B. Symbolic Systems
B.4 Language and Meaning
Course description
Language is the medium every other section is written in, so it belongs with the tools, though you study it on the reading track. Start with linguistics itself: phonetics, morphology, syntax, and semantics, using the free open textbook Essentials of Linguistics or Language Files. Apply the concepts to your own language before reaching for an exotic example, then compare it with a language built on a genuinely different system, an agglutinative language or one with a rich case system, to feel how differently a grammar can carve up the same reality. Panini's Ashtadhyayi, composed in India around the 4th century BCE, derives Sanskrit word forms from roughly four thousand compact rules and is often read today as an ancestor of formal and generative grammar; working through even a handful of its rules is a direct look at a rule system some 2,400 years old that still does the job it was built for. Chomsky's universal grammar, the idea that all languages share deep structural commonalities, is worth knowing as a research program rather than a settled result: read at least the case against it, Evans and Levinson's 2009 "The Myth of Language Universals", alongside whatever textbook presents the program itself.
Semiotics and the philosophy of language take up the next stretch. Saussure's posthumously compiled Course in General Linguistics draws the distinction between the signifier, a word's sound or form, and the signified, the concept it attaches to. From there, take up the Sapir-Whorf question of whether language shapes thought, treating strong and weak versions separately: the strong claim, that language determines what you can think, is rejected, but weaker effects on cognition, in color perception and spatial reference for instance, have some real support. A cautionary case: Chen (2013) reported that speakers of languages without an obligatory future tense save more. When Roberts, Winters, and Chen (2015) controlled for how languages are related by descent and geography, the correlation weakened and failed several of their robustness tests. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations belongs here too, read in secondary summary if not in full; his actual claim in section 43 is narrower than it is usually quoted, that for a large class of cases, though not all, the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
Rhetoric and writing close the subsection. Aristotle's Rhetoric, with its three modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, logos), is still the clearest starting point. Practice writing essays that explain something you have actually learned, since teaching a concept in your own words is the sharpest test of whether you understood it, and section IV returns to this as a formal method. If you are monolingual, treat learning a second language, ideally one structurally distant from your first, as an optional 2 to 3 hours a week outside the hours budgeted above; it is the most direct way to feel a different grammar from the inside rather than read about one.
Checkpoints
Each checkpoint is tagged with the stage of the cycle it tests.| Stage | Checkpoint | Attempts |
|---|---|---|
formalism | Transcribe ten spoken sentences in IPA and draw syntax trees for five, checking your work against a textbook's exercise answers. | Post the first attempt |
skepticism | State both the strong and weak versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and summarize the evidence for and against each. | Post the first attempt |
abstraction | Explain in what sense Panini's grammar and a modern programming-language grammar are the same kind of object. | Post the first attempt |
intuition | Publish a short essay explaining a concept from another section of this curriculum to a general reader, and revise it after at least one real critique from someone who knows the material. | Post the first attempt |
Discussion
Proposed edits
Found an error, a missing idea, or a better source? Propose a change. A moderator reviews each proposal.Sources
- Anderson, Catherine, et al. Essentials of Linguistics, 2nd ed. (eCampusOntario, 2022; open textbook).
- Evans, Nicholas & Levinson, Stephen C. "The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32(5), 429–448 (2009).
- Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Perry Meisel & Haun Saussy (Columbia University Press, 2011).
- Chen, M. Keith. "The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets." American Economic Review 103(2), 690–731 (2013).
- Roberts, Seán G., Winters, James & Chen, Keith. "Future Tense and Economic Decisions: Controlling for Cultural Evolution." PLoS ONE 10(7), e0132145 (2015).