Blog 9- Jargon

To me the topic of jargon is a fun one to talk about. Jargon, as the book describes it on page 470, is the use of "specific slang terms".When you come to think about it, jargon is everywhere! We all have our own and many times we even have several "sets" of jargon. As college students, we may even have one for each class and subject.

For example, my course of study is accounting and it definately has its own slang. Terms such as capitalizing, present value, footing, double-entry, notes receivable, etc. are not used much outside of the finance world. Some of these words are used in other areas, but can have entirely different meanings.

For all of us, we can agree that linguistics surely has its own set of technical terms such as phonemes, morphemes, lexicon, etc. It would be hard to know what these meant if hearing them outside of the field or before learning what they meant. Therefore, we can all understand how important it is for us to understand the vocabulary of whatever it is we are doing. Perhaps that is why they say that accounting is the language of business.

An article I found that summarizes some similar ideas is found at http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/1914-/language/jargon.htm. It also contains some points on slang in general.

As a side note, I want to say on my last post that class has been entertaining with you guys. Also, thanks for your comments and for sharing other interesting topics for research. Keep up the good work in your future studies!

Blog 8- Language Acquisition in Children

I decided to find a video that talked about how children acquire language. This was in part related to the video that we saw last class. In the video we saw several theories that linguists have presented for explaining how children acquire language. Two proposed theories were that of imitation and analogy.

In this video, Steven Pinker provides some eveidence for why the theory of imitation is not valid. For example, he explains that children add rules to form words that have never been heard by them before. This called my attention because I thought that language was learned by imitation, yet things that kids say everyday are evidence that that is false. I just never paid enough attention to it until now. For example, when kids saw "I throwed the ball", they are applying a rule of grammar that they know to a word that they already know. Hence, they are inventing the word to follow the rules of grammar, not copying it from their parents.

In general, realizing the fact that children simplify language and make it follow rules they already know has helped me appreciate the human brain more. I am convinced that the brain is "pre-wired", as Chomsky says, to acquire language. They are just some aspects of language that seem to flow from children without someone there to be forcing the waters.

Truly remarkable.