Concept and Nature Flashcards
Concern with the nature of symbols or the study of signs.
Semiotics
Perceivable objects, actions, or events that stand for or call attention to “signaled entities”
Sign Vehicles
May range from physical objects and perceptual qualities to non-existent entities and abstract ideas.
Signaled Entities
A system in w/c symbols are the basic means by which one individual communicates an idea to another.
Symbolic Meaning System
Sign whose sign vehicle and signaled entity are connected by virtue of a “relationship of similarity.” Sign vehicle “resembles” (looks like or sounds like) its signaled entity or the thing it represents.
Icon
Sign whose sign vehicle indicates “existential relationship” of spatiotemporal contiguity with its signaled entity. It is “tied to the situation of usage” in w/c the signaled entity is present, and the signaled entity can only be indexed in the situation of usage.
Index
Relation of _____ and _____ according to Ferdinand Saussure
Signifier and Signified
Sign whose sign vehicle bears an “arbitrary relationship” to its signaled entity. There is “no inherent tie between sign vehicle and signaled entity for they are “related arbitrarily solely as a matter of convention.”
Symbol
What are the 3 kinds of signs?
Icon, Index, Symbol
Composed mainly of symbols that are used to communicate meaning from one mind to another.
Sign System
Words in human languages are symbols whose connection with the referent entities is purely arbitrary.
Words as Symbols
“Symbols” in human languages that “encode arbitrary but constant relationships” between sign vehicles and signaled entities.
Lexemes or Lexical items
Basic lexical unit of language consisting o a word /several words, the element of w/c do not separately convey the meaning of the whole.
Lexemes
Properties of “entities in the nonlinguistic world of experience or imagination” are utilized in forming concepts and, as a result, the “meaning associated with a word is a conceptual abstraction”
Semantic features
Study of meaning in language or logic.
Semantics
Any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another.
Phoneme
“Abstract mental constructs” manifested or realized in actual spoken utterances as “vocal sounds.”
Sound segments / Phonemes
Conceptual units in the phonological or pronunciation system of the language.
Words
Mental construct that speakers use to distinguish and produce combinations of words that are grammatical sentences. It accounts for the fact that not every combination of words constitutes a grammatical sentence in English.
Syntactic rules
Words function in a manner that they are categorized into grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective etc.)
Words as Synctactic units
Knowledge that a native speaker has of his or her language – that is knowledge of syntactic, semantic, and phonological units and the rules for their organization in sentences | Ability or capacity of the speaker to produce and understand sentences that are syntactically, semantically, and phonologically acceptable | Underlying cognitive ability
Linguistic Competence
Speaker’s actual use of his knowledge in the production and interpretation of sentences | Overt manifestation of cognitive ability in actual behavior
Linguistic Performance
Focuses on the referential meaning; the meaning encoded in word symbols by virtue of their arbitrary association with referent entities; and on the variety of meanings
Semantic Analysis
Social factors in the context of usage (Semantic Analysis)
1) Sender
2) Receiver
3) Message form
4) Message channel
5) Topic code
6) Setting
