CMNS 110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Spoken Language, Concatenation, Arbitrariness
23 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
We use words to get what we want. Ex/ hate speech is institutionalized because language has the power to hurt. Ex/ i heard your mom passed away instead of saying i heard she died. Language has power to shape behaviour, cause emotional distress. Ex/ asking for some water at night, they cant see u, so gestures wont work. Human beings initially communicated through gestures because that"s what they could see around them in nature, they could see trees waving in the wind (no god, just physical forces) Human cmns began from series of gestures and became elaborate enough and turned into language. This drew human and nature closer, showed language emerged from nature. Language is spoken and you can hear it. Tell us that spoken language is a social phenomenon. Speaking and hearing it tell us about the nature of human society. Listening to people is the integral heart of cmns. Because language fades, we have to pay attention.
