The Language System

6

Part

Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication.

Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

The power of language

how words shape people & culture

understanding stereotypes

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers.

The difference between “girls are as good as boys at math” and “girls and boys are equally good at math” may not be obvious, but each carries a slightly different meaning.

The first statement contains a so-called subjectcomplement structure, which compares girls to boys. “Boys” is the complement or a standard against which “girls,” the subject, is examined. In other contexts, English speakers use this structure to compare one object to another that’s considered more typical or common. That’s why it sounds better to say “tents are like houses” instead of “houses are like tents,” or “zebras are like horses,” not “horses are like zebras.”

This diagram shows how the grammatical structure of a sentence can change its meaning.

The second sentence has a subject-subject structure and puts both girls and boys in the same position in the sentence, without comparing them.

Markman and Chestnut surveyed 650 English-speaking adults from the United States to better understand how people perceive the subtle difference between such statements even if they do not realize it.

“Language can play a huge role in how we perceive the world,” said Chestnut, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at New York University. “It’s important to identify parts of language that taken all together can influence us in one way or another, unknowingly.”

“girls are as good as boys at math”

“girls and boys are equally good at math”

Language and behavior

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

Computer science graduate student Reid Pryzant and Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky applied a machine learning technique to analyze more than 90,000 food and health-related product descriptions and their sales data on the Japanese e-commerce marketplace Rakuten.

They found that polite language that invokes culture or authority helps products sell. The work was carried out on online products in Japan, but the authors’ method could reveal top-selling words in English, Chinese and other languages.

This includes informative appeals to logos with language other than raw product attributes (i.e. brand name, product name, ingredients, price, and shipping). Words like “family size” (ファミリーサイズ), “package design” (パッケー ジデザイン), and “souvenir” (お 土産) belong to this catagory.

This includes appeals to authority, in the form of authoritative figures or longstanding tradition. Words such as “staff” (スタッフ), “old-standing shop” (老舗), and “doctor” (お医者様) belong to this category.

These words suggest seasonal dependencies. Words such as “Christmas” (クリス マス), “Mother’s day” (母の日), and “year-end gift” (歳暮) belong to this category. Note that words related to out-of-season events had low influence on sales.

These expressions show politeness, respectful-ness, and humbleness. Honorific Japanese (special words and conjugations reserved for polite contexts) such as “ing” (しており), “will do” (致します), “receive” (いただく) belong to this category.

Pryzant and Jurafsky found out that influential descriptions generally contained words in these four categories.

# items

* morph = morpheme features

** BPE = sub-word features

The researchers focused on two product catagories: chocolate and health. These catagories are both popular in the marketplace, but there is more variability among chocolate products than health products. First, the researchers tokenized descriptions into morphemes (a sequence of sounds with a recognizable meaning).

Second, they simplified descriptions into frequently occurring sub-word units.

This table shows the characteristics of the Rakuten data. These data consist of 93,591 product descriptions, vendors, prices, and sales figures.

Notably, the ratio of the size of vocabulary (unique keywords) to the size of tokens (occurrence of keywords) in the chocolate category is twice as large as that of the health category as listed in (%) in the table. This implies that product descriptions in the chocolate category are written with more diverse language.

The more of those keywords a description contained, the better the product sold, according to the research results, which recently appeared in an article presented at the SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce in Tokyo, Japan.

“Product descriptions are fundamentally a kind of social discourse, one whose linguistic contents have real control over consumer purchasing behavior,” the researchers wrote. “Business owners employ narratives to portray their products, and consumers react accordingly.”

The components of every human language

form, content, & use

1. form

Syntax is the rules for the structure of a sentence. Syntax deals with such details such as sentence organization, the order of clauses, relationships between words, elements of a sentence, etc. Syntax also determines which word combinations are acceptable. For example, if I say “He went to town.” it is acceptable, however, if I say, “town to went he” it does not work because of the syntax of English.

