Linguistics Olympiad Training Material

Linguistics (liNG’-gwi-stiks) Training Material -By Sagar Sarda

Linguistics Pictures, [Online], Available: http://www.walkinthewords.blogspot.com [Accessed 12 September 2011]

Table of Contents 1. A sample Linguistics Problem... -------------------------------------------------------------- 1 1.1 So how to solve it? .......................................................................... 2 1.3 Answers to the Sample Linguistics Problem: ............................................ 5 1.3.1 Answers to Slovenian-English: .............................................................................5 1.3.2 Answers to English to Slovenian: ..........................................................................5

2. Introduction:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6 3. Phonetics: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8 3.1 Phonetics of Consonants ................................................................... 8 Figure 1 ................................................................................................................8

3.2 Phonetics of vowels ....................................................................... 12 Figure 2 .............................................................................................................. 13 Figure 3 .............................................................................................................. 13

4. Morphology --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------15 5. Syntax ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------17 5.1 SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV .......................................................... 18 5.2 Transitive and Intransitive verbs ........................................................ 19 6 Bibliography: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 211 6.1 Books ...................................................................................... 211 6.2 Websites................................................................................... 211

1. A sample Linguistics Problem... Read the following sentences in Slovenian and their translations in English. Then answer the questions that follow: 1. Fant me je udaril.

A boy hit me

2. Ubil si žival.

You killed an animal.

3. Žival me in ga je pojedel.

An animal ate me and him.

4. Fant je spustil čaj.

A boy dropped tea.

5. Pojedel si duhovnikov brezsrčno.

You ate priests heartlessly.

6. Pismonoša ga je ubil neusmiljeno.

A postman killed him mercilessly.

7. Policist je brezsrčen.

A police officer is heartless.

8. On je nesmiseln.

He is pointless.

9. Pobral sem policistov.

I picked up police officers.

10. Pojedel si se.

You ate yourself.

Trnaslate the following sentences from Slovenian to English: 1. Ubil si ga nemiselno. 2. Udaril si fanta brezsrčno. 3. Duhovnik te je pobral. 4. Pojedel sem žival neusmiljeno. 5. Spustil sem se. 6. Fant se je ubil. Translate the following sentences from English to Slovenian: 7. I ate myself pointlessly. 8. You are merciless. 9. A priest dropped a policeman and an animal and a boy. 10. He picked you up. 11. A postman and a boy hit me and you. 12. He is pointlessly merciless and heartless. -By Sagar Sarda 1

1.1 So how to solve it? Try solving it yourself first, then go through the material on morphology and syntax and attempt it again. After that, compare your answers here. So, let‟s begin with the verbs, since they‟re often the most susceptible to change in any language (depending on the subject, object, tense, mood, etc.). Here, eating seems to be the most repeated verb, so note down all the cases of its appearance: Žival me in ga je pojedla = An animal ate me and him. Pojedel si duhovnika brezsrčno = You ate priests heartlessly. Pojedel si se = You ate yourself. Common words? Pojed + el/la. Any other appearances of pojed? No, so let‟s move to the next verb - to kill: Ubil si žival = You killed an animal. Pismonoša ga je ubil neusmiljeno = A postman killed him mercilessly. Ubil = kill (past tense). No other appearances of ubil. Moving on: Policist je brezsrčen = The policeman is heartless. On je nesmiseln = He is pointless. Je = to be. However, there are other appearances of this word, which need to be kept in mind. The verb „to be‟ often serves the purpose of an auxiliary verb (used to conjugate verbs in different tenses; to be and to have are the most common of such verbs, for example: I was going home) The other verbs can be deduced similarly: udaril=to hit; spustil=to pick up; pobral=to pick up. Nouns too can be deduced in a similar fashion: fant=boy; žival=animal; duhovnik=priest; policist/ov=police officer/s (-ov=plural, so duhovnik=priest); pismonoša=postman; čaj=tea (note, pronounced much the same way as the Hindi “chai”!) That leaves “si”, “se”, “ga”, “me”, “on”, “sem”, “in”, and the scary big-looking words. So, let‟s deal with “si”: Ubil si žival = You killed an animal Pojedel si duhovnikov brezsrčno = You ate priests heartlessly. Pojedel si se = You ate yourself. Common features? That‟s right, they all have „you‟ as the subject of the sentence. 2

