LING 2010Q Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Social Stratification, Unobservable, Preposition And Postposition
Document Summary
English, portuguese, spanish, chinese etc are languages. Language is a faculty of the human mind. A finite number of discrete elements are sample, combined, and permuted to create larger structures with properties that are quite distinct from those of their elements. A set of rules to combine words and form sentences: Rules about how people should speak and write. The objectives of prescriptive grammars (standardization, social stratification, social mobility) do not concern us linguists. A sentence should not end with a preposition. A scientific approach to an object of study cannot be prescriptive or normative about it. Science is both a collection of facts (knowledge) and a process. The object of study of linguistics is language as an object of nature. Natural speech is closer to the mental grammar than any other artificial variety of language. Prescriptive grammars and writing systems must be taught because they"re artificial.
