonation, and is run together with the following
word. Some psychologists (e.g., Gleitman & Wanner, 1984; Gleitman, 1990) have
suggested that children use this information in the reverse direction, and read the
syntactic structure of a sentence directly off its melody and timing. We will examine the
hypothesis in Section .

6.5 Context
Children do not hear sentences in isolation, but in a context. No child has learned
language from the radio; indeed, children rarely if ever learn language from television.
Ervin-Tripp (1973) studied hearing children of deaf parents whose only access to English
was from radio or television broadcasts. The children did not learn any speech from that
input. One reason is that without already knowing the language, it would be difficult for a
child to figure out what the characters in the unresponsive televised worlds are talking
about. In interacting with live human speakers, who tend to talk about the here and now
in the presence of children, the child can be more of a mind-reader, guessing what the
speaker might have meant (Macnamara, 1972, 1982; Schlesinger, 1971). That is, before
children have learned syntax, they know the meaning of many words, and they might be
able to make good guesses as to what their parents are saying based on their knowledge
of how the referents of these words typically act (for example, people tend to eat apples,
but not vice-versa). In fact, parental speech to young children is so redundant with its
context that a person with no knowledge of the order in which parents' words are spoken,
only the words themselves, can infer from transcripts, with high accuracy, what was
being said (Slobin, 1977).
Many models of language acquisition assume that the input to the child consists of a
sentence and a representation of the meaning of that sentence, inferred from context and
from the child's knowledge of the meanings of the words (e.g. Anderson, 1977; Berwick,
1986; Pinker, 1982, 1984; Wexler & Culicover, 1980). Of course, this can't literally be
true -- children don't hear every word of every sentence, and surely don't, to begin with,
perceive the entire meaning of a sentence from context. Blind children, whose access to
the nonlinguistic world is obviously severely limited, learn language without many
problems (Landau & Gleitman, 1985). And when children do succeed in guessing a
parent's meaning, it can't be by simple temporal contiguity. For example, Gleitman (1990)
points out that when a mother arriving home from work opens the door, she is likely to
say, "What did you do today?," not I'm opening the door. Similarly, she is likely to say
"Eat your peas" when her child is, say, looking at the dog, and certainly not when the
child is already eating peas.

Still, the assumption of context-derived semantic input is a reasonable idealization, if one

considers the abilities of the whole child. The child must keep an updated mental model
of the current situation, created by mental faculties for perceiving objects and events and
the states of mind and communicative intentions of other humans. The child can use this
knowledge, plus the meanings of any familiar words in the sentence, to infer what the
parent probably meant. In Section we will discuss how children might fill the important
gaps in what they can infer from context.

7 What and When Children Learn

People do not reproduce their parents' language exactly. If they did, we would all still be
speaking like Chaucer. But in any generation, in most times, the differences between
parents' language and the one their children ultimately acquire is small. And remember
that, judging by their spontaneous speech, we can conclude that most children have
mastered their mother tongue (allowing for performance errors due to complexity or
rarity of a construction) some time in their threes. It seems that the success criterion for
human language is something close to full mastery, and in a short period of time.
To show that young children really have grasped the design plan of language, rather than
merely approximating it with outwardly-convincing routines or rules of thumb which
would have to be supplanted later in life, we can't just rely on what they say; we need to
use clever experimental techniques. Let's look at two examples that illustrate how even
very young children seem to obey the innate complex design of Universal Grammar.

Earlier I mentioned that in all languages, if there are derivational affixes that build new
words out of old ones, like -ism, -er, and -able, and inflectional affixes that modify a
word according to its role in the sentence, like -s, -ed, and -ing, then the derivational affix
appears inside the inflectional one: Darwinisms is possible, Darwinsism is not. This and
many other grammatical quirks were nicely explained in a theory of word structure
proposed by Paul Kiparsky (1982).

Kiparsky showed that words are built in layers or "levels." To build a word, you can start
with a root (like Darwin). Then you can rules of a certain kind to it, called "Level 1
Rules," to yield a more complex word. For example, there is a rule adding the suffix -ian,
turning the word into Darwinian. Level 1 Rules, according to the theory, can affect the
sound of the stem; in this case, the syllable carrying the stress shifts from Dar to win.
Level 2 rules apply to a word after any Level 1 rules have been applied. An example of a
Level 2 rule is the one that adds the suffix -ism, yielding, for example, Darwinism. Level
2 rules generally do not affect the pronunciation of the words they apply to; they just add
material onto the word, leaving the pronunciation intact. (The stress in Darwinism is the
same as it was in Darwin.) Finally, Level 3 rules apply to a word after any Level 2 rules
have been applied. The regular rules of inflectional morphology are examples of Level 3
rules. An example is the rule that adds an -s to the end of a noun to form its plural -- for
example, Darwinians or Darwinisms.
Crucially, the rules cannot apply out of order. The input to a Level 1 rules must be a word
root. The input to a level 2 rule must be either a root or the output of Level 1 rules. The
input to a Level 3 rule must be a root, the output of Level 1 rules, or the output of Level 2
rules. That constraint yields predictions about what kinds of words are possible and
which are impossible. For example, the ordering makes it impossible to derive
Darwinianism and Darwinianisms, but not Darwinsian, Darwinsism, and Darwinismian.

Now, irregular inflection, such as the pairing of mouse with mice, belongs to Level 1,
whereas regular inflectional rules, such as the one that relates rat to rats, belongs to Level
3. Compounding, the rule that would produce Darwin-lover and mousetrap, is a Level 2
rule, in between. This correctly predicts that an irregular plural can easily appear inside a
compound, but a regular plural cannot. Compare the following:

ice-infested (OK); rats-infested (bad)

men-bashing (OK); guys-bashing (bad)
teethmarks (OK); clawsmarks (bad)
feet-warmer (OK); hand-warmer (bad)
purple people-eater (OK); purple babies-eater (bad)
Mice-infested is a possible word, because the process connecting mouse with mice comes
before the rule combining the noun with infested. However, rats-infested, even though it
is cognitively quite similar to mice-infested, sounds strange; we can say only rat-infested
(even though by definition one rat does not make an infestation).
Peter Gordon (1986) had children between the ages of 3 and 5 participate in an elicited-
production experiment in which he would say, "Here is a puppet who likes to eat _____.
What would you call him?" He provided a response for several singular mass nouns, like
mud, beforehand, so that the children were aware of the existence of the "x-eater"
compound form. Children behaved just like adults: a puppet who likes to eat a mouse was
called a mouse-eater, a puppet who likes to eat a rat was called a rat-eater, a puppet who
likes to eat mice was called either a mouse-eater or a mice-eater -- but -- a puppet who
likes to eat rats was called a rat-eater, never a rats-eater. Interestingly, children treated
their own overregularizations, such as mouses, exactly as they treated legitimate regular
plurals: they would never call the puppet a mouses-eater, even if they used mouses in
their own speech.

Even more interestingly, Gordon examined how children could have acquired the
constraint. Perhaps, he reasoned, they had learned the fact that compounds can contain
either singulars or irregular plurals, never regular plurals, by paying keeping track of all
the kinds of compounds that do and don't occur in their parents' speech. It turns out that
they would have no way of learning that fact. Although there is no grammatical reason
why compounds would not contain irregular plurals, the speech that most children hear
does not contain any. Compounds like toothbrush abound; compounds containing
irregular plurals like teethmarks, people-eater, and men-bashing, though grammatically
possible, are statistically rare, according to the standardized frequency data that Gordon
examined, and he found none that was likely to appear in the speech children hear.
Therefore children were willing to say mice-eater and unwilling to say rats-eater with no
good evidence from the input that that is the pattern required in English. Gordon suggests
that this shows that the constraints on level-ordering may be innate.

Let's now go from words to sentences. Sentence are ordered strings of words. No child
could fail to notice word order in learning and understanding language. But most
regularities of language govern hierarchically-organized structures -- words grouped into
phrases, phrases grouped into clauses, clauses grouped into sentences (see the Chapters
by Lasnik, by Larson, and by Newport & Gleitman). If the structures of linguistic theory
correspond to the hypotheses that children formulate when they analyze parental speech
and form rules, children should create rules defined over hierarchical structures, not
simple properties of linear order such as which word comes before which other word or
how close two words are in a sentence. The chapter by Gleitman and Newport discusses
one nice demonstration of how adults (who are, after all, just grown-up children) respect
constituent structure, not simple word order, when forming questions. Here is an example
making a similar point that has been tried out with children.

Languages often have embedded clauses missing a subject, such as John told Mary to
leave, where the embedded "downstairs" clause to leave has no subject. The phenomenon
of control governs how the missing subject is interpreted. In this sentence it is Mary who
is understood as having the embedded subject's role, that is, the person doing the leaving.
We say that the phrase Mary "controls" the missing subject position of the lower clause.
For most verbs, there is a simple principle defining control. If the upstairs verb has no
object, then the subject of the upstairs verb controls the missing subject of the downstairs
verb. For example, in John tried to leave, John is interpreted as the subject of both try and
leave. If the upstairs verb has a subject and an object, then it is the object that controls the
missing subject of the downstairs verb, as we saw in John told Mary to leave.

In 1969, Carol Chomsky published a set of classic experiments in developmental

psycholinguistics. She showed that children apply this principle quite extensively, even
for the handful of verbs that are exceptions to it. In act-out comprehension experiments
on children between the ages of 5 and 10, she showed that even relatively old children
were prone to this kind of mistake. When told "Mickey promised Donald to jump; Make
him jump," the children made Donald, the object of the first verb, do the jumping, in
accord with the general principle. The "right answer" in this case would have been
Mickey, because promise is an exception to the principle, calling for an unusual kind of
control where the subject of the upstairs verb, not the object of the upstairs verb, should
act as controller.

But what, exactly, is the principle that children are over-applying? One possibility can be
called the Minimal Distance Principle: the controller of the downstairs verb is the noun
phrase nearest to it in the linear string of words in the sentence. If children analyze
sentences in terms of linear order, this should be a natural generalization. However, it
isn't right for the adult language. Consider the passive sentence Mary was told by John to
leave. The phrase John is closest to the subject position for leave, but adult English
speakers understand the sentence as meaning that Mary is the one leaving. The Minimal
Distance Principle gives the wrong answer here. Instead, for the adult language, we need
a principle sensitive to grammatical structure, such as the "c-control" structural relation
discussed in the Chapter by Lasnik [?]. Let's consider a simplified version, which we can
call the Structural Principle. It might say that the controller of a missing subject is the
grammatical object of the upstairs verb if it has one; otherwise it is the grammatical
subject of the upstairs verb (both of them c-command the missing subject). The object of
a preposition in the higher clause, however, is never allowed to be a controller, basically
because it is embedded "too deeply" in the sentence's tree structure to c-command the
missing subject. That's why Mary was told by John to leave has Mary as the controller. (It
is also why, incidentally, the sentence Mary was promised by John to leave is
unintelligible -- it would require a prepositional phrase to be the controller, which is ruled
out by the Structural Principle.)

