MediaSpace Wiki

Relationships And Communities Session Eight

Index Card Assignment due Monday: During some one of the conversations that you are in this weekend that involve two or more people, take out an index card. Every time you are tempted to say something, don't. Write it down instead. When you've filled the index card you can resume talking.

• Signs (continued)
  • When we see cultural consistencies in the interpretation of signs, we often call them codes
  • The principle language through which we express emotion
  • A baseline for the development of language skills
  • Tools for reinforcing or contradicting what we say
• Symbols - Arbitrary and abstract representations of meaning
  • Tie our idea of a referent or thing to a word or symbol
  • Entail both meaning and syntax
  • The basis for language

• a system of symbols and the rules of their use
  • syntax
  • context
• an activity
  • invented
  • socialized
  • enacted via
    • speech acts
    • interacts
    • writing
• an environment
  • perhaps the most fundamental environment in which we live
  • we probably have some experience of language even before we are born
• a filter through which we experience and organize the world
  • we perceive the world, at least in part, though language
    • labels
    • stereotypes
    • figure versus ground
  • language syntax probably constrains our ability to express at least some ideas
    • we build sentences around actions and objects
      • verbs and nouns
      • verb phrases and noun phrases
    • those sentence are built, across human languages, in only three ways
      • prefix notations - (verb noun) noun
      • postfix notations - noun (noun verb)
      • infix notations - noun (verb noun)
        • English
    • each of these sentence can be automatically transformed into the others
    • sentences that have different assumptions are unimaginable to us
      • and ideas built around those assumptions may not be readily expressible
        • Consider, again, our alien and the problems of telling them that "?McDonald's French Fries taste good"