Next, “se”. Where does it occur? only one instance: Pojedel si se = You ate yourself. We already know that pojedel is the verb, meaning “to eat”, “si” provides the subject “you”, so what‟s left? The object. So, either “se” means the object is 2 nd person (you) or that the subject and object are identical (in either case the meaning of the sentence would not change). Since we do not have any additional information, we will have to leave it at that (there are no more reflexive sentences-same subject and object-or sentences with “you” as the object). Next, “ga”: Pismonoša ga je ubil neusmiljeno = A postman killed him mercilessly Žival me in ga je pojedla = An animal ate me and him They both have “him” as an object in the sentence, but the evidence is still not entirely conclusive, given that the second sentence has so many unknown words. So, we move on to “me”: Žival me in ga je pojedla = An animal ate me and him. Fant me je udaril = A boy hit me. Here, “me” is the common object, so me=me (though both are pronounced differently!). Knowing this word enables us to conclusively say that “ga” = 3rd person object, as earlier we did not know the meaning of “me”, but since that is now resolved, it makes sense to conclude that ga=him. This even gives us the meaning of “in” to be “and”. So, we have “on” and “sem” left: On je nesmiseln is the only example of “on”. It means “He is pointless”, and is also the only occasion where “he” is the subject of the sentence in the corpus (set of predefined information). “Sem”, too, has only one appearance, in the 9 th sentence, where it signifies that the subject is the first person (I...). So sem=I. That leaves the adjectives and adverbs. Brezsrčno = heartlessly; neusmiljeno = mercilessly; brezsrčen = heartless (-no = -ly); nesmiseln = pointless. You do not need to provide elaborate explanations as are provided above for the meaning of each word and how that was deduced. It will suffice to simply list out these meanings in an actual problem, and then list out the rules of syntax and morphology. However, if you feel more comfortable with it, then you can answer the problem in narrative style showing exactly how you arrived to your answer (saying I did this, then this was apparent to me, so I deduced this and conclude this...), however, the narrative approach is usually lengthier. All that you really need to provide is enough information about the language for any layman (like a computer!) to reach the exact same answers you did with just your rule set. 3

Lastly, to translate English into Slovenian, we will need to know rules of syntax and the application of “je”. NOTE: Many people think that since they have obtained the meaning of all individual words, the problem is mostly over and that they will score highly even if translations are not entirely accurate. This is not at all true. If the rules of syntax and morphology are not elaborately explained, even completely correct solutions will not score highly. However, if rules of syntax are mostly explained, even if one translation is not entirely correct, or the explanation contains an inaccurate rule, it is still possible to obtain a high number of points. Syntax and morphology form the main part of the problem, and the rules MUST satisfy EVERY sentence WITHOUT exception (this is the only way to ensure that the rules are correct; they must also make intuitive sense, as the unknown language is still a real one, spoken by real people, who would favor choosing the simplest explanation). As you might have noticed, sentences 2, 5, 9 and 10 begin with verbs, unlike the others, and have the syntactic structure VSO (verb-subject-object), unlike the others, which are SOV (subject-object-verb). So what‟s common to all these sentences? Ubil si žival.

=

You killed an animal

Pojedel si duhovnikov brezsrčno.

=

You ate priests heartlessly

Pobral sem policistov.

=

I picked up police officers

Pojedel si se.

=

You ate yourself

So what‟s common between these sentences? 3 of them have “you” as the subject of the sentence. The last has “I”. But that is the only incidence of “I” as a subject in the entire corpus, and every sentence in the corpus not listed here has the subject as 3 rd person (he or some noun-like animal or boy or priest or police officer). That is their common link, which means it is safe to assume that the sentences that are thus structured (VSO) are the sentences that use the personal pronouns for first and second person subjects (ie. the subject is either first or second person). So what else is left unexplained? The use of “je” in sentences with other verbs as well (sentences 1, 3, 4, 6; sentences 7 and 8 have “je” as the primary verb-there is no other verb in the sentence): Fant me je udaril.

=

A boy hit me.

Žival me in ga je pojedla.

=

An animal eat me and him.

Fant je spustil čaj.

=

A boy dropped tea.

Pismonoša ga je ubil neusmiljeno.

=

A postman killed him mercilessly.

So, we have a rule to identify a first or second person subject (using VSO), and clearly all these cases have third person subject, and all the sentences not here either have first or second person subjects or have the normal use of “je” (but they still have it in the sentence), to mean “is”. Clearly, so, it is appearing specially in cases where the subject is third person. So, with this, knowledge, it may even be concluded that “je” is not the word for “is” at all, and that “to be” is implied when there is no verb present. So, you should provide both possible answers in such cases, with explanations. The answers are given on the following page. 4