It would certainly be understandable if children were to follow the Minimal Distance

Principle. Not only is it easily stated in terms of surface properties that children can easily
perceive, but sentences that would disconfirm it like Mary was told by John to leave are
extremely rare in parents' speech. Michael Maratsos (1974) did the crucial experiment.
He gave children such sentences and asked them who was leaving. Of course, on either
account children would have to be able to understand the passive construction to interpret
these sentences, and Maratsos gave them a separate test of comprehension of simple
passive sentences to select out only those children who could do so. And indeed, he found
that those children interpreted passive sentences with missing embedded subjects just as
adults would. That is, in accord with the Structural Principle and in violation of the
Minimal Distance Principle, they interpreted Mary was told by John to leave as having
the subject, Mary, do the leaving; that is, as the controller. The experiment shows how
young children have grasped the abstract structural relations in sentences, and have
acquired a grammar of the same design as that spoken by their parents.
DEFINITION OF SPEECH AND LANGUAGE DISORDERS

Speech and language disorders refer to problems in communication and related areas
such as oral motor function. These delays and disorders range from simple sound
substitutions to the inability to understand or use language or use the oral-motor
mechanism for functional speech and feeding. Some causes of speech and language
disorders include hearing loss, neurological disorders, brain injury, mental retardation,
drug abuse, physical impairments such as cleft lip or palate, and vocal abuse or misuse.
Frequently, however, the cause is unknown.

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
INCIDENCE

More than one million of the students served in the public schools' special education
programs in the 1997-98 school year were categorized as having a speech or language
impairment. This estimate does not include children who have speech/language problems
secondary to other conditions such as deafness. Language disorders may be related to
other disabilities such as mental retardation, autism, or cerebral palsy. It is estimated that
communication disorders (including speech, language, and hearing disorders) affect one
of every 10 people in the United States.

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHARACTERISTICS

A child's communication is considered delayed when the child is noticeably behind his or
her peers in the acquisition of speech and/or language skills. Sometimes a child will have
greater receptive (understanding) than expressive (speaking) language skills, but this is
not always the case.

Speech disorders refer to difficulties producing speech sounds or problems with voice
quality. They might be characterized by an interruption in the flow or rhythm of speech,
such as stuttering, which is called dysfluency. Speech disorders may be problems with the
way sounds are formed, called articulation or phonological disorders, or they may be
difficulties with the pitch, volume or quality of the voice. There may be a combination of
several problems. People with speech disorders have trouble using some speech sounds,
which can also be a symptom of a delay. They may say "see" when they mean "ski" or
they may have trouble using other sounds like "l" or "r". Listeners may have trouble
understanding what someone with a speech disorder is trying to say. People with voice
disorders may have trouble with the way their voices sound.

A language disorder is an impairment in the ability to understand and/or use words in

context, both verbally and nonverbally. Some characteristics of language disorders
include improper use of words and their meanings, inability to express ideas,
inappropriate grammatical patterns, reduced vocabulary and inability to follow directions.
One or a combination of these characteristics may occur in children who are affected by
language learning disabilities or developmental language delay. Children may hear or see
a word but not be able to understand its meaning. They may have trouble getting others to
understand what they are trying to communicate.

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EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS

Because all communication disorders carry the potential to isolate individuals from their
social and educational surroundings, it is essential to find appropriate timely intervention.
While many speech and language patterns can be called "baby talk" and are part of a
young child's normal development, they can become problems if they are not outgrown
as expected. In this way an initial delay in speech and language or an initial speech
pattern can become a disorder which can cause difficulties in learning. Because of the
way the brain develops, it is easier to learn language and communication skills before the
age of 5. When children have muscular disorders, hearing problems or developmental
delays, their acquisition of speech, language and related skills is often affected.

Speech-language pathologists assist children who have communication disorders in

various ways. They provide individual therapy for the child; consult with the child's
teacher about the most effective ways to facilitate the child's communication in the class
setting; and work closely with the family to develop goals and techniques for effective
therapy in class and at home. Technology can help children whose physical conditions
make communication difficult. The use of electronic communication systems allow
nonspeaking people and people with severe physical disabilities to engage in the give and
take of shared thought.

Vocabulary and concept growth continues during the years children are in school.
Reading and writing are taught and, as students get older, the understanding and use of
language becomes more complex. Communication skills are at the heart of the education
experience. Speech and/or language therapy may continue throughout a student's school
year either in the form of direct therapy or on a consultant basis. The speech-language
pathologist may assist vocational teachers and counselors in establishing communication
goals related to the work experiences of students and suggest strategies that are effective
for the important transition from school to employment and adult life.

Communication has many components. All serve to increase the way people learn about
the world around them, utilize knowledge and skills, and interact with colleagues, family
and friends.
Expressive language disorder
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Expressive language disorder
Classification & external resources ICD-10 F80.1
ICD-9 315.31
Expressive language disorder (DSM 315.31) is a communication disorder which is
characterised by having a limited vocabulary and grasp of grammar. It is a general
language impairment that puts the person onto the level of a younger person.

As well as present speech production, very often, someone will have difficulty
remembering things. This memory problem is only disturbing for speech; non-verbal or
non-linguistically based memory will be unimpaired.

Expressive language disorder affects work and schooling in many ways. It is usually
treated by specific speech therapy, and usually cannot be expected to go away on its own.

Care must be taken to distinguish expressive language disorder from other

communication disorders, sensory-motor disturbances, intellectual disability and/or
environmental deprivation (see DSM-IV-TR criterion D). These factors affect a person's
speech and writing to certain predictable extents, and with certain differences.
Morphology is the field within linguistics that studies the internal structure of words.
(Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.) While words are
generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in
most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example,
English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dog-catcher are closely related.
English speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of
word-formation in English. They intuit that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog
is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect
specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how
those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics
that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages, and attempts to
formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.
Morphology is the field within linguistics that studies the internal structure of words.
(Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.) While words are
generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in
most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example,
English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dog-catcher are closely related.
English speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of
word-formation in English. They intuit that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog
is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect
specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how
those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics
that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages, and attempts to
formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

History
The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini
who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a
Constituency Grammar. The Graeco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in
morphological analysis.

The term morphology was coined by August Schleicher in 1859[1]

[edit] Fundamental concepts

[edit] Lexemes and word forms

The term "word" is ambiguous in common usage. To take up again the example of dog
vs. dogs, there is one sense in which these two are the same "word" (they are both nouns
that refer to the same kind of animal, differing only in number), and another sense in
which they are different words (they can't generally be used in the same sentences
without altering other words to fit; for example, the verbs is and are in The dog is happy
and The dogs are happy).
The distinction between these two senses of "word" is arguably the most important one in
morphology. The first sense of "word," the one in which dog and dogs are "the same
word," is called lexeme. The second sense is called word-form. We thus say that dog and
dogs are different forms of the same lexeme. Dog and dog-catcher, on the other hand, are
different lexemes; for example, they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a
word that is chosen conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a
lemma, or citation form.

[edit] Prosodic word vs. morphological word

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Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message.
This article has been tagged since February 2007.

There is yet another complication to using the term "word" in linguistic investigation: the
morphological word does not always correspond to a prosodic word (often called
phonological word).[2] This point involves the concept of word classes (popularly known
in the English speaking world as "parts of speech"). For virtually all languages, the native
grammatical tradition (where such exists) and modern linguistics both recognize that the
lexemes of the language in question belong to one of a small set of lexical classes
(categories of lexemes), such as "noun" and "verb".[3]

Some languages contain forms like the English he's. He's combines a noun and a verb -- it
is not a member of any single English word class. That being so, he's is not a
morphological "compound word" in the generally used sense of that term "compound
word". Yet it meets the standard criteria for a phonological word. The apostrophe "s"
allomorph of the word-form 'is' of the verb 'to be' is an enclitic attaching to a preceding
noun phrase when that noun phrase is the syntactic subject: e.g., "she's here", "Bobby's
leaving".

Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to
coincide with a single morphological word-form. In Latin, one way to express the
concept of 'NOUN-PHRASE1 and NOUN-PHRASE2' (as in "apples and oranges") is to
suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as it were. An extreme
level of this theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the
Kwak'wala language.[4] In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning
relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by
affixes instead of by independent "words". The three word English phrase, "with his
club", where 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes
a possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one word in many
languages. But affixation for semantic relations in Kwak'wala differs dramatically (from
the viewpoint of those whose language is not Kwak'wala) from such affixation in other
languages for this reason: the affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain
to semantically, but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in
Kwakw'ala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):[5]
kwixʔid-i-da bəgwanəmai-χ-a q�asa-s-isi t�alwagwayu
Morpheme by morpheme translation:

kwixʔid-i-da = clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER

bəgwanəma-χ-a = man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER

q�asa-s-is = otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3.PERSON.SINGULAR-POSSESSIVE

t�alwagwayu = club.

"the man clubbed the otter with his club"

(Notation notes:

1. accusative case marks an entity that something is done to.

2. determiners are words such as "the", "this", "that".

3. the concept of "pivot" is a theoretical construct that is not relevant to this discussion.)

That is, to the speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-
otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers -i-da (PIVOT-'the'), referring to man, attaches
not to bəgwanəma ('man'), but instead to the "verb"; the markers -χ-a
(ACCUSATIVE-'the'), referring to otter, attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q�asa
('otter'), etc. To summarize differently: a speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the
sentence to consist of these phonological words:

kwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q�asa s-isi-t�alwagwayu

"clubbed PIVOT-the-mani him-the-otter with-hisi-club

[edit] Inflection vs. word-formation

Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological
rules. Some morphological rules relate different forms of the same lexeme; while other
rules relate two different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called inflectional rules,
while those of the second kind are called word-formation. The English plural, as
illustrated by dog and dogs, is an inflectional rule; compounds like dog-catcher or
dishwasher provide an example of a word-formation rule. Informally, word-formation
rules form "new words" (that is, new lexemes), while inflection rules yield variant forms
of the "same" word (lexeme).

There is a further distinction between two kinds of word-formation: derivation and

compounding. Compounding is a process of word-formation that involves combining
complete word-forms into a single compound form; dog-catcher is therefore a compound,
because both dog and catcher are complete word-forms in their own right before the
compounding process has been applied, and are subsequently treated as one form.
Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes,
whereby the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. One example of derivation is
clear in this case: the word independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing
it with the derivational prefix in-, while dependent itself is derived from the verb depend.

The distinction between inflection and word-formation is not at all clear-cut. There are
many examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word-
formation. The next section will attempt to clarify this distinction.

[edit] Paradigms and morphosyntax

A paradigm is the complete set of related word-forms associated with a given lexeme.
The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of
nouns. Accordingly, the word-forms of a lexeme may be arranged conveniently into
tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense,
aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can
be organized into tables, using the categories of person (1st., 2nd., 3rd.), number (singular
vs. plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and case (subjective, objective, and
possessive). See English personal pronouns for the details.

The inflectional categories used to group word-forms into paradigms cannot be chosen
arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the
language. For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define
paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the
verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number
of the subject. In other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference
between dog and dogs, because the choice between these two forms determines which
form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however, no syntactic rule of English cares
about the difference between dog and dog-catcher, or dependent and independent. The
first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave
like any other noun or adjective behaves.

An important difference between inflection and word-formation is that inflected word-

forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of
syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word-formation are not restricted by any
corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax,
and word-formation is not. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between
syntax and morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and
paradigms, but not with word-formation or compounding.

