You would expect an uncountable number, Acres and acres of books in rows Like wheat or gold bullion. Or that the words just Appear in the mind, like banner headlines. In fact there is one shelf Holding a modest number, ten or twelve volumes. No dust jackets, because — no dust. Covers made of gold or skin Or golden skin, or creosote or rain- Soaked macadam, or some Mix of salt & glass. You turn a page & mountains rise, clouds drawn by children Bubble in the sky, you are twenty Again, trying to read a map Dissolving in your hands. I say You & mean Me, say God & mean Librarian — who after long research Offers you a glass of water and an apple — You, grateful to discover your name, A footnote in that book.
I almost recited this poem at a school event last year, but unfortunately I never got the opportunity, so I decided to share it here! I’d never heard of it before, but the language is beautiful.
Why flexibility is important in your language studies
Being flexible so you adapt to your circumstances, unexpected changes or new goals can decrease your stress by a lot.
Making a schedule that you hope you’ll follow can sometimes create useless pressure. Taking into consideration how you feel or what you should focus on, will work better in the long run.
Being flexible also allows you to improve faster in a language. If you notice that your listening skills are the worst, you won’t be able to improve too much with the rest. There will be limitations.
Prioritizing your enjoyment instead of your immediate progress, can make you study for longer too.
Changing your plans or goals to suit you better is 100 times better than pressuring yourself to stick to a rigid schedule.
Immersion is surrounding yourself with the language you learn. However, that doesn’t mean travelling to your target language’s country or talking only in your target language for X days/weeks/months only.
There are also some easy ways.
listen to music daily
watch a movie or a series, maybe cartoons, with dubs or subs
write your grocery list in your TL
change the settings of your phone or a particular site you use a lot
have some books in your TL (also read them)
read motivational quotes in the language you learn
play a game
write in your agenda
keep a diary
learn new recipes written in your target language
talk to yourself in that language
watch videos on youtube
keep a blog/make posts in that language
read the news
fanfiction
comics, webtoons
any activity you enjoy and can be found on the internet in your TL, just be consistent ^^
Pronoun- a word that takes the place of, or fulfills the function of a noun in certain specific circumstances.
The types of pronouns in Italian are: personal, relative, interrogative, possessive, demonstrative, and indefinite.
Personal Pronouns
Their function is to refer to somebody or something known to both listener and speaker, either because they are actually present or because they have already been mentioned in the conversation or in the text. The pronouns have the same gender and number as the noun to which they refer.
(I) STRESSED Personal Pronouns
Stressed personal pronouns are used to identify clearly the person to whom we refer, usually to distinguish them from somebody else. They almost always refer to people, rather than to things or animals.
1. Subject Pronouns
io - I
tu - you
lui / lei - he / she
Lei - you (formal)
noi - we
voi - you
loro - they
Loro - you (pl., formal)
Othermuch less usedsubject pronouns (limited to formal written and spoken language) are:
egli, esso - he
ella, essa - she
essi- they (m)
esse- they (f)
!!!In Italian, use of subject pronouns with verbs is not essential, since the endings of Italian verbs always show who the subject is. The use of pronouns is limited to situations where special emphasis on the subject is needed.
2. Object Pronouns
Object pronouns are used to refer to the person or thing that is the target of an action, and stressedobject pronouns place particular emphasis on it.
me- me
te- you
lui / lei - him / her
Lei- you (formal)
noi- us
voi- you (pl.)
loro- them
Loro - you (formal, pl.)
These pronouns can be used as the direct object of a verb:
- Vorrei vedere teal post mio!
or, preceded by a preposition, as theindirect object or other complement of a verb:
- Dai amequei soldi!
!!! When a preposition is present, only stressed pronouns can be used.
3. Reflexive Pronouns (stressed)
Reflexive pronouns refer to the object or other complement of a verb, when it is the same person as the subject.
me (stesso/a) - myself
te (stesso/a) - yourself
sé (stesso/a) - him/herself
noi (stessi/e) - ourselves
voi (stessi/e) - yourselves
sé (stessi/e) - themselves
The use of stessoto increase the emphasis given to the pronoun, is optional.
Some people like to log their language learning time. I only sporadically track my time if I’m trying to set a certain goal for that month, but here are the different methods I have used and maybe they’ll be useful to you.
This is app is somewhat similar to LingoJournal, but it has a social aspect as well since you can follow other users and congratulate them on their learning. (image not my own)
This app is very detailed in tracking your language learning. You can track by reading/writing/speaking/listening and then break it down into even more activities. It also has goals and how you can reach them, as well as a streak. This is only one of the many graphs of your data.