1.3 Answers to the Sample Linguistics Problem: 1.3.1 Answers to Slovenian-English: 1. You killed him pointlessly. 2. You hit a boy heartlessly. 3. For this problem, we encounter a word we never have before, “te”, but it would make sense given its placement and morphological similarity to “me”, that this signifies that the object is the second person, or “you”, which is not encountered in the corpus, except when the reflexive “se” is present. So, A priest picked you up 4. I ate an animal mercilessly. 5. I dropped myself. 6. A boy killed himself. 1.3.2 Answers to English to Slovenian: 7. Pojedel sem se nesmiljeno. 8. Si neusmiljen OR si je neusmiljen. There is some ambiguity to the exact meaning of “je”. It could be the primary verb in sentences 7 and 8, meaning “is” and an auxiliary in all other cases where it appears, indicating 3rd person subject. 9. Duhovnik je spustil policist in žival in fant. 10. On te je pobral. 11. Pismonoša in fant me in te je udaril. 12. On je neusmiljen in brezsrčen nesmiselno.

5

2. Introduction: A linguist, contrary to popular belief, is not someone who speaks many languages and acts as a translator, though this is often a bye-product of his job. A linguist is someone who studies how language works, and makes rules for the operation of languages that are as universal as possible. In a sense, he “deciphers” languages. As a result, knowledge of one language is sufficient to be a linguist, though knowing more does give a more intuitive feeling of the subject. As far as the International Olympiad in Linguistics is concerned, it is meant to be completely theory-free, solvable through clever deduction and reasoning. However, this is not always possible. Often, the problems demand knowledge of phenomena that are performed subconsciously. For example, the “s” in “pots” is pronounced differently from the “s” in “pods”. This difference is made subconsciously by the brain, and we may not be aware of a rule through which it does this, even though such a rule does exist. Even more strangely, the brain can correctly pronounce the plural form of words it has never encountered before, based on this same rule that the person subconsciously knows, but can’t quite describe. The rule is as follows: “s” and “z” are practically the same letter, as are “f” and “v”, “p” and “b”, etc. with one important difference. “Z”, “v” and “b” make use of the voice box, the larynx, which vibrates to produce a heavier, voiced sound, whereas, the larynx is not used at all in pronouncing “s”, “f” and “p”, which are known as voiceless sounds. They are relatively simple to distinguish-just place 2 fingers on your throat while pronouncing “zzzzzzzzzzzzzz” and “sssssssssss”- in the first case, the vibration is prominent, in the second, it is absent. When making plurals, the brain looks at the last sound of the word, determines whether or not it is voiced, and accordingly changes the pronunciation of the “s”. So, “d” and “t” in “pods” and “pots” are related in the same way-”d” is the voiced form of “t”. The study of such rules is a part of linguistics. However, linguistics is far broader than just this. Any word that a person “knows” consists of 5 pieces of information1: - Phonetic information: how to pronounce the word; - Morphological structure: details all the smaller bits it can be broken into, for example, “disassembled” can be broken into 3 smaller parts-”dis-assemble-d”, each part containing a specific meaning-”dis-” means “undo” or “opposite”; “-assemble-” means “to put together”; “-d” indicates that the verb is in past tense; 1

Akmajian, A.A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K., Harnish, R.M. (2010) Linguistics: An Introduction to Language th and Communication, 6 Edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Page 14. 6

- Syntactic structure: where and how the word would appear in a sentence-for example, in Hindi, main paani pita hoon would translate into English as “I water drink”; the languages follow different sentence structures - Hindi follows Subject-Object-Verb (SOV), while English follows Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), and instinctively, a bilingual person would translate main paani pita hoon as “I drink water”, not “I water drink”, based on the syntactic information he or she knows about nouns and verbs in each language. - Semantic information: words often have specific, distinct meanings (or denotations), but often they are used to refer to the connotations of the word itself, rather than its denotations. For example, the denotation of “blacksmith” is someone who works with metals like iron and produces armor, weapons, etc, and repairs such objects. However, the connotations of “blacksmith” include whatever you would normally associate with a blacksmith-for example, a blacksmith is commonly huge, robust and unhygienic, with black hands from beating metal. So, if someone were to say that “John has a blacksmith’s hands”, it would mean that John’s hands are black and dirty, even though blacksmith’s hands need not necessarily be black and dirty; a particular blacksmith’s hands may be cleaner than most, but what is commonly associated with “blacksmith” is “dirty hands”. Similarly, the connotations of “brother” include “comrade”, “friend”, “helpful”, and, more recently, “irritant” & “mean”; “mother” would connote “protection”, “affection”, “care”, etc., while it denotes “female biological parent”. Meaning of words is divided into 2 categories - denotations and connotations, and semantics is the study of this extended meaning and the nature of meaning itself. - Pragmatic information: many words we know have several meanings-for example “bat” has 2 meanings - it could refer to the mammal that flies and hangs upside down during the day in dark caves, or it could refer to the instrument used in cricket to hit balls, or even to the act of “batting”. However, we can tell the difference intuitively. When we say “the bat is emitting ultrasonic waves”, we understand that the “bat” being referred to here is probably the mammal, even though syntactically, there is nothing wrong with the cricket bat producing ultrasonic waves, logically, we assume that the bat must be the mammal, which is known to produce such sounds.

