4740221
| Question | Answer |
| Linguistics | The scientific study of 'natural language'. |
| Natural language | A system of symbols (spoken or signed) used by humans |
| Arbitrary | No natural or intrinsic relationship between pronunciation and meaning of a word. |
| Onomatopoeia | Words whose pronunciations suggest their meaning |
| Creativity | Ability to combine finite number of linguistic units to produce and understand an infinite range of sentences. |
| Linguistic competence | Knowledge of a language represented by the mental grammar that accounts for speakers' linguistic ability and creativity. |
| Linguistic performance | Use of linguistic competence in the production and comprehension of language. |
| Grammar | The mental representation of a speaker's linguistic competence; what a speaker knows about a language. |
| Descriptive grammar | A linguist's description or model of the mental grammar, including units, structures and rules. |
| Prescriptive grammar | Rules of grammar brought by grammarian's attempts to legislate what grammatical rules for speakers should be, rather than what they are. |
| Universal grammar (UG) | The innate principles and properties that pertain to the grammars of all human languages. |
| Discreteness | Letters and words can be rearranged to form new words and sentences. |
| Displacement | Ability to talk or sign about entities that are not related to the present - but can relate the past, and express the future. |
| Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH) | The notion that the semantic structure of the language that a person speaks either determines or limits the way they are able to form conceptions of the world they live in. |
| Linguistic determinism | The strongest form of the SWH, the language we speak establishes how we perceive and think about the world. |
| Linguistic relativism | A weak form of SWH, the different languages encode different categories and that speakers of different languages therefore think about the world in different ways. |
| Neurolinguistics | The study of brain mechanisms that underlie the acquisition and the use of human language. |
| Corpus callosum | A broad band of nerve fibers joining the two hemispheres of the brain. |
| Lateralisation | Cognitive functions localised to one or the other side of the brain. |
| Contralateral | The stimuli that travel between one side of the body and the opposite cerebral hemisphere. |
| Aphasia | Language loss or disorders following brain damage. |
| Broca's aphasia Agrammatic aphasia | Language disorder resulting from damage to Broca's region where the patient has difficulty with certain aspects of syntax, especially functional categories. |
| Wernicke's aphasia Jargon aphasia | The type of aphasia resulting from damage to Wernicke's area where an individual is unable to understand language in its written or spoken form. |
| Plasticity | The ability of the brain to modify its own structure and function following changes within the body or in the external environment. |
| Hemispherectomy | A surgical procedure where a half of the brain is removed or disabled. |
| Split brain | The result of an operation for epilepsy where the corpus callosum is severed, thus separating the brain into its two hemispheres. |
| Dichotic listening | Experimental method for brain research in which subjects hear different auditory signals in the left and right ears. |
| Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) | The electrical signals emitted from different areas of the brain in response to different kinds of stimuli. |
| Specific Language Impairment (SLI) | Difficulty in acquiring language but no other cognitive deficits is present. |
| Critical age hypothesis | The ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age. |
| Innateness | The theory of which some knowledge about language exists in humans at birth. |
| Content words (Open-class) | Words that denote objects, actions, attributes and properties. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs...etc. |
| Function words (Closed-class) | Words that have little or no semantic content. Conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns, etc. |
| Verbs | Refer to actions, events and states. (Kick, go, arrive, love, know) |
| Adjectives | Refer to qualities or properties, describe nouns. (Old, young, tall, short) |
| Nouns (Common) | Refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, quantity, etc. |
| Nouns (Proper) | Refer to particular individuals. (Kevin, Tony, Marcus, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) |
| Morphology | The study of the structure and content of word forms |
| Morpheme | The smallest grammatical or meaningful unit in a language. |
| Root | Lexical content morpheme that cannot be analyzed into smaller parts. |
| Stem | Root morpheme combined with at least one affix. |
| Base | Any root or stem where an affix is attached. |
| Affixes | Bound morphemes that are attached to base. |
| Prefixes | Precede other morphemes. (Pre-, Un-, In-, Im- etc.) |
| Suffixes | Follows other morphemes (-ly, -ious, -er, -ist etc.) |
| Infixes | Inserted into other morphemes. |
| Circumfixes | Attached to base morphemes both initially and finally. |
| Cranberry morpheme/Semimorpheme | Morpheme that cannot be assigned an independent meaning or grammatical function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from the other. |
| Agentive morpheme, -er | One who does something. (teacher, singer, painter etc.) |
| Comparative morpheme, -er | Indicates the comparative degree of an adjective. (nicer, prettier, smaller etc.) |
| Deixis | Words and phrases, such as “me” or “here”, that cannot be fully understood without additional contextual information. |
| Person deixis | Any expression used to point to a person. (me, you, her, them etc.) |
| Space deixis | Words used to point to a location. (here, there, this, that etc.) |
| Time deixis | Used to point to a time. (now, then, tonight, yesterday) |
| Specificity | Whether or not a specific entity is referred to. |
| Definiteness | Whether or not the reference is to an entity which the speaker thinks their addressee knows about. |
| Tense | Expresses the time when a state or action denoted by a verb occurs. |
| Aspect | A component of the conjugation of a verb, having to do with the internal temporal flow of an event. |
| Mood | A set of morphologically distinctive forms that are used to signal modality. |
| Modality | Attitudes and involvement such as desire, ability, obligation and likelihood. |
| Polarity | The distinction of affirmative and negative. |
| Reduplication | Whole root, or part of the root, is repeated, or duplicated, within the same word. |
| Lexical gaps | Accidental gaps in lexicons, words that are well-formed not non-existing. |
| Compound | Two or more words are joined to make one longer word. The meaning of the compound may be similar to or different from the meanings of its components in isolation. |
| Back-formation | Creation of a new word by analysing a word as a derivation and removing apparent affixes. |
| Eponyms | Words coined from proper names. |
| Blends | Combination of two words with parts of combined words removed. |
| Clippings | Abbreviation of longer words into shorter ones. |
| Acronyms | Words derived from the initials of several words and are pronounced as the spelling indicates. |
| Alphabetic abbreviations | Words derived from the initials of several words and are each element in the string is pronounced separately. |
| Syntax | The set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, specifically word order. |
| Phrase | One or more words forming a single unit (‘constituent’) in the syntax of a sentence. |
| Sentence | The largest independent unit in the grammar of a language. |
| Transitive verbs | Takes a Direct Object, the under-goer of the action is described by the verb is expressed in the object. |
| Intransitive verbs | Does not have a Direct Object, only the subject is given. |
| Ditransitive verbs | Verbs that take an Indirect Object and a Direct Object. |
Want to create your own Flashcards for free with GoConqr? Learn more.