[edit] Allomorphy
In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word-
forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats, and as dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy
applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning: in each pair, the first word
means "one of X", while the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the
plural form -s affixed to the second word, signaling the key distinction between singular
and plural entities.

One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this one-to-one

correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the
language. In English, we have word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, and
sheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way
that departs from the regular pattern, or is not signaled at all. Even cases considered
"regular", with the final -s, are not so simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same
way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, an "extra" vowel appears before the -s.
These cases, where the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", are
called allomorphy.

Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language,
and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules,
by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For
example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word
would result in the form *[dɪʃs], which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. In
order to "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural
marker, and [dɪʃəz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and
cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.

[edit] Lexical morphology

Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon, which,
morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it
concerns itself primarily with word-formation: derivation and compounding.

[edit] Models of morphology

There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture the
distinctions above in different ways. These are,

Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement approach.

Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-Process approach.
Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a Word-and-Paradigm approach.
Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is
very strong, it is not absolute.

[edit] Morpheme-based morphology

Inn,mn, morpheme-based morphology, word-forms are analyzed as arrangements of
morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a
word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend
is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.[6] In a word
like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. This way of
analyzing word-forms as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads
on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement.

The morpheme-based approach is the first one that beginners to morphology usually
think of, and which laymen tend to find the most obvious. This is so to such an extent that
very often beginners think that morphemes are an inevitable, fundamental notion of
morphology, and many five-minute explanations of morphology are, in fact, five-minute
explanations of morpheme-based morphology. This is, however, not so. The fundamental
idea of morphology is that the words of a language are related to each other by different
kinds of rules. Analyzing words as bjhjkhsequences of morphemes is a way of describing
these relations, but is not the only way. In actual academic linguistics, morpheme-based
morphology certainly has many adherents, but is by no means the dominant approach.

[edit] Lexeme-based morphology

Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of
analyzing a word-form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word-form is said
to be the result of applying rules that alter a word-form or stem in order to produce a new
one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a
word-form; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and
outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word-forms, and similarly outputs a
compound stem.

[edit] Word-based morphology

Word-based morphology is a (usually) Word-and-paradigm approach. This theory takes
paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word-
forms, or to generate word-forms from stems, word-based morphology states
generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point
behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the
other approaches. The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a
given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional
morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third
person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation,
since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-Process theories,
on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all too often assume
that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural,
but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm
approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules.
Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing
words and to new ones. Application of a pattern different than the one that has been used
historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older
follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing kine (where
cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation). While a Word-and-Paradigm approach
can explain this easily, other approaches have difficulty with phenomena such as this.
[edit] Morphological typology
Main article: Morphological typology
In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages
according to their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating,
and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have
lots of easily-separable morphemes; while others yet are inflectional or fusional, because
their inflectional morphemes are said to be "fused" together. This leads to one bound
morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. The classic example of an isolating
language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative language is Turkish; both
Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages.

Considering the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this
classification is not at all clear-cut, and many languages do not neatly fit any one of these
types, and some fit in more than one. A continuum of complex morphology of language
may be adapted when considering languages.

An interesting link that may prove to help in understanding more about linguistics is:
synchronic reality).

The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or
less match different categories in this typology. The Item-and-Arrangement approach fits
very naturally with agglutinative languages; while the Item-and-Process and Word-and-
Paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages.

The reader should also note that the classical typology also mostly applies to inflectional
morphology. There is very little fusion going on with word-formation. Languages may be
classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation, depending on the preferred
way of expressing notions that are not inflectional: either by using word-formation
(synthetic), or by using syntactic phrases (analytic).

[edit] Footnotes
^ Für die Lehre von der Wortform wähle ich das Wort "Morphologie" ("for the science of
word formation, I choose the term 'morphology'", Mémoires Acad. Impériale 7/1/7, 35)
^ For lengthy discussion of this issue, see Matthews, 1st ed., chapter 2, "Word, word-
form, and lexeme". Presumably this explication is repeated in the 2d ed.
^ Except for many Chomskyan linguists, linguists accept that the set of word classes is
not universal, but varies from language to language; for example, non-Chomskyan
linguists agree that Chinese and many other languages lack the lexical category,
"adjective". In such languages, the usual grammatical expression on an attribute (e.g.,
tall, green, moody) is an intransitive verb, sometimes called a 'stative verb'.
^ Formerly known as Kwakiutl, Kwak'wala belongs to the Northern branch of the
Wakashan language family. "Kwakiutl" is still used to refer to the tribe itself, along with
other terms.
^ Example taken from Foley 1998, using a modified transcription. This phenomenon of
Kwak'wala was reported by Jacobsen as cited in van Valin and La Polla 1997.
^ The existence of words like appendix and pending in English does not mean that the
English word depend is analyzed into a derivational prefix de- and a root pend. While all
those were indeed once related to each other by morphological rules, this was so only in
Latin, not in English. English borrowed the words from French and Latin, but not the
morphological rules that allowed Latin speakers to combine de- and the verb pendere 'to
hang' into the derivative dependere.
Affix
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Affixation)
Jump to: navigation, search
Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.An affix is a morpheme that is attached to
a base morpheme such as a root or to a stem, to form a word. Affixes may be derivational,
like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed.

Contents [hide]
1 Types of affixes
2 Lexical affixes
3 See also
4 Bibliography

[edit] Types of affixes

Affixes are divided into several types, depending on their position with reference to the
root:

Prefixes (attached before another morpheme)

Suffixes (attached after another morpheme)
Infixes (inserted within another morpheme) -- very much used in Borneo-Philippines
languages
Circumfixes (attached before and after another morpheme or set of morphemes)
Interfixes (semantically empty linking elements in compounds)
Suprafixes (also superfix, attached suprasegmentally to another morpheme)
Simulfixes (also transfix or root-and-pattern morphology, discontinuous affix interwoven
throughout a discontinuous base)
Duplifix (little used term referring to affix composed of both a reduplicated and non-
reduplicated element, see Reduplication and other processes)
Affixes are bound morphemes by definition. Prefixes and suffixes may be separable
affixes.

There also has been a proposal of a somewhat different type of affix, a disfix or
subtractive morpheme, which subtracts phonological segments from bases.

Affixes are central to the process of concatenation.

affix example
prefix undo
prefix-root
suffix looking
root-suffix
infix 1 (Tagalog Root: dugo blood) dinugo
ro<infix>ot
circumfix Kabyle: θissliθ "bride"
(compare to issli "groom")
circumfix>root<circumfix
suprafix produce (noun)
produce (verb)
(changing stress)

1 English tmeses, as in this example, are by some considered infixes. See Expletive
infixation.

[edit] Lexical affixes

Lexical affixes (or semantic affixes) are bound elements that appear as affixes, but
function as incorporated nouns within verbs and as elements of compound nouns. In other
words, they are similar to word roots/stems in function but similar to affixes in form.
Although similar to incorporated nouns, lexical affixes differ in that they never occur as
freestanding nouns, i.e. they always appear as affixes.

Lexical affixes are relatively rare. The Wakashan, Salishan, and Chimakuan languages all
have lexical suffixes — the presence of these is an areal feature of the Pacific Northwest
of the North America.

The lexical suffixes of these languages often show little to no resemblance to free nouns
with similar meanings. Compare the lexical suffixes and free nouns of Northern Straits
Saanich written in the Saanich orthography and in Americanist notation:

Lexical Suffix Noun

̶
-O, -aʔ "person" ,ELTÁL ṈEW̱ ʔəɬtelŋəxʷ "person"
̸
-NÁT -net "day" SCIĆEL skʷičəl "day"
-SEN -sən "foot, lower leg" SXENE, sx̣ənəʔ "foot, lower leg"
-ÁWTW̱ -ewtx̕ ʷ "building, house, campsite" ,Á,LEṈ ʔeʔləŋ "house"

Lexical suffixes when compared with free nouns often have a more generic or general
meaning. For instance, one of these languages may have a lexical suffix that means water
in a general sense, but it may not have any noun equivalent referring to water in general
and instead have several nouns with a more specific meaning (such "saltwater",
"whitewater", etc.). In other cases, the lexical suffixes have become grammaticalized to
various degrees.

Some linguists have claimed that these lexical suffixes provide only adverbial or
adjectival notions to verbs. Other linguists disagree arguing that they may additionally be
syntactic arguments just as free nouns are and thus equating lexical suffixes with
incorporated nouns. Gerdts (2003) gives examples of lexical suffixes in the Halkomelem
language (the word order here is Verb Subject Object):

VERB SUBJ OBJ

(1) niʔ šak’ʷ-ət-əs łə słeniʔ łə qeq
"the woman bathed the baby"

VERB+LEX.SUFF SUBJ
(2) niʔ šk’ʷ-əyəł łə słeniʔ
"the woman bathed the/a baby"

In sentence (1), the verb "bathe" is šak’ʷətəs where šak’ʷ- is the root and -ət and -əs are
inflectional suffixes. The subject "the woman" is łə słeniʔ and the object "the baby" is łə
qeq. In this sentence, "the baby" is a free noun. (The niʔ here is an auxiliary, which can
be ignored for explanatory purposes.)

In sentence (2), "the/a baby" does not appear as a free noun. Instead it appears as the
lexical suffix -əyəł which is affixed to the verb root šk’ʷ- (which has changed slightly in
pronunciation, but this can also be ignored here). Note how the lexical suffix may be
translated as either "the baby" (definite) or "a baby" (indefinite): this change in
definiteness is a common change in meaning that happens with incorporated nouns.

In linguistics, derivation is the process of creating new lexemes from other lexemes, for
example, by adding a derivational affix. It is a kind of word formation.

A derivational suffix usually applies to words of one syntactic category and changes them
into words of another syntactic category. For example, the English derivational suffix -ly
changes adjectives into adverbs (slow → slowly).

Some examples of English derivational suffixes:

adjective-to-noun: -ness (slow → slowness)

adjective-to-verb: -ise (modern → modernise)
noun-to-adjective: -al (recreation → recreational)
noun-to-verb: -fy (glory → glorify)
verb-to-adjective: -able (drink → drinkable)
verb-to-noun: -ance (deliver → deliverance)
Although derivational affixes do not necessarily modify the syntactic category, they
modify the meaning of the base. In many cases, derivational affixes change both the
syntactic category and the meaning: modern → modernize ("to make modern"). The
modification of meaning is sometimes predictable: Adjective + ness → the state of being
(Adjective); (stupid→ stupidness).

A prefix (write → re-write; lord → over-lord) will rarely change syntactic category in
English. The derivational prefix un- applies to adjectives (healthy → unhealthy), some
verbs (do → undo), but rarely nouns. A few exceptions are the prefixes en- and be-. En-
(em- before labials) is usually used as a transitive marker on verbs, but can also be
applied to adjectives and nouns to form transitive verb: circle (verb) → encircle (verb);
but rich (adj) → enrich (verb), large (adj) → enlarge (verb), rapture (noun) → enrapture
(verb), slave (noun) → enslave(verb). The prefix be-, though not as productive as it once
was in English, can function in a similar way to en- to mark transitivity, but can also be
attached to nouns, often in a causative or privative sense: siege (noun) → besiege (verb),
jewel (noun) → bejewel (verb), head (noun) → behead (verb).