7

3. Phonetics: 3.1 Phonetics of Consonants Phonetics of vowels and consonants are very different. Since there are more consonants, and consonants interchange with clearer patterns, we’ll concentrate on them first. The key ways in which consonants differ from each other are in: a) Place of pronunciation b) Method of articulation c) Voicing (use of larynx) d) Use of nose A phonetic chart can summarize this effectively: Figure 12

Figure 1. English Consonants Chart 2. NOT based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

2

Acosta, F.F. (2008) 26 September, English Consonants Chart, [Online], Available: http://fajardoacosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htm [Accessed 1 September 2011] 8

The voiceless affricate, “č”, is similar to “ch” in “church” in English; the voiced affricate, “j” is the “j” sound in “judge” in English. The palatal voiceless fricative is the sh sound; the palatal voiced fricative, “ž”, is a sound similar to the “s” sound in “measure” or “fusion”, while the voiceless palatal fricative, “š”, (also represented by “∫”, the integral sign), represents the “sh” sound in “shoulder” in English. The “θ” is the “th” sound in “thing” or “thin” or “through” whereas “ð” it is the “th” sound in “this” or “that” or “the”. The liquid flap “r” is the “r” in general American or British English, while the retroflex liquid “r” is the “r” in other European Languages, like Spanish. The velar nasal, “ŋ”, is pronounced as “ng”, as in “sing”. It is more prominent in African languages, and some Eastern European languages. The nasals, liquids and semivowels are all voiced, and together, are known as the sonorants, due to their resonating quality. They are not true consonants, as airflow, though somewhat restricted, remains largely open (consonants allow a significantly smaller volume of air through unobstructed). The glottal stop is something that appears primarily in British English, in place of “t” , for example, Bri’ish” (British). While it is not necessary to know the names of the various places of articulation and various types of consonants, it is important to be able to identify similarities between different sounds-like the fact that “p” and “t” are stops/plosives; “p”, “b”, “m” and “w” are all articulated at the same place in the mouth. For instance, a particular problem listed the names of Burmese children and their dates of birth. Then, another set of birth dates was given, along with another set of children’s names, and the task was to match the birth dates to the names. The solution entailed discovering that the place of articulation of the first sound of the name was decided by the day of the week on which the child was born. As is evident, there are 6 distinct sites for 6 different days, and the seventh, Sunday, was a vowel.

9

So, to summarize: 1. Four main types of consonants: a. Stops/plosives: Entail a complete halt in airflow for a fraction of a second. For this reason, they can’t even be extended, like “s” or “z” (which entail continuous exhalation). {p, b, t, d, k, g} b. Fricatives: entail a partial block in airflow for the duration of pronunciation (air still continues to leave the mouth, but the tongue/teeth/lips partially obstruct it to produce friction, and hence sound). {f, v, s, z, θ, ð, ∫, ž} c.

Affricates: the sound begins as a stop, but ends as a fricative. Only 2 in English. {č, j}

d. Sonorants: a psuedo-consonant class of sounds, further divided into nasals, liquids, and semi-vowels. i. Nasals: stop sounds elongated by exhaling through the nose. As a result, when people have a “blocked nose”, nasals begin sounding like their corresponding voiced stop (m --> b; n --> d; ŋ --> g). Also, it is difficult to make the transition from a nasal to consonants other than the corresponding voiced stop, so many languages transition out of nasals by either placing a vowel after the nasal, or the corresponding stop consonant. Interestingly, many languages do not distinguish between the nasals, especially African ones (for example, “m” and “n” are perceived to be the same). For instance, they will have conjugations where the first sound changes accordingly: _ _ xxxxxxx, where the Xs are permanent and the dashes are the variable letters. So, if the second variable is “d”, then the first is “n” by default; if the second is “g”, then again the first is “n”, and if the second is “b”, then the first is “m”. In a sense, “m” is not a different character in its own right, rather, “mb”, “nd”, and “ng” are the 3 distinct letters.

