Ling 001: Linguistic Typology

Talking about differences

• In light of the number of languages found in the world, our hypothesis about innateness has to say something about this kind of variation
• The idea is going to be that the variation isn’t absolute; rather languages show fixed points of difference
• This is illustrated in several examples of such differences in this and the following lecture

Basic Difference: Sound/Meaning Connections

• One obvious point is that languages differ in terms of how sounds are paired with meanings
• For instance, one thing we have to learn when we learn a foreign language is what the words of that language are (obviously)
• Examples:
• English Uzbek
• Dog It
• Cat Mushuk
• Tree Daraxt