Pengantar Linguistik Umum

SEMANTICS

Semantics is the study of meaning.
The meaning studied is divided into two, namely lexical meaning and sentential or structural meaning.
Lexical meaning refers to the meaning of words, which is mostly as an agreement of the community.

The meaning of words is related to some information concerning the words themselves.
If u hear the word book (noun), for example, we have in our mind that the word is not human, or an animal, but it is something specific related to things; it is concrete and it has certain features. This kind of information exists on the mind of everyone who knows the word, and in Semantics it is called the properties of the word. This is often called as semantic properties of a word.

Concerning Semantics, there three concepts to explore dealing with the meaning of word:
1.Form or expression: it is dealing with how a word is pronounced or expressed.
2.Concept: that is information on someone’s head or a message appears on someone’s mind when he/she hears a word.
3.referent: that is something related to the real world out of language to which a word refers to.

This three things are interrelated each other, and this relationship is called SEMANTIC TRIANGLE, because they makes up triangle relationship.
concept

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Word Referent
By looking at the diagram above we can see that there is a direct relation between A (concept) and B (word) and also A (concept) and C (referent). The relationship between B (word) and C (referent), however, is not direct as shown by the broken line. This is because of the fact that there is no obligatory relation between a word and what it refers to, and this is called arbitrary relation. To make it short, when someone say, let’s say, [amis] the Javanese would think that the word refers to something fishy. The sundanese, however, would think that the same word refers to something sweet, a kind of taste.

Lexical meaning also deals with two kinds of meaning those denotation and connotation.

Denotation or denotative meaning is when the words is meant to be the real world as it refers to. Let’s say, when someone mentions ‘dog’ in English and he is referring to a 4-legged flesh-eating animal, he uses a denotative meaning.

Connotation or connotative meaning is when the same word (dog) is meant to a person that he/she doen’t like, he uses connotative meaning.
Two words are homonymous when they have the same sound. They are pronounced in the same way and in the fact they different in meaning. Exp: flower n flour.
Flower means ground as the past participle of grind, whereas as flour is interpreting ground to mean ‘earth’.

Two words are called synonymous when they have almost the same meaning. For example: the word mother and mum are synonymous and so are the words father and daddy in English.

When two words have almost the opposite meaning it can be said that they are antonymous. The word long and short are example of antonym, because long is the opposite of short.


PRAGMATICS

Pragmatics studies the meaning of the speaker. It studies the speaker’s intention of producing utterances.

Macam2 ujaran: constative n performative.

The utterance which is used for stating the truth without any other intention, is called constative. The utterance, however, which is used for performing an action is called performative.

Performative may be uttered explicitly or implicitly.
The explicit performatives are the ones which have performative verbs showing the action performed. The examples are as follows: promise for promising, request for requesting, order for ordering.
The implicit performatives are the ones which do not have performative verbs but show the action performed due to the existence of the action performed. For example, the utterance “I’ll come tomorrow”, shows a promise, although it does not have a performative verb.

Constatives may be defined as utterances used for stating the truth with no action performed. For example, the utterance “The sun rises in the East” does not imply another meaning. It refers to the state that people in the world believe the truth.

Utterance meaning (makna ujaran/tuturan):
1.Illocutionary :makna yang terbalik dari kata2 yang di ujarkan.
2.Locutionary
3.Perlocutionary

Illocutionary ada 5 macam:
1.Assertives: commit the speaker to the truth of the expresses proposition (tindakan yg menuntut penutur utk melakukan sesuatu seperti bagaimana yg diujarkannya. e.g. stating, suggesting, boasting, complaining.
2.Directive: are used to produce some effects through action by the hearer (ujaran yang tujuanny org lain melakukan sesuatu. E.g. ordering, commanding, requesting, advising, and recommending.
3.Commissives: commit the speaker to some future (ujarannya menuntut penutur untuk melakukan sesuatu hal di masa yg akan dating). E.g. promising, offering.
4.expressives have the function of expressing or making known the speaker’s psychological attitude toward a state of affairs which the illocution presupposes (ujaran yg digunakan penutur utk mengungkapkan/menyampaikan perasaan trhdp sesuatu. E.g. thanking, congratulating, pardoning, blaming, praising.
5.declarations are illocutions whose successful performance (ada syaratnya: ujaran yg mengubah keadaan. Contoh: ijab Kabul).e.g resigning, dismissing, christening, naming, appointing.

There are two principles which have to be applied in communication, namely cooperative principles and politeness principles.

4 cooperative principles (prinsip kerjasama): quantity (katakan sesuatu tidak kurang tidak lebih), quality (katakana sesuatu yang benar), relevance (jawaban seharusnya nyambung/sesuai dgn pertanyaan), manner (tegas/jelas/kata2 yg dituturkan/dijwb jelas tegas tdk bertele2.