For a specific example, the Malagasy Language provides an ideal case of such nasal-morphing. Many words are formed by adding prefixes to existing words, and the prefix zafi+(nasal) is the example of such a prefix in Malagasy. It is important to note that the prefix itself differs in spelling based on the following consonant. For instance, “hafaladia” is a word that needs prefixing, and the beginning two 10

letters of this word “ha-” are just placeholders because in this language, the word needs a prefix in any form, so “ha-” provides an empty, or meaningless prefix. When this is eliminated, the morphemes “zafi+(nasal)” and “faladia” need to be combined. This is done by altering the last character of the first morpheme and first character of the second morpheme, and accordingly, (nasal) --> m and f --> p, f’s corresponding stop sound, since it is easier to transition from a nasal to a stop, than nasal to fricative while enunciating. So, the word becomes zafim-paladia, or zafimpaladia. In another case, when the same prefix is added to “kitrokely”, the new word is zafin-kitrokely, since it is easier to transition from “ŋ” to “k” than from any other nasal. Though the nasal is written as “n” in the latin transcription, this is because there is no distinction between “n” and “ŋ” in this script, though in fact the word is pronounced with “ŋ”.

Another example is found in English itself. The prefix “in-” stands for opposite, or contrary, like “decent” and “indecent”. Yet, this prefix is sometimes spelt differently based on the next letter, as in “proper” and “improper”, where it is spelt as “im-” because “m” is easier to pronounce here than “n”. “M” and “p” are pronounced in the same place, while “n” and “d” are pronounced in the same place. ii. Liquids: these are an important class, as many languages differentiate between this class and others. Often, the two sounds in the class, “l” and “r” sound absolutely identical to lots of people, especially in Africa and Japan, both of which contain only one liquid, and they interpret any liquid sound they hear as the liquid they know. As a consequence, they often mispronounce “l” and “r”; they would say: “liver” instead of “river” or “berry” instead of “belly”. What exacerbates the problem is that in half of the cases they will preserve the correct liquid, while in the other half, they will change it.

Additionally, many languages treat liquids differently. Romansch, a Romance language (like French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) spoken in Italy and Switzerland, is an example. There was a question one year (Stockholm, 2010, problem 5) concerning two dialects of Romansch and with different the vowel 11

sounds in certain cases, for which rules needed to be deciphered. The solution entailed discovering that “u” in the first dialect remained “u” in the second dialect if the next letter was a liquid and the liquid was not followed by another consonant. If either of these conditions were violated, then the “u” in the first dialect would be pronounced as “uo”in the other dialect. iii. Semi-vowels: also known as glides, these are mainly a class that do not really perform functions of vowels or consonants. All that is needed to be known about them is that they are voiced, and “w” is pronounced at the lips, while “y” is pronounced at the back of the mouth, at the palate. Again, while it is not necessary to know the technical names of these places, it is important to know that they are different, and it is important to be able to identify consonants with similar places or manners of articulation. One last piece of information concerning consonants is about consonant clusters. There is a lot to know about consonant clusters, but what’s important to know that languages have predefined possibilities of consonant clusters, and native speakers of a language that does not contain certain consonant clusters will experience great difficulty in pronouncing them. For example, Punjabi does not contain the consonant cluster “st”, and native Punjabi speakers will insert a vowel in between the two consonants in order to pronounce the cluster. For example, when they try to say “station”, (IPA: steɪ∫ɪn) instead they would say “s-uh-tation” (səteɪ∫ɪn). 3.2 Phonetics of vowels Moving on, the phonetics of vowels is not integral to the IOL as such, so this section is mainly for additional interesting information. Vowels are classified by the position of the tongue when pronouncing the vowel, and the shape of the mouth (rounded or unrounded), and length (which can be changed for all vowels). Figures 2 & 3 summarize all information about vowels.

12

This is a simplified chart with examples:

Figure 23 Figure 34

Figure 2. Simplified English Vowels Chart3.

This is a more accurate and complex chart:

Figure 3. Complete English Vowels Chart4.

3

Simplified English Vowels Chart, [Online], Available: http://people.umass.edu/neb/VowelChart.GIF [Accessed 2 September 2011] 4 Complete English Vowels Chart, [Online], Available: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vowipa.gif [Accessed 2 September 2011] 13

These charts only display the set of simple vowels. Vowels can often be combined together to give rise to new vowel sounds, known as diphthongs. The “i” in “fight” is an example of such a diphthong, which combines the low (open) back vowel, “a” in palm” and the front (closed) high vowel, “i”, the vowel sound in “sheep”. Other examples of diphthongs include “spout” and “boy”. A particular property of diphthongs is that they are always long. Languages sometimes differentiate between long and short vowels, like Faroese does (Problem 2, IOL at Pittsburgh, 2011). Most vowels will also have long and short versions, and commonly, the colon symbol (:, for example, “cream” would be transcribed as “kri:m”) indicates a single vowel elongated. Any place where a word is transcribed either with the colon or two vowel sounds (a diphthong), the vowel sound there is long.

