01- Generative Semantics:The Background of Cognitive Linguistics, George Lakoff (2004)

[@houssinnores1998]

Thank you so much, keep uploading more. Professor Lakoff really presents linguistic issues in a very simplified non-intimidating way.

[@luismiguelmenezes6785]

This lecture is amazing. It blew my socks off.

[@maryahmad5888]

Thank you so much , I really needed these lectures as I am a student who wants to know as much as possible about linguistics .

[@littlelittlelittle]

Really like his lectures- hv bn reading his name everywhere in all those books n readings that I find fascinating. Also, surprised to find he gave this series of lectures in Beijing, my hometown, hv bn leaving bj for 10 years now 😂. In 2004, I just graduated from Uni in English major, wandering on the street looking for scriptures, sutures among Haidian district’s Uni zone, I was a total punk. 🙂

[@healthdoc]

Words are tools to evoke metaphorical imagery that facilitates narratives leading to a broader understanding.

[@gesudinazaret9259]

@roxynoz8245reality doesn’t exist

[@gesudinazaret9259]

@roxynoz8245 no Im not ,you can’t talk about reality ,plus talking about something doesn’t imply its existence

[@saimbhat6243]

Yeah, okay! But if people didn't want to know the mechanics of language they would just be satisfied with your vague abstract definition of language. People are interested to know more about how language works than a word salad of a definition. "Words are tools to evoke metaphorical.....", tell me more than 10 sentences to elaborate your definition and how it works and we can do something about it.

[@saimbhat6243]

​@roxynoz8245 There is no THE Reality. Everything is as "real" as it gets, UNLESS you claim to have a revelation from god disclosing THE reality to you. Stop using cool sounding bits to sound profound. All there is, is reality, a human reality, constructed by an interacting and communicating mammal species and that is only reality or unreality you can access and talk about. Your personal experience, emotions and intuitions don't amount to sh*t.

[@gesudinazaret9259]

@@saimbhat6243 yes exactly I think that if you talk about language like art ,your statements belong to the category of poetry and art ,I don’t see the use of these claims under university lectures like the one OP made

[@thaithaovy.1]

Thank you ever so much for this. Such a treasure.

[@domenicmolinaro6580]

Thank you for this great upload, it has given me a whole new understanding :)

[@manouchk38]

18:18 who used for cat is metaphor which attributes personhood to the cat 18:55 which and who depends on meaning and, in particular, on the meaning in context. 19:55 context is not separate from the meaning

[@drhyshek]

This is fascinating.

[@maxheadrom3088]

21:00 In Brazil we make tons of jokes about Portuguese people - somethink like the jokes about Polish people in the US. The jokes in Brazil actually come from the different ways we understand the same language - Portuguese. One of the jokes is when Pedro asks Joaquim to check if the turn signal is working and Joaquim replies "it's, it's not, it's, it's not ...". A real example of the difference would be "can you give me a cup of tea" that would have a Portuguese person reply "yes" or "no" and a Brazilian reply "Just a sec, I'll make som" or "I'm out of coffee, sorry". AFAIK, we in Brazil speak 16th/17th century Portuguese while in Portugal they speak current Portuguese. Could that level of change have occured in the Portuguese lanugage spoken in Portugal? If anyone could reply, I'd be thankful!

[@inebriatedfowl3197]

Start by assimilating the fact that you do not speak a portuguese from centuries ago. Good luck

[@linguistics_and_the_like]

Thank you so much for sharing!

[@wenshanli6214]

Mataphor is borrowing of linguistic forms via conceptual association.

[@DavidRutten]

Did he say "twentytwo thousand five hundred years ago" at 4:20?

[@LLCroston]

Thank you so much! 🙂

[@deadman746]

I love Lakoff and will watch him in anything. But I have a problem with his calling Chomsky _a great linguist._ Chomsky admitted he wasn't sure he was doing linguistics, and he wasn't. He did _philology._ He eschewed corpora and instead relied on being a native speaker of English. When his assertions were tested with a corpus, they failed miserably, with scores of thousand of exceptions. As to whether he was _great,_ well, he dominated the field of linguistics for decades, so one central meaning of _great_ applies. But he wasn't good.

[@polishviking3586]

13:47 ... how about questions: "Have you EVER seen him?"

[@polishviking3586]

Who studies collocations in USA? Any clues? I need to contact those scholars... thnx!

[@عثمانبنعليطموح]

شكرا جزيلا

[@tartanhandbag]

i mean, 3 minutes in and im struggling to see how Lakoff, a student of Chomskys, could misrepresent him so fiercely. Language has no link to internal thought? Thats not a position chomsky takes, like, at all. Its precisely internal thought that leads Chomsky to say that language has more utility than communicating with another person. Why then do we find ourselves speaking to ourselves internally? he discusses this all the time, ive heard him say it several times, off the top of my head in On Language (book) and his interview with Robert W. Rieber. so it seems to be a mischaracterisation or else i have not understood what Lakoff is saying at the beginning here

[@tartanhandbag]

