LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Natural Language, Speech Community, Falsifiability

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 100
• Professor: Charlotte Reinholtz

Document Summary

Introduction to linguistics you cannot record in this class. Buy the newest edition of the textbook!!!! (8th edition) A natural language is a language that has a speech community where children grow up acquiring that language as their first language. Natural language is also limited to human beings. Many languages have only 2-300 speakers or less and are threatened with extinction. The distinction between language and dialect is a political distinction, not a linguistic distinction. There is no way of deciding whether or not two different dialects are equally intelligible and which one would be better. There are many similar languages, and they are called different things simply because of the political distinction. It is testable, concerned with theories (hypotheses) that are testable (falsifiable) It is based on observable linguistic data, such as speaker utterances, speaker intuitions about utterance acceptability, and speaker intuitions about utterance meaning. Utterance acceptability are speakers" intuitions about utterance acceptability.