14

4. Morphology Morphology refers to the study of how words change, or are “morphed” to add meaning or compound meanings or create entirely new words. Morphemes are parts of words that constitute the smallest recognizable or meaningful parts of words5. Most morphemes contain some sort of meaning to themselves, even if they can’t exist as words, like “in-” or “dis-” which mean “opposite”, or “-ed” (past tense), “-s” (plural), etc. When a word contains more than one morpheme, the meaning of the word is a combination at an intuitive level, of the meaning of the two words themselves6. Morphemes can be divided into 2 broad categories: 1. Free morphemes: Most words in English would come under this category; this category contains morphemes that can exist independently as words, without any morpheme attached to them. All free morphemes in English have specific meanings; they do not modify other nouns or verbs by making them plural or changing their tense or subject or object. However, this is not true of all languages. Take, for instance, Hindi, which has the word “hai” (है ), which does not meaning anything but “present tense”. All it does is indicate that the sentence is in present tense. English does not have such words that “mark” the tense or case or plurality, such words form a part of the word to be modified itself in English (like -ing in English). 2. Bound morphemes: Obviously, these are the opposite of bound morphemes, and cannot form words on their own. Often, they contain tense markers, mood markers, singular/plural markers, or any such modifier that only modifies the meaning of the base morpheme, which is usually a free morpheme, but can also sometimes be a bound morpheme itself. So, bound morphemes are also divided into more categories: a. Affixes: these are the most common type of free morphemes, and they include prefixes, infixes and suffixes (depending on where they are inserted in the base morpheme). Affixes ordinarily comprise of all the various markers that exist - like tense markers, mood markers (especially in Romance languages), plural markers, singular markers, subject markers (again, very prominent in Romance languages, where verbs are conjugated and suffixed depending 5

Akmajian, A.A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K., Harnish, R.M. (2010) Linguistics: An Introduction to Language th and Communication, 6 Edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Page 19 6 Akmajian, A.A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K., Harnish, R.M. (2010) Linguistics: An Introduction to Language th and Communication, 6 Edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Page 19 15

on the subject of the sentence - depending on whether it is first/second/third person singular/plural, male/female, etc.) and all other types of markers. Examples include, as previously stated, “in-”, “dis-”, “mis-”, “-ed”, “-s”, “-ity”, “-ate”, “-ant”, etc., with the “-” indicating the place where the base morpheme would be attached in the word. There are, in certain languages, affixes attached in the middle of the word as well, known as infixes. This happens very frequently in Native American languages, and also in some Austronesian languages (Indonesia and its surrounding islands, and the Australian-Indonesian islands in general). For example, in Bonto Igorot, a language of the Phillipines, the infix -in- signifies that the noun being described is the product of a complete action7. For example, the word kayu means wood, and with the infix -in- added, kinayu refers to “gathered wood”. This action, inserting a morpheme after the first letter, is the most common way infixes are added. b. Bound base morphemes: there are some base morphemes that cannot exist individually as well. Such morphemes are extremely uncommon in English, though not entirely absent. Examples include cran-, a base morpheme that never exists on its own, referring to a specific fruit only if it is attached to -berry and to an amalgamation of fruits if attached to another fruit, like -apple or -grape8. Other examples include malle- and feas-, derived from malleable and feasible and malfeasance. Feas- and malle- themselves cannot form words, but with suffixes like -able and -ance, they do form words. It is necessary to understand the role of morphemes in altering words and also and to develop the ability to recognize morphemes in various forms in different languages. The same morpheme could appear in multiple ways in the same language-like im- and in- in English, which are identical, but vary depending on the first letter of the base morpheme. It is advisable to attempt a few problems concerning complex morphology to better understand how to deal with morphology. Morphology is key in almost half of the questions in the IOL. Past year’s questions include: 2011: 1, 3, 4

2010: 1

2009: 5

2008: 3, 4, 5

2007: 2, 3

2006: 1, 4

2005: 1

2004: 1, 5. 9

7

Akmajian, A.A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K., Harnish, R.M. (2010) Linguistics: An Introduction to Language th and Communication, 6 Edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Page 20. 8 Akmajian, A.A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K., Harnish, R.M. (2010) Linguistics: An Introduction to Language th and Communication, 6 Edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Page 20 9 All problems published by The International Olympiad in Linguistics, [Online], Available: http://www.ioling.org/problems/ [Accessed 8 September 2011] 16

