LING 100A Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Language Change, Quebec French
Document Summary
Ling100 a lecture 3: characteristics of language continued: generality. There are predictable gestures within asl as there is within spoken languages. All human language has words; need a morphological grammar. Grammar is a mental construct that we all innately have. Warlpiri; has free word order unlike english: dogs two now see kangaroos several, see now dogs two kangaroos several. There are other ways that they indicate meaning in warlpiri. English: subject is performing the action, the object is receiving the action. Warlpiri: suffixes indicates what the subject and object are. With free word order, you have other ways to show who the subject/object are. Trying to discover what the patterns are, they are always present: parity. Grammar maps sound onto meaning; i. e. dialects within a language ex. May see complexity in some areas, but looking at grammar as a whole they are equally challenging and complex grammars.