Keywords Flashcards
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The relationship between the language and its context.
Context
The circumstances that form the setting for an event.
Affective Function
Language has primarily a social function
Lexis
The total set of words in a language as distinct from morphology; vocabulary.
Referential function
Language has an informative function
Pragmatics
Subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning.
Sociolinguistics
The study of language in relation to social factors, including differences of regional, class, and occupational dialect, gender differences, and bilingualism.
Semantics
The branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. The study of meanings.
Semiotics
The study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretations.
Syntax
The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.
Morphology
The study of the forms of things (e.g. shape and structure).
Phonology
The study of sounds in a language. The system of contrastive relationships among the speech sounds that constitute the fundamental components of language.
Phonetics
The study and classification of speech sounds.
Ellipsis
The omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.
Anachronism
A thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned.
Hard Power
The Law, police, armed forces, walls, barbed wire, CCTV
Soft Power
Products, commodities, fashions, desirables states of being, identities. Ideologies, how you want to be perceived.
Epistemology
The theory or science of the method or grounds of knowledge – how we know what we know.
Overt power/ knowledge relations
Religious instruction, parliamentary legalisation, medicine, science, economics.
Covert power/ knowledge relations
Advertising, Journalism, arts and literature
Implicit meanings in cultural products
Discourse
Written or spoken communication or debate, language of a particular field.
Epistemes
Discursive formations: linguistic frameworks underlying limits of discourse/knowledge.
Politeness
The relationship between how something is said to an addressee and that addressee’s judgement of how it should be said – Gundry 2008
Direct speech acts
Asserting (declarative form), Questioning (Interrogative form), Ordering/Requesting (Imperative form).
Indirect speech acts
Declarative “I’d like a coffee please” Assertive disguised as interrogative
Homonym
two or more words having the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings and origins (e.g. tear/tear)
Declarative
Declaring that you want something
Interrogative
Asking/Questioning
Imperative
Authoritative command/ordering
Denotation
Direct meanings
Connotation
Implied meanings
Semantic Shift
Meanings shift over time – e.g. gay (happy/homo)
Discourse markers
Fillers – e.g. well / I mean
Paralinguistic features/paralanguage
Body language – things other than linguistics that aid language. E.g. shrugging, facial expressions.
Prosodic features/prosody
Non-verbal aspects of speech: Tone, intonation, stress and rhythm.
Grammar
Organisation rules of language
Code Switching
Switching between languages in one sentence
Language Crossing
Linguistic movement (conversation) between people of different social backgrounds/contexts
Referential language
Containing a reference, solely conveying information
Metalingual
using one chunk of text to define or explain another; using a story to define a term
Idiolect
Language use that is typical of a particular person.
Expressive language
Communicating feelings and emotions.
Hedges
Mitigations to lessen the impact/force/softens of a message; e.g. The way women use super-polite forms of address
Mode of language
Means of communication – e.g. speech, writing, phone calls.
Intonation
Tone/Quality of voice
Sociolect
The variety of language that is typically used by the members of a particular social group
Cohesion
When lexis in a texts creates a chain of meanings throughout a text.
Ideational
Language used as a code to make sense of the world around us
Phatic
Relating to language used for general purposes of social interaction
Prosody
The patterns of stress and intonation in language.
Irony
The use of words to mean something very different from what they appear on the surface to mean.
Stress
Emphasis on certain words within a sentence to change meaning
