Caleb's Blog: Linguistic Thoughts and Other Musings

Blog #9: Language Disorders  (Staake). Introduction: What are language disorders? Well, to answer that, knowing everything we do so far this semester, language disorders impact our ability and efficiency to communicate. These disorders make it hard to speak, read, or understand language. Before continuing on with this blog entry, the sources used are "What Teachers Need to Know about Language Disorders" by Jill Staake, "Signs and Types of Communication Disorders" by Kirsten Gantt, and "What Are Language Disorders?" by Gail Belsky. All three sources took much time to find, as I did not want articles without authors, and most of the search results were medical websites or university sites with no authors. Staake's article was primarily found upon Googling visual images of language disorders, and after choosing the image, the article also has some insight on navigating language disorders in the classroom. Gantt's article was found after a LOT of sifti...

Blog #8: Historical Linguistics   (Nordquist).  Introduction: Historical linguistics  sounds more complicated than it is, I promise! It's just a fancy way of talking about the history of linguistics, and the study of that specific topic. How did languages change over time? WAIITTT!  The study of linguistics changes? *audible gasp* I know, it's crazy, but stay with me here.  Before moving on, today's sources are "Historical Linguistics introduction" by Dr. Mohsin Khan, "What Is Historical Linguistics?" by Richard Nordquist, and "Why does diachronic linguistics matter?" by David Mortensen. As always, I'm an extremely picky person, and these sources were not just run of the mill first-results-choices. Nordquist is an old friend to this blog, so upon finding his article on historical linguistics in page 3 or 4 of the Google search results, I picked him up as a reliable source. Dr. Mohsin Khan was a more obscure source in later pages of Google, ...

  Blog #7: Morphology (Karen C.) Introduction We're going basic here, folks. Morphology is the study of words, and words are made up with morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest units in linguistics, and can take several different forms. The word "dog" is itself a morpheme, and if you were to make that specific word plural , it would be changed to dogs . "Dogs" is made up of two morphemes, the word "dog" and the suffix -s. We'll get into this in just a bit. First, credit to the following sources: CrashCourse's "Morphology: Crash Course Linguistics #2," Richard Nordquist's "Definition and Examples of Morphemes in English," and "Morphology - Teaching Linguistics and English Language Learners" by Karen C., a blogger. CrashCourse is a YouTube page sponsored by CBS, and I have seen their educational videos in classrooms and even to study at home since about 2013. Nordquist is an often featured source here in this blog...

  Credit to Anonymous Imgur User As an English major in over his head near the end of the semester, this is innately relatable. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/created-a-linguistics-student-meme--206180489169714602/

  Blog #6: Gender Bias in Linguistics A "businessman" resisting the changing societal hierarchy (Tobias, leonardo.ai )  Introduction Believe it or not, males and females use language differently. In fact, there is even gender-exclusive language used by both sexes. Pronunciation, intonation, vocabulary, our old friend syntax, manners, etc. are all aspects that gender a language, such as English. "Male and Female Gender Differences in Language" from Learnmate, "Teachers, what is gendered language?" by Jemma Prior, and "Gender Differences in Using Language" by Xiufang Xia are today's sources. Learnmate as a source was cited based on their visual image, as well as some of the information it provided. Xia's academic article was found using Google's scholarly article filter, and Prior's was found by simply searching for gendered language articles. Summary ♂♀ Gendered language is a bias "towards a particular sex or social gender...

 Blog #5: Language Acquisition (Lemetyinen). Introduction: Language acquisition is the process used to learn and comprehend a given language, either as our native tongue or as a second learned language, making one multilingual. This entry will explain language acquisition, the stages of this process, a couple of the theories behind language development and acquisition, as well as the statistics that inform this process. Sources include Alexa Romberg and Jenny Saffran's "Statistical learning and acquisition", "Language Acquistion Theory" by Henna Lemetyinen, and "Language Acquistion: An Overview" by Kristina Robertson and Karen Ford.  Robertson and Ford's article was one of the first articles available on Google and offers an overview on the topic of language acquisition. In contrast, Lemetyinen's article was found after searching through various web pages, but focuses on the theories behind the titular process. Finally, Romberg and Saffran'...