LINA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Sehar
Document Summary
What do you unconsciously know when you speak a language: everyone speaks with a dialect and an accent of a language, only machines speak without an accent, every human language is systematic i. e. follows a set of rules. In linguistics, a sentence is grammatical, if it sounds natural to the native speaker of that particular language. In linguistics, we are not interested in writing or spelling: think about the sounds, rules are naturally picked up without instructions being given, native speakers have an intuition of what"s possible and what"s not possible in a language. Signs: signifier-refers to the form of the sign i. e. gesture, signified-meaning of the form of the sign. If language was iconic, a tree would be expressed as a tree (same word) in every language: however, it is expressed as different words (e. g. albol in spanish), in different languages, and is therefore symbolic. In conclusion, language is a symbolic sign system: lexicon means a mental dictionary.
