- •The theory of Language Lecture 1
- •3 Approaches:
- •Language is a system of signs & a structure
- •3 Types of signs:
- •Lecture 2 Language & thought
- •Where do language & thought meet?
- •A series of planes:
- •Inner speech
- •Thought
- •Conclusions:
- •Language & thought from the point of view of cognitive linguistics
- •Language & Culture
- •Sapir’s understanding of language
- •The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
- •Verbal means
- •Prototypical categories
- •Social stratification
- •Lecture 4 Language, Mind, Culture & Society
- •Are human beings absolutely alone & unique in their use of systems of signs to express social meanings?
- •Sociolinguistics
- •Language & gender
- •Lecture 5 Language as a means of communication. Discourse analysis.
- •Verbal message
- •Verbalization
- •Understanding
- •The origins of discourse analysis
- •Pioneers in the field of da (Labov, Grice, Sinclair)
- •Differences between text & discourse
- •Linguistic features of text – the product of the process of discourse
- •Lecture 6 Levels of analysis
- •Performatives vs. Statements
- •What governs the linguistic realization of these speech acts?
- •The parson may object to it: the pragmatic meaning of the utterance
- •Speech arts & culture
Verbal means
Semantic fields: degree of specification in designation of this or that sphere of reality.
Prototypical categories
Images used for building new words & new meanings in polysemes (use of metaphor)
Collocations & idioms
Modality
Cultural scenarios for stereotypical situations.
Prototypical categories
According to theory of prototypes, there are more prominent & typical members of a category & less central members.
Some members of a conceptual family will be very typical because they share many features with many other family members. Some members may have only a few features.
A prototype combines all the most typical features
Prototype categorization stems from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thesis that many concepts are based not on a collection of properties, but on family resemblance. One game shares some properties with another game & so on. It is based on family resembles.
Social stratification
It is the hierarchical structuring of groups within a society, reflecting inequalities among sectors of population (income, occupation, education & access to social, economic & political power). Speakers of different social groups exhibit differences in frequency of use of certain sounds, words & grammatical structures. The members are consciously or unconsciously aware of speech style characteristic of various social strata & they use this knowledge in accessing their own & people’s speech.
Khalapur in a North Indian village with some 5, 000 inhabitants. The population is divided into 31 castes. Higher castes use the sound system of the local dialect of Hindi, India’s official language. Lower castes use variants of standard forms. In the USA the most people use upper & lower class features but it is frequency of usage that identifies speakers.
Pronouncing the postvocalic – r –
Lower class – 50 %
Working class – 53 %
Lower middle class – 86 %
Upper middle class – 75 %
Lecture 4 Language, Mind, Culture & Society
The purpose of linguists is to explain language.
Language is so intricately & intimately bound up with human life that its essential nature is not easy to discern.
Language signs, being arbitrary, provide for abstraction: enable to set up conceptual categories to define our own world.
Language does not just reflect reality, but creates it. In this sense, it provides us with an explanation of experience.
The languages of different communities will represent different variants of reality, so the explanation of experience is a matter of cultural custom & linguistic convention.
The essential nature of language is cognitive. It is seen as psychological phenomenon. The form of language reveals a lot about the human mind. This is the only one aspect of language. The language also functions as a means of communication & social control. It is internalized in the mind as abstract knowledge, but in order for this to happen it must also be experiences in the external world as actual behavior. The 2nd aspect of looking at language would see in terms of social functions it serves.
It is fashioned as a system of signs to meet the elaborate cultural & communal needs of human societies.
The focus of attention is on ‘language as social semiotic’ (Michael Halliday), that is on language as a system of signs which are socially motivated.
Language not as genetic endowment, but as generic accomplishment.