SPHR 1071 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Linguistic Determinism, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Edward Sapir
8 Jan 2017
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Language is more than speech- the deaf have a language. Certain sequences of sounds create certain meanings, when you do not know a language, the sounds are meaningless, or arbitrary. Form: the phonological or gestural representation of a morpheme or word (sound/sign) Originally signing was more like miming, where the relationship between form and meaning was non-arbitrary, but as the languages developed miming was lost arbitrary. Sound symbolism: words whose pronunciation suggests their meanings. Onomatopoeic words in languages imitate the sounds associated with what they refer to but often differ between languages. Language has a universal creative aspect in that an unlimited number of novel sentences can be formed. Noam chomsky (father of linguistics) argued against the view that language is a learned response to stimuli- universal grammar. We can distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences despite that we have never heard the words before. Linguistic competence: our knowledge of words and grammar.