6 politeness principles (prinsip kesantunan): tact maxim, generosity maxim, approbation maxim, modesty maxim, agreement maxim, sympathy maxims.
Contoh:
Charlene: I hope u brought the bread and the cheese.
Dexter: Ah, I brought the bread.
Dexter violets quantity maxim to convey more than what he said. This phenomenon is called a conversational implicature. This violation is to maintain agreement maxim which tries to minimize disagreement between self and other. The contribution of Dexter violates one of the cooperative principle maxims, but it keeps one of the politeness principles.

Deixis (ujaran yang referentnya berubah2)

3 jenis deictic expression or deixis: person deixis (deixis orang): org pertma/ke2, tergantung siapa yg berbicara, org k3 biasanya konstan. ,
spatial deixis (deixis ruang): tergantung pada ruang yg dibicarakan (ini pensil, itu pensil :pensil ini dan pensil itu dipisahkan oleh jarak ), and
temporal deixis (deixis waktu): tergantung pada waktunya saat pembicara mengujarkan sesuatu.


SOSIOLINGUISTIK


Sosiolinguistics studies language in relation with the factors, such as sex, social status, region, situation, religion, accupation, race.

Language varieties, i.e. dialects, registers, styles, slangs, and jargon.

a dialect is a language variation which can be characterized in terms of its vocabulary items, pronunciation, and sometimes grammatical construction.

2 Dialects: regional and social dialects.

Regional dialects refer to the language used by people from different regions of the same language, whereas social dialects refer to the language used by people from different social groups of the same language.

Mutual intelligibility is caused by how many percents of the vocabulary that both the speakers from different groups who communicate can understand each other. For example, if the difference is about 20%, they can communicate each other even they find a few strange words. However, if there is 80% or 90% of the words that they don’t know, they’ll get difficulty in communicate.

Idiolek (kekhasan bahasa yg dimiliki seseorang).
Dialek tidak terlepas dari language community.

Styles: are also called situation dialects. They are different situations.
2 syles: formal styles (if the situation is formal, the language is formal), informal styles (if the situation is informal, the language used id informal). Informal styles are usually characterized by the use of contraction and slangs.

Slangs : slangs refer to the words used by a specific group of people, which are not openly used by common people. Slangs are familiar to a certain group but not to the others. For example, the slang used by among pickpockets in Java, is not recognized by common people. They say “cacing” to replace “kalung”. Another slang is used by teenagers. The word “doku” is to replace “uang”.

Registers : styles and registers are called situation dialects. Styles refer to the language associated with the situation they take place, whereas registers refer to the language used for occupational purposes.

Jargons: (bersifat ilmiah) jargons refer to the language used by different fields of study. (bidang ilmu tertentu/biasanya dipakai oleh para ahli tertentu). Linguistics has its own Jargon, for example phonology, morphology which do not exist in other fields of study. For example, morphology in medicine does not have the same meaning with the word morphology in Linguistics.

Code switching: In communication, people tend to change their code depending on the person they talk to. They may change their language to another language if they speak with the person who are competence in the language different from their native language.


PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Psycholinguistics (ilmu yg mempelajari tentang bagaimana hub manusia dgn pikiran) studies language production, language comprehension, and language acquisition. It studies language production in relation with the ability of human being in producing utterances or sentences to communicate to others.

Language acquisition refers to how children acquire their first language they are exposed to.

3 theories concerning how children acquire language:
1.children acquiring language by imitation: children may acquire language through imitation, but this leads to a problem. They never produce the utterances that are exactly the same as the utterances produced by adults around them. For example, when the adult speaks mama, they will produce mama, but the language they listen to is not.

2.children Acquiring by reinforcement (penekanana/dukungan): people believe that children acquire language by reinforcement. Reinforcement helps them produce language. They get reinforcement from the adults when they produce correct form. This approach is not fully accepted.

3.by analogy: For example, when the adult say “I painted a red barn”, children will say “I painted a blue barn”, or “I see a red barn”, or “I see a barn red”. However, this approach does not work since the last possible sentence is not accepted in English. The explanation shows that children construct their own language as the result of contacting with the adults. The way they construct their language can be characterized systematically. It means that they formulate grammatical rules from the simplest to the most complicated ones.

3 Stages in Language Acquisition: one word stage (single negative word, e.g.no,allgone), First sentence stage (negative word added to beginning of sentence, e.g.no want food), later sentence stage (negative element inserted between subject and predicate, e.g.He no bite you).

4 stages associated with ages: cooing stage (Gessel by 16 weeks), Babbling stage (Gessel by 28 weeks), One word stage (Gessel by 40 weeks), two word stage (Gessel by 18 months).

Language acquisition refers to the subconscious process of acquiring language. It means that when children acquire language they are not aware of the rules of applied in constructing sentences; even they are not aware of making errors.

Language learning refers to the process of conscious process of learning language. It is usually done in formal education with certain curriculum and syllabus, with certain materials, time and place, with certain teachers and instructions. Teachers correct their errors.

There are some factors that may influence the success of learning the second language. They are: age, and affective factors, i.e. motivation, self confidence, and anxiety.