5. Syntax Syntax is the part of linguistics that deals not with the microscopic level of language (words), but with the macroscopic level (sentences). Syntax is probably the place where non-native speakers of a language make the most mistakes, through word for word or literal translations. All languages are governed by an arbitrary set of grammatical rules that are almost never identical for languages. Take an example of a simple English sentence: “John hit the big ball”. If you were to translate this sentence correctly (not word for word) into another language and then translate wrongly (word for word) back into English, it is very likely that the words would be very jumbled. If the other language were: Hindi: John big ball hit. French: John hit the ball big. Spanish and most Romance languages would follow the same structure as French, while most languages evolved from Sanskrit would follow the same pattern as Hindi, and most Germanic languages would yield the same result as the original English sentence (without any error!). These deviations from the original are the main task and problem that computerized translators face - language is so vast that it is nearly impossible to produce rules that govern the language in its entirety, especially when so many words, especially in English could represent multiple parts of speech (they could be verbs or nouns or adjectives, etc.-the word “that” falls under 4 separate parts of speech!). Computers “parse” information by breaking the sentence down into smaller phrases, making them agree with regular sentences. An ordinary, simple sentence would contain 3 parts - a subject phrase, verb phrase and object phrase, in certain orders. Note, this is just a standard sentence, in many cases, it is possible to make sentences without a subject or object as well. Each phrase within itself could also contain various modifiers and sub-clauses and sub-phrases. For example, in the sentence: “A panicked John hurriedly ran from the enormous labrador”, the subject phrase, “A panicked John”, contains an article and an adjective besides the principle noun, which forms the head of this noun phrase. The verb phrase, “hurriedly ran” contains an adverb as well as a verb, and, then there is a preposition, “from”, followed by the object phrase which is another noun phrase, “the enormous labrador”. This sentence itself could be handled by a computer, though with some difficulty, but if you were to add to this sentence, the phrase “that was giving chase 17

furiously”, now you have a very ambiguous word, “that” (which belongs to at least 4 different parts of speech-it is a pronoun, adverb, conjunction and determinant, and each one might be translated differently in another language) coupled with a 3-word long verb in the past continuous tense, and an adverb. If the computer was meant to decipher all of this accurately, and translate it correctly into another language, the rules describing each language would have to be extremely detailed and specific, and this is why syntax is such a big problem that requires a brain fluent in either language to translate, with only a subconscious understanding of syntactic rules. 5.1 SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV This list of abbreviations indicates all the possibilities of language subject-verb-object phrase orders. English is an SVO language (its order is Subject-Verb-Object), while Hindi is SOV (woh paani pita hai = I (Subject) water (Object) drink (Verb) hai (tense marker; tense = present). Examples: SVO: Most Romance and Germanic languages, Mandarin, Russian, Slavic languages. SOV: Sanskrit-derived languages, Japanese, Latin etc. Over 75% of all languages fall under SVO or SOV. VSO: Welsh & Irish (Gaelic)10, Hebrew, some Austronesian languages. VOS: Malagasy (from Madagascar)11 is the best documented example. Others include Tzotzil and Fijian. Mainly Austronesian languages (including Malagasy). OVS: Hixkarayana12 (a Carib language spoken in Brazil), and Tamil, in some forms and cases. OSV: This is one of the rarest forms, and occurs mainly in special cases of other languages. For example, in English, “I hate tennis, but cricket I like”. Rare examples include Nadëb13, another language spoken by a small minority in Brazil. Lastly, it is important to know that there are many languages with multiple structures in different tenses or moods or free form structures-where two or more of the subject, verb and object can be freely interchanged. Examples of the cases with multiple structures include English in passive voice (the lion was shot by the hunter = OVS) or French and most Romance languages with personal

10

VSO and Master Yoda, [Online], Available: http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htm, [Accessed 9 September 2011] 11 VSO and Master Yoda, [Online], Available: http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htm, [Accessed 9 September 2011] 12 Dryer, M.S., Order of Subject, Object and Verb, [Online], Available: http://wals.info/chapter/81, [Accessed 9 September 2011] 13 Dryer, M.S., Order of Subject, Object and Verb, [Online], Available: http://wals.info/chapter/81, [Accessed 9 September 2011] 18

