Lecture 4- Conversations 2

Question 1

What is the foundational unit of language?

Answer 1

Conversations

Question 2

In a big paragraph talking about a person what are you required to do that proves conversation is held together by more than just pairing sentences?

Answer 2

Can be 3 sentences with 4 different ways of talking about the same person. You have to track who this person is from sentence to sentence to keep a record of who they are. Continually adding to a model that exists in your head. We integrate information over multiple sentences.

Question 3

What happens when sentences in a long paragraph don’t build on each other?

Answer 3

It becomes hard to process, every sentence makes sense individually and their are some connections in-between but because they don’t build on each other we will forget half the information and not understand what is happening.

Question 4

What does the fact that we can convey the same content in different modalities and that we can add content at different times and ways show about language?

Answer 4

We’re creating something beyond the linguistic forms

Question 5

How does expertise help in conversation and what does this mean about language?

Answer 5

• The more you know, the better you process the language

- This shows that we are using something in addition to the language to process it

Question 6

What does translating show about language?

Answer 6

-Translating isn’t just turning one sentence into
another sentence.
-We can talk about the same thing in different languages because we don’t take things literally e.g. idiom specific to a culture would make no sense directly translated. Instead we take what’s in the language build a model in our head and translate to another level .