ANTB21H3 Lecture 2: Week 2 Reading Summaries
Document Summary
Robbins burling chapter 1: smiles, winks, and words (msl) The word language refers to the system of sounds, words, and sentences. Digital signals: have sharp boundaries, are discrete, can assume no more than a finite number of states. Human beings communicate with both digital and analog signals. Language is digital, gesture-calls (snorts, giggles, sighs, etc. ) are analog (the ups and downs of pitch and emphasis, vary continuously so they form analog signals) Language allows us, with great ease, to refer to things and events, and to say something about them. Language is pervasively conventional as well as arbitrary. Recursion is one of the most distinctive characteristics of language. Ferdinand de saussure chapter 3: nature of the linguistic sign (msl) The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Thinking: being aware of learning, or of going through a process by which a phenomenon is found to be governed by a rule, or has a general knowable way of behaving.
