1.8: Next steps and references

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Next steps and references, from Sarah Harmon

Video Script

So where do we go from here? How do we transition to our next several chapters or modules?

Well, this is the layout of the rest of the textbook and the modules in the course will follow along with this. Notice that we're going to go from small to big. So, the small we're going to start with sounds. It can get very complex and it's totally normal to be freaked out; this happens. We're going to start small with the sounds and then go a little bigger and talk about words… and go a little bit bigger and talk about phrases… and then go a little bit bigger and talk about meaning. Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics and pragmatics. Those are the core areas of linguistics as you saw in an earlier section, and those are really the areas that you need to understand before you start applying to this information to different areas.

After we finish semantics and pragmatics, then we can start talking about speech communities and how different speech communities interact, dialects. That is sociolinguistics. From there we'll talk about historical linguistics, how language changes over time. We'll talk a little bit more about language universals as well. From there, we'll talk about how we acquire or learn a language. It doesn't matter if it's a related language or a completely different language, if it's a language that we learn as a child or a language that we learn as an adult. We'll talk about all of it. Then we'll round out with a little bit on how language processing happens, so how our brain takes language and understands it, as well as produces it. It should be noted that, especially in chapters nine and 10, there are new advances all the time; even as I record, this which is fairly late before the semester starts for 2021, there are changes that are going to be announced. Even what is in this textbook could get modified. There's a lot of what Catherine Anderson says, and a lot of what I say, that is a little bit more generic exactly because of that; we want to give you a good foundation first before we get into the nitty gritty of what actually goes into learning a language, as well as understanding language.

As far as the resources for this chapter, a lot of what I talked about can also be found in just about any intro to linguistics textbook, in their chapter one or their introductory chapter. If you want some more resources, I would look at what both Introduction to Language and Language Files have, as far as their list of resources. It's really long and I didn't want to put them in the slides here, but you will see them listed out in the actual LibreTexts page.

You can do this. Remember language is difficult, it's complex, it's not simple by any stretch of the imagination. Even when you look at a language and think it's simple, it's not. It is really nuanced and complex, and so to analyze it, we have to take a step back, we have to open our minds, we have to be creatively thinking about any possibility and, most importantly, we need to find patterns, but we need to have fun doing it.