LING 320 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Theoretical Linguistics, Idiolect, Sociolinguistics
19 Nov 2012
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Document Summary
A society is a group of people who are drawn together for a purpose (or purposes). Members of a society may speak one language, or they may speak several. Communication involves codes both on the part of the speaker and the interpreter. The grammar employed is the knowledge that two speakers use, and is what interests linguists (they want to be able to characterize it) Native speakers" knowledge of their grammar is far more nuanced than grammar books, and as such linguists prefer to be able to get the information from the source, despite the difficulty people have in describing (their own) speech. Dead languages are dead because there are no more speakers whose mother tongue is, for example, People know what they know, but they don"t know how they know it. For lightfoot, it is about distinguishing between i-language (individual linguistic range) and e- ), of which i-language is the more important.
