LINGUIST 1A03 Lecture Notes - Language Change, Iconicity, Linguistic Prescription
22 Sep 2013
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Document Summary
The study of how language is organized and used. Descriptive vs. prescriptive grammar: prescriptive what someone should or shouldn"t say. Ability to communicate feelings, ideas, thoughts, information is possible because of language. Language is a modular system : speakers understand and product language using several subsystems or modules at the same time. Key subsystems (english language has 14 vowel sounds) Phonetics: production & interpretation of sounds. Morphology: words (the structure of units that form words) Syntax: sentences (the structure of larger units) Discourse: organization of language beyond the sentence. Speakers produce new words, expressions, sentences out of existing units (that other speakers of that language will understand). Rule-governed creativity: language used governed by rules and constraints (what"s possible and what"s not possible, production and interpretation of new forms is not arbitrary (saying that doesn"t sound right" even if you don"t know why)