pronouns (in which case it would be SOV, not SVO), Spanish in half the cases lacks a subject, and many more. Examples of a free structure (also, No Dominant Order-NDO) include many Austronesian, African and American languages. Some linguists classify German, Greek and Dutch, among others, as having a free structure, though this is still debated.14 Discussions about word order are not limited to the orders of the Subject, Verb and Object. The grammar of a language also specifies how pre/post positions would come in a sentence (name depends on whether the words come before or after the word they modify/govern). For example, English widely uses prepositions, while Hindi primarily uses postpositions. It is important to understand that prepositional/postpositional morphemes can come in many forms-they can even be suffixed or prefixed besides being positioned before or after the word they govern. For example, English, a predominantly prepositional language that reserves special prepositional words (like from, above, under, about, with, over), does contain some bound postpositions, like ward in homeward. Even the positioning of adjectives can vary from language to language. In English, adjectives and adverbs always come before the noun / verb they are describing, and it would be very unnatural to say “I ate hungrily the fish salty”. However, in Spanish and other Romance languages, this would precisely be the word order, and this is what led to the word order being jumbled above, when translating word for word from French to English. Additionally, some words are even allowed to “break the rules”. For example, in French, some qualitative adjectives are allowed to precede the noun, whereas other qualitative adjectives and all quantitative adjectives must come after the noun. So, if the adjective above had been “beautiful” instead of “big”, the sentence would have been translated properly into English, without any error. Another example is evident in English, where adverbs can come on either side of a verb, but when adverbs describe a noun, they must precede the adjective (you would say “extraordinarily red rose”, not “red extraordinarily rose”, but “I frequently eat Chinese” and “I eat Chinese frequently” are both accepted). In contrast, adjectives must always precede a noun in English.

5.2 Transitive and Intransitive verbs This is probably the most important topic within syntax as far as the Olympiad is concerned. Knowing the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs is crucial, especially where Aztec and Mayan languages are concerned. The rules for both types of verbs in such languages are very different in such languages, and this is something that really needs to be stressed - how to distinguish the two types of verbs. 14

Pagel, M., (June 2009), Evolution of Word Order Changes, [Online], Available: http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v10/n6/fig_tab/nrg2560_F5.html, [Accessed 10 September 2011] 19

An intransitive verb is a verb that does not have an object. In English, it is often grammatically correct, and in fact even expected in some cases, to not have an object in a sentence. For example, the sentence John went to the pizzeria does not have a traditional object. There is a preposition placed before the place that John visited (“to”), and in this case, it could have sufficed to say “John went”, where “went” is an intransitive verb. An intransitive verb is a verb that does not have an object. Other examples of sentences with intransitive verbs include “I fall”, “you sleep”, “we dream”, “they drink”, “he eats”, “I joke”, and many more. However, many of these verbs could also have a transitive form, for example, “they drink water” and “he eats biscuits”. It is essential that caution regarding the type of verb is exercised in dealing with Mayan and Aztec languages, and indeed most Indian languages native to the Americas. Problem 5 of the IOL 200915, in Nahuatl, the language of the Ancient Aztec Empire, intransitive and transitive verbs had different suffixes to indicate the same thing (to “make” someone do the verb instead of simply “doing” it: like, The postman makes him drink as opposed to The postman drinks). The suffix –tia indicated this for an intransitive verb, while the suffix –ltia indicated this for transitive verbs, and hence it was very easy to either confuse the extra “-L” as a part of the verb itself, or view it as a separate morpheme.

15

The International Olympiad in Linguistics, Poland 2009, Problem 5 - Nahuatl [Online], Available: http://www.ioling.org/booklets/iol-2009-indiv-prob.en-gb.pdf [Accessed 8 September 2011]. 20

6 Bibliography: 6.1

Books  Akmajian, A.A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K., Harnish, R.M. (2010) Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication, 6th Edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. th  Finegan, E. (2008) Language: Its Structure and Use, 5 Edition, Boston: Thomson Higher

Education. 6.2

Websites  Linguistics

Pictures,

[Online],

Available:

http://www.walkinthewords.blogspot.com

[Accessed 12 September 2011].  Acosta, F.F. (26 September 2008), English Consonants Chart, [Online], Available: http://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/language/phonology.htm

[Accessed

1

September

2011].  Simplified English Vowels Chart, [Online], Available: http://people.umass.edu/neb/VowelChart.GIF [Accessed 2 September 2011].  Complete English Vowels Chart, [Online], Available: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/138/sec5/vow-ipa.gif [Accessed 2 September 2011].  The International Olympiad in Linguistics, [Online], Available: http://www.ioling.org/problems/ [Accessed 8 September 2011].  VSO and Master Yoda, [Online], Available: http://www.akerbeltz.org/beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_VSO.htm, [Accessed 9 September 2011].  Dryer, M.S., Order of Subject, Object and Verb, [Online], Available: http://wals.info/chapter/81, [Accessed 9 September 2011].  Pagel, M., (June 2009), Evolution of Word Order Changes, [Online], Available: http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v10/n6/fig_tab/nrg2560_F5.html, September 2011]. 21

[Accessed

10