{"id":1447,"date":"2019-06-24T20:00:45","date_gmt":"2019-06-25T01:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/?p=1447"},"modified":"2019-06-26T11:09:15","modified_gmt":"2019-06-26T16:09:15","slug":"interesting-linguistics-june-24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/2019\/06\/24\/interesting-linguistics-june-24\/","title":{"rendered":"Interesting Linguistics – June 24"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to everyone who posted a response to my last\nchallenge.  You can go and check out my\nreply to that one as well if you’d like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today’s challenge is quite a bit different.  It is about Semantics, which is the meanings\nof words, and is taken from my Lexicography class, which is a class about\nmaking dictionaries.  Semantics is not my\nfavorite, but you might get bored if I ONLY post about discourse stuff.  So here we go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bird.  What would\nyou give as a definition of “bird?” \nHow do you know if something is a bird or not?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now that might sound simple, but people have been\nfighting about that for a long time.  Two\nmain camps that we talked about in class today are those who argue for\n“Necessary and Sufficient Conditions” and those who argue for\n“Prototypes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those who argue for Necessary and Sufficient Conditions\nwould say that there is a set of attributes such that all of those attributes\nare NECESSARY for something to be classified as a bird, and that if you list\nout all of those attributes it will be SUFFICIENT in narrowing down the list of\n“everything” to the list of just birds.  For example, having wings and having feathers\nmay be two of those “conditions” or “attributes” that make\nsomething “bird”y.  All birds\nhave feathers and all birds have wings. \nHowever, though those could both be called NECESSARY for something to be\na bird, they aren’t yet SUFFICIENT in narrowing down your choices of all words\nto just those that fit the category of “bird.”  You could, for example, have a Halloween\ncostume with angel wings with feathers on it, and though that costume has both\nfeathers and wings, it is not a bird.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you like this idea of Necessary and Sufficient\nConditions, can you think of other conditions or attributes that you would need\nto have to describe “bird?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some people, though, don’t like the idea of Necessary and\nSufficient Conditions, saying that it doesn’t quite work all the time.  For example, is a penguin whose feathers\nnever came in not a bird because he doesn’t happen to have feathers?  Hmm. . . . \nOr another Necessary and Sufficient Condition that we’d like to add is\nthat a bird flies, but we all know that penguins and ostriches don’t fly.  So as much as we’d like to say that being\nable to fly is like a “prerequisite” to being a bird, it doesn\u2019t\nquite work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s why these people who don’t like Necessary and\nSufficient Conditions came up with a new theory, called Prototypes.  They said that there is something, take a\nrobin for example, that is a prototypical bird. \nAll other birds will be somewhat like that prototypical bird, though not\nnecessarily exactly like it, and that “family resemblance” is what\nmakes them a bird.  So a prototypical\nbird would have feathers and fly, but the Prototype theory would say that it’s\nok to have a bird that doesn’t have feathers or doesn’t fly, since it’s still\nlike a prototypical bird in other ways. \nIt may, for example, have wings.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These arguments go on and on, back and forth, which is\nwhy I don’t really like theories that don’t look so practical.  But based on this very brief overview, what\ndo you think?  What makes a bird a bird?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(PS. Can you see the pelican in the picture?  It’s the best picture of a bird that I could\nfind from my recent PGA trip, though we saw so many cool ones!  This picture is taken in Guinea-Bissau.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to everyone who posted a response to my last challenge.  You can go and check out my reply to that one as well if you’d like. Today’s challenge is quite a bit different.  It is about Semantics, which is the meanings of words, and is taken from my Lexicography class, which is a class […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":945,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/945"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}