There are certain common rules of syntax. A sentence must contain a noun phrase and a verb phrase. Using our previous example “He went to town” contains a noun phrase “He” and a verb phrase “went to town.” Another example would be the “The big dog ran to the house.” The noun phrase for this example is “The big dog” and the verb phrase is “ran to the house.”

Morphology is focused on the organization of words. Morphemes are the smallest grammatical units possible. Examples of morphemes would be any letter or vowel of the English alphabet.

There are two types of morphemes: free and bound. Free morphemes can stand only. Examples include many words such as boy, small, and sad. These morphemes do not need any help to make sense. Bound morphemes must be connected to a larger word to make sense. Examples include prefixes and suffixes such as un-, non-, -ly, -s.

phonology

Phonology looks at the sound of speech and the shaping of syllables. The sound for /p/ is different depending on its placement in a word and the vowels near it. For example, /p/ can vary in sound in such words as pea, poor, and soup. Each word contains /p/ but the sound is slightly different. Sequencing also changes the of words the -ed sound is different in “jogged” than it is in “walked” the first has a /d/ sound while the second has a /t/ sound.

2. content

semantics

Semantics is the rules that determine the meaning of words. Synonyms and antonyms are also a part of semantics. Synonyms are different words that have the same meaning. Examples include “small” and “tiny” or “big” and “large.” Antonyms are two words that have opposite meanings. Examples include “big” and “little” and “small” and “large.”

Understanding semantics can allow a language user to employ a rich vocabulary that is full of alternative words and meanings. However, it is the sentence and not the individual word that most significantly shapes the meaning of communication. This is due to the fact that the entire sentence or paragraph provides context, which is something we will look at later.

There are two ways to define the meaning of a word. One is denotative and the second is connotative. The denotative meaning is the dictionary definition. The connotative is the context-specific definition. For example, a dog is a four-legged animal that barks. This is the denotative definition. The connotative definition would depend on the setting. One person may think that a dog is a giant barking monster. Another might see a dog as a cute little friend. They both know a dog is a four-legged barking animal but they further define a dog by the addition of further explanation.

3. use

pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of language in the context of its use. This component of language describes the rules of communication, types of communication, and the intentions of communication. Culture is a powerful influence on the pragmatics of a language.

There are several common characteristics that influence the pragmatics and how people speak to each other. These characteristics are gender, age, race, dialect, style, social status, and role. In English, it is common to change how we communicate based on these characteristics. How we speak to our boss is different from how we speak to our children. How to speak to colleagues is different than to strangers. These differences in communication are due to pragmatics.

The facts with which pragmatics deals with includes: 1 3

Facts about the objective facts of the utterance, including: who the speaker is, when the utterance occurred, and where;

2 4

Facts about the speaker’s intentions. On the near side, what language the speaker intends to be using, what meaning she intends to be using, whom she intends to refer to with various shared names, whether a pronoun is used demonstratively or anaphorically, and the like. On the far side, what she intends to achieve by saying what she does.

Facts about beliefs of the speaker and those to whom she speaks, and the conversation they are engaged in; what beliefs do they share; what is the focus of the conversation, what are they talking about, etc.

Facts about relevant social institutions, such as promising, marriage ceremonies, courtroom procedures, and the like, which affect what a person accomplishes in or by saying what she does.

the aim of language... is to communicate... to impart to others the results one has obtained... As I talk, I reveal the situation... I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.”

—Jean–Paul Sartre

The components of language attempt to succinctly explain how communication takes place. Understanding these concepts will help those who are learning a language or teaching people to learn a different language where problems may be. For example, if a student uses an inappropriate phrase this may be due to a misunderstanding of pragmatics. If a student mispronounces a word this is due to issues with phonology. Language components can be valuable in identifying language learning challenges.

There is much more to be said about language form. The understanding of syntax, morphology, and phonology helps in better understanding language acquisition. Therefore, ESL teachers need an exposure to the basics of this in order to be able to provide better support for their students.

the language system

Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do. Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.