Note that derivational affixes are bound morphemes. In that, derivation differs from
compounding, by which free morphemes are combined (lawsuit, Latin professor). It also
differs from inflection in that inflection does not change a word's syntactic category and
creates not new lexemes but new word forms (table → tables; open → opened).

Derivation may occur without any change of form, for example telephone (noun) and to
telephone. This is known as conversion. Some linguists consider that when a word's
syntactic category is changed without any change of form, a null morpheme is being
affixed.

This article is about inflection in linguistics. For inflection in mathematics, see Inflection
point.
Not to be confused with intonation.

Inflection of the Spanish lexeme for "cat", with blue representing the masculine gender,
pink representing the feminine gender, grey representing the form used for mixed-gender,
and green representing the plural number. The singular is unmarked.In grammar,
inflection or inflexion is the modification or marking of a word (or more precisely
lexeme) to reflect grammatical (that is, relational) information, such as gender, tense,
number or person. The concept of a "word" independent of the different inflections is
called a lexeme, and the form of a word that is considered to have no or minimal
inflection is called a lemma. An organized list of the inflected forms of a given lexeme is
called an inflectional paradigm.

Examples in English
In English many nouns are inflected for number with the inflectional plural affix -s (as in
"dog" → "dog-s"), and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional
past tense affix -ed (as in "call" → "call-ed").

English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the third person singular in the present
tense (with -s), and the present participle (with -ing). English short adjectives are
inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms (with -er and -est respectively).
In addition, English also shows inflection by ablaut (mostly in verbs) and umlaut (mostly
in nouns), as well the odd long-short vowel alternation. For example:

Write, wrote, written (ablaut, and also suffixing in the participle)

Sing, sang, sung (ablaut)
Foot, feet (umlaut)
Mouse, mice (umlaut)
Child, children (vowel alternation, and also suffixing in the plural)
In the past, writers sometimes gave words such as doctor, Negro, dictator, professor, and
orator Latin inflections to mark them as feminine, thus forming doctress, Negress,
dictatrix, professress, and oratress. These inflected forms were never frequently used,
although many English users continue to use Latin endings today in somewhat more
common constructions such as actress, waitress, executrix, and dominatrix.

German, which is related to English, employs many of these inflectional devices, but
Umlaut and Ablaut are widespread, while in English they are considered more like
exceptions.

[edit] Declension and conjugation

Two traditional grammatical terms refer to inflections of specific word classes:

Declension: inflection of nouns, and often pronouns, adjectives, and determiners as well;
often involving number, case, and/or gender; and
Conjugation: inflection of verbs, often involving tense, mood, voice, and/or aspect, as
well as agreement with one or more arguments in number, gender, and/or person.
Below is an example of a noun declension of the Latin noun vir 'man'. It is inflected for
case and number with suffixes.

Singular Plural
Nom. vir vir-ī
Gen. vir-ī vir-ōrum
Dat. vir-ō vir-īs
Acc. vir-um vir-ōs
Abl. vir-ō vir-īs

Below is a conjugation of the verb hi 'arrive' in Lakota. It is inflected for person with
prefixes and for number with the suffix -pi.

Singular (/dual) Plural

1st wa-hi 'I arrive' -
Inclusive (dual) ų-hi 'you & I arrive' ų-hi-pi 'we arrive'
2nd ya-hi 'you arrive' ya-hi-pi 'you all arrive'
3rd hi 'he arrives' hi-pi 'they arrive'
However, these two terms seem to be biased toward well-known dependent-marking
languages (such as Spanish, Latin, German, Russian, Japanese etc.). In dependent-
marking languages, nouns in adpositional phrases can carry inflectional morphemes.
(Adpositions include prepositions and postpositions.) In head-marking languages, the
adpositions can carry the inflection in adpositional phrases. This means that these
languages will have inflected adpositions. In Western Apache (San Carlos dialect), the
postposition -ká’ 'on' is inflected for person and number with prefixes.

Singular Dual Plural

1st shi-ká’ 'on me' noh-ká’ 'on us two' da-noh-ká’ 'on us'
2nd ni-ká’ 'on you' nohwi-ká’ 'on you two' da-nohwi-ká’ 'on you all'
3rd bi-ká’ 'on him' - da-bi-ká’ 'on them'

Traditional grammars have specific terms for inflections of nouns and verbs, but not for
adpositions.

[edit] Inflection vs. derivation

Main article: Derivation (linguistics)
Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes (atomic meaning units) to a
word, which may indicate grammatical information (for example, case, number, person,
gender or word class, mood, tense, or aspect). Compare with derivational morphemes,
which create a new word from an existing word, sometimes by simply changing
grammatical category (for example, changing a noun to a verb).

Words generally do not appear in dictionaries with inflectional morphemes. But they
often do appear with derivational morphemes. For instance, English dictionaries list
readable and readability, words with derivational suffixes, along with their root read.
However, no traditional English dictionary will list book as one entry and books as a
separate entry nor will they list jump and jumped as two different entries.

In some languages, inflected words do not appear in a fundamental form (the root
morpheme) except in dictionaries and grammars.

[edit] Inflectional morphology

Main article: Inflectional morphology
Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called inflectional
languages. Morphemes may be added in several different ways:

Affixation, or simply adding morphemes onto the word without changing the root,
Reduplication, doubling all or part of a word to change its meaning,
Alternation, exchanging one sound for another in the root (usually vowel sounds, as in
the ablaut process found in Germanic strong verbs and the umlaut often found in nouns,
among others).
Suprasegmental variations, such as of stress, pitch or tone, where no sounds are added or
changed but the intonation and relative strength of each sound is altered regularly. For an
example, see Initial-stress-derived noun.
Affixing includes prefixing (adding before the base), and suffixing (adding after the
base), as well as the much less common infixing (inside) and circumfixing (a
combination of prefix and suffix).

Inflection is most typically realized by adding an inflectional morpheme (that is,

affixation) to the base form (either the root or a stem).

[edit] Relation to morphological typology

Main article: morphological typology
Inflection is sometimes confused with synthesis in languages. The two terms are related
but not the same. Languages are broadly classified morphologically into analytic and
synthetic categories, or more realistically along a continuum between the two extremes.
Analytic languages isolate meaning into individual words, whereas synthetic languages
create words not found in the dictionary by fusing or agglutinating morphemes,
sometimes to the extent of having a whole sentence's worth of meaning in a single word.
Inflected languages by definition fall into the synthetic category, though not all synthetic
languages need be inflected.

[edit] Inflection in various languages

[edit] Uralic languages

The Uralic languages (comprising Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic) are agglutinative
languages, following from the agglutination in Proto-Uralic. The largest languages are
Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, all European Union official languages. Uralic inflection
is, or is developed from, affixing. Grammatical markers directly added to the word
perform the same function as prepositions in English. Almost all words are inflected
according to their roles in the sentence: verbs, nouns, pronouns, numerals, adjectives, and
some particles.

Hungarian and Finnish, in particular, often simply concatenate suffixes. For example,
Finnish talossanikinko "in my house, too?" consists of talo-ssa-ni-kin-ko. However, in the
Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Sami), there are processes which affect the root,
particularly consonant gradation. The original suffixes may disappear (and appear only
by liaison), leaving behind the modification of the root. This process is extensively
developed in Estonian and Sami, and makes them also inflected, not only agglutinating
languages. The Estonian accusative case, for example, is expressed by a modified root:
maja →majja (historical form *majam).

[edit] Indo-European languages

All Indo-European languages, such as Albanian, English, German, Russian, Persian
(Fârsi), Spanish, French, Sanskrit, and Hindi are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. In
general, older Indo-European languages such as Latin, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, and
more prominently Greek and Sanskrit in all their historical forms, are extensively
inflected. Deflexion caused newer languages such as English and French to lose much of
their historical inflection. Afrikaans, an extremely young language, is almost completely
uninflected and borders on being analytic. Some branches of Indo-European (for
example, the Slavic languages, the Celtic languages, and the Romance languages) have
generally retained more inflection than others (such as many Germanic languages, with
the notable exception of Icelandic).

[edit] English
Old English was a moderately inflected language, using an extensive case system similar
to that of modern Icelandic or German. Middle and Modern English lost progressively
more of the Old English inflectional system. Modern English is considered a weakly
inflected language, since its nouns have only vestiges of inflection (plurals, the
pronouns), and its regular verbs have only four forms: an inflected form for the past
indicative and subjunctive (looked), an inflected form for the third-person-singular
present indicative (looks), an inflected form for the present participle (looking), and an
uninflected form for everything else (look). While the English possessive indicator 's (as
in "Jane's book") is a remnant of the Old English genitive case suffix, it is now not a
suffix but a clitic. See also Declension in English.

[edit] Other Germanic languages

Old Norse was inflected, but modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish have, like English,
lost almost all inflection. Icelandic preserves almost all of the inflections of Old Norse
and has added its own. Modern German remains moderately inflected, retaining four
noun cases, although the genitive began falling into disuse in the late 20th century in all
but formal writing, inspiring the title of the 2004 bestseller Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein
Tod ("the dative is the death of the genitive", using the dative where archaic or formal
writing would use the genitive). The case system of Dutch, simpler than German's, is also
becoming more simplified in common usage. Afrikaans, recognized as a distinct language
in its own right rather than a Dutch dialect only in the early 20th century, has lost almost
all inflection.

[edit] Latin and Romance languages

The Romance languages, such as Spanish, Italian, French, and Romanian, have more
inflection than English, especially in verb conjugation. A single morpheme usually carries
information about person, number, tense, aspect and mood, and the verb paradigm may
be quite complex. Adjectives, nouns and articles are considerably less inflected, but they
still have different forms according to number and grammatical gender.
Latin was even more inflected; nouns and adjectives had different forms according to
their grammatical case (with several patterns of declension, and three genders instead of
the two found in most Romance tongues), and there were synthetic perfective and passive
voice verb forms.

[edit] East Asian languages

Some of the major Eastern Asian languages (such as the various Chinese languages,
Vietnamese, and Thai) are not inflected, or show very little inflection (though they used
to show more), so they are considered analytic languages (also known as isolating
languages).

[edit] Japanese
Japanese shows a high degree of inflection on verbs, less so on adjectives, and very little
on nouns, but it is always strictly agglutinative and extremely regular. Formally, every
noun phrase must be marked for case, but this is done by invariable particles (clitic
postpositions). (Many grammarians consider Japanese particles to be separate words, and
therefore not an inflection, while others consider agglutination a type of inflection, and
therefore consider Japanese nouns inflected.)

[edit] Basque
Basque, a language isolate, is an extremely inflected language, heavily inflecting both
nouns and verbs. A Basque noun is inflected in 17 different ways for case, multiplied by 4
ways for its definiteness and number. These first 68 forms are further modified based on
other parts of the sentence, which in turn are inflected for the noun again. It is been
estimated that at two levels of recursion, a Basque noun may have 458,683 inflected
forms (Agirre et al, 1992). Verb forms are similarly complex, agreeing with the subject,
the direct object and several other arguments.

