1) Linguistics as a study

Question 1

How many languages is spoken all over the world?

Answer 1

6000-7000

Question 2

What is the most endangered language in Europe?

Answer 2

Tsakonian

Question 3

What is diacronic linguistic?

Answer 3

the study of language change, also called historical linguistics

Question 4

What is synchronic linguistics?

Answer 4

the study of the state of language at any given point in time

Question 5

What is general linguistics?

Answer 5

general principles of the study of all languages, characteristics of human language as a phenomenon

Question 6

What is applied linguistics?

Answer 6

application of linguistic theories, methods and findings

Question 7

What is the most well-developed branch of applied linguistics?

Answer 7

the teaching and learning of foreign languages

Question 8

What is descriptive linguistics?

Answer 8

describes the facts of linguistics usage as they are, and not how they ought to be

Question 9

What is contrastive linguistics?

Answer 9

identifies the common characteristics of different languages or language families

Question 10

What is structural linguistics?

Answer 10

pays explicit attention to the way in which linguistic features can be described in terms of structures and systems

Question 11

What are some contemporary disciplines of linguistics?

Answer 11

pragmatics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse and conversation analysis, lexicography, corpus linguistics, semiotics

Question 12

What is grammatical competence?

Answer 12

allows us to produce and interpret grammatical sentences, includes the knowledge of which speech sounds are part of a given L, how they may or may not be strung together

Question 13

What is communicative competence?

Answer 13

refers to a language user’s grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, etc. as well as social knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately

Question 14

Name the universal properties of language

Answer 14

Modularity, Discreteness, Constituency, Recursion and productivity, Arbitrariness, Reliance on context, Variability, Displacement

Question 15

What does Modularity mean?

Answer 15

= the language system is modular, it consists of a number of different subsystems which interact in specific ways

Question 16

What does Discreteness mean?

Answer 16

discreteness divides the continuous space of sound or meaning into discrete units

Question 17

What are discrete linguistic units?

Answer 17

the term is especially used in phonetics and phonology to refer to sounds which have relatively clear-cut boundaries, = only certain number of units is inside it (cat/bat, change in meaning - phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases)

Question 18

What does Constituency mean?

Answer 18

all languages organize basic discrete units into constituents, you can create more complex units from simple units

Question 19

What are constituents?

Answer 19

= linguistic units which are functional components of larger constructions, we can combine constituents to produce an infinitive variety of sentences of indefinite length

Question 20

What does Recursion do?

Answer 20

it allows a process to be applied repeatedly

Question 21

What is Productivity?

Answer 21

the creative capacity of language users to produce and understand an indefinitely large number of sentences

Question 22

What is Arbitrariness?

Answer 22

linguistic forms are said to lack any physical correspondence with the entities in the world to which they refer

Question 23

What does Reliance on context mean?

Answer 23

context is important to decode the message, a consequence of arbitrariness is duality - a single sequence of sounds may have more than one meaning

Question 24

What does Variability mean?

Answer 24

although all languages share some universal characteristics, they also differ in many ways, they are variable

Question 25

What does Displacement mean?

Answer 25

language can be used to refer to context removed from the immediate situation of the speaker (it can be displaced), we can describe or refer to things that are not visually present

Question 26

English has _____ sounds represented by _______ letters

Answer 26

36, 26