COGS 100 Lecture Notes - Arbitrariness, Verbal Behavior

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Cognitive Science
• Course: COGS 100
• Professor: Michael Picard

Document Summary

The property that meaningful units such as morphemes are made up of meaningless units such as phonemes, which can be recombined over and over again to make different words. Relationship between the sounds/spelling of a word and its meaning is not predictable. Recombine morphemes, words and sentences to convey a potentially infinite number of thoughts. Ability to make a new sentences and for everyone to be able to understand. Embedding of pieces of a sentence (or whole) inside other pieces or sentences. Language: set of symbol and principles for the combination of these signs, which allow for communication and comprehension. Mental lexicon: set of all words a person knows. Grammar: rules for combining units at each language level sounds, words, and sentences. Semanticity: fact that parts of language refer to aspects of reality. Arbitrariness: represent but are not like that to which they refer. Displacement: communication of ideas/things remote in time and space. Prevarication: potential for deception use of language.