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The history of English

The history of English in (about) 10 minutes
The history of English - Old English
The history of English - Middle English (part 1/2)
The history of English - Middle English (2/2) and Modern English (1/2)
The Great Vowel Shift
What did Shakespeare's play sounded like?
Professor David Crystal: The Influence of the King James Bible on the English Language
Modern English (2/2)
Language and the brain
Language and the brain
Brain functions in the left and right hemispheres
Brain 2
Brain 1
Brain areas 2
Brain areas
Aphasia
The Origin of Language

The Origin of Language - Part 2

Languages of the world
Conlangs
L'origine du mot 'noël' dans d

Language Acquisition
Language Acquisition
Acquisition: Crash Course (10 min)
Comment les bébés apprennent à parler
2 Stanford researchers explore childrens language learning
Le babillage des bébés: mini

The History of english:

-old
-middle
-modern

OLD ENGLISH 450-1150

Ang-saxon invasion
· Angles
· Saxons
· Jutes
· Frisians
· Celts had to moved
Ang -sax tribes Denmark and Northern Germany also spoke a dialect Western ( німец)
The Heptarchy-unity of country
-West saxon and Kentish in the South
-Anglian in the North
Christianization
-St. Augustine
-597AD
Latin
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-educated ruling classes

-Church functionaries
-Church dignitaries and ceremonies:
-priest, vicar, altar, mass, church, bishop, pope, nun, angel, verse, baptism, monk, eucharist,
candle, temple, presbyter
-Domestic words
fork, spade, chest, spider, school, tower, plant, rose, lily, circle, paper, sock, mat, cook
- ecclesiastical Latin loanwords
chorus, cleric, creed, cross, demon, disciple, hymn, paradise, prior, sabbath
Old English literature
-Northumbria
-Caedmon( poet) Caedmon’s Hymn
- 7 th Century
Old English: the language
-Many genders, forms, inflections
- Common words: water, earth, house, food, drink, sleep, sing, night, strong, the, a, be, of,
he, she, you, no, not
-sk=sh
Skield-shield Disk-dish Skip-ship
The Scandinavian invation
- Norsemen
- Danes+ Norwegians
- 8th to 11th c.

The Scandinavian invasion

-Alfred the Great (848-899)
-878: treaty between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings
-Danelaw
-Danish influence
Danish influence
- many place names ending in
-by, -gate, -stoke, -kirk, -thorpe, thwaite, -toft
Whitby, Grimsby, Ormskirk, Scunthorpe, Stoke Newington, Huthwaite, Lowestoft, etc
- "son" ending on family names Johnson, Harrison, Gibson, Stevenson
- Anglo-Saxon equivalent "ing"
Manning, Harding
Old Norse
-direct alternatives or synonyms Pronouns: they, them, their
-Anglo-Saxon cratt and Norse skill Loss of inflections: prepositions: to, with, by
wish and want
dike and ditch
sick and ill
raise and rear
wrath and anger

MIDDLE ENGLISH 1150-1500

William the Conqueror
1066
William the Conqueror, duke of Normandie, invades England.
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Victory at the battle of Hastings

He becomes King.

The Norman Conquest

- French nobility + high clergy
- first Latin then French became the official language of England
French = spoken by the aristocracy
English = the language of the people
Latin = the written language.
The Norman influence
10,000 words
abstract nouns ending in the suffixes "
'-age "-ance/- ence" "ant/-ent", "-ment", "ity" and "-tion"
starting with the prefixes
"con-", "de-", "ex-". "trans-" and "pre-".

