Ch. 5 - Words Flashcards
What is a word?
The minimal unit of meaning that can stand alone.
What is a concept?
-The mental representation of a statistical regularity in our experience
-Representations of classes of objects or events
What do concepts provide to us?
-they provide us with expectations, guide our responses to new instances of these objects or events
What are the forms of the dual nature of words?
-Phonological form- how it sounds
-Semantic representation- what it means
What are the two types of words?
1) Content words
2) Function words
What are content words? Examples?
- words that are labels for concepts
- nouns (represent objects), verbs (represent events), adjectives (describe)
Content words are an __________ _________ of words.
open-class; inviting new words all the time
What are function words? Examples?
- Words that serve grammatical purposes
- prepositions (of, at, in, to, from), determiners (the, a, some), conjunctions (and, but, because)
What is a lemma? (naked)
the most basic from of a word.
What is a lexeme? (how you can dress them up)
the set of all forms a word can take
Words in _________ are composed of one or more syllables. Elephant example?
isolation; “It’s an elephant”
Within ___________, phonemes regroup to form syllables across word boundaries. Elephant and going to example?
utterance; “It-sa-NEL-ephant” “Gonna”
What is the onset of a syllable?
the initial consonantal portion of a syllable; trying to make alliterations (the bold and the beautiful; then and there)
Match onsets of syllables to ____________. Examples?
alliterate; “the bold and the beautiful,” “then and there”
What is the rime of the syllable?
it is a vowel (nucleus) and final consonantal portion (coda) of a syllable
Match rimes to ___________. Examples?
rhyme; cash, dash, stash
What is the onset, rime, nucleus, and coda of the word “speech”
Onset: SP
Rime: EECH
Nucleus: EE
Coda: CH
What are Phonotactic Rules? Example of a violation of phonotactic rules?
the rules for combining phonemes into sequences to form words
(“sealed letter” is possible but not “seal dletter”)
What do phonotactic rules distinguish?
1) possible words: treb, fleen, gorp
2) impossible words: tber, fneel, gpor
Phonotactic rules vary from language to language.
Tski is _____ in Japanese but not in English
Street is _______ in Japanese, but it is in English
legal; illegal
Words are symbols.
Where do we look to figure out where the meaning of a symbol came from?
the traditional cognitive approach
What is the traditional cognitive approach? Example?
- that symbols acquire meaning through relationships with other symbols
- the dictionary defines words with other words
What is the Symbol Grounding Problem (Searle, 1980)?
The “Chinese Room Argument”
Say you land at the Beijing Airport and you are trying to read the signs. A Chinese dictionary won’t help you understand the meanings because ????????
(Symbol Grounding Problem)
What are semantic primes?
innately meaningful concepts used to define all other concepts