Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Sarcasm, Pragmatics

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Terry Biggs

Document Summary

Most common, universal feature of human society. Pervades every facet of our lives, public and private. Every culture, no matter how isolated or primitive has language. Every person, except under extreme deprivation/accidents, develops skills in use of language. Every human is born with the ability to acquire language in every culture and inside your head, all your thoughts are language. A shared symbolic system for communication: letters, written and spoken symbols that stand for the referent of the word, shared by all speakers of a language culture, system enables communication, there"s rules for these symbols, like grammar. Language = words + rules: words of language comprise the mental lexicon, grammar: rules that dictate the legal combination of units of language. Symbols can be combined to generate an infinite number of messages that can have novel meaning: all three of these combined: displacement. Past, future, imaginary events, objects can be symbolically represented and communicated.