The Norman influence

- Crown and nobility (e.g. crown, castle, prince, count, duke, viscount, baron, noble,
sovereign, heraldry)
- Government and administration (e.g. parliament, government, governor, city)
- Court and law (e.g. court, judge, justice, accuse, arrest, sentence, appeal, condemn,
plaintiff, bailiff, jury, felony, verdict, traitor, contract, damage, prison)
- War and combat (e.g. army, armour, archer, battle, soldier, guard, courage, peace, enemy,
destroy)
- Authority and control (e.g. authority, obedience, servant, peasant, vassal, serf, labourer,
charity)
- Fashion and high living (e.g. mansion, money, gown, boot, beauty, mirror, jewel, appetite,
banquet, herb, spice, sauce, roast, biscuit)
- Art and literature (e.g. art, colour, language, literature, poet, chapter, question)

BUT
Ang-sax words
Cyning-king
Cwene-queen
Erl-earl
Chiht-knight
Ladi- lady
lord

The Norman influence

Humble trades retained their Anglo-Saxon names (e.g. baker, miller, shoemaker, etc)
Skilled trades adopted French names (e.g. mason, painter, tailor, merchant, etc).
Animals in the field kept their English names (e.g. sheep, cow, ox, calf, swine, deer)
Animal as food had French names (e.g. beef, mutton, pork, bacon, veal, venison,
The Norman influence
-French word completely replaced an Old English word
-Sometimes French and Old English components combined to form a new word: gentleman.
-Sometimes, both English and French words survived, but with significantly different
senses
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Rise of English
-In the 13th century, king John Lackland lost Normandy and English became more frequent
in the aristocracy.
-From the 14th century, English became progressively the official language of the country.
-London: business and commercial centre of England
Dialects of England
Mercian
Oxford in 1167
Cambridge in 1209
East Midlands
Stigmatization of other dialects: lack of social prestige/education
Language change
-Loss of inflections
-Stress shift and loss of suffixes
-Unstressed "schwa"
-Word order became more important
-By Chaucer
-SVO
-The "Ormulum"
-Biblical text
-late 12th century
-phonetic' spelling
Passage from the "Ormulum"
Middle English
Piss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum,
Forr bi batt Orrm itt wrohhte.
Icc hafe wennd inntill Ennglissh
Goddspelless hallghe láre,
Affterr batt little witt batt me
Min Drihhtin hafebb lenedd.
Modern English
This book is named Ormulum,
because Orm created it.
I have turned into English
the Holy Gospels' lore,
according to that little wit that
My Lord has granted me
History and ME
-English emerged as the language of England
- The Hundred Year War against France (1337 - 1453)
-The Black Death (1349 - 1350 )
Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Canterbury Tales
1380s
First great works of English literature
Chaucer and new words
-500 different French loanwards
-2000 new words
-paramour, difficulty, significance, dishonesty, edifice, ignorant
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-churlish, friendly, learning, loving, restless, wifely, willingly

-absent, accident, add, agree, bagpipe, border, box, cinnamon, desk, desperate, discomfit,
digestion, examination, finally, flute, funeral, galaxy, horizon, infect, ingot, latitude, laxative,
miscarry, nod, obscure, observe, outrageous, perpendicular, princess, resolve, rumour,
scissors, session, snort, superstitious, theatre, trench, universe, utility, vacation, Valentine,
village, vulgar, wallet, wildness > Yuliia Konopelniuk: John Wycliffe's Bible

John Wycliffe’s Bible

-1384
-John Wycliffe (Wyclif)
-Translation of "The Bible"
-vernacular English
-1,000 new English words
barbarian, birthday, canopy, child-bearing, communication, cradle, crime, dishonour,
emperor, envy, godly, graven, humanity, glory, injury, justice, lecher, madness, mountainous,
multitude, novelty, oppressor, philistine, pollute, profession, puberty, schism, suddenly,
unfaithful, visitor, zeal, etc
Chaucer's pronunciation
-Similar consonants
-/r/ is rolled
-/h/ sometimes dropped
•Consonant combinations, such as "kn,"
• Similar short vowels
• The long vowels are regularly and strikingly different. This is due to what is called The
Great Vowel Shift.
The Great Vowel Shift
-Systemic changes of long vowels
-late Middle English period (roughly the period from Chaucer to Shakespeare)
-Radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries
-Otto Jespersen: "The great vowel shift consists in a general raising of all long vowels" (A
Modern English Grammar, 1909).
A chain shift
Consonant changes
-The Old English consonant /×/ disappeared
-"-burgh", "-borough", "brough" or "bury"
-Some consonants ceased to be pronounced at all
-the final "b" in words like dumb and comb
-the "I" between some vowels and consonants such as half, walk, talk and folk
-the initial "k" or "g" in words like knee, knight.
-Beginning of postvocalic /r/ vocalization (better, bard)
Fricatives [fl, [0], and [s]
• In V_V, voiceless fricatives become voiced
OE > ME
Ras [ra:s] (rose) risan [rizan] (to rise) > rose, rise
Wif, wifas > wife, wives
This voicing does not happen after geminated consonants: Cyssan > kiss
Gemination
-Simplification of geminated consonants in the north (13th c) and spread to the rest of the
country in the early 15th c.
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They were kept in the spelling

