Key Terms Exam 1 Flashcards
corpus (corpora pl)
Any collection of texts from which linguistic information can be extracted, but especially those collections developed and designed specifically for that purpose.
corpus linguistics
Branch of linguistics concerned with the design, development, and use of corpora to study language.
descriptive rule
Statement of what regularly actually occurs in a language, as opposed to what supposedly should occur.
descriptivist
Person inclined to describe language as it is, has been, or will be, rather than to regulate it according to what he or she believes it should be.
prescriptive rule
Statement of what supposedly should occur in a language, rather than what has or does occur.
prescriptivist
Person inclined to regulate language as he or she believes it should be, rather than describing what it is as an adjective.
hypercorrection
Linguistic form, structure, or pronunciation that a speaker supposes to be correct, or formal that results in an actual prescriptive error.
style
Specific type of speech, for instance, formal speech, colloquial speech, academic speech, or gossip. Levels of formality.
cognate
Word from one language that shares an etymon with a word from another language. Words from daughter languages that have the same meaning.
diachronic
Historical or concerned with history; language develops diachronically.
dialectology
Study of variation in a particular language or language family.
discourse analysis
Systematic study of discourse, or continuous speech, written or spoken.
displacement
Human cognitive ability to project forward or backward in time, as well as to think in the abstract.
etymon
Historical word from which a more recent form is derived, whether in the same or a different language.
grammar
Structure and rules governing a language at the levels of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse.
grammatical
Features of a language that conforms to the rules of grammar and are therefore comprehensible to other native speakers of the language.
historical linguistics
Branch of linguistics focused on the development of language over time, also known as diachronic linguistics.
langue
Underlying, abstract system of language; relationship of linguistic signs to one another in lexicon and syntax.
parole
Actual speech as opposed to langue.
lexicography
Art and craft of writing dictionaries or about the lexicon.
linguistic competence
Innate human ability to acquire and use language, given certain biological and developmental constraints.
linguistic performance
A speaker’s utterances in a given language.
linguistic sign
linguistic entity that joins signifier and signified in one linguistic representation, the actual meaning of a word. (signifier+signified=linguistic sign)
signifier
Any meaningful string of sounds, that is, linguistic form. Arbitrary noises that make up a word.(signifier+signified=linguistic sign)
signified
Concept that the signifier represents. (signifier+signified=linguistic sign)
linguistics
Study of language in any or all of its aspects.
metathesis
Phonological process in which sounds switch places in the phonemic structure of a word.
morphology
Study of word forms and the process in which they are formed.
phonetics
Description and classification of sounds and the study of their production and perception.
phonology
Study of sound system and sound change, usually within a specific language or language family.
pragmatics
Study of how we communicate with language.
proto-language
Language for which there is no written evidence, but can be reconstructed from the evidence of related written languages, according to systematic rules of historical sound change and word formation. A hypothesized language.
psycholinguistics
Study of relationships among language, mind, and brain, including process of language acquisition.
recursivity
The capacity to create an infinite amount of creative language with a finite amount of lexicon, grammatical rules, etc.
reflex
Word derived from an older form, whether in the same or a different language.
semantics
Systematic study of meaning of language, especially word and sentence meaning.
sociolinguistics
Study of language in use, especially in terms of variation. General use by socioeconomic status, gender, race.
stylistics
Study of language as used in artificial contexts, such as literature, judicial or political speech.
synchronic
Concerned with the present state of affairs. Language in use at the present time.
syntax
Systematic ways in which words combine to create well formed phrases, clauses, and sentences.
language change: internal factors
change within the language itself, focusing of structure and sound. (natural development ask/aks)
language change: social factors
change that depends on the behavior of speech community. (language contact)
language change: cognitive factors
change that depends on our comprehension of the language and our mind’s language process. (all intensive purposes)
Ferdinand de Saussure
Swiss linguist who proposed the theory signifier+signified=linguistic sign
Sir William Jones
First to propose that languages like Latin, Greek, and Hindi all developed from the same proto-language via his observations of Sanskrit.
Jacob Grimm
German linguist who takes Sir Williams hypothesis a step further to explain specific sound changes that happened to make Germanic and Romance dialects differ from one another.
Karl von Frisch
Studied in depth the communicative possibilities in honey bee dances in the 1940’s
Ablaut
The change in the vowel sound to conjugate an Old English strong verb. Swim, swam, swum.
Analogy
Linguistic process by which the less usual is drawn to resemble the usual. Children commonly make these sort of mistakes, “look at the gooses!
Gender (of a language)
Grammatical category that depends on the contrast among masculine/feminine/neuter, used to classify nouns, pronouns, and adjectives.
Grammatical gender
Arbitrary gender given to nouns etc. (still exists in Romance languages)
Hypotactic
Syntax or style created by subordination. Meaning you know the case of a word by sentence order not word structure.
Natural gender
Reflects the actual gender of an animate object such as people, animals, or pronouns.
Orthograph
Latinate term used to refer to spelling.
Emoticon
Symbol that communicates emotional response.
Grammaticalization
Process in which an open class word becomes a grammatical form. Like cyber becoming a prefix for things to do with the internet.
Interposing
Word formative process involving insertion of a word or words into a fixed idiomatic phrase
Lingua Franca
Common language developed or adopted in specific context to facilitate communications among speakers who don’t share a common language.
Retronymy
Word formative process that creates words or phrases to augment or replace words once used alone, in order to distinguish them from new words or phrases for new development, like e-mail.
Old English
449-1066: invasion of Germanic tribes the the British isles (Jutes, Saxons, Angles)
Middle English
1066-1476: Norman conquest
Early Modern English
1476-1776: invention of the printing press
Modern English
1776-present: Declaration of Independence
