Communication and Language with Professor P!

[0:00]Hi, back in session with Professor P. I hope you're having a great day, staying healthy and safe in such a crazy time. Okay, today we're going to talk about communication and language. Follow along with your concept sheet if you printed them out and they are in your canvas course, in your module. Um it's quite interesting when we talk about communication because really the function that language plays is communication. Every time we communicate, we're sharing a cultural experience with one another. No matter who we're speaking to, right? And it becomes important because when we look at language, language is really a symbolic sort of way we're communicating. If I tell you, oh my god, I was run over by a truck the other day, the truck doesn't have to be there and me being run over don't. We shared that experience, that understanding of what that symbolism meant, right? Let's get to it. When we look at this kind of communication and language, all species communicate, but we are the only one that has language. All right, let's get to non-verbal human communication. Give me some examples of non-verbal human communication. Don't flip me off though. All right, non-verbal human communication, body stance, body movement, facial expressions, right? Musical notes, equations, stop signs, make sure you stop, yellow, right, red, flags, texting. As humans, right, we communicate non-verbally all the time, right? My husband would say maybe I roll my eyes at him. What is that mean, right? All of these kinds of things, non-verbal human communication is typically accurate in our communication. What we say isn't always accurate, it doesn't mean we're liars, but it typically may not be always that kind of truthfulness, body language is. Right, it's very hard to, you know, try to fake that, you right, when we're feeling something. All right, let's get to silence. Is silence a form of communication? Actually, it is. Silence can communicate a lot of things. In American society, right, it could communicate sadness, anger. I mean, we even have come on the silent treatment. How many of you get it and how many of you give it? You might be a recipient, right, a receiver, a giver, all those kinds of things. But not in every culture does it mean something negative. Um, there's a a really good article called Silence in Western Apache Culture. And among the Apache, silence is very important. It's used as a sign of respect, it's used during ambiguous situations. They talk about different kinds of way they utilize silence. Um, going courting when you date at a young age. Um, uh, virginity is highly valued, so going on dates with chaperones, even holding hands is okay, but you have to keep silent for a certain amount of time. Um, so if you speak too soon, you're considered right to be a little loose. Um, you know, during uh um, religious circles, during times of death, even when children come home from school, from boarding school, the parents won't speak to them right away because they don't want to make them feel bad. You know, they say they may have changed because of their experiences in school, so they give them the respect and they let their children speak to them first. Could be an hour, could be a day or two later, right? So they really use it like I said as a form of respect, um, and it's not about having the silent treatment and being angry. All right, let's get to the three ways non-humans communicate. Sound, odor, body movement. Sound, odor, body movement, remember that. All right, what's the difference between an open and a close system? An open system is a human system. It is complex. It has phonology, morphology, syntax, it has complex rules, and it's infinite. We can continue to build off meaning. So if I say something like care, what could we make off of that? Careful, careless, caretaker, care bear. We could continue to create meaning. Now, a close system is a non-human primate system, like chimpanzees, you know, gorillas, apes. Now they have a complex system, but it's not an open system. Right, they have thousands of calls in the wild, but one call means something specific. You can't combine calls to make new calls. They can't talk about the past or what they want to do in the future. It's in the present time, right? It is complicated, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's a human system, okay? And there's been a lot of debate about that in a lot of the fields, so make sure you sort of understand that, it is a closed system. All right, origins about the theories of language. One of the things students always ask me is we talk about when did language come about? What we do know is that language came about when we had the ability. So we first look at CCs, like the brain structure, right? And we know until we had between 1300 and 1500 CCs in the brain, which we do now, that we had small utterances, right? Another thing, the anatomy of the throat had to be structured the way it is so we can make utterances as well. So when we look at it, we want to use sort of the physical body, the cognition to really understand the origins of language. All right, children's acquisition, the next concept on your sheet. Children's acquisition, what they're really saying here is universally children have the ability to learn language at the same time, right? The language they're going to learn is going to be different, but the ability is there, okay? So usually between 18 and 24 months, you know, children can say two to three word sentences. And they actually know the ordering, it sounds weird if the ordering's wrong. So instead of saying eat daddy, they'll say daddy eats, right? If you guys have younger siblings or cousins, try it on them, say some freaky things and then they'll sort of like look at you funny, right? So, that's what they're talking about there when they're talking about children's acquisition. Let's get to descriptive linguistics. Descriptive linguistics really talks about how languages are constructed, that sort of, for some of you it could be really boring, but looking at, you know, the structure, the rules, the unconscious rules, right? All of those of patterns of speech. All right, phonology. Think about like a telephone, phonology. Phonology is really the study of sound in a language and how sounds could like change. I mean, think about this, when we look at sounds in a language, like some languages have really like deep throated sounds like Russian, right? They use it, uh, um, you know, a part of the throat that's a little bit more in the back part. As American speakers, we speak more upfront, even languages sometimes in certain languages, they share the same sounds of letters. Right, usually typically in the English language we don't, but in other languages, maybe an L and an R may sound the same, right? So it becomes important, but a phonologist really wants to understand sound in the language, right? And how sound can change the meaning if I say lake, and I say, let's take out the L and do a R and then we go rake, then we know it changes the meaning, right? Just that little small sound in the language. All right, turn your concept sheet please. Let's get to morphology. Morphology says this, it's the study of sound sequences in a language. That just means it's the study of words in a language. A morph is the smallest sort of unit that can change the meaning of a word, like an S in the English language. If I say, you know, um, you know, brush, and then I go brushes, it pluralizes it, right? An ED would past tense something, an ing would go it's in action, so those are small little morphs that can actually change the meaning of an entire word, right? So that becomes important. We have free morphemes and bound morphemes. A free morpheme is just a word that stands alone