ANTA02H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: American Sign Language, Nonverbal Communication, Noam Chomsky
Document Summary
Language and culture like two sides of a coin. Language is part of culture, but also tool through which culture is communicated. While many different animals and organisms can communicate, only humans have the capacity for fully developed language-grammar, syntax, speech. Allows humans to communicate cultural ideas and symbolic meaning from one generation to another in a cumulative fashion, and to generate new cultural ideas based on our experience. The logic of a culture is also the logic of its language how it orders and classifies the world. Linguist noam chomsky argues that the human brain contains a limited set of rules (universal grammar) for organizing language, so that all languages have a common structural basis. Language (spoken) and written (writing-existed for 6000 yrs), is our primary means of communication. Kinesics is the study of non-verbal communication through body movements, stances, gestures, expressions.
