LING 200 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Linguistic Prescription, International Phonetic Alphabet, Vocal Folds
27 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
Linguistics- the study of the human language and how it works. Linguists build a model of the system that describes and explains how speakers naturally speak. Linguists are generally more interested in studying spoken language than written language. Prescriptive grammar does not further this goal. What are the properties of human language: human language reflects one"s self identity, culture, and background, emerges early on in childhood. Why study language: to understand the nature of the human mind and understand a central property. This is known as a discrete combinatorial system. What are the basic units and what determines how they can combine: set of discrete units (sounds and signs, set of rules for combining these units. Human language is unbound, productivity"s constrained by rules (systematic) Informally: what a native speaker actually says or would consider acceptable. Formally: conforms to the rules of the speaker"s mental grammar.
