An ever-expanding list of linguistic concepts introduced in class:
- The advantages of sound as a medium for communication
- Sounds (signs) vs Phonemes
- Phonetics vs Phonology
- Basic features of the human(oid) vocal tract
- Writing Systems: alphabets, syllabaries, ideographs/pictographs/glyphs
- Morphemes and Morphology
- Roots vs Affixes (prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, etc?)
- Syntax
- Ambiguity in human language
- The Lexicon: Polysemy, Homophony
- Sociolinguistics: Dialect, Style, Ideolect
- Lingua Franca
- Word Formation strategies: affixation, previously nonsensical combinations of sounds, borrowing, "genericizing," acronyms, semantic extension (metaphor), etc?
- Semantic Change: generalization, specialization, amelioration, pejoration
- Linguistic evolution in relation to external history
- Internal Linguistic Evolution: Sound Change (e.g., The Great Vowel Shift)
- Constructed/Artificial languages (Esperanto, Solresol, etc.)
- Animal systems of communication
- Features of human language (as opposed to animal systems of communication:
- vocal-auditory channel
- broadcast transmission & directional reception
- rapid fading
- interchangeability
- total feedback
- specialization
- semanticity
- arbitrariness
- discreteness
- displacement
- productivity
- traditional transmission
- duality of patterning
- Animal dialects?