like walk, bounding it up means walking, walked, right? So free is just a word that's stand alone, bound morpheme is a word that's bounded with something. I always say it's like prefixes and suffixes, right? So all of this you guys do on a daily basis, you just don't stop and go I'm using morphology, right? That's not the way we, we sort of work. It's sort of an unconscious thing that we learn and we start learning language, you know, at birth, right? We start to hear it and sort of analyze it. All right, syntax. Syntax is just words, phrases, sentences. It's where the complexity of language comes about. When you write a paper, you're using syntax, right? When you're sending things to people, emails, there's syntax. Now that becomes a really where the complex language comes about with paragraphs and and and sentences and things like that. That's syntax. All right, I'll be looking at your syntax when I'm reading papers and things like that. All right, historical linguistics is the other term on your concept sheet and basically, that's how language changes over time and how languages are related. So historical linguistics may look at the English language and go, how has it changed in the last 50 years? I mean, we know we can look at how it's changed in the last 10 years, emojis, right? Emoticons or texting, you know, or getting more casual, using a lot of slang, right? We also with historical linguistics say, how are languages related? So what sort of makes up the English language? Do we have Sudion Indian roots? Is there Spanish roots, right? They want to look at the relationship of languages as well, besides looking at how languages change. Linguistic divergence. This is quite interesting. So linguistic divergence is really looking at how groups of people once were living together. Part of them becomes separated and that part that becomes separated, there's a change in the language. So in essence, there's a change in like morphology, phonology and syntax. Okay. So one of the things we ask is how does this occur? How do people once living together, how do they get separated and then there's a change in the language from the people that become separated? One could be physical barriers, things like mountains, rivers, lakes. Think about this, if you look at like a border, on one side they're speaking one language and the other another, right? Um, if you look at rivers, the Rio Grande, right? You look at this separation, this physical, in India, they're separated by vast mountains and they have some of the most languages in the world, right? So it becomes important to understand that sort of physical and geographical barriers. Another reason how this occurs is social distance, race, religion, class. I mean, one of the things they use in your book, the example of India, they look at the untouchables and the Brahmins. The Brahmins were a high caste, the untouchables were the lower caste, there was a difference in language, right? They would even say we can apply this to the English language that people who are more upper class probably speak more standardized language and people who are middle or lower have the ear where they have a diversity in their languages, right? So it doesn't mean it's a good or a bad thing, it just means there's going to be differences. All right, let's move on to the next reason how this occurs. Another way is borrowed and borrowing words. Borrowed words means this, once we've had contact with a group, we could have a change in the language and we could sort of steal words and make them our own. Something like salsa, sushi, fiance, deja vu, right? All of those become words we took a hamburger, it's German, that's a a key American food, right? And it doesn't go just I'm I'm using our language, but it goes across, right? I mean, you go into another country and something like jeans maybe a borrowed word, right? So it's important to understand it can have a direct change in our language. The last one is conquest and colonization, which is an an ugly way language changes where, you know, colonizers say, change your language or I could kill you. Um, don't speak your language or I'm going to brutalize you some way, right? It could be a nasty way. All right, let's move on, um, to the next reason how this occurs. Another way is borrowed and borrowing words. Borrowed words means this, once we've had contact with a group, we could have a change in the language and we could sort of steal words and make them our own. Something like salsa, sushi, fiance, deja vu, right? All of those become words we took a hamburger, it's German, that's a a key American food, right? And it doesn't go just I'm I'm using our language, but it goes across, right? I mean, you go into another country and something like jeans maybe a borrowed word, right? So it's important to understand it can have a direct change in our language. The last one is conquest and colonization, which is an an ugly way language changes where, you know, colonizers say, change your language or I could kill you. Um, don't speak your language or I'm going to brutalize you some way, right? It could be a nasty way. All right, let's move on next to socio linguistics. Sociolinguistics is the fun part of language and sociolinguistics is really look looking at the social speech patterns in language, okay? So basically, um, if we look at the social context of language, the way we're speaking is going to determine who we're speaking with, right? So, um, we have like avoiding language. So we might be more formalized in a setting like a job interview, you know, with people we don't know well. A casual or a joking, um, sociolinguistic language would be like our friends, people calling us by our first name. Things like mister, misses, education, all those can say there's a there's a difference in our social status. By calling me for Professor P, right, it could be, you know, a social status, an age difference, a man, I remember the first time somebody called me ma'am. I was like, oh my god, I'm getting old, right? So, all of these kinds of things are the social aspects of speech patterns. We even have gender speech patterns. So, for example, um, it is known women ask more questions. Why is that? Typically, they don't want the flow of the conversation to end, right? Women also aren't going to be as direct in language as men are. These are overall general characteristics, not they're not going to apply to everybody, right? So, depending on the kinds of households you are raised in, would depend on the kind of speech pattern. Me being raised with two brothers, I'm pretty direct, um, and that could be taken as being bitchy, even though it's not, right? So when women have authority in their speech, sometimes it's looked at as being a negative thing. There's lots of articles and stuff on this fun stuff, all right? So think about it, you know, in your own lives how you're utilizing language. All right, the last two concepts, multi- multi-multilingualism, a lot of you are multilingual, you speak more than one language. Some of you may speak Spanish, you guys may speak Chinese, you know, Tagalog, um, Russian, all these different kinds of languages, you're multilingual. How many of you are multilingual? Code switching is using two languages in the course of a single conversation. But it's not considered lazy speech, you have to do it fluently, okay? So Spanglish, Chinglish, right, all of these are saying I'm going in and out of two or more language in the course of a single conversation. How many of you are code switchers? Some of you are multilingual, maybe code switchers, others may not be, right? So it just depends. I hope you enjoyed this chapter. If you have any questions, you can email me, we can zoom, I'm always there for you. Have a great day and utilize your language well. Bye.