LING 080 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Linguistic Prescription, Linguistic Description, Historical Linguistics
4 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Language - the use by human beings of voice sounds (or signed gestures), and often written symbols that represent these sounds, organized combos and patterns to express and communicate thoughts and feelings. Different languages - system of words, formed from combinations and patterns, used by people of a certain country or group with a shared history. Branch of science that studies how language works. You have a thought, make gestures w/ lungs and vocal apparatus, and the person you"re talking to has the same thought. Pragmatics (how speakers and writers use language to do things ) Historical linguistics (how languages change, reconstruction of earlier stages) Sociolinguistics (language and society, how speakers and dialects differ from each other) Psycholing (mind and brain, how language is acquired) The relationship b/t a word and its referent is arbitrary (saussure"s idea) A rose by any other name would smell as sweet . English has 42 phonemes = 42 individual, distinct sounds.
