11.17.2006

The First Class

November 13, 2006 16:00-18:00
I had my first class of Linguistic Theory, given by Prof. Gibbon. Wow, to me, it really came too late. It's so different from what other linguistic courses I have ever had. Very interesting! I reckoned I may regard Linguisitics as one of my goal.
The lecture began with the question "What's a model". But we didn't answer it directly. We first came to the basic questions, "what's language", "what's a language", "how many languages are spoken in the world or one country", etc. So, what's language? According to my former knowledge of linguistics, language is a system of arbitrary signs and symbols, which are used to communicate. So what's a language? A language is language that's spoken among a particular group of people. Here Prof. Gibbon introduced the concept of "community language" to us. On the other hand, "the language has its own name among the people who speak it, but also the outside name used by others." (D. Gibbon), e.g. "Deutsch" is named in English "German".
Then we furthered to the discussion on "model". Model is theoretical description, a structure, a formula, which pocesses its own appearance. Here, we got an example of model from Prof. Gibbon: Teddy Bear is a model. It refers to the doll that looks like a bear, but smaller than a bear. At that moment, I was a bit confused. What's the relationship between model and our course "Linguistic Theory"? Aha, it concerns with the linguistic methodology----folks linguistics and scientific linguistics.

A little research I did: What is functional linguistics?
Functionalism was raised by Vilem Mathesius (1882-1945) in 1911. The main idea of functional linguistics is "Language is not a self-contained system, but is entirely dependant on the society." Then this idea was developed by Halliday. "By saying that language is part of the social semiotics, Halliday means that the whole of the culture is meaningful , is constructed out of a series of systems of signs." Two group of scholars are doing the research concerning with functional linguistics: Prague School and London School.

The question I'm still looking for the answer: What's the relationship between Cognitive Linguistics and Functional Linguistics?