We thought about differences of “Langue” and “Parole”, and Saussure’s chess metaphor.
We read chapter3, the sections about “Twentieth Century: Daniel Jones and the Phoneme”, “Twentieth Century: Bloomfield and the Americans” and “Chomsky”.
We summarized chapter3, “The Study of Language: Greeks to the 20th Century”.
Homework
Choose a topic for your presentation (June 29th).
Write a Japanese grammatically impossible sentence (see today’s handout, chapter 4, for an example in English: ‘Quickly table green under happy’.)
Write a Japanese sentence that has never been spoken or written before (see today’s handout, chapter 4, for an example in English: ‘Purple elephants are turning somersaults in the hall’.)
Presentation topics. Read one of these books (or a chapter in a book) and tell the class about it.
Presentation date: June 29th
Time: 2 minutes.
Neal Stephenson speaking at Google, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
productivity in linguistics means the ability to create new words and concepts
Today, we
read chapter 2, “What is Language?” of “General Linguistics”, and summarised the following sections:
Variety of message, Organization of sounds and Human Language versus Animal Communication.
We answered the following questions:
What does “productivity” mean?
A: “Most animals have a very limited number of messages that they can give or receive. A human can produce an incalculable number of new combinations from the elements of his language. Language can cope with entirely new situations by adding new items. Only human language is capable of dealing with unforeseen and novel situations.”
What does “duality” mean?
A: “Most animals can use each basic sound only once. The number of messages an animal can send is restricted to the number of basic sounds. Each human language has a stock of sound units or phonemes which are similar in number to the basic sounds possessed by animals, between thirty and forty. These phonemes are in themselves meaningless, but they are combined into larger meaningful units or morphemes. The number of possible morphemes is enormous- an educated man might use up to 100 000, according to one calculation. This organisation of sounds into two layers, one of phonemes and one of morphemes, is known as duality or double articulation. Duality means that language is a much more powerful tool than animal communication systems, since the mathematical possibilities of combinations of morphemes are incalculable.”
Homework:
Find a famous book by these two famous linguists and their Japanese translation, and write their details down using the MLA format in the handout provided.
Ferdinand de Saussure
Noam Chomsky
Duality of Patterning, from http://www.uni-due.de/DI/REV_Linguistics.htm
