LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: High Rising Terminal, Affix, George Lakoff
8 Feb 2018
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Prescriptivism/descriptivism: prescriptive, telling people how to talk (wrong to end a sentence with a preposition, wrong to split an infinitive, descriptive, recounting how people do talk. Formality scale: social setting, formal transaction, public speaking, coffee date, religious ceremony, waiting at bus stop, high formality= more standard, low formality= less standard (more slang) Solidarity scale: relationships between participants, how well two people know each other/ feel themselves to be similar. Intimate=high solidarity, more non-standard features: unfamiliar=low solidarity, more standard features. Intonation: structure, communication styles (generalizations, not particularly scientific) In many languages, nouns belong to different grammatical categories: french- le/la, german- der/die, gender is semantic in terms of man/woman, arbitrary in terms of objects. Just a grammatical distinction made by language, has little to do with how humans think of gender/sex: grammatical gender represents one way to categorize nouns, masculine vs. feminine, masculine, feminine, neutral, animate, inanimate (as arbitrary as gender)
