This week's reading:

Folks,

Apparently some folks have had trouble getting to the website for this week's reading. Try clicking this link, or cutting & pasting it:

http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/~pine/Book2/chap1EL-2.htm

Cheers & Best,

Michael

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Understanding Slang & Saussure

I just finished doing my assignment on the evolution of slang. After doing the research I found the information to be informative and it was actually kind of fun to look up different slang words that we use in everyday vocabulary and find out the true roots. It made me think of when my friends and I actually started using the terms and it was interesting to see that almost everyone has different variations or definitions/ meanings for the slang that they presently use. It’s funny how a slang word gets passed on per-say to different groups of people and it kind of starts to become a trend or fad in society, also in some instances you don’t even realize that the slang is actually coming out of your mouth.

I also found that I got a better understanding of Saussure’s article, after doing the assignment because when you just read what he says it’s hard to get your mind around it. But when I was finished writing my paper, the key points regarding how language evolves and starting up a new language was a bit clearer. In the lecture last week we talked about Saussure and how he discusses that person-to-person communication revolves around articulating syllables into words. In my opinion, he tries to make it clear that in every language, the people that are well aware of it, can interpret someone even though the words/syllables aren’t exactly proper. In turn it may relate to slang, because with slang comes a different word however there is a general meaning that people associate with the term. As expected some people do have variations but overall there is a common understanding of each individual slang term.

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Tutorial Response; Walking Vs Speaking

For this week's blog entry, I have decided to write in response to a discussion that was held in the tutorial last week concerning the nature of speaking and walking. A suggestion was given about this topic questioning that if someone was brought up in an isolated environment, whether or not they would automatically learn how to walk and/or use their vocal cords.

I thought that this point was interesting, because coming from a collective society, the majority of humans don't concider how they adapted their means of transportation and communication. I think that it would be interesting to observe how someone brought up in an isolated situation would react.

With respect to walking, I feel that a human would eventually learn how to move around either with walking or another similar form of transportation. This movement may begin with something similar to other animal movements, such as walking on arms and legs instead of just legs. Eventually through growth and modification, the human would adapt a more comfortable means of transportation, whether that is walking as we understand in today's culture or in another form.

In my opinion, speaking would be more difficult to adapt in an isolated environment. As Saussure states, linguistics involves both a social and individual aspect. Without a social aspect to correspond to the individual aspect, the individual would fail to achieve communication. Even if the human discovered how to utilize his or her vocal cords, this person would still be unable to communicate effectively in a social setting as he or she would have zero knowledge of the common language and symbols used in that environment.

An example that argues this question of natural instincts can be seen with newborn babies. As the baby grows it immediately becomes curious with movement, beginning with squirming, continuing with crawling, and finishing with walking. Speech, on the other hand, is something that the parent of a child tries to introduce and teach to the infant.

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Saussure Reading Response

This post is in response/to add on to what Melissa posted last week about language as a social contract and how members of a community have to agree on linguistic as well as visual signs in order to communicate. The last part of Melissa's post where she discussed Saussure's idea that a person who loses the ability to speak would still be able to communicate with others because he would still understand both linguistic and visual signs being presented to him, made me remember something that an teacher I had in elementary school had told me about when she had taught in Nunavut. Inuit children don't usually nod their heads to express either "yes" or "no", instead they often raise their eyebrows really high and open their eyes wide to express "yes" and scrunch up their noses to express "no". I remember when she told me and the rest of the class, we all thought it was funny and really couldn't imagine doing it. However, thinking about it now it really re-inforces and acts as a good example of Saussure's ideas about the agreement communities have concerning words and signs. Obviously, if a person from Ontario for example, had no prior knowledge of these signs they wouldn't understand and may even misunderstand the action for another meaning, if a person from Nunavut tried to communicate either one because in Ontario, like many other places, we have a different agreement about the actions. This relates directly to Saussure saying that words arbitrary as in this example the actual visual signs are arbitrary, as two completely different actions can mean the exact same thing depending on the social agreement in a particular community concerning the agreement.

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Soemthing I found interestin

Language has a social part that can only be used with more then one persone. When people are talking, they have to be able to understand what they are saying therefore they have to have a "a kind of contract agreed between the members of a community" or society. This is quite true because people have to globaly understand what words mean in order to have discussions. If two people are talking different languages there will be absolutely no understanding of what the other persone is trying to express. Furthermore, I found it interesting that sassure states "Language is quite seperate from speach: a man who loses the ability to speak none the less retains his grasp of the language system, provided he understands the vocal signs he hears." Therefore, this individual can still communicate with people in his society.

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Object of Study Response

Language is a complex system that is agreed upon throughout society as a means of communication. Although this agreement may be altered by certain individuals within a society with the use of slang or code, the language that is used follows a certain structure or “contract”.