[edit] Auxiliary languages

Many auxiliary languages have very simple inflectional systems. Interlingua, in contrast
with the Romance languages, has no irregular verb conjugations, and its verb forms are
the same for all persons and numbers. It does, however, have compound verb tenses
similar to those in the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages: ille ha vivite, "he has
lived"; illa habeva vivite, "she had lived". Nouns are inflected by number, taking a plural
-s, but rarely by gender: only when referring to a male or female being. Interlingua has no
noun-adjective agreement by gender, number, or case. As a result, adjectives ordinarily
have no inflections. They may take the plural form if they are being used in place of a
noun: le povres, "the poor".

Morpheme
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has
semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes, the
smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound.

The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes cannot stand
as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand alone, or bound if it is used
exclusively alongside a free morpheme. Its actual phonetic representation is the morph,
with the morphs representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs.

English example:
The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-" (meaning not x), a bound
morpheme; "-break-", a free morpheme; and "-able", a bound morpheme. "un-" is also a
prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes.

The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s" in cats ([kæts]), but "-es" in dishes ([diʃɪz]),
and even the voiced s, [z], in dogs ([dogz]). These are the allomorphs of "-s". It might
even change entirely into -ren in children.

Contents [hide]
1 Types of morphemes
1.1 Other variants
2 Morphological analysis
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Types of morphemes

Free morphemes like town, dog can appear with other lexemes (as in town hall or dog
house) or they can stand alone, i.e. "free".
Bound morphemes (or affixes) like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to
form a lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes.
Unproductive, non-affix morphemes that exist only in bound form are known as
"cranberry" morphemes, from the "cran" in that very word.
Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on (as in the dog
morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme s becomes dogs).
Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the
addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness."
Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes
realized as [-z], [-s] or [- ɪz].

[edit] Other variants

Null morpheme
Root morpheme
Prefix morpheme
Suffix morpheme

[edit] Morphological analysis

In natural language processing for Japanese, Chinese and other languages, morphological
analysis is the process of segmenting a given sentence into a row of morphemes. It is
closely related to Part-of-speech tagging, but word segmentation is required for these
languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces. Famous Japanese
morphological analysts include Juman and Chasen.

Lexeme
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly
corresponds to a set of words that are different forms of the same word. For example, in
the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme,
conventionally written as RUN.[1] A related concept is the lemma (or citation form),
which is a particular form of a lexeme that is chosen by convention to represent a
canonical form of a lexeme. Lemmas are used in dictionaries as the headwords, and other
forms of a lexeme are often listed later in the entry if they are unusual in some way.

A lexeme belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a particular meaning (semantic

value), and in inflecting languages, has a corresponding inflectional paradigm; that is, a
lexeme in many languages will have many different forms. For example, the lexeme
RUN has a present third person singular form runs, a present non-third-person-singular
form run (which also functions as the past participle and non-finite form), a past form
ran, and a present participle running. (It does not include runner, runners, runnable, etc.)
The use of the forms of a lexeme is governed by rules of grammar; in the case of English
verbs such as RUN, these include subject-verb agreement and compound tense rules,
which determine which form of a verb can be used in a given sentence.

A lexicon consists of lexemes.

In many formal theories of language, lexemes have subcategorization frames to account

for the number and types of complements they occur with in sentences and other
syntactic structures.

The notion of a lexeme is very central to morphology, and thus, many other notions can
be defined in terms of it. For example, the difference between inflection and derivation
can be stated in terms of lexemes:

Inflectional rules relate a lexeme to its forms.

Derivational rules relate a lexeme to another lexeme.

[edit] Composition
Lexemes are often decomposed into smaller units called morphemes, according to root
morpheme + derivational morphemes + desinence (not necessarily in this order), where:
The root morpheme is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most
significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller
constituents.[2]
The derivational morphemes carry only derivational information.[3]
The desinence is composed of all inflectional morphemes, and carries only inflectional
information.[4]
The compound root morpheme + derivational morphemes is often called the stem.[5] The
decomposition stem + desinence can then be used to study inflection.

Null morpheme
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In morpheme-based morphology, a null morpheme is a morpheme that is realized by a
phonologically null affix (an empty string of phonological segments). In simpler terms, a
null morpheme is an "invisible" affix. It's also called zero morpheme; the process of
adding a null morpheme is called null affixation, null derivation or zero derivation. The
concept was first used over two thousand years ago by Pāṇini in his Sanskrit grammar.
(Some linguists object to the notion of a null morpheme, since it sets up (they say) an
unverifiable distinction between a "null" or "zero" element, and nothing at all.)

The null morpheme is represented as either the figure zero (0), the empty set symbol ø, or
its variant Ø.

Examples in English include hiatus and co-operation.

The existence of a null morpheme in a word can also be theorized by contrast with other
forms of the same word showing alternate morphemes. For example, the singular number
of English nouns is shown by a null morpheme that contrasts with the plural morpheme
-s.

cat = cat + -Ø = ROOT ("cat") + SINGULAR

cats = cat + -s = ROOT ("cat") + PLURAL
In addition, there are some cases in English where a null morpheme indicates plurality in
nouns that take on irregular plurals.

sheep = sheep + -Ø = ROOT ("sheep") + SINGULAR

sheep = sheep + -Ø = ROOT ("sheep") + PLURAL
Also, a null morpheme marks the present tense of verbs in all forms but the third person
singular:

(I) run = run + -Ø = ROOT ("run") + PRESENT: Non-3rd-SING

(He) runs = run + -s = ROOT ("run") + PRESENT: 3rd-SING
According to some linguists' view, it's also a null morpheme that turns some English
adjectives into verbs of the kind of to clean, to slow, to warm. Null derivation, also
known as conversion if the word class changes, is very common in English.
In languages that show the above distinctions, it's quite common to employ null affixation
to (not) mark singular number, present tense and third persons (English is unusual in its
marking of the third person singular with a non-zero morpheme, by contrast with a null
morpheme for others). It's also frequent to find null affixation for the least-marked cases
(the nominative in nominative-accusative languages, and the absolutive in ergative-
absolutive languages).

A basic radical element plus a null morpheme is not the same as an uninflected word,
though usage may make those equal in practice.

Morphophonology
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Morphophonology (also morphophonemics, morphonology) is a branch of linguistics
which studies:

The phonological structure of morphemes.

The combinatory phonic modifications of morphemes which happen when they are
combined
The alternative series which serve a morphological function.
Examples of a morphophonological alternatives in English include these distinctions:

Plurals "-es" and "-s", as in "bus, buses", vs. "bun, buns".

Plural of "-f" is "-ves", as in "leaf, leaves"
Different pronunciations for the past tense marker "-ed".
English, being mostly an isolating language, does not have much morphophonology.
Inflected and agglutinating languages may have extremely complicated systems, e.g.
consonant gradation.

[edit] Orthographic context

The English plural morpheme s is written the same regardless of its pronunciation: cats,
dogs. This is a morphophonemic spelling. If English used a purely phonemic
orthography, these would instead be spelled cats and dogz, because /s/ and /z/ are separate
phonemes in English.

To some extent English orthography reflects the etymology of its words, and as such it is
partially morphophonemic. This explains not only cats /s/ and dogs /z/, but also science
/saɪ/ vs. unconscious /ʃ/, prejudice /prɛ/ vs. prequel /pri/, chased /t/ vs. loaded /əd/, sign
/saɪn/ signature /sɪɡn/, nation /neɪ/ vs. nationalism /næ/, and special /spɛ/ vs. species
/spi/, etc.

Most morphophonemic orthographies, however, reflect only active morphology, like cats
vs. dogs, or chased vs. loaded. Turkish and German both have broadly phonemic writing
systems, but while German is morphophonemic, transcribing the "underlying" phonemes,
Turkish is purely phonemic, transcribing surface phonemes only (at least traditionally;
this appears to be changing). For example, Turkish has two words, /et/ 'meat' and /et/ 'to
do', which in isolation appear to be homonyms. However, when a vowel follows, the
roots diverge: /eti/ 'his meat', but /edir/ 'he does'. In Turkish when a root that ends in a /d/
appears without a following vowel, the /d/ becomes /t/, and that is reflected in the
spelling: et, et, eti, edir.

German has a similar relationship between /t/ and /d/. The words for 'bath' and 'advice'
are /bat/ and /rat/, but the verbal forms are /badən/ 'to bathe' and /ratən/ 'to advise'.
However, they are spelled Bad, baden and Rat, raten as if the consonants didn't change at
all. Indeed, a speaker may perceive that the final consonant in Bad is different from the
final consonant of Rat because the inflections differ, even though they are pronounced the
same. A morphophonemic orthography such as this has the advantage of maintaining the
orthographic shape of the root regardless of the inflection, which aids in recognition
while reading.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, pipes (| |) are used to indicate a morphophonemic

rather than phonemic representation.

Table. The underlying, phonemic, and phonetic representations of German and Turkish
words. The forms in boldface are the ones chosen for the official orthographies.
word morpho-
phonemic phonemic phonetic
German Bad |bad| /bat/ [bat]
baden |badən| /badən/ [badən]
Rat |rat| /rat/ [ʀat]
raten |ratən| /ratən/ [ʀatən]
Turkish et |ed| /et/ [ɛt]
et |et| /et/ [ɛt]
edir |edUr| /edir/ [edir]
eti |etU| /eti/ [eti]

(In the Turkish examples, |U| represents an underlying high vowel that may surface as
any one of the four phonemes /i y ɯ u/.)

Another example of a morphophonemic orthography is modern Hangul, even more so the

obsolete North Korean Chosŏn-ŏ sinch'ŏlchabŏp orthography.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphophonology"

Phoneme
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
In human language, a phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes meaning.
Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but abstractions of them. An
example of a phoneme would be the /t/ found in words like tip, stand, writer, and cat.
In sign languages, the basic movements were formerly called cheremes (or cheiremes),
but usage changed to phoneme.

Some linguists (e.g. Roman Jakobson) consider phonemes to be further decomposable

into features, such features being the true minimal constituents of language. Features as
opposed to phonemes however overlap each other in time. A phoneme could be seen as a
contemporaneous bundle of features.

A phoneme can include slightly different sounds or phones. For instance, the p sound in
the words pin and spin is pronounced differently, but is still considered the single /p/
phoneme. Two phones that belong to the same phoneme are called allophones. A common
test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phones relies on finding
so-called minimal pairs: words that differ only by the phones in question.

Contents [hide]
1 Background and related ideas
1.1 Notation
1.2 Examples
2 Restricted phonemes
3 Neutralization, archiphoneme, underspecification
4 Phonological extremes
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Background and related ideas

In ancient India, the Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini (c. 520–460 BC), in his text of Sanskrit
grammar, the Shiva Sutras, originated the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and
the root. The Shiva Sutras describes a phonemic notational system in the fourteen initial
lines of the Aṣṭādhyāyī. The notational system introduces different clusters of phonemes
that serve special roles in the morphology of Sanskrit, and are referred to throughout the
text.

Around the 1st century CE, the definitions of phoneme (oliyam) and alphabet (ezuththu)
were discussed in the Tolkāppiyam concerning the Tamil language.

