LIN 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Animal Communication, Soft Drink, Quintessentially Group
2 Sep 2015
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
All languages differ with respect to their inventory of sounds, vocab, word order, types of affixes, etc, but they all have a common set of traits. A language can be used to communicate intentions and concepts from one speaker"s mind to another"s. Human languages have semanticity - ability to convey a meaning. Every language uses a system of signs that are associated with meanings. Other languages have a different set of conventional signs. Even different dialects of the same language have a different set of conventional signs. Speakers of a language encode what we want to say by turning their thoughts into a continuous linear sequence of discrete units. Language is composed of discrete units that are assembled according to the rules of that language"s grammar. All languages systematically combine these discrete units to form larger units, arrange units in a particular order, and substitute units for each other.