After reading The Object of Study, the main idea that appealed to me was the argument stating, “it is not clear that our vocal apparatus is made for speaking” (pg.2). I felt that this argument highlighted human’s intelligence and organizational skills in that generations before us were able to take advantage of the vocal apparatus that we possess and create something that would be relied upon for generations to come. Without this common understanding of communication, the world would not function as it does today and we would lack solidity in engaging with others.

Aside from the complexity of the creation of language, humans have also adapted language into forms aside from speech, including reading, writing, and sign language. Being able to code language into other forms again illustrates the human’s ability to organize a concept that can be adapted into society and learned by others as a way to transfer information.

I enjoyed that The Object of Study provided an insight into the complexity of linguistics. It fascinates me that something that the world may view as a natural gesture, is actually a system that has been created and continued throughout history with a mere coincidence that we possess a vocal apparatus.

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Michael's Notes on Saussure

Dear Folks, 
  As my first contribution to the blog, I'm posting my notes on Saussure. 
This is one of the hardest texts we'll read all year, so I thought these notes might be helpful.

Cheers,

Michael

Saussure NOTES

Intro Chapter III §1

- What linguistics studies is not self-evident, because each and every word does not just mean different things, but is different things: an idea, a sound, an element of history

- At first glance, the question “what is a word?” must be answered: it depends

- Speech sounds are not independent of thoughts; in that sense, they are not “things”

- Language is always both individual and social; these two aspects are inseparable from each other

- Language always involves both a present and a past; language does not have a history “and” a present usage; these two are also inseparable; linguistic history is always being made; it is made every time someone speaks the language

- Solution to dilemma is to study linguistic structure: a “social product of our language faculty”; a body of conventions adopted by society to use the language faculty; the principle of order to all the different aspects of language;

- It is not clear whether language is a natural function of the vocal apparatus; it is clear that no one language is more natural than another

- [Key term:] Articulation, the division of sound into discrete syllables, words, sentences; essential to the process of making meaning; we make sense of the whole (whatever idea is expressed) by making sense of the parts, and understanding their relation to each other; one essential definition, though not the only one: language is articulated sound

§2

- in order to express concepts (or ideas), an individual speech act requires a circuit between two people, involving both (articulated) speaking and (comprehending) listening

- the physiological and psychological facts are also part of a social phenomenon: the words used to express concepts are the same between the members of the language-speaking group [“wonderful!” is used in all kinds of ways—but not to describe a toothache, except sarcastically; no one uses the expression “dirt path” to describe Highway 401, again unless they’re kidding]; the shared words are symptoms of a shared concept, which in turn becomes a shared word, used to express the shared concept; words and language are where we express our agreement and shared experience; none of us call Highway 401 a “dirt road” because that isn’t the way any of us experience it; hence we use “the same signs linked to the same concepts”

- read FdS p 30, right hand column: the totality of stored impressions is the totality of (and called) language

- language is the totality of shared impressions and concepts, independent of (or beyond) the individual utterances and speech acts of individuals, which Saussure calls speech [which includes written speech acts]

[more on language structure:]

1. It is external to the individual, who is powerless to control it; if you want to say ‘sheep’ and mean ‘car,’ no one will understand you; more importantly, no one will follow your example; it will be even worse if you start to say “the” three or four times before every word; the convention is to say “the” just once, and it will be impossible for you to change it

2. Language struucure can be studied independently, both of individual speech acts, and of specific historical conditions; in other words, no one individual or situation defines a language, and its structure can be studied independent of them all, even if it is no longer spoken

3./4. Structure is sufficiently consistent and tangible that it can be studied, because even though the patterns formed by all the speech acts are very diverse, they are coherent enough that they can be studied like objects; a linguist can study words, just as an astronomer studies stars and constellations, or a geologist studies mountains and rocks

§3



- A [particular] language has a key role in social life; “language” (in general) does not; the language capacity of human beings is an abstraction; we cannot point out or explain exactly what it is, but only look to the way it is used in particular cases

- There are two kinds of particular case: individual speech acts, and the social totality of these acts, the structure of them all, which is English as opposed to French, as opposed to German

- Language is an abstraction; what I am saying right now is concrete, and so is the English language



Part ONE Chapter I §1 – how linguistic signs actually work

- if we assume that words (simply) represent things, then we assume that concepts are independent of words, because ideas already exist, and language simply comes along and provides names or labels for what we already understand

- linguistic signs link concepts and sound patterns – not brain waves and objects, but experiences (sound pattern and concepts are both ‘experiences’)

- sound pattern, because the actual sound isn’t required, or essential; many distinct sounds can have the same sound pattern, such as child’s voice, a non-native speaker, a TV star, a drunk; recognition of the pattern is what creates meaning, not (just) recognition of the sound

- A sign is the conjunction of sound pattern and concept; a stop sign automatically tells us, signals ‘stop’ to us; if we see drivers ahead of us stop at an intersection (and don’t see a traffic light), we automatically assume there’s a stop sign, we make the association; even a crude drawing of a tree has the same effect, because the association works the same way, that is, the same combination of sound pattern and concept

