Linguistic competences

1. M A Y E L A C A R R I L L O
S E R G I O R A M O S
The Nature of Linguistic
Competence

2. The Universality of Human Language
All languages are similar in their organization and in
their function:
 Every human language has a lexicon and a grammar
to create sentences.
 Knowledge of the grammar and lexicon = person’s
linguistic competence.

3. Grammar
Is composed by:
 Phonological component (containing rules and
principles related to regularities of sound system of
language)
 Morpholoical component (contains rules governing
the modification of the forms of words)
 Syntactic component (contains rules and principles
that create sentence structure)

4. Languages
Vary in a few ways
 Like Sentence structure:
English: Subject + Verb + Object
Vs
Japanese: Subject + Object + Verb
Differences among large classes of languages are called
Parameters

5. Universal Grammar
 Is the representation of all the universal
characteristics of human languages.
 Consists of a collection of characteristics of language
that are the same in all languages (general principles
of organization and operation) and a collection of
dimensions of variation (parameters).

6. The Phonological Component of the Grammar
 The fundamental genius of human languages: take
meaningless units related to sound and combine
them to produce meaningful units like words.

7. Some Concepts to Pay Attention to:
 Phones: represent an individual speech sound.
 Phonemes: classes of phones that serve the function
of keeping words distinct from one another. They are
written between slashes to distinguish them from
phones.
Example: /b/ &/p/ in the words big and pig

8.  Minimal Pairs: different words in which two
phonemes contrast in the same position.
Example: pig and big, bill and pill.
 Phonetic Transcription: method for representing
units of sound. These units are placed between
brackets

9.  Allophones: is one of a set of a multiple possible
spoken sounds (or phones) used to pronounce a
single phoneme. They are not themselves phonemes
because they don’t keep words apart; they are not in
contrastive distribution, but in complementary
distribution.
Examples: /p/ in spin and /p/ in pin.

10. Basic Role of the Phonological Component of the
Grammar
 Is to specify the phonemic inventory of the language,
which is a list of all the classes of speech sounds in
the language that are contrastively distributed.
 Phonemic inventory of a language has a profound
effect on a speaker´s perception of speech sounds.

11. Classification
The phones of a language can be classified according
to characteristics of their production.
The most basic:
 Consonants & Vowels

12. Roles of the Phonological Component of The
Grammar
 Specify the speech of sounds that represent the
words of that language.
 Set constraints on what sequences of phonemes will
be possible in the language.(Phonotactic constraints
of language)
 Provide detailed information about exactly how
speech is to be produced.

13. Phonological Rules
There are regular phonological patterns of the
language, like:
-All voiceless stops that begin a word will be aspirated,
but those that do not begin a word won’t.
-Every word would have a syllable that is stressed
more than others.
The job of the many phonological rules is to specify
the predictable phonetic details of
pronunciation.

14.  Related to pronunciation: Prosody
Some words get more stress than others, and the
entire sentence would have a pattern of intonation
that is reflected in the way the fundamental
frequency of voice rises and falls while it is spoken. It
is predictable by phonological rules.

15. Morphemes
 Are the smallest units of meaning or grammatical
function in a language.
 The morphemes can be divided into two classes:
bound and free.

16. Types of Morphemes
 Free morphemes are individual words (the, dog),
while bound morphemes must be affixed to words
(“s” in plays, “re” in rewrite).
 There are two kinds of bound morphemes:
Inflectional and derivational.

17. Inflectional Morphemes
 Inflectional morphemes are those required as an
aspect of sentence structure (-ed in kissed, -s in
loves). Inflectional morphemes play grammatical
roles required by the structure of a sentence; the
inflection simply adds information to the stem
without changing the meaning of the stem.

18. Derivational Morphemes
 Derivational morphemes can change both the
meaning and the part of speech of the stem to which
they are attached (-er in words like killer and writer).
Some derivational morphemes change meaning of a
word without changing the part of speech (un- as in
unhappy, unwilling).

19.  The morphophonological rules specify the actual
pronunciation of morphemes when they are
combined in a word.

20. The Syntactic Component of the Grammar
 The syntax of a language creates the structure of its
sentences, which, along with the words with them,
determine the meaning of each.

21. Basic Operations
 Creates the basic structures of sentences.
 Gives human language its creativity.
 Gives people the ability to create sentences with
great precision of meaning.

22. Concepts:
 Sentence: structure consists of the hierarchical
organization of constituents
 Constituents: are components of the sentence that
form a unit.

23.  Argument: A basic sentence consists of a single verb
and the grammatical elements that must appear with
the verb for the sentence to be well formed. These
grammatical elements are called arguments of the
verb and all verbs require at least one argument, a
subject.

24. Images of sentences