Before they disappeared, they caused the clipping (shorter duration) of the preceding vowel.
Big -> bigger
Put -> putting
Man › manned
Phonemicisation of the voicing contrast in Middle English
-The voicing opposition becomes phonemic in Middle English and voiced and voiceless
consonant appear in all the postions
- Word initial
-OE feder » Midole English vader

MODERN ENGLISH 1500-1945

Fewer changes
-Absence of invasions
-Apparition of the notion of a norm
Grammarians
-From the 18th century onwards.
-Introduce regularity, logic and stability in the language
-Introduced rules and distinctions

Diffusion of the norm

-Introduction of the English Printing Press (invented by Gutenberg in 1450, first English one
in London by Caxton in 1478); which fixes orthography
-Development of reading among the upper class (18th century)
- Development of literacy (end of the 19th c)
- Development of the mass media (20th century): radio and TV spread the same norm. >

Early Modern English

Tudor English 1453 - 1660
Classical English 1660 - 1815

Tudor English 1453 - 1660

Christopher Marlowe / William Shakespeare/ Francis Bacon/ Ben Jonson/ John Milton / the
Renaissance/ the "Elizabethan Era" / the "Age of Shakespeare".

Tudor English 1453 - 1660

-deliberate borrowings
-Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek and French) = the language of education and scholarship

-genius, species, militia, radius, specimen, criterión, squalor, apparatus, focus, tedium, lens,
antenna, paralysis, nausea
-horrid, pathetic, pungent, frugal,area, complex, concept, invention, technique, temperature,
capsule, premium, system, expensive, notorious, gradual, habitual, insane, ultimate, agile,
fictitious, physician, anatomy, skeleton, orbit, atmosphere, catastrophe, parasite,
sarcasm, paradox, chaos, crisis, climax
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1526, William Tyndale printed his 'New Testament'

1549, the "Book of Common Prayer"
1611: the Authorized, or King James, Version of "The Bible"

The King James Bible

-Conservative version
-digged for dug, gat and gotten for got, bare for bore, spake for spoke, clave for cleft, holpen
for helped, wist for knew, etc
-archaic forms: brethren, kine and twain.
-The "-eth" ending is used throughout for third person singular verbs, even though ". es" was
becoming much more common by the early 17th century
-ye is used for the second person plural pronoun, rather than the more common you.

William Shakespeare
late 16th and early 17th century
verification of nouns (= conversion):
Whe pageants us vit out-herods Herod dog them at the heels the good Brutus ghosted ~ Lord
Angelo dukes it well uncle me no uncle
William Shakespeare
vast vocabulary (34,000 words by some counts)
2,000 neologisms or new words
-bare-faced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, aerial,
gnarled, homicide, brittle, radiance, dwindle, puking, countless, submerged, vast, lack-lustre,
bump, cranny, fitful, premeditated, assassination, courtship, eyeballs, ill-tuned, hot-blooded,
laughable, dislocate, accommodation, eventful, pell-mell, aggravate, excellent, fretful,
fragrant, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, gloomy

William Shakespeare
Fixed word order: SO
complex auxiliary verb system
Variable past tenses: clomb/climbed, clew/clawed, shove/shaved, digged/dug, etc.
Plural noun endings: just -s and -en
Verb ending:
"en" (loven) > " eth" (e.g. loveth, doth, hath, etc) > "-es" (loves) > Yuliia Konopelniuk:

International trade
16th and 17th Century
loanwords were absorbed from the languages of many other countries throughout the world >

