PSYCH 240 Study Guide - Final Guide: Syntactic Ambiguity, Linguistic Determinism, Language Processing In The Brain
Document Summary
People communicate ideas by producing and comprehending arbitrary intermediate sounds. Communicative: language permits us to communicate with one or more people who share our language. Arbitrarily symbolic: language creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents: an idea, a thing, a process, a relationship, or a description. Regularly structured: language has a structure; only particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings. Structured at multiple levels: the structure of language can be analyzed at more than one level (e. g. , in sounds, meaning units, words, and phrases). Generative, productive: within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances, virtually limitless. Syntax: rules that determines word order, different meaning for different phrase structures, same words can be grouped into phrases differently which changes meaning. Syntactic ambiguity: words can be grouped together into more than one phrase structure.
