Chapter 1 Flashcards
Linguistic Competence
What we know when we know a language; the unconscious knowledge that a speaker has about his or her native knowledge.
Linguistic Performance
The observable use of language. The actualization of one’s linguistic competence.
Performance Error
Errors in language production or comprehension, including hesitations and slips of the tongue
Speech Communication Chain Steps
- Think of what you want to communicate
- pick out words to express the idea.
- Put these words together in a certain order following rules
- Figure out how to pronounce these words
- send those pronunciations to your vocal anatomy
- Speak: send the sounds through the air.
- Perceive: listener hears the sounds
- Decode: Listener interprets sounds as language
- Connect: Listener receives communicated idea
Speech Communication Chain
When we use language as our communication system, one person acts as the information source and the transmitter, sending a signal to another person, who acts as a receiver and the destination.
Noise
Interference in the communication chain
Lexicon
The vocabulary of a person, language or branch of knowledge or other lexical expressions, including their form, meaning, morphological and syntactic properties.
Mental Grammar
The mental representation of grammar. The knowledge that a speaker has about the linguistic units and rules of this native language.
Language Variation
The property of languages having different ways to express the same meanings in different contexts according to factors such as geography, social class, gender etc.
Descriptive Grammar
Objective description of a speaker’s knowledge of a language (competence) based on their use of language (performance)
Evidence that writing and language are not the same
- Archaeological Evidence
- Writing does not exist everywhere
- Writing must be taught
- Neurolinguistic Evidence
Reasons some people believe writing to be superior to speech
- Writing is more physically stable, speech consist of mainly sound waves. Writing on the other hand, can be preserved for a very long time.
- Writing can be edited, so the end product is usually better organized and has fewer mistakes unlike speech
- Writing must be taught, and therefore intimately associated with education and educated speech.
semanticity
Property of having signals that convey a meaning, shared by all communication systems
Prescribe
Prescriptive rules tell you how to speak or write, according to someones idea of what is “good” or “bad”
Charles Hockett’s nine design features
- Mode of communication
- Semanticity
- Pragmatic Function
- Interchangeability
- Cultural Transmission
- Arbitrariness
- Discreteness
- Displacement
- Productivity
mode of communication
Means through which a message is transmitted for any given communication system
arbitrariness
In relation to language, refers to the fact that a word’s meanings is not predictable from its linguistic form, nor is its form dictated by its meaning.
Linguistic Sign
The combination of a linguistic form and meaning.
convention
Something that is established, commonly agreed upon, or operating in a certain way according to common practice.
nonarbitrairness
direct correspondence between the physical properties of a form and the meaning that the form refers to
iconic
relationship between form and meaning such that the form of word bears a resemblance to its meaning
onomatopoeia
iconic use of words that are imitative sounds occurring in nature or that have meanings that are associated with such sounds.
sound symbolism
phenomenon by which certain sounds are evocative of a particular meaning.
Discreteness
The property of communication systems by which complex messages may be built up out of smaller parts.
displacement
The property of some communication systems that allows them to be used to communicate about things, actions and ideas that are not present at the place or time where communication is taking place.
productivity
The capacity of a communication system (unique to human language) for novel messages built out of discrete units to be produced and understood.
modality
a mode of communication. A language’s modality tells us two things: how it is produced and how it is perceived
myths about signed languages (4)
- Signed Languages derived from spoken languages rather than being languages in their own right
- Signed Languages do not have any internal structure
- Signed Languages do not consist of words at all but rather involve signers using their hands to draw pictures in the air or to act out what they are talking about
- There is only one signed language that is used by deaf speakers all over the world
differences between codes and languages (4)
- A code is an artificially constructed system of representing a natural language
- A code is used for certain gestures to represent letters, morphemes, and words of spoken language and follow the grammar of that spoken language
- manual codes are based on natural languages rather than being languages themselves
- Signed languages evolve naturally and independently of spoken languages
Convention
Conventionalizing a noise in such form. The form is not an exact copy of that natural noise.
Prescriptive Grammar
A set of rules designed to give instructions regarding the socially embedded notion to the “correct” or “proper” way to speak or write