Classical English: 1660 - 1815

Daniel Defoe
Jonathan Swift
Alexander Pope
Henry Fielding
(William Wordsworth, Byron, Shelly, Keats)

Classical English: 1660 - 1815

-Development of the press: The Tater in 1709, The Guardian in 1711.
-Gradually the whole country will start to practice English according to a uniform model
-Interest in philosophy and languages
- The first English grammars appeared, first descriptive then prescriptive:
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- English Grammar, by Lindley Murray in 1795

- First dictionaries, including the 'Dictionary of the English language' by Samuel Johnson in
1755

Late Modern English

Late Modern English: 1815 -1945
Contemporary English: 1945 – 2020

Late Modern English

Industrial revolution
Expansion of science and technology.
Enrichment of the lexicon according to new technical and scientific data.

The Industrial Revolution

neologisms to describe the new creations and discoveries.
Latin and Greek
oxygen, protein, nuclear and vaccine
-lens, refraction, electron, chromosome, chloroform, caffeine, centigrade, bacteria,
chronometer, claustrophobia

Development of education
In 1880: compulsory education up to 10 years
14 years in 1914, 15 years in. 1944
Multiplication of middle-class public schools
Multiplication of universities
standardization

Contemporary English: 1945 - 2020

-enrichment of the lexicon of science and technology
-The influence of American English
• American dominance in economic and military power, as well as its overwhelming
influence in the media and popular culture

RP and dialects
-language snobbery in England
-1917, Daniel Jones introduced the concept of Received Pronunciation (sometimes called the
Queen's English, BBC English or Public School English)
-educated middle and upper classes
Radio in the 1920s
Television in the 1930s
Regional accents were further denigrated and marginalized
Some change since 1945

Language and the brain

The brain !
The language organ is the mind
The left hemispheric cortex
A special branch of linguistics, called neurolinguistics, studies the physical structure of the brain as it
relates to language nroduction and comprehension.
The case of Phineas Gage
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September 1848
Near Cavendish, Vermont
a construction foreman
Phineas P. Gage
an iron tamping rod
Structure of the human brain
• The cerebrum, consisting of a cortex the outer layer) and a subcortex, is also divided into two
hemispheres joined by a membrane called the corpus callosum.
-The right hemisphere controls the left side of the body
-The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body
-Contralateral neural control
- Each hemisphere has unique functions
= hemisphere function is asymmetrical
-The right controls spatial acuity
-The left hemisphere controls abstract reasoning and physical tasks which require a step-by-step
progression.
-In adults, the left hemisphere also controls language >

Why this lateralization ?

-Principle of functional economy and increased specialization
-right hemisphere: controls matters relating to 3D spatial acuity (= awareness of position in space in
all directions simultaneously)
-left hemisphere: controls patterns that progress step-by-step in a single dimension
-Most humans are born with a preference for performing skills of manual dexterity with the right hand

Why the left hemisphere?

-Language is a linear process
-Sounds and words are uttered one after another in a definite progression, not in multiple directions
simultaneously
-Language with other left brain skills such as the ability to perform complex work tasks, or abstract
step-by-step feats of logic, mathematics, or reasoning
How do we know that the left hemisphere controls language in most adults?
Increased neural activity
PET Scans
Language = left hemisphere
Artistic = right hemisphere
Severed corpus callousum
• The subject cannot verbalize about an object visible only in the left field of vision or held in the left
hand
Brain damage
-Strokes
-The cognitive loss of language is called aphasia
-Aphasics cannot produce normal, creative speech in either written, spoken, or gestural form
-right hemisphere damaged -> language skills are not impaired
-left hemisphere -> language loss
Switching off
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-sodium amvtal is injected into the left carotid artery

-language skills are temporarily disrupted.
: Musical notes and tones
-Musical notes and tones are best perceived through the left ear
-The right ear better perceives and processes the sounds of language, even linguistic tones > Yuliia
Dichotic listening
-left hemisphere dominance for syllable and word processing
-dichotic listening test
Broca's area
-'anterior speech cortex'
-Paul Broca, French surgeon, 1860s
-Producing language
Wernicke's area
'posterior speech cortex'
Carl Wernicke, German doctor, 18705
Understanding language
The motor cortex
An area that generally controls movement of the muscles
Physical articulation of speech

