Ling1 Final Flashcards
(87 cards)
The lack of inherent connection between the sound of a word and its meaning. For example, the English word “dog” has no natural relationship to the animal it signifies.
Arbitrary Relation of Form and Meaning
The internalized rules and principles that govern how words are structured, sentences are formed, and meaning is conveyed in a language.
Mental Grammar
The study of the sound systems of a language and the rules governing their combinations.
Phonology
The study of word formation and structure, including how words are built from smaller units.
Morphology
The set of rules that determine the structure and order of words in sentences.
Syntax
The study of meaning in language, examining how words and sentences represent ideas, objects, and relationships.
Semantics
The study of how context influences the interpretation of meaning beyond the literal sense of words.
Pragmatics
Words that mimic natural sounds, such as “buzz” or “splash,” often considered in discussions about the origins of language.
Onomatopoeia
The idea that humans are born with an natural ability to acquire language, supported by the existence of Universal Grammar.
Innateness Hypothesis
The smallest unit of meaning in a language, such as “book” or “books” (composed of “book” + “s” to indicate plural).
Morpheme
A morpheme that can stand alone as a word, e.g., “run” or “happy.”
Free Morpheme
A morpheme that cannot stand alone and must be attached to another morpheme, e.g., prefixes like “un-“ or suffixes like “-ing.”
Bound Morpheme
Morphemes that modify a word’s tense, number, aspect, or gender without changing its core meaning, such as “-s” in “cats.”
Inflectional Morphemes
Morphemes that create new words or change the grammatical category of a word, such as “-ness” in “happiness.”
Derivational Morphemes
The process of combining two or more words to form a new word, e.g., “toothbrush.”
Compounding
The process of adding prefixes, suffixes, or infixes to a base word to form new meanings, e.g., “redo.”
Affixation
The study of how words combine to form phrases and sentences, governed by specific rules.
Syntax
Groups of words that function as a single unit within a sentence, such as a noun phrase or verb phrase.
Constituents
The relationships between sentence elements, such as subject, object, and predicate.
Grammatical Relations:
model introduced by Noam Chomsky, describing how sentences are derived from underlying structures through transformations.
Transformational Grammar
The property of language that allows for infinite embedding of phrases or clauses, such as “The cat [that chased the mouse [that stole the cheese]] ran away.”
Recursion
A situation where a sentence can be interpreted in more than one way due to its structure, e.g., “Visiting relatives can be annoying.”
Syntactic Ambiguity
The study of meaning in language, including word meanings, sentence meanings, and the relationships between them.
Semantics
The literal or primary meaning of a word, as opposed to its connotation.
Denotation