4. Google Sheets
You can get a pre-made sheet to track your studying time, but I prefer to use it to track new words learned from my reading.
5. Notion
You can make a checklist for each week such as with this template.
Research Director Mari Tervaniemi from the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Educational Sciences investigated, in cooperation with researchers from the Beijing Normal University (BNU) and the University of Turku, the link in the brain between language acquisition and music processing in Chinese elementary school pupils aged 8–11 by monitoring, for one school year, children who attended a music training programme and a similar programme for the English language. Brain responses associated with auditory processing were measured in the children before and after the programmes. Tervaniemi compared the results to those of children who attended other training programmes.
“The results demonstrated that both the music and the language programme had an impact on the neural processing of auditory signals,” Tervaniemi says.
Learning achievements extend from language acquisition to music
Surprisingly, attendance in the English training programme enhanced the processing of musically relevant sounds, particularly in terms of pitch processing.
“A possible explanation for the finding is the language background of the children, as understanding Chinese, which is a tonal language, is largely based on the perception of pitch, which potentially equipped the study subjects with the ability to utilise precisely that trait when learning new things. That’s why attending the language training programme facilitated the early neural auditory processes more than the musical training.”
Tervaniemi says that the results support the notion that musical and linguistic brain functions are closely linked in the developing brain. Both music and language acquisition modulate auditory perception. However, whether they produce similar or different results in the developing brain of school-age children has not been systematically investigated in prior studies.
At the beginning of the training programmes, the number of children studied using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings was 120, of whom more than 80 also took part in EEG recordings a year later, after the programme.
In the music training, the children had the opportunity to sing a lot: they were taught to sing from both hand signs and sheet music. The language training programme emphasised the combination of spoken and written English, that is, simultaneous learning. At the same time, the English language employs an orthography that is different from Chinese. The one-hour programme sessions were held twice a week after school on school premises throughout the school year, with roughly 20 children and two teachers attending at a time.
“In both programmes the children liked the content of the lessons which was very interactive and had many means to support communication between the children and the teacher” says Professor Sha Taowho led the study in Beijing.
You know how articles reporting on psycholinguistic experiments often say something like ‘X number of people took part but Y number of people’s results were discounted for various reasons…didn’t understand the instructions, wasn’t paying attention, was generally incompetent…’, well now I can say I have probably just been admitted to that inevitable and illustrious group of rejected data-providers.
First, I did some example tests to get used to the computer and the instructions for the task which involved learning a made-up language. That was all well and good. Then I started the experiment proper. I was plugging away at the exercises, tapping here, tapping there as required until the researcher came in mid-way and told me, in a kindly, roundabout sort of way, that I was being too slow (it was meant to be a short-term memory test after all)!
After that, I sped up as best I could. After the first short-term memory part, I moved on to the second long-term memory one. Essentially they were testing to see what kinds of rules I had learned from part 1. After the experiment there was a quick interview-like section where the experimenter asked me to describe the rules I had learned from the exercises and what I thought this made-up language was. Now here’s the bizarre bit…I correctly spotted that the made-up language was essentially an ergative language - hooray! However, virtually all the rules that I had been using during the experiment (and consequently my answers) were completely wrong!
It turns out they are testing whether certain alignments (e.g. ergative alignment or accusative alignment or some unattested one) are equally learnable or not. I reckon their null hypothesis will be that unattested and attested systems are equally learnable with the aim of demonstrating that typologically-unattested systems are harder to learn. Evidently I find even attested systems hard to learn! I suppose (and hope, for dignity’s sake!) that in every experiment there’s always one such person!
This is Chomsky’s formulation of the Strong Minimalist Thesis, i.e. the working hypothesis underlying the Minimalist Program.
Language = the narrow syntax, i.e. the computational system that builds structure using items from the lexicon. Structure is built using simple, yet powerful, operations.
The narrow syntax builds the structure and then the structure goes off to other systems with which the narrow syntax shares an interface. These other systems (of which Chomsky assumes there are two, one semantic, the other to do with production (speech or signs etc.)) are systems in their own right. This means they can only ‘see’ and deal with certain things. Therefore, the narrow syntax must produce something that an interface system can ‘read’. Since there are two interface systems, the narrow syntax must produce structures which are legible to both interface systems. The interface systems are different and so require different ‘legibility conditions’ to be met. The narrow syntax thus faces a problem of how to satisfy these conditions simultaneously. The hypothesis being followed in the Minimalist Program is that the narrow syntax that we have is an optimal solution to this problem – it meets the conditions of the interface systems in (one of) the best possible ways.