The term phonème was reportedly first used by Dufriche-Desgenettes in 1873, but it
referred to only a sound of speech. The term phoneme as an abstraction was developed by
the Polish linguist Jan Mieczysław Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj
Kruszewski during 1875-1895. The term used by these two was fonema, the basic unit of
what they called psychophonetics. The concept of the phoneme was elaborated in the
works of Nikolai Trubetzkoi and other of the Prague School (during the years 1926-
1935), as well as in that of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, and
Leonard Bloomfield. Later, it was also used in generative linguistics, most famously by
Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, and remains central in any accounts of the
development of virtually all modern schools of phonology.

Some languages make use of pitch for phonemic distinction. In this case, the tones used
are called tonemes. Some languages distinguish words made up of the same phonemes
(and tonemes) by using different durations of some elements, which are called
chronemes. However, not all scholars working on languages with distinctive duration use
this term.

Usually, long vowels and consonants are represented either by a length indicator or
doubling of the symbol in question.

In sign languages, phonemes may be classified as Tab (elements of location, from Latin
tabula), Dez (the hand shape, from designator), Sig (the motion, from signation), and with
some researchers, Ori (orientation). Facial expressions and mouthing are also phonemic.

[edit] Notation
A transcription that only indicates the different phonemes of a language is said to be
phonemic. Such transcriptions are enclosed within virgules (slashes), / /; these show that
each enclosed symbol is claimed to be phonemically meaningful. On the other hand, a
transcription that indicates finer detail, including allophonic variation like the two
English L's, is said to be phonetic, and is enclosed in square brackets, [ ].

The common notation used in linguistics employs virgules (slashes) (/ /) around the
symbol that stands for the phoneme. For example, the phoneme for the initial consonant
sound in the word "phoneme" would be written as /f/. In other words, the graphemes are
<ph>, but this digraph represents one sound /f/. Allophones, more phonetically specific
descriptions of how a given phoneme might be commonly instantiated, are often denoted
in linguistics by the use of diacritical or other marks added to the phoneme symbols and
then placed in square brackets ([ ]) to differentiate them from the phoneme in slant
brackets (/ /). The conventions of orthography are then kept separate from both phonemes
and allophones by the use of angle brackets < > to enclose the spelling.

The symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and extended sets adapted to a
particular language are often used by linguists to write phonemes of oral languages, with
the principle being one symbol equals one categorical sound. Due to problems displaying
some symbols in the early days of the Internet, systems such as X-SAMPA and
Kirshenbaum were developed to represent IPA symbols in plain text. As of 2004, any
modern web browser can display IPA symbols (as long as the operating system provides
the appropriate fonts), and we use this system in this article.

The only published set of phonemic symbols for a sign language is the Stokoe notation
developed for American Sign Language, which has since been applied to British Sign
Language by Kyle and Woll, and to Australian Aboriginal sign languages by Adam
Kendon. However, there are several phonetic systems, such as SignWriting.

[edit] Examples
Examples of phonemes in the English language would include sounds from the set of
English consonants, like /p/ and /b/. These two are most often written consistently with
one letter for each sound. However, phonemes might not be so apparent in written
English, such as when they are typically represented with combined letters, called
digraphs, like <sh> (pronounced /ʃ/) or <ch> (pronounced /tʃ/).

To see a list of the phonemes in the English language, see IPA for English.

Two sounds that may be allophones (sound variants belonging to the same phoneme) in
one language may belong to separate phonemes in another language or dialect. In
English, for example, /p/ has aspirated and non-aspirated allophones:aspirated as in /pɪn/,
and non-aspirated as in /spɪn/. However, in many languages (e. g. Chinese), aspirated /pʰ/
is a phoneme distinct from unaspirated /p/. As another example, there is no distinction
between [r] and [l] in Japanese, there is only one /r/ phoneme in Japanese, although the
Japanese /r/ has allophones that make it sound more like an /l/, /d/ (specifically the
flapped form [ɾ]), or /r/ to English speakers. The sounds /z/ and /s/ are distinct phonemes
in English, but allophones in Spanish. /n/ (as in run) and /ŋ/ (as in rung) are phonemes in
English, but allophones in Italian and Spanish.

An important phoneme is the chroneme, a phonemically-relevant extension of the

duration a consonant or vowel. Some languages or dialects such as Finnish or Japanese
allow chronemes after both consonants and vowels. Others, like Italian or Australian
English use it after only one (in the case of Italian, consonants; in the case of Australian,
vowels).

[edit] Restricted phonemes

A restricted phoneme is a phoneme that can only occur in a certain environment: There
are restrictions as to where it can occur. English has several restricted phonemes:

/ŋ/, as in sing, occurs only at the end of a syllable, never at the beginning (in many other
languages, such as Swahili, /ŋ/ can appear word-initially).
/h/ occurs only before vowels and at the beginning of a syllable, never at the end (a few
languages, such as Arabic, or Romanian allow /h/ syllable-finally).
In many American dialects with the cot-caught merger, /ɔ/ occurs only before /r/, /l/, and
in the diphthong /ɔɪ/.
In non-rhotic dialects, /r/ can only occur before a vowel, never at the end of a word or
before a consonant.
Under most interpretations, /w/ and /j/ occur only before a vowel, never at the end of a
syllable. However, many phonologists interpret a word like boy as either /bɔɪ/ or /bɔj/.
[edit] Neutralization, archiphoneme, underspecification
Main article: Underspecification
Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all
environments. In the environments where they don't contrast, the contrast is said to be
neutralized.

In English there are three nasal phonemes, /m, n, ŋ/, as shown by the minimal triplet,

/sʌm/ sum
/sʌn/ sun
/sʌŋ/ sung

However, with rare exceptions, these sounds are not contrastive before plosives such as
/p, t, k/ within the same morpheme. Although all three phones appear before plosives, for
example in limp, lint, link, only one of these may appear before each of the plosives. That
is, the /m, n, ŋ/ distinction is neutralized before each of the plosives /p, t, k/:

Only /m/ occurs before /p/,

only /n/ before /t/, and
only /ŋ/ before /k/.
Thus these phonemes are not contrastive in these environments, and according to some
theorists, there is no evidence as to what the underlying representation might be. If we
hypothesize that we are dealing with only a single underlying nasal, there is no reason to
pick one of the three phonemes /m, n, ŋ/ over the other two.

(In some languages there is only one phonemic nasal anywhere, and due to obligatory
assimilation, it surfaces as [m, n, ŋ] in just these environments, so this idea is not as far-
fetched as it might seem at first glance.)

In certain schools of phonology, such a neutralized distinction is known as an

archiphoneme (Nikolai Trubetzkoy of the Prague school is often associated with this
analysis.). Archiphonemes are often notated with a capital letter. Following this
convention, the neutralization of /m, n, ŋ/ before /p, t, k/ could be notated as |N|, and
limp, lint, link would be represented as |lɪNp, lɪNt, lɪNk|. (The |pipes| indicate underlying
representation.) Other ways this archiphoneme could be notated are |m-n-ŋ|, {m, n, ŋ}, or
|n*|.

Another example from American English is the neutralization of the plosives /t, d/
following a stressed syllable. Phonetically, both are realized in this position as [ɾ], a
voiced alveolar flap. This can be heard by comparing writer with rider (for the sake of
simplicity, Canadian raising is not taken into account).

[ɻaɪˀt] write
[ɻaɪd] ride

with the suffix -er:

['ɻaɪɾɚ] writer
['ɻaɪɾɚ] rider

Thus, one cannot say whether the underlying representation of the intervocalic consonant
in either word is /t/ or /d/ without looking at the unsuffixed form. This neutralization can
be represented as an archiphoneme |D|, in which case the underlying representation of
writer or rider would be |'ɻaɪDɚ|.

Another way to talk about archiphonemes involves the concept of underspecification:

phonemes can be considered fully specified segments while archiphonemes are
underspecified segments. In Tuvan, phonemic vowels are specified with the features of
tongue height, backness, and lip rounding. The archiphoneme |U| is an underspecified
high vowel where only the tongue height is specified.

phoneme/
archiphoneme height backness roundedness
/i/ high front unrounded
/ɯ/ high back unrounded
/u/ high back rounded
|U| high

Whether |U| is pronounced as front or back and whether rounded or unrounded depends
on vowel harmony. If |U| occurs following a front unrounded vowel, it will be
pronounced as the phoneme /i/; if following a back unrounded vowel, it will be as an /ɯ/;
and if following a back rounded vowel, it will be an /u/. This can been seen in the
following words:

-|Um| 'my' (the vowel of this suffix is underspecified)

|idikUm| → [idikim] 'my boot' (/i/ is front & unrounded)
|xarUm| → [xarɯm] 'my snow' (/a/ is back & unrounded)
|nomUm| → [nomum] 'my book' (/o/ is back & rounded)

Not all phonologists accept the concept of archiphonemes. Many doubt that it reflects
how people process language or control speech, and some argue that archiphonemes add
unnecessary complexity.

[edit] Phonological extremes

Of all the sounds that a human vocal tract can create, different languages vary
considerably in the number of these sounds that are considered to be distinctive
phonemes in the speech of that language. Ubyx and Arrernte have only two phonemic
vowels, while at the other extreme, the Bantu language Ngwe has fourteen vowel
qualities, twelve of which may occur long or short, for twenty-six oral vowels, plus six
nasalized vowels, long and short, for thirty-eight vowels; while !Xóõ achieves thirty-one
pure vowels—not counting vowel length, which it also has—by varying the phonation.
Rotokas has only six consonants, while !Xóõ has somewhere in the neighborhood of
seventy-seven, and Ubyx eighty-one. French has no phonemic tone or stress, while
several of the Kam-Sui languages have nine tones, and one of the Kru languages, Wobe,
has been claimed to have fourteen, though this is disputed. The total phonemic inventory
in languages varies from as few as eleven in Rotokas to as many as 112 in !Xóõ
(including four tones). These may range from familiar sounds like [t], [s], or [m] to very
unusual ones produced in extraordinary ways (see: Click consonant, phonation, airstream
mechanism). The English language itself uses a rather large set of thirteen to twenty-two
vowels, including diphthongs, though its twenty-two to twenty-six consonants are close
to average. (There are twenty-one consonant and five vowel letters in the English
alphabet, but this does not correspond to the number of consonant and vowel sounds.)

The most common vowel system consists of the five vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/. The most
common consonants are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/. Very few languages lack one of these: Arabic
lacks /p/, standard Hawaiian lacks /t/, Mohawk lacks /p/ and /m/, Hupa lacks both /p/ and
a simple /k/, colloquial Samoan lacks /t/ and /n/, while Rotokas and Quileute lack /m/ and
/n/. While most of these languages have very small inventories, Quileute and Hupa have
quite complex consonant systems.

Sememe (Greek semaino - mean, signify) - semantical language unit of meaning,

correlative to morpheme.

A sememe is a proposed unit of transmitted or intended meaning; it is atomic or

indivisible. A sememe can be the meaning expressed by a morpheme, such as the English
pluralizing morpheme -s, which carries the sememic feature [+ plural]. Alternately, a
single sememe (for example [go] or [move]) can be conceived as the abstract
representation of such verbs as skate, roll, jump, slide, turn, or boogie. It can be thought
of as the semantic counterpart to any of the following: a meme in a culture of ideas, a
gene in a genetic makeup, or an atom (or, more specifically, an elementary particle) in a
substance.

