LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Falsifiability, Complementary Distribution, Universal Grammar

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 200
• Professor: Liz Smeets

Document Summary

Function: knowing how to communicate/ express oneself in the language. Form: knowledge of the words and rules for putting words together. Tacit knowledge: we know a lot about language implicitly. The relation between form and meaning is arbitrary (chicken example) Language- the linguistic properties shared by all of the languages in the world. No language or linguistic variety is superior to any other in any scientific way. The only difference between signed language and spoken language is the modality (way it is conveyed) Grammar is a mental representation of all the rules a person needs in order to speak and understand their language. Phonology- the study of sounds and their systematic organization words are separated by sequences of sounds, thousands of words but not as many sounds. Humans can make over 100 speech sounds, generally a single language uses 12-60 sounds. Languages have rules about which sounds go where. In english, a syllable cannot be begun with ng