Tuesday, 22 September 2015

Steven Pinker: What Our Language Habits Reveal





Class Notes
  • Language Change: Descriptive attitudes towards language/Prescriptive attitudes towards language
  • Descriptivism/Prescriptivism
  • Standard English has to be kept somehow
  • Language is a window onto Human Nature 
  • Language emerges from human minds interacting with one another
  • Visible in unstoppable change in language- Slang & Jargon, historical change, dialect divergence, language formation
  • Communication model- Sender, Message, Receiver 
  • Euphemistic language used to dodge topics not wanting to speak about
  • Context means everything- Social, Historical and Cultural 




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