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This page will be a repository of the questions posed for you to reflect on when you are doing the readings, and write about when you are finished reading.
In case you cannot submit a Reading Response to the Assignments tool in Owlspace for technical reasons, you can read the question here and submit it to Dropbox, or in a pinch, by email to me. When the technical problem as cleared, I will ask students who submitted their response in other ways to resubmit it to the Assignments module in Owlspace. I need to have the assignments all together in one module.
1. Consider Bolinger's discussion of how children acquire language. Does it seem correct to you, judging from your own experience seeing and hearing children learning to talk (or to sign)? Is there anything you think can be added to his description, or corrected if you think it is inaccurate in some way?
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2. Think of two other systems that you think are sign systems (i.e. a set of links between outform forms and inner "concepts" or significations of some sort. Here, "outward" means there is some aspect of the sign that has some manifestation in the physical world, or at least in the mental world outside language (for the latter, I mean any perceptual experience that is not strictly linguistic, like the experience of color, pitch, shape, pain, temperature etc.). "Inner" means some mental understanding that the outward form is conventionally linked to. Discuss how the sign systems you have identified are like human language (a linguistic sign system of a language), and how they are not.
The Tyler excerpt describes some ways of organizing lexical information via the meaning relations among words in a language. He views these various types of lexical information structures as ways of capturing or representing speakers' linguistic knowledge. Comment on how well such structures represent speakers' lexical semantic knowledge. What aspects of it do they capture best? What do they leave out?
Lehrer discusses several taxonomies based on sets of noun lexemes like the words for animals. She also presents a taxonomy of verbs of cooking, and refers in passing to some other sets of verbs in a semantic field e.g. strike, kick, punch, slap, which can also be arranged hierarchically (i.e. in a taxonomy of kinds of actions/events).
Do you think that verbs can be taxonomized (i.e. related in a taxonomy) in the same way nouns can? What are some similarities and differences between using this mode of lexical organization for nouns and for verbs? Are there any differences or problems that we run into with verbs that we don't see, or see as much, with nouns?
(In case you need to talk about what nouns and verbs refer to, we can assume for now that nouns refer to "thing" concepts, and verbs refer to "action" or "event" concepts.)