What kinds of structures do you observe in your language of study? Refer to the diagram on page 9 in Aitchison’s linguistics. How do you combine different disciplinary perspectives to formulate a more holistic understanding of your target language? Do you give preference to one disciplinary approach over the others? How will your knowledge of language structures and disciplinary methodologies influence the trajectory of your learning plan?
In Ge’ez what I am focusing on the most is the syntax and semantics of the language. This is mainly because phonetics and phonology are close to my native tongue so I feel like I don’t have to start from there. Crystal brought up an interesting point saying that, studying the aspects of language in an isolated fashion may help you focus but it introduces an artificial element to the study. When you are learning the language to use it, the stepwise fashion that is described American linguist Leonard Bloomfield is helpful, because essentially you are using building blocks to get to meaning and without having those your meaning or semantics can be misconstrued. Structure dependence is important to understand as you are going through this process. It might guide how much focus you may need in syntax or what style you should mimic in learning. Languages like latin don’t have much dependence on structure from what I understand.
Comments