I truly enjoyed reading through the three papers for reading this week. I found it the last paper "How to investigate language structure" truly interesting, especially when they started talking about the various levels that can be found in language. I had never thought of language having a structured series of levels. However, now that I think of language having structure, I can better organize the many parts of language.
Additionally, I enjoyed reading about "How the brain handles language", because it was a great refresher on neurology and psychology. I had a brief chapter in my high school psychology and Anatomy and Physiology classes about the brain and how speech works. What I found most interesting was the information on "slips of the tongue". I get frustrated with myself when I am talking to someone or writing them and I am excited, because I start to mix up my words or omit two or three words in my sentences. I catch myself doing this especially when I am trying to have a quick conversation with someone over text messaging.
Lastly, in the papers, "How we mean" and "How we analyze meaning", I recognized the various distinctions that languages have for things that are important to their culture. For example, in Biblical Hebrew there are five different words that describe a desert storm. My favorite example is with the Inuits, they are over four different ways to describe snow. Also, I have never actually recognized the use of collocations. For the examples in the paper given, I found it very interesting that I could fill everyone one of those words in with a one or two choice words that almost always are found with that word. This showed me, that with every language I learn, I am not fluent until I can actually recognize various collocations.
Comments
I thought it was really interesting how you brought up the way different languages can have so many words to describe something that is lumped under one broad category in English. It shows how language is so inextricably tied to culture -- for the Inuits, obviously, snow is a big part of their culture, and it makes sense that they would need different words to distinguish between the types of snow.