LIN203H1 Lecture 8: lec8.pdf
Document Summary
Up to now, we have been considering english as a language. denning et al. These questions presuppose that a language is a well-defined entity . In fact, that"s not true; that it"s always possible to classify two ways of speaking or writing as either. The same language or different languages . languages aren"t discrete and well-defined entities; the boundaries between them are fuzzy and it"s not always possible to e. g. count how many there are. No two people speak exactly the same way . If i call coca-cola soda and the letter z zee, and you say pop and zed, This sense of language is called an idiolect . Probably not. the individual way a particular person speaks, with a different grammar and vocabulary than anyone else"s idiolect. we might say they speak the same language . But if two people"s idiolects are broadly similar to each other, Thus the idea of a language is an abstraction in this sense.