Course Reflection

I was most interested when we started talking about language in more context-sensitive approaches. Beginning with the papers on the taxonomy of language and how we can group certain uses of language into different categories to how this even relates to uses of slurs, a lot of the introduction of illocutionary force in language was definitely the most thought-provoking and, in my opinion, most complete understanding of how language works. I think it really captured how much of meaning in language is defined by relationships and structures in play. These readings gave more merit to language as more than a mere abstract symbolization of thought and more as a system of communication that involves people. Thus as a system of communication, these ideas of force offers ways of understanding how relationships and structures that are present within language affect the way language exists in our usage of it,