LIN 1300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Onomatopoeia, Linguistic System, Arbitrariness

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LIN 1300
• Professor: Kathleen Brannen

Document Summary

Language is the cognitive capacity that allows humans to communicate with each other to express thought. Language is also a social tool that permits speakers to identify themselves as members of a community or group. Two meanings of the word language : language is an abstract notion that applies to all languages, a language is a means of communication that permits the members of a community to understand each other. Speech: the use of this system in real situations by real users. The design features of language: interchangeability: all members of the species can send and receive messages, feedback: we are aware of what we are transmitting. In principle, there is no limit: displacement: we can refer to events remote in space and in time, productivity: we can produce new messages on any topic. We can recombine elements for new meaning: duality of patterning: meaningless units (phonemes) are combined to form arbitrary signs.