There are five type of sememes, 2 denotational and 3 conotational, while conotational are
occurring only in phrase units (they do not reflect the denotat ):[1]

Denotational 1: Straight denotation, for example "head" (body);

Denotational 2: Secondary, denotation by resemblance with other denotation: "head"
(ship);
Conotational 1:
Conotational 2:
Conotational 3:
Phonology
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For the journal, see Phonology (journal).
Linguistics
Theoretical linguistics
Phonetics
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Semantics
Lexical semantics
Statistical semantics
Structural semantics
Prototype semantics
Pragmatics

Applied linguistics
Language acquisition
Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Linguistic anthropology
Generative linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
Computational linguistics
Descriptive linguistics
Historical linguistics
Comparative linguistics
Etymology
Stylistics
Prescription

History of linguistics
List of linguists
Unsolved problems
Phonology (Greek φωνή (phōnē), voice, sound + λόγος (lógos), word, speech, subject of
discussion), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific
language (or languages). Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and
perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within
a given language or across languages.

An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a
language. In English, for example, /p/ and /b/ are distinctive units of sound, (i.e., they are
phonemes / the difference is phonemic, or phonematic). This can be seen from minimal
pairs such as "pin" and "bin", which mean different things, but differ only in one sound.
On the other hand, /p/ is often pronounced differently depending on its position relative
to other sounds, yet these different pronunciations are still considered by native speakers
to be the same "sound". For example, the /p/ in "pin" is aspirated while the same
phoneme in "spin" is not. In some other languages, for example Thai and Quechua, this
same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate phonemes.
In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how
sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English described above, and topics such as syllable
structure, stress, accent, and intonation.

The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign
languages, even though the phonological units are not acoustic. The principles of
phonology, and for that matter, language, are independent of modality because they stem
from an abstract and innate grammar.

Representing phonemes

The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonological
point of view. Note the intersection of the two circles—the distinction between short a, i
and u is made by both speakers, but Arabic lacks the mid articulation of short vowels,
while Hebrew lacks the distinction of vowel length.The writing systems of some
languages are based on the phonemic principle of having one letter (or combination of
letters) per phoneme and vice-versa. Ideally, speakers can correctly write whatever they
can say, and can correctly read anything that is written. (In practice, this ideal is never
realized.) However in English, different spellings can be used for the same phoneme
(e.g., rude and food have the same vowel sounds), and the same letter (or combination of
letters) can represent different phonemes (e.g., the "th" consonant sounds of thin and this
are different). In order to avoid this confusion based on orthography, phonologists
represent phonemes by writing them between two slashes: " / / " (but without the quotes).
On the other hand, the actual sounds are enclosed by square brackets: " [ ] " (again,
without quotes). While the letters between slashes may be based on spelling conventions,
the letters between square brackets are usually the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
or some other phonetic transcription system.

[edit] Phoneme inventories

[edit] Doing a phoneme inventory

The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonetic point of
view. Note that the two circles are totally separate—none of the vowel-sounds made by
speakers of one language are made by speakers of the other.Part of the phonological
study of a language involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of
native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the
sound inventory of the language is. Even though a language may make distinctions
between a small number of phonemes, speakers actually produce many more phonetic
sounds. Thus, a phoneme in a particular language can be pronounced in many ways.

Looking for minimal pairs forms part of the research in studying the phoneme inventory
of a language. A minimal pair is a pair of words from the same language, that differ by
only a single sound, and that are recognized by speakers as being two different words.
When there is a minimal pair, the two sounds represent separate phonemes. However,
since it is often impossible to detect all phonemes with this method, other approaches are
used as well.

[edit] Phonemic distinctions or allophones

If two similar sounds do not belong to separate phonemes, they are called allophones of
the same underlying phoneme. For instance, voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, /k/) can be aspirated.
In English, voiceless stops at the beginning of a stressed syllable (but not after /s/) are
aspirated, whereas after /s/ they are not aspirated. This can be seen by putting the fingers
right in front of the lips and noticing the difference in breathiness in saying 'pin' versus
'spin'. There is no English word 'pin' that starts with an unaspirated p, therefore in
English, aspirated [pʰ] (the [ʰ] means aspirated) and unaspirated [p] are allophones of the
same phoneme /p/.

The /t/ sounds in the words 'tub', 'stub', 'but', 'butter', and 'button' are all pronounced
differently (in American English at least), yet are all perceived as "the same sound",
therefore they constitute another example of allophones of the same phoneme in English.

Another example: in English and many other languages, the liquids /l/ and /r/ are two
separate phonemes (minimal pair 'life', 'rife'); however, in Korean these two liquids are
allophones of the same phoneme, and the general rule is that [ɾ] comes before a vowel,
and [l] does not (e.g. Seoul, Korea). A native speaker will tell you that the [l] in Seoul and
the [ɾ] in Korean are in fact the same sound. What happens is that a native Korean
speaker's brain recognises the underlying phoneme /l/, and, depending on the phonetic
context (whether before a vowel or not), expresses it as either [ɾ] or [l]. Another Korean
speaker will hear both sounds as the underlying phoneme and think of them as the same
sound. This is one reason why most people have a marked accent when they attempt to
speak a language that they did not grow up hearing; their brains sort the sounds they hear
in terms of the phonemes of their own native language.

[edit] Change of a phoneme inventory over time

The particular sounds which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one
time, [f] and [v] were allophones in English, but these later changed into separate
phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described
in historical linguistics.

[edit] Other topics in phonology

Phonology also includes topics such as assimilation, elision, epenthesis, vowel harmony,
tone, non-phonemic prosody and phonotactics. Prosody includes topics such as stress and
intonation.

[edit] Development of the field

In ancient India, the Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini (c. 520–460 BC), who is considered the
founder of linguistics, in his text of Sanskrit phonology, the Shiva Sutras, discovers the
concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. The Shiva Sutras describe a
phonemic notational system in the fourteen initial lines of the Aṣṭādhyāyī. The notational
system introduces different clusters of phonemes that serve special roles in the
morphology of Sanskrit, and are referred to throughout the text. Panini's grammar of
Sanskrit had a significant influence on Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern
structuralism, who was a professor of Sanskrit.

The Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, (together with his former student Mikołaj
Kruszewski) coined the word phoneme in 1876, and his work, though often
unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He worked
not only on the theory of the phoneme but also on phonetic alternations (i.e., what is now
called allophony and morphophonology). His influence on Ferdinand de Saussure was
also significant.

Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy's posthumously published work, the Principles of Phonology

(1939), is considered the foundation of the Prague School of phonology. Directly
influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of
morphophonology, though morphophonology was first recognized by Baudouin de
Courtenay. Trubetzkoy split phonology into phonemics and archiphonemics; the former
has had more influence than the latter. Another important figure in the Prague School was
Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the twentieth century.

In 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English
(SPE), the basis for Generative Phonology. In this view, phonological representations are
sequences of segments made up of distinctive features. These features were an expansion
of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features
describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a universally fixed set, and have
the binary values + or -. There are at least two levels of representation: underlying
representation and surface phonetic representation. Ordered phonological rules govern
how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation (the so called
surface form). An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological
theory was the downplaying of the syllable and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore,
the Generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and
created problems.

Natural Phonology was a theory based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe
in 1969 and (more explicitly) in 1979. In this view, phonology is based on a set of
universal phonological processes which interact with one another; which ones are active
and which are suppressed are language-specific. Rather than acting on segments,
phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic
groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance.
Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply
simultaneously (though the output of one process may be the input to another). The
second-most prominent Natural Phonologist is Stampe's wife, Patricia Donegan; there are
many Natural Phonologists in Europe, though also a few others in the U.S., such as
Geoffrey Pullum. The principles of Natural Phonology were extended to morphology by
Wolfgang U. Dressler, who founded Natural Morphology.

In 1976 John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology. Phonological phenomena

are no longer seen as operating on one linear sequence of segments, called phonemes or
feature combinations, but rather as involving some parallel sequences of features which
reside on multiple tiers. Augosegmental phonology later evolved into Feature Geometry,
which became the standard theory of representation for the theories of the organization of
phonology as different as Lexical Phonology and Optimality Theory.

Government Phonology, which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify

theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all
languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their
selection of certain binary parameters. That is, all languages' phonological structures are
essentially the same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in
surface realizations. Principles are held to be inviolable, though parameters may
sometimes come into conflict. Prominent figures include Jonathan Kaye (Linguist), Jean
Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Monik Charette, John Harris, and many others.

In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky
developed Optimality Theory — an overall architecture for phonology according to
which languages choose a pronunciation of a word that best satisfies a list of constraints
which is ordered by importance: a lower-ranked constraint can be violated when the
violation is necessary in order to obey a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon
extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince, and has become the
dominant trend in phonology. Though this usually goes unacknowledged, Optimality
Theory was strongly influenced by Natural Phonology; both view phonology in terms of
constraints on speakers and their production, though these constraints are formalized in
very different ways.
Semantics (Greek sēmantikos, giving signs, significant, symptomatic, from sēma (σῆμα),
sign) refers to aspects of meaning, as expressed in language or other systems of signs.
Semantics contrasts with syntax, which is the study of the structure of sign systems
(focusing on the form, not meaning). Related to semantics is the field of pragmatics,
which studies the practical use of signs by agents or communities of interpretation within
particular circumstances and contexts.[1] By the usual convention that calls a study or a
theory by the name of its subject matter, semantics may also denote the theoretical study
of meaning in systems of signs.

Semanticists generally recognize two sorts of meaning that an expression (such as the
sentence, "John ate a bagel") may have: (1) the relation that the expression, broken down
into its constituent parts (signs), has to things and situations in the real world as well as
possible worlds, and (2) the relation the signs have to other signs, such as the sorts of
mental signs that are conceived of as concepts.
Most theorists refer to the relation between a sign and its objects, as always including any
manner of objective reference, as its denotation. Some theorists refer to the relation
between a sign and the signs that serve in its practical interpretation as its connotation,
but there are many more differences of opinion and distinctions of theory that are made in
this case. Many theorists, especially in the formal semantic, pragmatic, and semiotic
traditions, restrict the application of semantics to the denotative aspect, using other terms
or completely ignoring the connotative aspect.

Contents [hide]
1 Etymology
2 Linguistics
2.1 The dynamic turn in semantics
2.2 Prototype theory
3 Computer science
4 Psychology
5 Semasiology
6 References
7 See also
7.1 Major philosophers and theorists
7.2 Linguistics and semiotics
7.3 Logic and mathematics
7.4 Computer science
8 External links

[edit] Etymology
The word semantic (from French sémantique) was invented by Michel Bréal during the
19th century.

[edit] Linguistics
In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as borne
on the syntactic levels of words, phrases, sentences, and even larger units of discourse
(referred to as texts). As with any empirical science, semantics involves the interplay of
concrete data with theoretical concepts. Traditionally, semantics has included the study of
connotative sense and denotative reference, truth conditions, argument structure, thematic
roles, discourse analysis, and the linkage of all of these to syntax.

