Today’s report is by Ms. Ebisutani.

Today,

1. We thought about differences of “Langue” and “Parole”, and Saussure’s chess metaphor.
2. We read chapter3, the sections about “Twentieth Century: Daniel Jones and the Phoneme”, “Twentieth Century: Bloomfield and the Americans” and “Chomsky”.
3. We summarized chapter3, “The Study of Language: Greeks to the 20th Century”.

Homework

1. Choose a topic for your presentation (June 29th).
2. Write a Japanese grammatically impossible sentence (see today’s handout, chapter 4, for an example in English: ‘Quickly table green under happy’.)
3. 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.

1. Daniel Pinker’s “The Language Instinct“
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. How the Alphabet was Made, by Rudyard Kipling
4. How the First Letter was Written, by Rudyard Kipling
5. “Snow Crash“, a science-fiction novel about language, refers to history and the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. By Neal Stephenson.
6. Japanese myths or famous stories about how language began
7. A famous and/or influential Japanese book about (Japanese or English) linguistics

Or you could introduce a famous Japanese linguist or linguistics expert, either living or dead.

1. A famous Japanese linguist or linguistics expert (either living or dead)