Week 15’s class (4/23)

Today we had an opportunity to look up an example with regard to the final project. It gave me a sense of how the final project is expected to look like. Also we should keep in mind that no finding every single error is needed. Just giving error examples is fine. Additionally, we also have friends who can give us support from our group. Then later on, we’re divided into three groups discussing the questions we had for our final project. I think this is a good idea to share and discuss our experience of where we are and what troubles we’re facing. I’m thinking to present my final project with PowerPoint. Hopefully I can figure out the place where I can park my PT file on PBWIKI page.

Week 15: Linguage Change Over Time: Historical Linguistics

This chaper mainly addresses two concepts. The first one is that language is always changing as is referred to the last vido we watched. All levels between generations such as vocabulary, phonology, morphology, and so on are changing too. The second concept deals with the language families, which Finegan spends a number of pages to talk about. It begins with Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Afroasiatic, and other language families of Asia and Europe. It's good to learn that Indo-European family includes English, German, Russian, French, and Hindi while Chinese language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family, and the Austronesian family includes Malay while the Afroasiatic family contains Arabic.

Week 14’s class (4/16)

Today we’re divided into small groups comparing and examining the linguistic difference between Old English and Modern English based on the Scripture. Honestly, I had a hard time figuring it out. But while discussing in the main room, it’s beneficial to learn the discovery from group’s sharing. We also talked about our final project. We need to find a peer to support our questions from the project. I already transcribed the spoken sample and will analysis both writing and spoken samples in the coming week.

Week 14: The History of English

It was quite interesting to read the shifting history of the English language, from Old English, Middle English, and turn to now Modern English. In Old English, it was highly inflected. It also preferred the grammatical structure patterns “SVO” and “SOV”, where the exclusive use of the "SVO" pattern is used principally nowadays. Some word-initial consonant clusters were used; the subjunctive was used frequently. Word order was more flexible than in Modern English. Middle English was a transitional period. It had influenced by French due to the Norman invasion and had borrowed thousands of French words. Word order became fixed increasingly. Modern English has fewer inflections and it relies on word order. Also, a great many words have borrowed from Latin and Greek.

Week 13’s class (4/9)

First, we were divided in groups examining the given sentence based on Grice’s Maxims: manner, relevance, quantity, and quality. Each group also defined and explained the categories of speech act. Later on, we moved to discuss our trial final project. It seemed that I needed more time to read other group’ postings before this discussion. I cannot read it fast. It would be better if we could be informed of reading other groups’ positing before this class. Or at least I can know what we are expected to do in dicussion. I can prepare it in advance.

I like the idea of playing a game. It is always fun in class. I think it’s quite interesting and entertaining to me because we had to recall what you learnt from the textbook and applied it to these questions immediately, especially we had to type fast (in short seconds maybe). Classes are toward the end of this semester. I feel a little stressful because all things come together. But I know I will just be fine.

Week 13: Speech Acts and Conversation

I enjoy the reading for this week because I think the content of this chapter is reachable to our daily conversation. Speech acts we offer such as an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal occur to our daily live. There are four cooperative principles to be considered in the chapter, and they are maxims of quantity, relevance, manner, and quality. Too much or less information, irrelevant or unrelated, miscellaneous or chaotic, or untruthful utterance will illustrate a violation of the maxims of the cooperative principle. Ironically, speakers sometimes are forced to violate a maxim due to their cultural norms, for example, being polite. People who are invited to someone's house for dinner may feel constrained to say compliments on the dinner if they think the foods are not their taste. It would be impossible to tell the truth. So indirect speech acts may result.

Week 12’s class (4/2)

At the beginning of this class, we discussed some questions from quiz 3 in the main room. After that, the whole class was broke down into two groups, and each group was assigned an exercise from the textbook to discuss. This discussion was mainly focused information structure and pragmatics. In our group, we were dealing with matter of the categories of information structure. We couldn’t finish all of questions in the activity because of time limit. But I like the idea of group discussion. We could see how people negotiate their different ideas/thoughts with one another and come to a compromising answer. Later on, we spent some time on the topic of definite and indefinite articles. For example, is there any meaning difference between “play a piano,” “play the piano,” and “play piano.” It’s quite interesting to learn that playing "a" piano work on English for what I’ve leant from my teachers, playing a piano didn’t never work out in a sentence.