WLC 215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Phatic Expression, Formal Language
15 Dec 2017
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Document Summary
Essentially, it is expelling air through the nose and mouth, using our articulatory organs to modify air in different ways. We can arrange the sounds we produce into fixed patterns which in turn can form an infinite variety of meanings. Linguist: well-formed v. ill-formed (is an utterance acceptable and understood by a native speaker or is not understood) The ultimate authority in language is the speaker. It"s valuable to look at prescriptive rules but they are flawed, difficult to use, and don"t account for the constant evolution of language. Innateness: we are born with the ability to easily acquire new languages, there is some gene that we acquired by random mutation. Adaptive theory: early human ancestors gained apposable thumbs, learning to grip things differently and made tools: this exercised different areas of the brain and perhaps primed the brain for language learning. Monogenesis v. polygenesis: one source or multiple sources. Latin is the root of the romance languages.
