Word Antics and Word Tactics
Woo hoo! Gimme some of that sweet sweet free-of-charge Ivy League book-learnin'.
I wanted to audit a course this semester, and very fortunately one of the available options — "available" meaning "taught around lunchtime" — happened to be a course about the psychology & cognitive science of linguistics. The classroom is in a building just up the street from the office; I've shifted my schedule to accommodate long Tuesday & Thursday lunch breaks.
The topic — what language is made up of, how words and concepts interact — is something I've been increasingly wishing that I'd gotten around to studying in college, so I'm excited for the opportunity now. And honestly, it's kind of comforting to have reading assignments again. Sad? I don't necessarily think so.
The current nut to crack concerns syntax and semantics: how the syntactic and semantic information encased in words are separate, and how they interact. (Syntax relates to "grammar" categories, basically — noun vs. verb vs. adjective — and semantics relates to "meaning" categories — thing vs. event vs. property.)
If I learn anything I'll try to report it. For now I'll just note that my brain keeps trying to force the words "syntax" and "semantics" into a more similar-sounding pair, such as "semantics and syntactics" or "syntax and semantx." (That second word should end with the sound of a grinding bike gear.) I doubt there's a good linguistic reason my brain would try to do this.
In any case, this is all a nice counterpoint to my day job. Good to get some intellectual perspective on the whole language thing, rather than just enforcing comma rules all the time.
I wanted to audit a course this semester, and very fortunately one of the available options — "available" meaning "taught around lunchtime" — happened to be a course about the psychology & cognitive science of linguistics. The classroom is in a building just up the street from the office; I've shifted my schedule to accommodate long Tuesday & Thursday lunch breaks.
The topic — what language is made up of, how words and concepts interact — is something I've been increasingly wishing that I'd gotten around to studying in college, so I'm excited for the opportunity now. And honestly, it's kind of comforting to have reading assignments again. Sad? I don't necessarily think so.
The current nut to crack concerns syntax and semantics: how the syntactic and semantic information encased in words are separate, and how they interact. (Syntax relates to "grammar" categories, basically — noun vs. verb vs. adjective — and semantics relates to "meaning" categories — thing vs. event vs. property.)
If I learn anything I'll try to report it. For now I'll just note that my brain keeps trying to force the words "syntax" and "semantics" into a more similar-sounding pair, such as "semantics and syntactics" or "syntax and semantx." (That second word should end with the sound of a grinding bike gear.) I doubt there's a good linguistic reason my brain would try to do this.
In any case, this is all a nice counterpoint to my day job. Good to get some intellectual perspective on the whole language thing, rather than just enforcing comma rules all the time.
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