How to make linguistics enjoyable?

How to make linguistics enjoyable?

English Linguistics –Basic concepts

Chapter One

What is linguistics for me and linguistics approaches in everyday speech?

I studied linguistics before, or at least my college professor did all the efforts to teach me. I have never been against it; however, it is rather hard to grab the essence of this wonderful discipline sometimes. For all this, I would give it a try. In the first Unit we come across an interesting dialog between two teenagers, actually presenting a joke of which punchline is perfectly collaborated and understood by all of them. The principle task is to collect similar dialogs and analyze them from a linguistic point of view. I do not want to repeat the linguistic analysis of the two kids exploring the joke of the chicken that crossed the road, therefore I have tried to seek similar examples. In order to work out a life-like situation, I have opted for two names; let us have Jessica and James talking to each other in the first dialog.

Jess: Why is six afraid of seven?

Jam: have no cluecan numbers be afraid of?

Jess: think of like you'd say it...

Jam: I ain't no clue

Jess: because seven eight nine

Jam: (laughing), sure

I think I should not explain the punchline or the hit of this joke. Especially not for natives, since they do not have to pay outstanding efforts to understand that “eight” is pronounced the same like “ate”, thus six has the very right reason to be scared of seven. (tacitness, equality). Moreover, they do not even have any problems to figure out the differences in meaning, therefore the joke does really take effect. On the contrary, being a non-native or native-like speaker we need to focus on the dialog more precisely, and if being lucky enough we might manage to come out of the story with a smiley on the face (equality, tacitness). The kids, however, do not have to focus on grammar rules, or memorize all the irregular verb forms (at least the forms of “eat”), the effect comes automatically. In addition, there is no logical explanation why we face homophones here, why the past form of “ate” is consequently pronounced the same way like the number (arbitrariness). We do not know. However, as for duality of patterning, hereby we might point out a fantastic dialectical difference. Probably in cockney or Londoner dialect (I potentially avoided mentioning British English) this joke will not take a glorious effect, therefore the duality of patterning might suffer failure. It is only because “ate” is not pronounced like “eight”, it is only pronounced like /et/, obviously the joke does not operate here. The question might arise, however, that a British English speaker might understand “ate” pronounced like eight or not, or at least he would need some time to ponder about, consequently, a native might get on the same uptake capability like a non-native speaker. In this coherence, linguistic experts might observe this phenomenon form another point of view: the failure or sub-failure of duality of patterning. The speakers of any languages, however, do not work as machines, so there is not a computer program-like machinery in real life conversations. This could be the explanation why a British native speaker would adequately understand the joke upon hearing /eit/, even though he does not use this dialect (creativity). In contrast, if he is supposed to expose this joke, he really has to focus on the proper (we may ask, which is the proper one?) pronunciation here. Otherwise, the whole conversation would never ever take effect. (or only side-effects?). Furthermore, the joke above might have been abridged. I wittingly opted for the longer one. However, among natives or on a certain level of language acquisition behind, it should really take effect without any problems, regardless of regional dialects. (explanatory adequacy, nobody cares about which dialect is being used in this current dialog – the question on this level might not be like which tool is better: Swiss army knife or an ax?)

The next example would not seem to be corroborative example for the first look. However, I was an ear witness of this conversation among American youngsters, out of whom one is on the very edge to get around a girl in a club:

Guy: Polar bear.

Girl: What?

Guy: I say polar bear.

Girl: What?

Guy: I don' know but it hit the ice.

Girl: (smiling)

Guy: wanna drink something?

