1. What is language
1.1. rule governed
1.1.1. grammar
1.1.1.1. How to combine words in right order.
1.1.1.2. Determines meaning to sentences.
1.1.2. Vocabulary
1.1.2.1. Governed by arbitrary rules.
1.1.2.2. General agreement between the linguistic community.
1.2. intended
1.2.1. Language is a form of communication but not all communication is by language.
1.2.2. Sometimes we communicate without language, unintentionally.
1.3. Creative and Open Ended
1.3.1. we are able to understand sentences which were never said before.
1.3.2. Languages are not static entities
1.3.2.1. they change and develop over time.
1.3.3. Languages also borrow words from one another.
2. Language and thought
2.1. Sapir-worth hypothesis
2.2. Testing the hypothesis
3. Language and translation
3.1. Problems of translation
3.1.1. Context and the different ways of saying it
3.1.2. Untranslatable words
3.1.3. Different languages
3.2. Criteria for good translators
3.2.1. Comprehensibility
3.2.2. Some texts will be difficult to translate such as poetry
4. Problematic Meaning
4.1. Vaguennes
4.1.1. Meaning depends on context
4.1.2. People may have different ideas of what a vague words implies.
4.2. ambiguity
4.2.1. Transmits different meanings to different people
4.2.2. Can mislead people
4.3. secondary meaning
4.3.1. Denotation
4.3.1.1. What a word refers to (public meaning)
4.3.2. Conotation
4.3.2.1. web of associations that surround a word
4.3.2.2. Varies from person to person
4.3.2.3. Euohemism
4.4. metaphor
4.4.1. Difficult to determine difference
4.4.1.1. brilliant mind
4.4.1.2. chair leg
4.4.2. Not just a literal language
4.4.3. metaphorically true, literally false
4.5. Irony
4.5.1. Saying something to mean the opposite
4.5.2. Problematic