- the arcuate fasciculus

-a bundle of nerve fibers
-connection between Wernicke's and Broca's areas.
Language disorders
Brain damage
Production or comprehansion can be affected
SLI: Specific language impairment
Aphasia
Aphasia
-Aphasia is caused by damage to the language centers of the left hemisphere in the region of the
sylvian fissure.
-Strokes cause 85% of all aphasia cases; other causes include cerebral tumors and lesions.
-Sub-areas of the language center.
-Two types of language loss : Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia >
Broca's area
-(1861) Paul Broca discovered Broca's area
-Broca's area seems to process the grammatical structure rather than select the specific units of
meaning. It seems to be involved in the function aspect rather than the content areas of language
-Broca's aphasia involves difficulty in speaking (emissive aphasia)
-Loss of grammatical and syntactic connectedness
-Grammar rules as well as function morphemes are lost
-Agrammatic aphasia
Wernicke's aphasia
(1875) Karl Wernicke: Wernicke's area
Controls comprehension + selection of content words
Grammar and function words are preserved
The content is mostly destroyed
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Receptive aphasia
Long fluent nonsense
Not able to respond specifically to their interlocutor
Jargon aphasia
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the origin of lang

-cuneiform writing (500+ years old)
-chauvet cave-France

1)Lang=50000y.o
-Fossils
-DNA evidence
-comparisons with other animals
-studies of lang change over time

How did lang arise?

Lang= gift from god
Experiments
Egypt
King James 4

2) THE NATURAL SOUND SOURCE

A.Bow-wow. Early words as imitations of the cries of beasts and birds.
B.Ding-dong. All things have a vibrating natural resonance, echoed somehow by man in his
earliest words.
C.Pooh-pooh. The first words were emotional interjections and exclamations triggered by
pain, pleasure, surprise, etc.
D.The Musical Theory. Language originated in the form of songs, as reactions to emotions,
especially love and joy.
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3.THE SOCIAL INTERACTION SOURCE

The Yo-He-Ho Theory. Language has been formed from the words uttered by groups of
people engaged in joint burdensome labour of some sort.

4. THE PHYSICAL ADAPTATION. SOURCE

• Evolution of physical features that enable speech
TEETH
-Human teeth are upright.
-They are roughly even in height
-They are smaller

MOUTH AND TONGUE

Mouth: small and fast opening
Vocal tract : L-shaped
Tongue: shorter, thicker, and more muscular
closing the nasal cavity
LARYNX AND PHARYNX
Lower larynx
Creates the pharynx cavity

5. THE TOOL-MAKING SOURCE

-Manual gestures may have been a precursor of language.
-Right-handedness
-Stone tools. Tool making
6. GESTURAL THEORY
• The gestural theory states that human language developed from gestures that were used for
simple communication.
GESTURAL THEORY
• Two possible scenarios have been proposed for the development of language, one of which
supports the gestural theory:
1 Language developed from the calls of our ancestors.
2 Language was derived from gesture.
GESTURAL THEORY
• Two types of evidence support the gestural theory.
a)Gestural language and vocal language depend on similar neural systems.
b) Nonhuman primates can use gestures or symbols for at least primitive communication
GESTURAL THEORY
-Verbal language and sign language depend on similar neural structures.
-Primate gesture is at least partially genetic
-Gesture and language are linked: voice modulation could have been prompted by preexisting
manual actions.
-Gestures both supplement and predict speech.
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GESTURAL THEORY
Why was there a shift to vocalization?
-Hands were occupied and could no longer be used for gesturing.
-Manual gesturing requires that speakers and listeners be visible to one another.
-Combining modalities because all signals still needed to be costly in order to be intrinsically
convincing.

