Definitions Flashcards
Discourse
Sequences of language that are longer than a sentence, also referred to as the conversation or text.
Domain
A sphere of activity, concern, interest or field eg: home, work, the law, school etc.
Sociolinguistics
The study of the relationship between language and society.
Audience/interlocutors
Conversational partner, or the people involved in the communication.
Locale
Where someone is when the discourse takes place.
Field/subject matter
What is being communicated about.
Mode
The type of language being used (spoken, written, signed, or electronic)
Register
Socially defined language, or language that is defined by use.
Dialect
A variety that has grammar and vocabulary that identifies the geographical or social origin of the speaker, ie: language that is defined by the user.
Ethnolect
A variety of a language associated with a certain ethnic or cultural subgroup. An ethnolect may be a distinguishing mark of social identity, both within the group and for outsiders.
Jargon:
Ethnolect Language shared by those who belong to a profession, trade, or some other occupational group.
Flapping:
A single rapid contact between two organs of speech, such as between the tip of the tongue and the teeth ridge in the production of [t] in the word latter.
Sociolect
A variety of language (a register) associated with a social group such as a socioeconomic class, an ethnic group (precisely termed ethnolect), an age group, etc.
Passive voice
Stress: The degree of force or emphasis with which a syllable is articulated.
Received pronunciation: The prestige (the most highly valued) and regionally neutral accent of British English.
The discourse strategy that promotes an object to subject and simultaneously demotes the subject to a by-phrase. It changes the original verb following into its past participle form.
Agentless passive
A passive without an agent or doer of the action.
Accent
A characteristic way of pronouncing a language or variety that is identified with national, regional, social or ethnic background.
Stress
The degree of force or emphasis with which a syllable is articulated.
Received pronunciation
The prestige (the most highly valued) and regionally neutral accent of British English.
Face
One’s public self-image. Positive face, where the wants of a person are attended to and they feel good, or negative face, where a person’s wants are imposed upon.
Variety
A subset of language that is common to a group of people sharing regional origin or social characteristics
Vernacular
A variety of everyday language specific to a social group or region.
Elision
The slurring or omission of certain sounds in a phonological context.
Assimilation
Sounds changing their shape to become more alike. (Assimilation occurs due to the state of the vocal chords, place of articulation or manner of articulation.)
Reduction
Losing or reducing sounds through speech (for example, deletion or assimilation)
Addition
Sounds being added in speech where they previously didn’t exist.
Slang
An in-group variety in which people with something in common with interact, and which is often bound by time and generation. It is informal, usually spoken (not written) and it involves mainly vocabulary.
Shortening
Reduction of form, often used in slang. Eg: “rents” for “parents.
Diminutives
A suffix added to a common or proper noun that indicates smallness and usually expresses affection (though sometimes dismissal).
Reduplication
A repetition process where all or part of the stem of a word is repeated, and the resulting form is a kind of compound; e.g. shilly shally, nasty pastie, school shmool.
Modal verb
Verbs like can, could, shall, will, would, may, might, must, that signal the attitude of the speaker and express probability, possibility, doubt etc.
Swearing
The strongly emotional use of taboo expressions in insults, epithets and expletives.
Tag
An element attached to the end of an utterance (for example eh? Or innit?) It often requests the hearer to express agreement or disagreement.
Interrogative tags
A type of interrogative that ‘tacks’ the interrogative onto the end of a declarative clause and requests the hearer to express agreement or disagreement. The auxiliary and the pronoun version of the subject is added.
Turn-taking
The practice of alternating turns from one speaker in a conversation to another.
Topic management
Includes the initiation of the topic, topic development and also topic change. Matters like gender, status, personality and expertise are involved.
Adjacency pairs
A part of a conversation that contains an exchange of turns by two speakers. The turns are related to each other in such a way that the first turn requires a certain type of response in the second turn, and include automatic patterns.
Minimal responses
Words and noises that listeners use while someone else is talking.
Cohesion
The linguistic connections and ties that exist between the words and sentences to give structure to a text.
Coherence
The semantic connections that exist within a text to make it meaningful.
Synonyms
Words that have closely related meaning and can often be substitutes for each other.
Anaphoric
Expressions that refer back to something that has gone on before in the discourse (the antecedent).
Cataphoric
Expressions that refer forward to another expression that follows it. For example: if you want it, take my book.
Deictic expression
Words such as here and these that represent a way of using language to ‘point’ to particular aspects of an event.
Hedges
devices that speakers use to lessen the impact of an utterance.
Rebus
Use of existing symbols or letters to replace parts of words or whole words: for example ‘b’ ‘u’ ‘c’
Alphanumerics
The combination of words and letters to replace parts of words or whole words, often related to the phonology of the word. For example: gr8, B4, 4eva
Paralinguistic features
Features of speech that are marginal to language. This includes aspects of body language such as stance, gesture and gaze.
Metaphor
Non-literal uses of language, or figurative expressions that refer to something that they don’t literally denote in order to suggest a similarity.
Consonance
A special linguistic effect that involves the repetition of consonant sounds in the same position in a sequence of words.
