Linguistics

Essay by EssaySwap ContributorCollege, Undergraduate February 2008

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Take Home Mid-Term 1. A) Before one can start to answer the question proposed one has to explain that there are totally different grammatical settings that one can show or present for many words in many languages. In order to see or understand the way that Safire presents to us the word enjoy is different to every single person. As Pinker clearly illustrates ? Each persons brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for ( a mental dictionary ) and a set of rules that combine the words o convey relationships among concepts ( Mental Grammar )?( Page 76 ). This tells us that systematically our brains work differently to achieve the same or sometimes different interpretation of a word or sentence.

In Safires article one sees the importance that he gives to such differential cultural ways of what people say before a dinner. This changes in different countries since their culture, nature, education and many other relevant factors show that for ? them ? that is the appropriate way of offering the food before is eaten.

The previsional morphology that one can relate to the word is that ? en ? comes from the Spanish or Latin meaning of to or to do and then ? Joy ? comes from the obvious English word to have fun. So basically the word can be seen as to have joy. This is obviously something that the restaurant in Maryland takes for account that one is going to enjoy both the meal and the experience at the restaurant. This is a notion of the arbitrary relation between a word and it?s meaning. I do not believe that enjoy is used as the article claims as a verbal command. I think that it is more like a verb said...