- “But ‘stop’ means I do something, such as stop my car or bicycle; ‘tree’ doesn’t do that” – well, then ‘tree’ is a different kind of concept, one that does not involve a specific instruction; “kinds of words” are kinds of concepts, different ways to use signs in our social lives

§2

- the sign is arbitrary; it could be any sound pattern that, through the history of usage, a society/culture/language-user group agrees to use as a concept

- Is the stuff you grill to make a sandwich “cheese,” “fromage,” or “Käse”? It depends on where you are and which language you’re speaking, and only on that; none of these words is any closer to “the truth” than the others

- As Saussure says, there is no internal connection of signal to signification; the ‘external’ connection is linguistic structure, the history of the (particular) language; it is external precisely because it already existed before you and I were born; we learned it; and is there anything more important that we did in our lives to become who we are?

- Even signals which appear to be natural, such as ‘tick-tock’ for a ticking clock (an imitative sound), or bowing low to a superior authority, like an act of physiological submission, is only meaningful because it is a learned convention; unless someone understands that convention, that language, it isn’t meaningful

- Semiology means that all meaningful sounds behave like linguistic signs, or are a part of language

- “Arbitrary” does not mean that the sign can mean whatever anyone wants it to mean; it means that signs are chosen through the process linguistic history, and have no natural or absolute basis; cheese, fromage, and Käse are characteristic sounds of their languages, i.e., they “sound like” English, French, German words, and are consistent with the sound patterns of other words in those languages; beyond that, they have no special relation to what we put on sandwiches, in particular no natural or automatic relation; had the history of the language been different, so would the words

- [famous] example: in English, when the animal is walking around, we call it a cow [from German Kuh] or swine [from German Schwein]; when it’s on the table, as food, we call it beef or pork [from French boeuf and pork]; the change happened after the French invasion of England in 1066, after which all the ruling nobility were French, and so could afford to eat the meat; the English peasants who tended the animals could not, and so used the (older) words for the animals in the living form, which was how they knew them

- The fact that some words have sound patterns that resemble what they describe as a concept (such as “gurgle” or “screech” in English) doesn’t change the arbitrary nature of the sign, because other languages may not use a related sound for that concept; it’s never universal, and meaning always depends on the history of adopted conventions

- Exclamations, too, vary from language to language, and over time; it is not natural or inevitable that someone says “Ow!” or “Ouch!” when they bang their thumb with a hammer, any more than it’s natural they say—as I would, in that case--@!#$$#, %%$%#@&^!! *&*^%+$#@ !#@ %^$#@$!!

§3

- Signs are temporal; they take place in linear time, unfold one part at a time; we understand them by [Key term:] synthesis, by mentally combining the parts into wholes, and the wholes into larger wholes; as we hear or read them, syllables combine into words, words into phrases, phrases into sentences, paragraphs, stories, essays; articulation is the process of generating these parts in time; whether audibly (in speech) or visually (in writing), the temporal aspect of the process is equally essential

Chapter I §1 – Variability & Change

- Once a signal is chosen by a linguistic community, it cannot be changed, except by the community; since it is community (or communally) based, the process is a not a matter of free choice or contract (“hey, fellers! Why don’t we call them dumb birds “pigeons,” eh?); a language is always an inheritance from the past

- No society ever knows (its) language otherwise; hence, the origin of language is a fairly minor question; for practical purposes, it has “always been like this”

- What we inherit is above all linguistic structure: even if through speech acts we add words and expressions to “English” [with a capital ‘E’], the rules of its grammar (and spelling) change very slowly, over centuries—if at all

1. Language cannot be changed by conscious choice of the community (or individuals within the community), because it isn’t based on rational consensus in the first place; “the sign is arbitrary” also means that changing the system is difficult, because it is elusive

2. The working variables of a language are very small—27 letters in English, and about 90 different vocal sounds in total—but the combinations of them as signs are virtually limitless; again, that makes fundamental change difficult

3. The system is extremely complex; just to list all of the rules of spoken and written English would be a huge undertaking; it is hard to change for that reason, too

4. Collective inertia resists all innovations – everyone uses language constantly; even in a small community, the number of speech acts in a day is in the hundreds of thousands; changing a system so heavily used “on the fly” is difficult; hence “continuity with the past restricts freedom of choice”

- the sign is arbitrary, but fixed by tradition—and there is nothing else that “fixes” signs, gives them stability, except tradition

§2

- While the system of linguistic structure, anchored in the past of custom and tradition, is extremely slow to change, the language itself is not, in fact can change rapidly, because the relation between signal and signification is relatively unstable

- Changes in social customs can bring changes in such relations; the industrial revolution brought new words, and new senses for old ones (such as “work,” “job,” “task”); so did the computer revolution

- The sheer number of times that words are spoken every day tends, as we saw, to make changes to the system difficult; but, through usage, it makes changes to the signs probable, or at least very flexible; the ceaseless evolution of slang is a good illustration

- Hence “a language” and a linguistic community are inseparable; they define themselves and each other through (historical) time



 

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