The decompositional perspective towards meaning holds that the meaning of words can
be analyzed by defining meaning atoms or primitives, which establish a language of
thought. An area of study is the meaning of compounds, another is the study of relations
between different linguistic expressions (homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, polysemy,
paronyms, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, metonymy, holonymy, exocentric, and
endocentric).
[edit] The dynamic turn in semantics
This traditional view of semantics, as a finite meaning inherent in a lexical unit that can
be composed to generate meanings for larger chunks of discourse, is being fiercely
debated in the emerging domain of cognitive linguistics[2] and also in the non-Fodorian
camp in Philosophy of Language[3]. The challenge is motivated by

factors internal to language, such as the problem of resolving indexical or anaphora (e.g.
this X, him, last week). In these situations "context" serves as the input, but the
interpreted utterance also modifies the context, so it is also the output. Thus, the
interpretation is necessarily dynamic and the meaning of sentences are viewed as context-
change potentials instead of propositions.
factors external to language, i.e. Language is not a set of labels stuck on things, but "a
toolbox, the importance of whose elements lie in the way they function rather than their
attachments to things."[3] This view reflects the position of the later Wittgenstein and his
famous game example, and is related to the positions of Quine, Davidson and others.
A concrete example of the latter phenomenon is semantic underspecification — meanings
are not complete without some elements of context. To take an example of a single word,
"red", its meaning in a phrase such as red book is similar to many other usages, and can
be viewed as compositional[4]. However, the colour implied in phrases such as "red
wine" (very dark), and "red hair" (coppery), or "red soil", or "red skin" - are very
different. Indeed, these colours by themselves would not be called "red" by native
speakers. These instances are contrastive, so "red wine" is so called only in comparison
with the other kind of wine (which also is not "white" for the same reasons). This view
goes back to de Saussure:

Each of a set of synonyms like redouter ('to dread'), craindre ('to fear'), avoir peur ('to be
afraid') has its particular value only because they stand in contrast with one another. No
word has a value that can be identified independently of what else is in its vicinity.[5]
and may go back to earlier Indian views on language, especially the Nyaya view of words
as indicators and not carriers of meaning[6].

An attempt to defend a system based on propositional meaning for semantic

underspecification can be found in the Generative Lexicon model of James Pustejovsky,
who extends contextual operations (based on type shifting) into the lexicon. Thus
meanings are generated on the fly based on finite context.

[edit] Prototype theory

Another set of concepts related to fuzziness in semantics is based on prototypes. The
work of Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff in the 1970s led to a view that natural
categories are not characterizable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but are
graded (fuzzy at their boundaries) and inconsistent as to the status of their constituent
members.
Systems of categories are not objectively "out there" in the world but are rooted in
people's experience. These categories evolve as learned concepts of the world —meaning
is not an objective truth, but a subjective construct, learned from experience, and
language arises out of the "grounding of our conceptual systems in shared embodiment
and bodily experience"[7]. A corollary of this is that the conceptual categories (i.e. the
lexicon) will not be identical for different cultures, or indeed, for every individual in the
same culture. This leads to another debate (see the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis or Eskimo
words for snow).

[edit] Computer science

In computer science, considered in part as an application of mathematical logic,
semantics reflects the meaning of programs or functions.

The Semantic Web refers to the extension of the World Wide Web through the embedding
of additional semantic metadata.

[edit] Psychology
In psychology, semantic memory is memory for meaning, in other words, the aspect of
memory that preserves only the gist, the general significance, of remembered experience,
while episodic memory is memory for the ephemeral details, the individual features, or
the unique particulars of experience. Word meaning is measured by the company they
keep; the relationships among words themselves in a semantic network. In a network
created by people analyzing their understanding of the word (such as Wordnet) the links
and decomposition structures of the network are few in number and kind; and include
"part of", "kind of", and similar links. In automated ontologies the links are computed
vectors without explicit meaning. Various automated technologies are being developed to
compute the meaning of words: latent semantic indexing and support vector machines as
well as natural language processing, neural networks and predicate calculus techniques.

[edit] Semasiology
In International Scientific Vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology.

[edit] References
^ Otto Neurath (Editor), Rudolf Carnap (Editor), Charles F. W. Morris (Editor) (1955).
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
^ Ronald W. Langacker (1999). Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin/New York:
Mouton de Gruyer. ISBN ISBN 3110166038.
^ a b Jaroslav Peregrin (2003). Meaning: The Dynamic Turn. Current Research in the
Semantics/Pragmatics Interface. London: Elsevier.
^ P. Gardenfors (2000). Conceptual Spaces. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
^ Ferdinand de Saussure (1916). The Course of General Linguistics (Cours de
linguistique générale).
^ Bimal Krishna Matilal (1990). The word and the world: India's contribution to the study
of language. Oxford. The Nyaya-Mimamsa the centuries-long debate on whether
sentence meaning arises through composition on word meanings, which are primary; or
whether word meanings are obtained through analysis of sentences where they appear, is
discussed in chapter 8.
^ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind
and its challenge to Western thought. Chapter 1.. New York: Basic Books..
In linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek συν- syn-, “together”, and τάξις táxis,
“arrangement”) is the study of the rules that govern the structure of sentences, and which
determine their relative grammaticality. The term syntax can also be used to refer to these
rules themselves, as in “the syntax of a language”. Modern research in syntax attempts to
describe languages in terms of such rules, and, for many practitioners, to find general
rules that apply to all languages. Since the field of syntax attempts to explain
grammaticality judgments, and not provide them, it is unconcerned with linguistic
prescription.

Though all theories of syntax take human as their object of study, there are some
significant differences in outlook. Chomskyan linguists see syntax as a branch of
psychology, since they conceive syntax as the study of linguistic knowledge. Others (e.g.
Gerald Gazdar) take a more Platonistic view, regarding syntax as the study of an abstract
formal system. [1]

Works on grammar were of course being written long before modern syntax came about;
the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini is often cited as an example of a pre-modern work that
approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory.[1] In the West, the school of
thought that came to be known as ‘traditional grammar’ began with the work of
Dionysius Thrax.

For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a framework known as grammaire

générale, first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld in a book of the same title. This
system took as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of
thought processes, and that hence there is a single most natural way to express a thought
(which, coincidentally, was exactly the way it was expressed in French).

However, in the 19th century, with the development of historical-comparative linguistics,

linguists began to realize the sheer diversity of human language, and to question
fundamental assumptions about the relation between language and logic. It became
apparent that there was no such thing as a most natural way to express a thought, and
logic could no longer be relied upon as a base for studying the structure of language.

The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the last
century which could reasonably called the "century of syntactic theory" as far as
linguistics is concerned. For a detailed and critical survey of the history of syntax in the
last two centuries see the monumental work by Graffi 2001.
[edit] General grammar (Grammaire générale)
Main article: Port-Royal grammar
The Port-Royal grammar modelled the study of syntax on that of logic (indeed, large
parts of the Port-Royal Logic were copied or adapted from the Grammaire générale[2]).
Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analysed
into the form "Subject-Copula-Predicate". Initially, this view was adopted even by the
early comparative linguists (e.g., Bopp),

[edit] Modern theories

There are two features shared by most theories of formal syntax. First, they hierarchically
group subunits into constituent units (usually referred to as phrases). Second, they
provide a system of rules to explain why certain utterances seem more acceptable or
grammatical than others. Most formal theories of syntax also offer explanations of the
systematic relationships between syntax and semantics, in other words, between form and
meaning.

[edit] Generative grammar and its descendants

Main article: Generative grammar

Phrase structure treeIn the framework of transformational-generative grammar (of which

government and binding theory and minimalism are recent developments), the structure
of a sentence is represented by phrase structure trees, otherwise known as phrase markers
or tree diagrams. Such trees provide information about the sentences they represent by
showing the hierarchical relations between their component parts.

[edit] Other theories of formal syntax

There are various theories for designing the best grammars such that by systematic
application of the rules, one can arrive at every phrase marker in a language and hence
every sentence in the language. The most common are Phrase structure grammars,
preferred by Noam Chomsky's MIT school of linguistics, and ID/LP grammars, the latter
of which some argue has an explanatory advantage (especially those in opposition to the
MIT school of linguistics, such as Ivan Sag and Geoffrey Pullum.) Dependency grammar
is a class of syntactic theories separate from generative grammar in which structure is
determined by the relation between a word (a head) and its dependents. One difference
from phrase structure grammar is that dependency grammar does not have phrasal
categories. Algebraic syntax is a type of dependency grammar.

A modern approach to combining accurate descriptions of the grammatical patterns of

language with their function in context is that of systemic functional grammar, an
approach originally developed by Michael A.K. Halliday in the 1960s and now pursued
actively on all continents. Systemic-functional grammar is related both to feature-based
approaches such as Head-driven phrase structure grammar and to the older functional
traditions of European schools of linguistics such as British Contextualism and the
Prague School.

Tree-adjoining grammar is a grammar formalism with interesting mathematical properties

which has sometimes been used as the basis for the syntactic description of natural
language. In monotonic and monostratal frameworks, variants of unification grammar are
often preferred formalisms.

With the publication of Gold's Theorem[3] 1967 it was claimed that grammars for natural
languages governed by deterministic rules could not be learned based on positive
instances alone. This was part of the argument from the poverty of stimulus, first
presented in 1980[4]. This led to the nativist view, that a form of grammar (including a
complete conceptual lexicon in certain versions) were hardwired from birth.

A grammar is a description of the syntax of a language. Theoretical models rarely

consider the language in use, as revealed by corpus linguistics, but focus on a mental
language or i-language as its "proper" object of study. In contrast, the "empirically
responsible"[5] approach to syntax seeks to construct grammars that will explain
language in use. A key class of grammars in the latter tradition are the stochastic context-
free grammars.

A problem faced in any formal syntax is that often more than one production rule may
apply to a structure, thus resulting in a conflict. The greater the coverage, the higher this
conflict, and all grammarians (starting with Panini) have spent considerable effort
devising a prioritization for the rules, which usually turn out to be defeasible. Another
difficulty is overgeneration, where unlicensed structures are also generated. Probabilistic
grammars circumvent these problems by using the frequency of various productions to
order them, resulting in a "most likely" (winner-take-all) interpretation, which by
definition, is defeasible given additional data. As usage patterns are altered in diachronic
shifts, these probabilistic rules can be re-learned, thus upgrading the grammar.

One may construct a probabilistic grammar from a traditional formal syntax by assigning
each non-terminal a probability taken from some distribution, to be eventually estimated
from usage data. On most samples of broad language, probabilistic grammars that tune
these probabilities from data typically outperform hand-crafted grammars (although some
rule-based grammars are now approaching the accuracies of PCFG).

Recently, probabilistic grammars appear to have gained some cognitive plausibility. It is

well known that there are degrees of difficulty in accessing different syntactic structures
(e.g. the Accessibility Hierarchy for relative clauses). Probabilistic versions of minimalist
grammars have been used to compute information-theoretic entropy values which appear
to correlate well with psycholinguistic data on understandability and production
difficulty.[6]

Statistical grammars are not subject to Gold's theorem since the learning is incremental.
Syntactic category
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A syntactic category is either a phrasal category, such as noun phrase or verb phrase,
which can be decomposed into smaller syntactic categories, or a lexical category, such as
noun or verb, which cannot be further decomposed.

In terms of phrase structure rules, phrasal categories can occur to the left side of the
arrow while lexical categories cannot.

The lexical categories are traditionally called the parts of speech. They include nouns,
verbs, adjectives, and so on.