PSYC 221 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Phrase Structure Rules, Linguistic Universal, Transformational Grammar

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 221
• Professor: Mc Colemanand Kleffner

Document Summary

Language is central to society and our lives. Linguistics: the discipline that studies language as a formal system: linguistics focuses on language itself as a system, psycholinguistics: the study of language from the perspective of psychology; the study of language behaviour and processes. Defining language: we attribute meaning to the sounds of language; there is nothing inherent about language that denotes meaning, we sa(cid:455) (cid:862)(cid:272)at(cid:863) (cid:373)ea(cid:374)s (cid:862)(cid:272)at(cid:863) a(cid:374)d (cid:374)ot (cid:271)e(cid:272)ause (cid:862)(cid:272)at(cid:863) sou(cid:374)ds like the (cid:449)a(cid:455) a (cid:272)at looks. Language: a shared symbolic system for communication; three assumptions of language: language is symbolic, the symbol system is shared by all speakers of a language culture, the system enables communication. Interchangeability: total feedback, specialization, semanticity, arbitrariness, discreteness, displacement, productivity, duality of patterning (duality of structure) In short, animal languages do not have the same characteristics that are universally true of human language.