Kinds of Linguistic Knowledge

• Phonetic knowledge
  • You know how to translate abstract linguistic categories into articulatory gestures.
  • You know how to classify particular acoustic patterns as belonging to particular linguistic categories.
  • You know how to use the patterns of loudness and pitch in your language to help you find boundaries between units.
  • Units: phonetic features
• Phonological knowledge
  • You know what sounds can legally follow what other sounds in your language.
  • You know how the same abstract sound gets realized in different ways in different environments.
  • You know how units at one level (for example, phonemes) combine to form units at a higher level (for example, syllables).
  • Units: phonemes, moras, syllables, metrical feet, phonological phrases
• Morphological knowledge
  • You know what order to put, or expect, the morphemes in in a polymorphemic word.
  • You know how the sounds in a morpheme change when it combines with another.
  • You know how to interpret or produce a word consisting of a novel combination of familiar morphemes.
  • Units: morphemes
• Syntactic (and semantic) knowledge
  • You know what order to put the constituents of a sentence in to signal a particular meaning.
  • You know what roles the constituents of a sentence play in the state or event referred to by the sentence.
  • You know where to expect gaps in particular patterns.
  • Units: phrases, clauses, sentences
• Semantic knowledge
  • You know how words and sentences relate to objects and relations in the world.
  • You know how to interpret the scope of negation.
  • You know how to "find" the thing that is referred to by a definite noun phrase (such as the guy who always parks in front of my driveway).
  • Units: semantic features, objects, relations, variables, worlds, mental spaces
• Pragmatic knowledge
  • You know how get somebody to do something for you using language.
  • You know how the meanings of words such as go and come change with the context.
  • You know how to begin and end a phone conversation without offending the hearer.
  • Units: utterances, discourses, turns
• Knowledge of varieties of language
  • You know what forms sound more formal than others and how to select the forms that are appropriate to the situation.
  • You know when somehow has said something that is politically incorrect.

[L645 Syllabus]

Last modified: Tue Sep 2 12:01:45 EST
Comments: gasser@cs.indiana.edu