Thoughts about This Chapter (Chapter 5)

Like a lot of philosophers ponder the meaning of life, this chapter made me ponder about the meaning of language. Turns out, this is called semantics. I liked this chapter because it was fairly easy to follow, but you still had to really think when analyzing words and sentences.

In fact, this class has taught me so many ways to label and diagram sentences. In middle school, I remember constantly having to do exercises labeling parts of speech in sentences for my English class. Now in Language Theory, we have learned how to diagram a sentence’s phrase structure to show the ambiguous meaning. This really breaks a sentence down and shows you the two or more different ways it can be interpreted.

Another interesting concept from this chapter was the relations found in thematic roles of a sentence. To me, this was kind of similar to labeling parts of speech in middle school, but slightly different. I best understood this method to be focused on the subject, direct object, and indirect object of the sentence. Once I was able to locate these, I was better able to label the words as agent, theme, goal, etc.

One of the more challenging concepts from this chapter was time deixis and place deixis. I had some trouble understanding exactly what these phrases were. I was able to grasp that a deictic phrase is basically an expression of a time or place that is not specifically described or contains the words “that” or “this.” One thing that helped me remember this is the word “deity,” which is a word for god or goddess. So, like gods and goddess can’t be specifically defined or described (usually), neither can deictic phrases.

While reading and working through this chapter, I found it so crazy that people that people actually take the time to really look at the words and sentences we use everyday. I feel like we really take language for granted and never take time to learn its history or meaning. All we are really told is that English comes from Great Britain. But the history of our language is so much deeper than that and goes way beyond just Great Britain. I wish schools would take more time to teach language theory and history. I truly believe that it woul

d make people better writers and speakers.