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Week 4: The Origin of Language

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                                                                    Homo Timeline: Check Week 4 Powerpoint for the rest of the images (they wouldn't paste to here) The Origins of Language (maybe) The shortage of direct, empirical evidence has caused many scholars to regard the entire topic as unsuitable for serious study: in 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned any existing or future debates on the subject Since the early 1990s, a number of linguists, archaeologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and others have attempted to address this issue with new, modern methods Assumptions are based on fossil records, archaeological evidence, studies of language acquisition, comparison between human language and systems of communication among other animals (other primates) Chomsky: discontinuity theory = a single chance...
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Week 3: Semiotics, or the Science of Signs

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  Semiotics Logician, mathematician, philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) began writing on semiotics, or the theory of sign relations  in the 1860s. He eventually defined semiosis as an "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretation, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs." A tri-relative cooperation A sign  represents, in the broadest possible sense of "represents". It is something interpretable as saying something about something. It is not necessarily symbolic, linguistic, or artificial. An object  (or semiotic object) is a subject matter of a sign and an interpretant. It can be anything discussable or thinkable, a thing, event, relationship, quality, law argument, etc, and can even be fictional, for instance Hamlet. An interpretant  (or interpretant sign) is the sign's more or less clarified meaning or ram...
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Week 2: Classifying Language

  Classifying Language Geneological classification: (Proto-Indoeuropean - Indoeuropean - Romance Languages) We cannot purely use this method of classification as some languages escape it. E.g Albanian has some features that belong to the Indoeuropean family and other features that belong to other language families Morphological Classification: Morpheme = the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words Isolating Languages In which each grammatical category is represented by a separate word. 1 word = 1 separate function wo ai ni = I love you ni ai wo = you love me Chinese and Vietnamese are isolating languages Tonal Languages Some isolating languages are tonal. This means that the meaning of the word changes when it is pronounced differently Agglutinating Languages In which words are easily divided into separate segments with separate grammatical functions E.g from Turkish 'Ev' = home and 'in' = genitive so 'evin' = of the home The Swahili Language: mtot...
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