General Knowledge Flashcards
What is syncretism?
One form, one function
What kind of language is OE compare to PdE, concerning sentence structure?
- OE: V2 and SVO language
- PdE: not V2 anymore - residual V2, SVO
What is a negative concord language?
A language where different negative expressions are combined to express a single logical negation.
What is finiteness?
tense + agreement inflection + nominative case in the sentence
What is a word?
Words label, refer to mental representations of specific entities in the world (concepts) in an arbitrary connection: signified vs signifier
What’s the difference between derivation and inflection?
Inflection:
Signal syntactic relationship, don’t create meaning, nor change word category, highly productive, semantically transparent, syncretic, only suffixes
Derivation: generates meaning and changes category, highly selective, semantically often intransparent, not syncretic, prefixes and suffixes
How can word be formed?
Compounding, abbreviation, conversion, clipping, backformation, onomatopoeia, clitics, word manufacture, derivation
What’s a compound?
New words created by combining free morphemes/words. They behave like single words in sentences.
- only right headed compounds
- mostly no inflection inside compounds
- recursive (can be repeated ad infinitum)
What are the two classes of abbreviations?
Initialisms: HIV (pronounced as letter)
Acronyms: NATO (pronounced as words)
What is conversion?
Assigning an existing word to a new word category
To hit - a hit
What are clippings and blendings?
Clipping: shortening a polisyllabic word (prof-essor)
Blending: two wordparts form a new one: breakfast+lunch=brunch
What is backformation?
Creative reduction due to incorrect morphological analysis: television (1907) - televise (1927)
What is word manufacture?
A person after whom something is named: Fahrenheit, Tempo, Kleenex
Morphology typology
Isolating vs agglutinating vs inflectional
Free. Bound Add inflection
Morphemes
Vietnamese. Turkish. German+Engl
What’s the difference between word and stem based languages?
Word/root based languages have the root as a perfectly good word, inflectional affixes are optional (English, German)
Stem based languages have stem + mandatory inflectional affixes (Latin, Russian)
What’s a phoneme?
A sound that distinguishes meaning and can establish minimal pairs
— shown in broad transcription /…/
What is an allophone?
Variants of a phoneme in complementary distribution, they don’t distinguish meaning
— narrow transcription (with diacritics h and ‘ stress marker)
What’s a phone?
An actual speech sound
How can phonemes be identified?
By the minimal pair test!
What’s the difference between phonetics and phonology?
Phonetics: sound in an utterance (performance), independent of particular language, physical sound, concrete, phone […]
Phonology: sound in a system (competence), language-specific, systematic function (difference in meaning), abstract, phoneme /…/
How many phonemes are there in English?
In RP 45
How is a syllable structured?
Coda+nucleus = rhyme + Onset = syllable
What are the levels of sonority?
- Plosives 2. Fricatives 3. Nasals 4. Approximants 5. Vowels
(1+2 obstruents, 3-5 sonorants)
What are suprasegmentals?
Parts of speech that are longer than just one sound/segment:
1) syllable
2) prosody: stress (lexical (a), phrasal (b)), pitch (tone (a), intonation (b))
(a) Vietnamese (b) German/English
What is a morpheme?
A minimal linguistic sign carrying meaning + function
What is a morph?
The concrete realization of a morpheme
What is a allomorph
Two or more variants of a morpheme
1) phonologically conditioned (-al nation-al vs. nationality)
2) lexically conditioned: a) total suppletion (go vs went), b) partial suppletion (bring vs brought)
What is derivation?
Combination of 1 free and x bound morphemes
– head is usually on the right and determines the word category
(Unhappiness)
Grammatical categories vs grammatical functions?
Fixed vs dependent on syntactic content
Grammatical categories: noun, verb, adjective, preposition, determiner, auxiliary
Grammatical functions: subject, (object) complement, predicate, argument, adjunct
What are the 4 clause functions?
Declarative
Interrogative
Imperative
Exclamative
What is the innateness hypothesis?
Chomsky’s hypothesis that the course of language acquisition is determined by an innate language faculty
