L161 Unit 5

L161 Unit 5

1. 5.1 The challenges of language production

   • In any language, people tend to understand more, either when reading or listening, than they are able to express themselves
   • Glossary Terms
     • Interlocutor
       • Refers to the person or persons being spoken to in a conversation
     • Accomodation
       • People's tendency to adapt their speech to the speech of their interlocutor
         • E.g. by changing their accent or avoiding words that might be misunderstood
   • Speaking involves a complex range of skulls, and that different situations call for different skill sets.

2. 5.2 Learning & using words

   • Peculiarities about grammatical gender in different languages
     • In English, nouns do not have a grammatical gender. However, machines with 'character' are usually treated as feminine
     • Learners of German are often amused to discover that the word Madchen (girl) is not feminine but neuter. All German diminutives are neuter, regardless of the gender of the word they refer to.
     • There are three words in French that change gender depending on whether they are singular or plural: orgue (organ), amour (love) and délice (delight)
     • The word mar (sea) in Spanish is usually masculine, but sailors and people from coastal regions often use it in the feminine

3. 5.3 Word categories

   • Glossary Terms
     • Word category
       • Refers to the different types of words that exist in a language
       • All words belong to certain categories according to the part they play in a sentence
     • Article
       • A word that goes in front of a noun
       • E.g. the, a, an
     • Noun
       • A word that refers to a thing, an animal, a place or a person
     • Verb
       • Describes what a person or thing is, does, or what happens
       • E.g. an action, a state, an event, a situation, a change
     • Adjective
       • Decribes a noun, giving extra information about it
     • Adverb
       • Modifies the meaning of a verb, adjective or adverb
     • Pronoun
       • Used in a place of a noun that has already been mentioned or that is already known
     • Preposition
       • Used in front of nouns or pronouns and shows the relationship between the noun or pronoun and other words in a sentence
     • Conjunction
       • Used to connect phrases, clauses and sentences
       • E.g. or, but, and
     • Determiner
       • Introduces a noun
       • E.g. a/an, the
     • Exclamation
       • Expresses an emotion such as surprise, pleasure or anger
     • Morphology
       • The area of linguistics that deals with word forms
     • Form
       • The external shape of a word as opposed to its meaning
     • Inflections
       • Changes in the form of a word according to the words grammatical function
     • Morpheme
       • A minimal and indivisible morphological unit that cannot be analysed into smaller units
     • Prefix
       • Letters/sounds added to the beginning of an existing word in order to create a new word with a different meaning
     • Suffix
       • Letters or sounds added to the end of an existing word to create a new word with a different meaning
   • In order to use a word correctly you need to know the different forms that the word can take within a sentence, and be able to use the right one for the context.

4. 5.4 Putting words together

   • Glossary Terms
     • Declension
       • The variation of the form of a noun, pronoun or adjective, by which its grammatical case is indentified
     • Case
       • In a declension, each of the different forms that nouns, adjectives or pronouns can adopt in order to express their semantic relation to other words in the sentence

5. 5.5 Discourse

   • Glossary Terms
     • Discourse
       • A unit of text used by linguists for the analysis of linguistic phenome that range over more than one sentence
     • Cohesion
       • A text, a conversation or a speech is cohesive when the elements within it are linked together
     • Coherence
       • A text, a conversation or a speech is coherent when the sum of its elements makes sense
   • Most language learners tend to focus initially on vocabulary, morphology and syntax when they learn to speak and write a foreign language, however it is also important to learn the ways in which different spoken and written texts are organised in any particular language.

6. Online Unit 5

   • Glossary Terms
     • Foreigner Talk
       • A simplified version of a language that is sometimes used by native speakers when addressing non-native speakers.
     • Meaning Negotiation
       • A process that speakers go through to reach a clear understanding of each other
         • For example, asking for clarification, rephrasing and confirming what you think you have understood are all strategies for the negotiation of meaning.