Misc Flashcards
Semantics
Semantics (from Ancient Greek: sēmantikós, “significant”)
is the linguistic and philosophical study of meaning, in language, programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics.
It is concerned with the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they stand for in reality, their denotation.
Pragmatics
a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning.
Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology.
Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or “coded” in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge (e.g., grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors.
In this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time, etc. of an utterance.
The ability to understand another speaker’s intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.
transitive verbs
A verb can be described as transitive or intransitive based on whether it requires an object to express a complete thought or not. A transitive verb is one that only makes sense if it exerts its action on an object. An intransitive verb will make sense without one. Some verbs may be used both ways.
A transitive verb needs to transfer its action to something or someone—an object. In essence, transitive means “to affect something else.”
Transitive verbs are not just verbs that can take an object; they demand objects. Without an object to affect, the sentence that a transitive verb inhabits will not seem complete.
Please bring coffee.
allophonic variation
Allophone = nondistinctive (noncontrastive) positional variants of a phoneme; substituting one allophone for another allophone of the same phoneme will not lead to a different word. Allophonic variation is caused by phonetic position, the influence of the neighbouring sounds and the style of speech. Allophones of a phoneme are predictable: they are conditioned by the phonetic environment, which determines the appearance of one or another allophone, e.g. the aspirated version of /t/ is predicted by its position: word (or syllable) initially before a stressed vowel; the nonaspirated version is predicted by all other phonetic environments. Occasionally, allophones are in “free variation”, e.g. stops may or may not be released word finally. Allophones in free variation do not distinguish meaning: stops released or not released makes no difference in meaning.
passive
Passive voice is a voice that indicates that the subject is the patient or recipient of the action denoted by the verb. This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role, e.g. The kid was hit by a car. vs. A car hit the kid.
future tense
tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses generally express time relative to the moment of speaking.
a future tense is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. English does not have a future tense formed by verb inflection, although it has a number of ways to express the future, particularly the construction with the auxiliary verb will or shall or is/am/are going to. I will let you know
Morphology
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.
It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words, such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes.
Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word’s pronunciation and meaning.
It differs from morphological typology,
which is the classification of languages based on their use of words, and lexicology,
which is the study of words and how they make up a language’s vocabulary.
Marker/Marking
In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme
(smallest grammatical unit in a language, not identical to a word, with the principal difference that a morpheme may or may not stand alone)
that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. Most characteristically, markers occur as clitics or inflectional affixes.
clitic = a morpheme in morphology and syntax that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host.
Morphological Derivation
Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as -ness or un-. For example, happiness and unhappy derive from the root word happy.
Phonotactics
Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek phōnḗ “voice, sound” and tacticós “having to do with arranging”) is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters and vowel sequences by means of phonotactic constraints.
ditransitive verb/sentence
In grammar, a ditransitive verb is a verb which takes a subject and two objects which refer to a theme and a recipient. According to certain linguistics considerations, these objects may be called direct and indirect , or primary and secondary .
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern
the structure of sentences (sentence structure) in a given language, usually including word order.
One basic description of a language’s syntax is the sequence in which the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) usually appear in sentences. Over 85% of languages usually place the subject first, either in the sequence SVO or the sequence SOV.
Aspect
Aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, denoted by a verb, extends over time.
Perfective aspect
is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during (“I helped him”).
Imperfective aspect
is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows (“I was helping him”; “I used to help people”).
Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions (continuous and progressive aspects) from repetitive actions (habitual aspect).
non-finite clause
In linguistics, a non-finite clause is a dependent or embedded clause whose verbal chain is non-finite;[1] for example, using Priscian’s categories for Latin verb forms, in many languages we find texts with non-finite clauses containing infinitives, participles and gerunds.
