Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Deep Structure And Surface Structure, Pragmatics

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Dr.Mike

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. Letters, written and spoken symbols that stand for the referent of the word. Shared by all speakers of a language culture. Words of language comprise the mental lexicon. Grammar: rules that dictate the legal combination of the units of language. Allows for forming and transferring mental representations: structure. Consists of the symbols that are used and their order. Related to the concept of syntax (the rules that govern the order of words). Refers to the underlying meaning of the combined symbols. Related to the concept of semantics (the meaning og words and sentences): generativity. Symbols can be combined to generate an infinite number of messages that can have novel meaning: displacement. Past, future, imaginary events, objects can be symbolically represented and communicated.