David Crystal's Readings
To be honest, David Crystal is definitely, not my favorite writer. I have had a chance to read his books before, and his writings seemed very dry and hard to read. When I started to read the assigned chapters, I felt the same, however as I went further, I found several pieces of helpful information and linguistic discoveries.
I liked how he went deeper into speech process and described several parts of the brain. The left hemisphere is the dominant one for language production for right-handed people. The same hemisphere is also responsible for information sequencing, logical organization, analytical tasks etc. I found interesting that all this process is controlled by just one part of the brain. I also read about the theory of cerebral localization and several areas of the brain, such as Broca's and Wrenches'. The last one is responsible for comprehension of speech. Isn't that fascinating how just one area of the brain controls the whole speech comprehension? I also learnt about neurological aspects of the brain as well as slips of the tongue, which, albeit seem just slips, occur because of same grammatical construction or rhythm units.
I also learnt about naturalist and conventionalist views of Plato and Aristotle and thought about intrinsic and arbitrary relations of the words. Sense and reference of the language part was also intriguing-words exist both within the language and outside the language. Apart from all of these, these readings made me think about lexeme vs. word relations, how some words exist in certain languages and do not exist in others, and sense of several relations among words-synonymy, antonymy, inclusion and incompatibility.
I think, all these information made me think about language learning process in general and how different our perceptions of the languages are. I will probably start to pay attention on small details of my learning process ,and think about how different my target language is from other languages that I've pursued earlier.
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