Rhyme
The recurring pattern of identical or similar sounds at the end of two or more different words.
Rhythm
The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in language.
Onomatopoeia
The use of words whose sounds convey or suggest their meaning. They may mimic sounds in the real world.
Assonance
The repetition of similar stressed vowel sounds for special effect.
Personification
A figure of speech that gives non-humans human qualities.
Coordination
The combination of two or more elements - words, phrases or clauses - that are equal in function and status. They are linked by coordinators or coordinating conjunctions.
Subordination
The combination of clauses that are syntactially non-equivalent.
Alliteration
The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of nearby words.
Punning
A type of word play that uses different meanings of a word or brings together words that are similar in sound but have different meanings.
Hyperbole
Exaggerated language often used for the purpose of emphasis.
Sound symbolism
The direct association between the sounds of a word and the external word.
Affixation
A morphological process that involves the addition of bound morphemes to a word stem. For example: ‘diarise’ - to put in a diary.
Collocation
The tendency for some words to combine with each other. For example: “Happy birthday” and “Thank God”.
Neologisms
A newly coined word.
Compounding
A way of forming a new word by combining two or more free morphemes. The resulting compound is a word that contains a stem that is made up of more than one root. For example “thank you -> thankyou” or “dark room” -> “darkroom”
Acronyms:
Words formed from the initials of other words. For example “YOLO” for “You Only Live Once”
Irony
Language that expressed incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.
Oxymoron
A phrase that combines two contradictory terms. For example “act naturally” or “definite maybe”.
Ambiguity
An expression with more than one meaning. For example: “Anna said that Lucy loves her boyfriend”.
Passive constructions
The discourse strategy that promotes and object to a subject and demotes the subject to a by phrase, changing the verb to its past participle form. For example “Fred kicked the dog” -> “The dog was kicked by Fred.”
Antithesis
A kind of parallelism that involves the juxtaposition of contrasting phrases: often they are structured similarly but show different ideas. For example: The sun rises, the sun sets.
Parallelism
The use of similar sounds, words or grammatical constructions. For example: He was kind, bright and funny. OR She was tired and she was sore and she was aching.
Connotation
Associated meanings a word may carry.
Denotation
The referential meaning constantly associated with a word (the dictionary meaning)
Listing
Coordinated phrases or lists of words.
Old (given information)
Information that is familiar in the sense that it refers to something that has appeared earlier in the text, or which is common knowledge.
Nominalisation
The process that turns whole clauses into noun-like structures, for example: ‘The fact that students had not done their homework was unexpected’ becomes ‘the students’ lack of completion of their homework was unexpected.’ See further explanation here
New information
Information that has not been seen before or is not common knowledge.
Predicate
The part of the sentence that provides the information about the subject. It usually includes the verb and everything else in the sentence. For example: (He) washed the car.
There-construction
The insertion of a dummy subject pronoun there in order to allow the subject to appear later. Usually an ‘empty’ construction. For example: There are two different books on the table.
Topic and Comment
The topic is the part of the sentence that is being written or talked about. The rest of the sentence makes some sort of statement about the topic, and this is called the comment. Usually topic is before comment. For example: (topic) The book (comment) is new.
Clefting
Splitting off a part of the sentence in order to give it prominence - thereby forming two clauses. The first is introduced by an empty subject ‘it’ and a form of ‘be’, with the rest being recast as a relative clause. For example: From ‘I saw him last year’ -> “It was last year that I saw him.”
Fronting
Items are moved to the front of the sentence to show prominence.
Left dislocation
The part of the sentence you want to emphasise is moved to the extreme left of the sentence. There is some sort of ‘copy’ is left to replace the constituent (usually ‘it’). For example: From ‘I love icecream’ -> “Icecream, I love it.”
Right dislocation
The opposite strategy to left-dislocation. A constituent is moved to the end of the sentence and replaced with a copy pronoun. For example: From ‘I love icecream’ -> ‘I love it, icecream.’
Constituent
Any functional unit of a grammatical construction.
Synonyms
Words that have closely related meanings and can often be substituted for each other. For example: big is a synonym of large.
Antonyms
Words that are the opposite in meaning. For example: Small is an antonym of big.
Deictic expressions
Words such as here and there, which use language to ‘point’ to aspects of the text. For example: “Here is a really good example.”
Taboo
Words or subjects that are distasteful, frightening, or make people feel uncomfortable. For example: death.
Euphemism
Polite or sweet-sounding terms and phrases that are substituted for harsh or abrasive or offensive terms. For example: ‘Gone to heaven’ instead of ‘dead’
Dysphemism
Being harsh, abusive or offensive as a substitute for a less offensive term. For example: ‘Nazi’ for strict person.
Sociolect:
A variety used by people of a particular socioeconomic status or educational background (usually referred to as ‘high’ or ‘low’)
Ethnolect
A variety that identifies speakers by their ethnicity: usually influenced by their first language or that of their families.
Ethnic broad
One of the ethnic accents of Australian English that features strongly in media stereotypes.
Community languages
Languages other than English spoken by immigrants and their descendants.