The Strong Minimalist Thesis is not a doctrine – it is a working hypothesis. It’s a bit like the assumption that natural phenomena can be modelled by mathematics – you assume an ideal, see how far the natural phenomenon matches the ideal, identify the areas where it does and does not, then return for more hypothesising. By using the Strong Minimalist Thesis as a working hypothesis linguists (of course this only applies to linguists who make the same assumptions as Chomsky) can try to establish:
(1) The ‘legibility conditions’ of the interface systems.
(2) The extent to which the narrow syntax does meet these conditions in some ‘optimal’ way.
(3) The extent to which the narrow syntax does NOT meet these conditions in some ‘optimal’ way.
(4) Reasons for why language may be optimal/sub-optimal.
Hopefully that has shed some light on what is at first glance…and second, third, fourth glances etc…a pretty obscure little sentence.
“John is trapped in a room made of cheese on top of a mountain, and can signal for help only by eating the walls of the room such that a message is formed that can be seen from afar.”
The Performance Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (PGCH) was put forward by John Hawkins (2004) as an explanation for why grammatical patterns and the frequencies of those patterns cross-linguistically are the way they are.
In essence, it says that linguistic constructions which are easier to process are more likely to be grammaticalised. Conversely, those which are harder to process are less likely to be grammaticalised. Furthermore, processing ease is hypothesised to underlie our preferences for certain constructions over others (where there is competition between constructions) in usage. Linguistic performance thus shapes the grammar.
Hawkins suggests that there are three principles behind the hypothesis. Simplifying horrifically:
Minimise Domains: this basically means make the distance between elements which go together syntactically and semantically as small as possible, e.g. if an adjective goes with a particular noun, put them as close together as possible.
Minimise Forms: this basically means make those elements mentioned above as small and as meaningful as possible, e.g. consider spoken English “I’mma be there” where “I am going to be there” has very much had its form minimised.
Maximise Online Processing: this basically means arrange those elements in such a way that a listener will be able to process the structure of what you’re saying in the most efficient way possible. This involves making structures easier to recognise but also avoiding potential misinterpretations of structure, e.g. “I looked the number up” – consider where you place the “up” as the object gets longer. “I looked the number of my friend who just moved in next door up” vs. “I looked up the number of my friend who just moved in next door”. If the object is going to be very long, it is better to put “up” straight after the verb so that the verb (and its idiomatic meaning) can be recognised sooner. When the object isn’t so long, as in “I looked the number up,” efficiency isn’t greatly affected.
Note that language users flout these principles all the time, e.g. for stylistic effect, and are not consciously aware of them.
Using these three principles, Hawkins’ theory makes some very strong and interesting predictions about the types of patterns found in the languages of the world, and about which patterns are more likely or unlikely to be found.
Reference
Hawkins, J. (2004). Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scotttrembls raised an interesting point: “Do you know if there’s any evolutionary relationships between SVO, SOV and VSO languages? The evolutionary explanation never seems to come up- has this already been disporved or do we not understand enough about language evolution?”
There’s no evolutionary relationship in the sense that all SVO languages are genetically related and separate from all SOV languages etc. SOV, SVO and VSO languages are distributed throughout the world and are found in many different language families. But we know that languages can change types over a period of time so, in this sense, there are evolutionary paths from one type to another. For example, Old English and Latin are considered to be canonically SOV languages but their descendants (English and the modern Romance languages) are SVO languages. You might wonder when an SOV language stops being an SOV languages and becomes an SVO language. You have to bear in mind that these types refer to canonical structures, languages may use other structures at the same time but their use will be more restricted (although there are languages which many would characterise as being ‘free word order’ in which case they would not fall into any of these categories). For example, English is canonically SVO, but English uses other word orders for questions, focus structures etc. So the relative frequencies of particular structures within a language may change over time resulting in what appears to be a single type-switch.
Work on implicational universals (universals of the form which says if a language has structure X then it will have structure Y) initiated by Joseph Greenberg and taken further by John Hawkins makes some interesting predictions for language change. Greenberg’s formulations were for the most part tendencies, i.e. if X then Y significantly more often than not, but Hawkins aimed to identify exceptionless universals which often involved adding extra conditions, i.e. if X then, if Y then Z. This places more constraints on the forms languages can take but it also makes strong predictions about evolutionary paths of language change. The reasoning is roughly: if these formulations hold for the present situation and if there is no reason to assume things were any different in the past then languages can only move through allowed ‘states’ as determined by the strong implicational universals.