Girl: sure, yeah

Rarely would this dialog take effect in the mind of a Granny (a woman ages between 60 and death, secondary school Russian re-trained so-called English teacher in Hungary). She would only understand the words separately, but would never ever know that this guy was extremely lucky that evening. It is not enough to understand the words, or look for grammatical structure (the language itself is extremely simple here – simplification). Even if there was any grammar in it to satisfy the hunger of Grannies (Present Perfect preferably), without social as well as cultural integration, this conversation would not take effect. Therefore, the arbitrariness and creativity of the language users play a very significant role here. Not mentioning the fact that it would not even take effect on different social levels in English speaking countries either. However, a native would much more easily figure out the essence of this dialog than a non-native, since he is really living in that surrounding and performing the language on a higher level (Chomsky's explanatory adequacy?). Why should we not use a more perfect and acceptable version of this dialogue? (it would be again a question what is acceptable or not?). Probably because we like using idioms, or because this guy – even though he was eager to get around the girl – was too shy to propose directly with the following:

I like you. (= it hit the ice).Do you want to drink anything?

At last, I should ask: would we have the same reaction (consent of the girl) if she had heard this “normal” question? It is worth pondering about.

The next example might be the top cream of our cake. It is a joke again, easily digestible, still very smart.

A small boy is sent to bed by his father.

Five minutes later...

"Da-ad..."

"What?"

"I'm thirsty. Can you bring me a drink of water?"

"No. You had your chance. Lights out."

Five minutes later: "Da-aaaad..."

"WHAT?"

"I'm THIRSTY. Can I have a drink of water??"

"I told you NO! If you ask again, I'll have to spank you!!"

Five minutes later... "Daaaa-aaaad..."

"WHAT??!!"

"When you come in to spank me, can you bring me a drink of water?"

I hope I do not have to take any efforts to explain the punchline of the joke. What we actually can see here from linguistic or semantic point of view is that how creatively a five year old kid could use the language, how he could take advantage of a sudden situation. I have picked on this joke because I wanted to present a joke that could take effect in Hungarian too. The punchline and the meaning of this dialog could easily be converted into Hungarian language, and it would really take effect without any discrepancy.

In this first Unit I have been dealing with basic linguistic approaches (if we can name them like this), some features like duality of patterning, creativity, arbitrariness, equality, tacitness. We could get a bit of taste from these via practical jokes, all taken from real life and real English – letting behind deeper linguistic science.

Forms, words, morphemes

It is extremely interesting part of linguistics. Morphemes are the smallest units conveying meaning in a language, or changing meaning if attached to each other (free or bound). The types of morphemes and many examples are given for us, therefore explaining them again is really inevitable now. My task was, however, to collect examples for cranberry morphemes and I cannot apart from defining them. Cranberry morphemes are those of which one part is not conveying direct meaning. It means if you divide the two or more parts, one of the parts has not automatically understandable meaning: cran + berry, for instance, we know what berry is, but it is not determinable what the word “cran” is derived from. Or at least, for the first look. So if you compare this to “blackberry”, for example, we all know that this will convey the meaning of a kind of berry which is black, and consequently black has an easily recognizable meaning. For all these, after a deeper research we might get to the origin of “cran”, which is actually crane (like the bird), and due to the fact that these berries were liked by those beautiful birds, hence the name. I have collected some Hungarian cranberries, upon which we may lay our eyes for a while. Before I tried to investigate the wonder of Hungarian cranberries, I turned to my colleagues for some help. They let me know that there are no real cranberry morphemes in Hungarian, or not of those which properly match the analogy. Therefore, I have decided on naming them semi-cranberries, and treating them like real ones.

LEKVÁR (eng. marmalade)

I do think LEK- collaborates with CRAN, since it has no real meaning, whereas VÁR is a free morpheme. However, semantically the compound of these two words ends up in a new word, which has nothing to do with the original meaning of VÁR. The word LEK could be, analogically, considered a bound morpheme. In addition VÁR can carry LOVAG-, FELLEG- in front, thus forming a totally different but semantically perfect word. Here our analogy suffers a bit of failure, but this does not make us frustrated to go on.

PAPSAJT

This is an interesting case. I am not quiet sure that it is a cranberry morpheme. However, the two words like PAP and SAJT (priest+cheese) has nothing in common with the combined word typed above, since it is nor a dairy nor a cleric but a plant growing on the streets.

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