Saussure was a professor in historical linguistics, which is concerned with how languages relate to each other and how they change over time. This interest in how language changes over time can be called diachrony. Saussure was more interested in synchrony, which doesn’t change over time. This means he looked at the parts of a language, as if they didn’t change. Saussure studied the structure of language without comparing it to other languages and without focusing on change.
Saussure distinguished two different parts of language, "langue" and "parole". "Langue" is the system of the language or the theory of the language. When we learn a language in school we are learning the “langue” of the language: vocabulary words, grammatical structures, the order of words, etc. "Parole" is how the language is actually spoken. Often times, people speak in a way that is different from how language is taught in schools. We make mistakes, use slang words, and use figurative language. This is all part of parole. Saussure was more interested in studying the langue of a language. Parole was harder to study because the language people speak changes often. Studying the langue allowed Saussure to understand the basic structure of language.
Saussure wanted to know how people communicate language with each other. In his “Course in General Linguistics”, Saussure first defines language and how it is involved in speech.
Many different factors work together to create language.
To summarize, Saussure describes language as our ability to represent meaning by using signs (the words themselves and the way they sound when spoken). In the process of communicating with another individual, language can be found in the process of taking meaning from the words that we hear (which make up an “auditory image”). This process is psychological, while producing signs is the physiological process of speech. To study language, we focus on the psychological process.
Language is studied apart from speech. It does not exist among one person but among the community of people that use it. Each member of the community shares a knowledge of the language but cannot change the system of the language individually. Language as a stable system can be studied scientifically, which is the goal of linguistics.
Saussure also focuses on the arbitrary nature of signs.This means that a word and the sounds that make up a word don’t tell us anything about word means. For example, the word “dog” doesn’t tell us about what a dog is. The letters and sounds chosen are not special.  Most words are chosen in this way. A small amount of words are not. For example in the word “slap”, the letters sound like the noise you hear when you slap something. The arbitrary nature of sounds allows us to make many words. If every letter had a single meaning, then we could only create a small number of words with that letter.
Sherry Ortner
Sherry Beth Ortner (born September 19, 1941) is an American cultural anthropologist and has been a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA since 2004.
Ortner grew up in a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, and attended Weequahic High School, as did Philip Roth and Richie Roberts. She received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 1962. She then studied anthropology at the University of Chicago with Clifford Geertz and obtained her Ph.D. in anthropology in 1970 for her fieldwork among the Sherpas in Nepal. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and finally the University of California, Los Angeles, where she currently teaches.
Jane Wagner
Jane Wagner (born February 26, 1935) is an American writer, director, stage actor and producer. She was born in Morristown, Tennessee. Wagner is best known as Lily Tomlin's comedy writer, collaborator and wife. She is the author of "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe", "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" and other Tomlin vehicles.
Bruno Giacosa
Bruno Giacosa (1929 – 21 January 2018) was an Italian wine producer. He was born in the village Neive in Piemonte. He produced a number of Barbaresco and Barolo wines, as well as bottlings of Arneis, Barbera, Dolcetto and a sparkling wine. Giacosa was considered a traditionalist. He has been described as the "Genius of Neive".
Giacosa died at his home in Alba, Piemonte of complications from a stroke on 21 January 2018 at the age of 88.
United States federal government shutdown of 2018
A shutdown of the United States federal government began at midnight EST on Saturday, January 20, 2018, after a failure to pass a legislation funding bill for government operations and agencies and ended on Monday, January 22, 2018.
The shutdown was caused from disputes over the status of protection of persons affected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy, and therefore whether those covered under the program should face deportation. There was also a dispute over whether funding should be funded towards building a Mexico–United States border wall, a keystone policy during Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
This is the first shutdown in United States history to occur while both chambers of Congress as well as the White House are controlled by the same party (in this case, the Republican party). The 2018 shutdown began when the Senate failed to approve a House-passed bill to keep the government open. The shutdown began on the first anniversary of Donald Trump taking office.
Spinosauridae
Spinosauridae (meaning 'spined lizards') is a family of carnivorous theropod dinosaurs from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. They are unique among other meat-eating dinosaurs from their more water-based lifestyle, which involved a diet of mostly fish. Spinosaurid fossils have been found all over the world, including Asia, South America, Europe, Africa, and Australia.
Spinosaurids had longer arms than most theropods, the claw on the first finger was usually the largest. They evolved jaws like those of crocodiles, and their teeth were long and cone-shaped, made to trap prey in their mouths instead of tearing them apart. Because of this, their teeth usually did not have the strong knife-like edges (called serrations) of a lot of other meat-eating dinosaurs.
The family contains Spinosaurus, the first spinosaurid discovered, and the largest carnivorous dinosaur we know of. Paleontologists suggest it might have reached up to 15 meters (49 ft.) in length.
A study made in 2010 by Roman Amiot and his colleagues found that spinosaurids had very semiaquatic (living partly in water, and partly on land) lifestyles, this means they lived in habitats like those of hippopotamuses, crocodiles, and turtles, making them very unusual compared to other theropods. It also means they could exist at the same time and place as other large predators without competing for food. For example; Carcharodontosaurus, which lived at the same time as Sigilmassasaurus and Spinosaurus, did not need to fight with either of those animals for prey; those spinosaurids ate fish, while Carcharodontosaurus was on land most of the time, hunting smaller dinosaurs.
The family "Spinosauridae" was named by the German paleontologist Ernst Stromer in 1915, he was the one that discovered the first genus in the group, "Spinosaurus". And as scientists discovered more fossils of its close relatives, the family was eventually split into two subfamilies: Baryonychinae, and Spinosaurinae. This was done because of differences in the anatomy of their skulls and teeth.
This is a cladogram made in 2017 showing the relationships between different spinosaurids inside of megalosauroidea.
Romana Acosta Bañuelos