We understand enough about the evolution of some language families to be able to test these predictions and the predictions have been largely correct so far. However, many would not take this evolutionary picture to be an ‘explanation’, rather it is seen as a ‘description’ of the facts which allows us to characterise possible evolutionary paths of change and distinguish them from impossible ones. Given that each stage of a language is a present-day language in its time, it is still ultimately up to the explanations offered by formal and functional approaches to account for the form a language takes at any particular point in its evolutionary history.
When people study language typology they study the ways in which languages vary. However, it’s more than just saying different languages use different words or these languages use very similar sounds. We study the ways in which structural features of languages differ (or are similar) and many go further asking questions about what the limits of linguistic structural variation are.
English speakers will know that in a simple transitive clause we start with the subject followed by the verb followed by the object, e.g. ‘Bob (S = subject) likes (V = verb) pizza (O = object)’, i.e. English has typically SVO word order. But are there other ways of arranging such a structure? Logically there are six ways: SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS. The next question that a typologist will ask is how are languages distributed across these possibilities. As a null hypothesis we might think that we would expect to find roughly equal numbers of languages in each group, but this is not what we find at all. SVO and SOV account for around 85% of all languages (with SOV being a bit more frequent than SVO). Adding VSO languages brings the total to around 95% of all languages. The question is: why is the distribution of languages so skewed?
Three broad types of answers suggest themselves as candidates (at least to my mind):
1) It could be down to chance – the distribution of languages today may represent a highly skewed sample. If we came back in 1,000 years we might see a completely different distribution. This approach is obviously not taken by language typologists. There is certainly something interesting about the distribution which demands an explanation. To write the pattern off as due to chance would be to miss potentially significant insights into the ways languages are structured and shaped.
2) The formal aspects of human language (perhaps as encoded by Universal Grammar) constrain the surface forms that human languages can inevitably take, i.e. variation is not limitless though it may be apparently vast.
3) The functional pressures that act on speakers and hearers every time they use language will affect which forms languages will prefer to take, i.e. structures that are easier to say and to comprehend will be preferred and so will come to dominate amongst the languages of the world.
Given the great success of generative linguistics in the past few decades, (2) is a very popular approach to take. However, many intuitively feel that the approach in (3) is ultimately more satisfactory as an explanation. Personally I’m inclined to think that if we can explain surface variation in terms of performance preferences, this is a good thing because it means there is less for the formal approach to account for. Furthermore formal aspects of language are most often thought to be all-or-nothing affairs. If a grammar rules out a particular structure, that structure cannot exist, whereas if performance factors disfavour a particular structure, that structure will be either non-existent or rare.
But are (2) and (3) incompatible? You might think so given the distinction that’s often made between competence and performance. Many would not consider performance factors as relating to language proper – it is extra-linguistic and not something the linguist should be looking at. But the fact is that all the (overt) language that we use to construct theories of both competence and performance is being ‘performed’ in some way (either spoken or written or signed). I think there may well be limits on variation set by formal properties of human languages (which will account for some of the totally unattested structures) but others will be set by performance. And then maybe others that are to do with physics and biology more generally (here I’m thinking more of phonological typological patterns).
For now then it may be useful to adopt either (2) or (3) as an approach to language typology with the aim of seeing how far they can go, but always with the ultimate aim of putting the two together in the end for a more comprehensive account of why languages are the way they are.
The words for ‘one hundred’ in Indo-European languages exemplify an ancient sound change – the centum/satem split (the Latin and Avestan words for ‘one hundred’ respectively).
Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed as having three ‘series’ of velar consonants – palatal velars, plain velars and labiovelars (*kj, *k and *kw respectively). However, in nearly all daughter languages, these three series collapsed into two. Languages on the centum-side of the split merged the palatal and plain series to be left with *k and *kw and those on the satem-side merged the labiovelars and plain series to give *kj and *k.
It was thought to be the case that the centum/satem split represented an ancient dialect division of Indo-European languages. Most centum-languages are found in the west whilst most satem-languages are found in the east. However, a number of problems with this view exist. Tocharian is a centum-language but is (or was) the furthest east of any Indo-European language. There is also evidence that some languages kept the three series distinct in certain environments longer than others, e.g. Luvian (an extinct IE language spoken in Anatolia).
This, plus other evidence, suggests that the centum/satem labels are better viewed as descriptive shorthands which are used to label mergers which occurred independently in various Indo-European daughter languages (although this view raises problems of its own as well!).