@@michaelschumacher1822 as much as it may be true that communication, say on a hunt, definitely benefitted from language, i dont think we need to force one "original function" above another here. i think that language, as with other faculties that rely on imagination, is a tool for conceptualising, that bleeds into other senses. Linguistically, concepts can be played with creatively and then get codified through use and acceptance. That said, they also derive from lived experience and they way we conceptualise them prior to communication. I dont think you need an external person to use the word "you" for you to have a conception of yourself as a separate entity from others. looking at a reflection in a river and seeing myself touch my nose is enough for that (as one example), whether you have the words for it or not. the words may come along later and sometimes you experience a "god, i knew there should have been a word for that all along" or "why isnt there a word for XYZ" moments. feral children still have concepts of self, concepts of the passing of time, of spatial awareness etc and these provide the background for things like pronouns, tenses and prepositions, respectively. there are many ways to conceptualise information. for examples, dogs dream, but dont use the same complex symbolic language as us, maybe occasionally they dream visually of their rival from across the street, and in this dream they are continually arriving at different lampposts, only in time to see their rival finishing their pee and waddling off. bark bark bark. my god! what a nightmare! we dont suppose that any language is necessary for this dream, beyond maybe a compulsion to bark in anger, but still a whole story is conveyed, a whole complex of information conceptualised visually. we also have the same cognitive structures that allow a dog to dream visually and we may have those sorts of dreams too. where we differ is in the additional ability to codify information also in language, whether written, internally, signed or vocalised. language sits on those other cognitive capacities and feeds into that system of abstract symbolic expression. the currency for that abstract symbolic expression is then held within the agreed upon assumptions about the sounds and their meaning/representation, such that they can be exchanged for social benefit. for koko the gorilla and nim chimpsky, the ASL they were taught indeed seemed to reveal something about their internal linguistic abilities (baby gorillas "babbling" to themselves, trying out "sounds"/primordial words in ASL), to conceptualise of themselves as an entity, for example, and then express that with others in a manner that was understood and reciprocated. as such, our intersubjective lives gives meaning to words. having your own made up language with no one who understands it is pointless. this is sort of Wittgenstein via Putnams "meaning aint in the head" argument, like the meaning of words are ascribed when there is a shared utility, and so there is a "point" to having a word. however, its not all behaviourism either, as chomsky initially made his mark on linguistic by pointing out. there is a poverty of stimulus and prior understanding there: these words appear to map to some prior internal concept. you can see this happening with children in development, first objects (ball, chair) and then pronouns, then prepositions, and much later getting into highly abstract concepts like equity, entropy or ethics as the brain develops and these words eventually have something to map onto when the world around you encourages the brain to care about such things by having peers using that word and giving them value. so the initial conception may happen first internally, which paves the way for the codification of the concept through shared use, this corroborates the collective and shared use of this conception and this process may even modulate the initial conception, as the word is heard in different contexts. the entire process of resolving initial conceptions and overlapping collective uses may serve as a beneficial social practice? i think it is fair to assume that the internal monologue of a toddler is much less advanced than that of a teenager and so perhaps your idea of "internal thought using the grunts and signals" may not be so far off. inside their heads, before they can speak, they may already have seen themselves in the mirror and conceptualised the self, abstracted the entities of each parent into various sub-divisions that may later have language systems mapped onto them. clearly, internal thought, being much more general than language, comes before external language, both in development and evolutionarily. however, that thought may not yet have a fully developed accompanying language capacity to express it, neither internally nor externally, and so those internal conceptions, that may never the less be abstract, reside in a pre-linguistic state, possibly relying on other cognitive capacities that form earlier, such as the visual system. obviously there are different discussions of this "Language of Thought"/mentalese, but thats roughly how i conceive of it. certainly our language is littered with abstractions from more literal, prepositional concepts " i dont think chomsky was saying anything about fully fledged internal thought coming first. i think he just says that there is also huge benefit to internal language, just as there is for external language, just as internal visual imagination is useful but also based on some understanding of prior visual experience. he is just saying that language is more to do with thought and conceptualisation than communication. the thought that leads to the meow is more complex than the meow itself. the thought doesnt have to be in meow itself. i think this is one of the main lessons of transformational grammar. that sentences, beyond their use as pragmatic communicative tools, often reveal further meaning that reflects deeper thought. for example, we leave ambiguities all over the place when we dont need to. if it was all about comunication, it would be a lot less creative and a lot more ...communicative. there is a lot to be said for communication during a hunt, but also a lot to be said about the walk back to camp, pondering, "but what did he really means when he said that "my bow is sharper than my mind?"". i know this stuff has been covered in many places, from A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1959) through to more recent discussions on "The Merge Function In Thought And Speech" from the 90s (can be found on youtube)

[@anhumblemessengerofthelawo3858]

Yes, you are simply failing to understand correctly. Whether it is due to a lack of intelligence on your part, or, the inability to study difficult texts because you're constantly being distracted by your phone, I don't know. I merely know that you in this regard are a complete failure. If I were you, I would lose all hope. You gave it your best shot, don't feel too bad. Chomsky wasn't exactly worth reading in the first place!

[@syrim4139]

This lecture was 3 days before i was born lol

[@deadman746]

One does say _the bicycle whose tires are flat,_ not _which's._ Perhaps that is discerption from _witches._

[@maghady2900]

are there any lectures?

[@debarshiarathdar7278]

72 minutes of dissing GG lol

[@saimbhat6243]

This is so surprising that a field of study that tends to call itself a science of human language is so focused on idiosyncracies of a single language and is still yet to come up with anything general about human language. The idiosyncrasy of languages like arabic or chinese are going to give them headaches for sure. LOL

[@younathansalih6996]

I Iike it this stylish

[@lennykoss8777]

💗💗💗

[@healthdoc]

John 1:1 in the beginning was the word and the word will make mankind gods.

[@alessandraparrini9779]

Because...fake reasoning argumentative structure. The emotional breaks on the pitch. Unacceptable in a written text unless say a letter or mail that mimics the spontaneity of a direct friendly talk.

[@inebriatedfowl3197]

As a student of linguistics. I would legitimately love to hear why you consider his argumentation as false. No ill will

[@alessandralemongrass1745]

I was analysing a sample sentence. I wasn't expressing an opinion on his position. I should have specified that.

[@ThompsonFranklin-p3u]

Johnson Robert Gonzalez Carol Clark Dorothy