LIN 2381 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Diaphoneme, Nonpast Tense, Linguistic System
15 Dec 2017
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Document Summary
Language - a mental system governed by rules, highly structured, operates by principles. order one way language is structured. Inflection (morphology -> cases) = word form (conveys different meaning) Displacement (possibly to talk about what is not there, ie. distinguish between past and non-past) Discreteness (combine small units into bigger ones) Arbitrariness no necessary relationship between words of a given language and the concept that they are representing (form + meaning = linguistic sign) Internal used to be synthetic now analytical (difficult to explain) External usually an event that occurred in history. (norman conquest > changes in vocabulary) Agglutinative many morphemes per word (japanese, korean, etc ) Fusional many morphemes overlay (russian, french etc ) All spoken languages are based on complex, variable structured systmes that are continuously evoloving. The key heuristic or analytical tool for studying linguistic variation is the linguistic variation.
