LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Universal Grammar, Preposition And Postposition, Linguistic Prescription
Document Summary
Speakers encode meanings into sounds (or hand shapes) Listeners decode speech sounds (or hand shapes)into meaning. Consider forms that should be familiar to you, even if you don"t use them. Can determine what constitutes a possible word. Understand that there are constraints on how a word can be built. Inventory of sounds in your language ( phonetics ) Sound patterns of your language, what sequences are possible ( phonology ) How to build good phrases and sentences ( syntax ) Meanings of words and how to use them ( semantics ) How to assign meaning to a given sentence. It is not even clear that onomatopoeic words are not arbitrary. True of both spoken and signed languages. Ie. what sound a pig makes (according to diff. languages) Everyday speakers create and understand novel sentences. Can use finite set of building blocks and rules > to create an infinite set of new sentences.