MIRROR NEURONS
Definition: A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when performing an action and
when observing the same action performed by another (possibly conspecific) creature.
MIRROR NEURONS
• Motor Theory of speech perception
(Liberman, 1957; Liberman et al., 1967; Liberman and Mattingley, 1985)
The 'articulatory filter hypothesis'
(Vihman 1993, 2002).
Motor Theory of speech perception: the mental representation of perceived speech is in terms
of motor articulation categories as opposed to acoustic categories
7.The Genetic source
THE CHOMSKYAN HYPOTHESIS
Noam Chomsky has argued that language is a genetic specification located in the human
brain.
Chomsky argues that humans are programmed very specifically for language.
THE CHOMSKYAN HYPOTHESIS
Noam Chomsky has argued that the ability to use language is innately specified in the human
brain.
LAD (Language Acquisition Device)
'Language Faculty'
ARGUMENTS FOR THE CHOMSKYAN THESIS
A.Speed of acquisition
B.All humans learn to speak
C.The critical-age hypothesis
I.Age gradation
2.Maturational stages in nature
3 The case of Genie
D.Poverty of the stimulus
E. Specificity of language deficits
1.Broca's area
2.Wernicke's area
3. The WUG test and language impairment = пташка
• Myrna Gopnik s
tudied a multigenerational family in England

THE FOXP2 GENE

-The FOXP2 gene is required for proper development of speech and language.
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-The FOXP2 gene has been implicated in several cognitive functions

-A mutated FOXP2 causes the observed production deficiency.
FOXP2, BOYS AND GIRLS
-Little girls acquire language earlier than boys and develop a larger vocabulary, before time
gradually becomes the difference.
- FOXP2?
-Experiment on (dead) children. The little girls presented the protein FOXP2 in quantities 30%
larger in a region of the left cortex of the brain associated with language

COUNTERARGUMENTS TO THE CHOMSKYAN THESIS.

a)Language or cognition?
b) Specific language impairment or mental deficit?
c) How poor is the stimulus?

Where do all lang come from?

THE MONOGENESIS THEORY
• In Judeo-Christian tradition, the original language was confused by divine intervention, as
described in the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis.
THE POLYGENESIS THEORY
-The hypothesis of parallel evolution. This hypothesis holds that, as humans evolved parallel
in more than one location; each group developed its own unique language.
-The major language families of today would be descended from these separate mother
tongues
SCIENTIFIC MONOGENESIS: THE MOTHER TONGUE THEORY
This theory holds that one original language spoken by a single group of Homo sapiens gave
rise to all human languages spoken on the Earth today.
As humans colonized various continents, this original mother tongue diverged through time
to form the numerous languages spoken today.
Languages of the world
7106 lang
2301-asia 2138 africa 1313 pacific 1064 america
Differences between languages
- All aspects of language!

- Phonetics and Phonology

- Morphology
- Syntax
• Spoken aspects:
-Tones
-Sounds
-Tempo
-Intonation
-Stress and rhythm
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'Dialect'
Ordinary people: a dialect is almost certainly no more than a local non-prestigious variety of a
'real language.
Linguists
-'language' is used to refer either to a single linguistic norm or to a group of related norms
-'dialect' is used to refer to one of the norms.

Sociolinguists -> every variety is a dialect, including the standard variety

-Discrete languages as ideologically constructed rather than linguistically real entities

Mutual intelligibility
If speakers can understand each other, they are speaking dialects of the same language
If they cannot, they are speaking different languages.
The first 15 languages (number of native speakers)
Chinese- Spanish- English - Arabic- Hindi - Bengali- Portuguese- Russian-Japanese- Lahnda
(Pakistan)- Javanese -Turkish - Korean - French - German

Language families
• A language common ancestral language or a parefamily is a group of languages related to a
nt language, called the proto-language of that family.
- language tree model
Romance/Germanic/Slavic
English
- 370 million native speakers
-610 million second language speakers
-The dominant language of scientific research
-Language of internet

Constructed languages
= Conglangs
-A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology,
grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised
-Constructed languages may also be referred to as artificial, planned or invented languages and
in some cases fictional languages.

Language acquisition
WHAT IS LANGUAGE ACQUISITION?
-It is an instinct.
-It is very rapid.
-It is very complete.
-It does not require instruction.

FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACOUISITION

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• lateralisation of the brain

hormonal changes
DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS
Acquisition is carried out in the first years of childhood and leads to unconscious knowledge of
one's native language which is practically indelible.
Learning (of a second language) is done later (after puberty) and is characterised by imperfection
and the likelihood of being forgotten. Learning leads to conscious knowledge.
DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS
FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION This is the acquisition of the mother tongue.
•BI- AND MULTILINGUALISM This is the acquisition of two or more languages from birth
or at least together in early childhood.
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION-This is the acquisition of a second language after the
mother tongue has been (largely) acquired. Usually refers to acquisition which begins after
puberty, i.e. typically adult language acquisition.
DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS
ERROR This is an incorrect feature in language acquisition which occurs because of the stage at
which the child is at a given time (acquisition in as yet incomplete). Errors are regular and easily
explainable.
MISTAKE Here one is dealing with a random, non-systematic and usually unpredictable
phenomenon in second language learning. Mistakes are sometimes termed 'performance errors to
emphasise that they arise on the spur of the moment when speaking and are not indicative of any
acquisitional stage.
: DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS
COMPETENCE is the abstract ability to speak a language, i.e. knowledge of a language
independent of its use.
PERFORMANCE is actual use of language. Its features do not necessarily reflect characteristics
of performance, for example, when one is nervous, tired, drunk one may have difficulties
speaking coherently. This, however, does not mean that one cannot speak one's native language.
> HOW IS LANGUAGE TRANSMITTED?
I. Linguistic input from parents (performance)
2. Abstraction of structures by children
3. Internalisation (competence of next generation)
ACOUISITION OF
V A set of syntactic rules which specify how sentences are built up out of phrases and phrases out
of words.
V A set of morphological rules which specify how words are built up out of morphemes, i.e.
grammatical units smaller than the word.
V A set of phonological rules which specify how words, phrases and sentences are pronounced.
A set of semantic rules which specify how words, phrases and sentences are interpreted, i.e. what
their meaning is.
3 COMPETING SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ABOUT LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
- Behaviorism (B.F. Skinner)
- Universal Grammar (Noam Chomsky)
- Cognitive Theory (Jean Piaget)
BEHAVIORISM (B.F. SKINNER)
-Behaviorists - everything is acquired through conditioning
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-language as a form of conditioning that happens through rewards and punishments

-Language acquisition = a stimulus-response mechanism
-Imitation
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (NOAM CHOMSKY)
-Chomsky (1960s) argued that kids often ignore their parents corrections
-Poverty of the stimulus
-Chomsky: human beings are biologically wired for language
-language acquisition device (LAD), innate ability
-Universal Grammar
COGNITIVE THEORY (JEAN PIAGET)
-language acquisition and developing mental capacities
-cognitive development >
-language is seen as part of our advancing mental capacitieі
THE FOUR LANGUAGE SKILLS
-Listening
-Speaking
-Reading
-Writing
INPUT
-Under normal circumstances, human infants are certainly helped in their language acquisition by
the typical behaviour of older children and adults in the home environment who provide language
samples, or input, for the child.
-Recognizing your mother's voice - Baby talk
'BABY TALK' / 'MOTHERESE'
-the frequent use of questions
-exaggerated intonation
-extra loudness
-slower tempo with longer pauses
-simple sentence structures
-many repetitions and paraphrasing
-the 'here and now'
NO IMITATION, NO CORRECTION
• Learning through imitation?
-Infants may repeat single words or phrases, but not the sentence structures
-Learning through correction?
• Adult 'corrections' are not a very effective determiner of how the child speaks. > Yuliia
SEMANTICS
Overextension
'dog for all animals
'spoon' for all items of cutlery.
Hyponymy: the generalization of a term, to describe other terms.
animal, dog, beagle
Use of 'DOG'
ACQUISITION AND LEARNING
Acquisition = gradual development over time of ability in a language by using it in
communicative situations with others who know the language.
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Learning = a more conscious process of accumulating knowledge through analysis of features of

language
ACOUISITION BARRIERS
Joseph Conrad
Vocabulary and grammar are easier to acquire than pronunciation.
THE AGE FACTOR
After the critical period for language acquisition has passed, around the time of puberty, it
becomes very difficult to acquire another language fully.
• The dominance of the LI is particularly strong in the pronunciation