Chapter 1 - The Territory Flashcards
Linguists
Specialists who try to determine language rules that people use to communicate
Pyscholinguistics
study of the way people acquire and process language
Sociolinguistics
Study of language, cultural, and situational influences
Speech
a verbal means of communicating. others means are writing, drawing, manual signing
phonemes
specific sounds within a spoken language
Language
A socially shared code or conventional system for representing concepts through the use of arbitrary symbols, and rule governed combinations of those symbols
Dialects
Subcategories of the parent language that use similar but not identical rules
Coding
A factor of the speaker and listeners shared meanings, the linguistic skills of each, and the context in which the exchange takes place
Communication
Is the process participants use to exchange information and ideas, needs, and desires. Active process involving encoding, transmitting, and decoding the intended message.
Communicative competence
The degree to which a speaker is successful in communicating, measured by the appropriateness and effectiveness of the message. The competent communicator is able to conceive, formulate, modulate, and issue messages and to perceive the degree to which intended meanings are successfully conveyed
Paralinguistic codes
Including intonation, stress or emphasis, speed or rate of delivery, pause or hesitation are superimposed on speech to signal attitude or emotion
Intonation
The use of pitch (most complex of all paralinguistic codes) and is used to signal mood of an utterance
Suprasegmental devices
Paralinguistic mechanisms that change the form and meaning of a sentence by acting across elements, or segments, of a sentence
E.g. stress, intonation, tone, pitch to convey meaning and emotion
Nonlinguistic cues
Includes gestures, body posture, facial expression, eye contact, head and body movement, and physical distance or proxemics
Metalinguistic skills
The ability to talk about language, analyze it, think about it, judge it, and see it as an entity separate from its content
E.g. learning to read and write
Linguistic competence
User’s underlying knowledge about the system of rules
Linguistic performance
Linguistic knowledge in actual usage
Long term constraints for discrepancy between competence and performance
Ethnic background, socioeconomic status, region of country, intellectual disability
Short term constraints on discrepancy between competence and performance
Physical state changes - intoxication, fatigue, distraction, illness, situational variants such as role, status, or personal relations of speaker
Comprehension in communication is influenced by what?
Intent of the speaker, the context, available shared meanings, and the linguistic complexity of the utterance
Language as a generative system means
Generative has root in generate which means to produce, create (genesis), or bring into existence. Language is productive or creative tool
Words can refer to more than one thing
These things can be called by different names
Words can be combined in different ways
Displacement
Ability to communicate beyond the immediate or present context (e.g. talking about an event that happened the week prior)
Language divided into three major components
Form, content, use
Form in language includes?
Syntax, morphology, and phonology
Content in language encompasses
Semantics (meaning), pragmatic (use)
Syntax
Form or structure of a sentence; specify word, phrase, clause order, sentence organization, and relationships between word, word classes, and other sentence elements
How are sentences organized?
According to overall function. E.g. declaratives, interrogatives etc
What are the main elements of a sentence?
Noun and verb phrases composed of various word classes (n, v, adj, etc)
Morphology
Concerned with the internal organization of words
Words consist of one or more smaller units called?
Morphemes
Morpheme
Smallest grammatical unit and is indivisible without violating the meaning or producing meaningless units e.g. dog
Morphemes are of two varieties
Free - independent and can stand alone e.g. toy, big, happy
Bound - grammatical markers that cannot function independently
E.g. s, est, un
What are the two types of bound morphemes?
Derivational- include prefixes and suffixes
Inflectional - suffixes only; changes the state or increases the precision of the free morpheme (e.g. ed, plural markers, third person singular present tense verb ending such as “s” in she walks)
Phonology
Aspect of language concerned with the rules governing structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables
phoneme
smallest linguistic unit of sound that can signal a difference in meaning e.g. letter sound /p/
Allophonoes
individual members of these families of sounds e.g. /p/ sound will sound different depending soon the surrounding sounds - soup, poor, pea
e.g. word butter the “tt” sound is an allophone of /t/ because it’s a variation on the sound. more like “td”
How are phonemes classified
by their acoustic or sound properties as well as by the way they are produced (how the airstream is modified) and their place of production (where along the vocal tract the modification occurs)
How many phonemes does English have?
approximately 43 phonemes
Distributional rules describe?
which sounds can be employed in various positions in words. e.g. in English the “ng” sound never appears at the beginning of a word in the English language
Sequencing rules
address sound modifications made when two phonemes appear next to each other e.g. “ed” in walked vs. jogged - one uses the /t/ and the other /d/ sound
Semantics
system of rules around meaning or content of words and word combinations
World knowledge
refers to an individual’s autobiographical and experiential understanding and memory of particular events
Word knowledge
contains word and symbol definitions and is primarily verbal. Word knowledge forms each person’s mental dictionary or thesaurus
Concept development
results in increased validity, status, accessibility
Status
alternative referents e.g. canine for dog
Validity
amount of agreement between a language user’s concept and the shared concept of the language community
accessibility
the ease of retrieval from memory and use of the concept
Semantic features
aspects of the meaning that characterize the word e.g. features of mother include parent or female
Selection restrictions
based on specific features and prohibit certain word combinations because they are meaningless or redundant. e.g. male mother (meaningless); female mother (redundant)
Pragmatics
overall organizing aspect of language in which all of the other elements (morphology, semantics, phonology, syntax) are ordered.
the use of language to affect others or to relay information; the study of language in context and concentrates on language as a communication tool to achieve social ends
Pragmatics consists of
- Communication intention and how they are carried out
- Conversational principles or rules
- Types of discourse, such as narratives and jokes, and their construction
Dialect Factors
Geography, socioeconomic level, race and ethnicity, situation or context, peer-group influences, first or second language learning
