Spanish Cset 1 Flashcards
How is probability express in the past in Spanish?
Spanish uses the conditional: “Yo lo comería.” I probably ate it, or, I must have eaten it.
How is probability typically expressed in the present in Spanish?
To express probability in the present, Spanish uses the future: “Yo lo comeré.” I am probably eating it, or, funnier, I must be eating it.
Phonetics
The study of human speech sounds.
Pragmatics
The Study of the use of language in context… deals with how listeners arrive at intended meaning of speaking
Phonologhy
The Branch of linguistics which studies how sounds are organized, and used in natural language.
Ex: time [t] & dime [d] Identical words, except beginning sounds.
Morphology
The study of the structure of the words and how words are formed.
Morphemes
Minimal units of words that have a meaning and cannot be subdivided any further. There are two types. (free morphemes and bound morphemes)
reactivation has five morphemes in it (one free and four bound), as a stepby-step analysis shows:
re-activation
activate-ion
active-ate
act-ive
Thus reactivation has one free morpheme (act) and four bound morphemes (re-, -ive,
-ate, and -ion).
A word cannot be divided into morphemes just by sounding out its syll
Bound Morphemes
The smallest unit that has meaning but cannot stand alone. (A morpheme that must be attached to another morpheme and cannot stand alone.) Affix are often this type of morpheme. It also includes prefixes (added to the beginning of another morpheme), suffices (added to the end), infixes (inserted into other morphemes), and circumfixes (attached to another morpheme at the beginning and end)
Ex: o, as, a, amos, an (the ending of any grammatical change in a verb.
Free Morphemes
The smallest unit that has meaning and can stand alone. (or A morpheme that does not need to be attached to another morpheme and can stand-alone) Ex. play
1) open class/ lexical/content
-verb, noun, adjective, and adverb.
2) closed class/function/grammatical
Ex. el, las, los, nos,vos
- Conjuctions, prepositons, articles, and pronouns
Derivational
These are added to morphemes to form entirely new words that may or may not be the same part of speech.
Ex.: Cloud, cloudy, happiness, greenish, establishment)
Inflectional Suffixes
These are added to the end of an existing word for purely grammatical reasons, there are 8 in English. They do not alter the syntactic behavior of the word.
Ex. -ed past tense, -s plural, -ing progressive
s
(endings that mark distinctions of number, case,
person, tense, mood, and comparison). They include the plural -s and the
possessive ’s used with nouns (boys, boy’s); the third person singular present
tense -s, the past tense and past participle -ed, and the present participle -ing
used with verbs (aids, aided, aiding); and the comparative -er and superlative
-est used with some adjectives and adverbs (slower, slowest).
Root Words
come from Latin or Greek words. They can also be known as a “word root” or just a root.
Root words can’t be used alone in English.
Ex. aud is a Latin root word that has to do with hearing
auditorium, audio and audition
Aud does not mean anything on its own in English. (you can not use it as a stand-alone word) but understanding the meaning of the root makes it easier to figure out what the English words that use it mean.
Syntax
The study of sentence structure (grammar). How words are arranged to form sentences.
Semantics
The study of meaning and language. The analysis of the meaning of words, phrases, sentences. The way in which sounds and meanings are related. Studies the way in which language expressions have meaning.
Descriptive grammar
The structure of a language as it’s actually used by speakers and writers. It represents the unconscious knowledge of a language. It does not teach the rules of a language, but rather
describe rules that are already known.
Descriptive grammarians ask the question, “What is English (or another language) like—what are its forms, and how do they function in various situations?”
Basic principles of grammar
There are two types of grammars: descriptive and prescriptive.
Descriptive Grammar
The structure of a language as it’s actually used by speakers and writers. It represents the unconscious knowledge of a language. It does not teach the rules of a language, but rather describe rules that are already known.
Prescriptive Grammar
Descriptive grammarians ask the question, “What is English (or another language) like—what are its forms and how do they function in various situations?” By contrast, prescriptive grammarians ask “What should English be like—what forms should people use and what functions should they serve?” Prescriptivists follow the tradition of the classical grammars of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, which aimed to preserve earlier forms of those languages so that readers in subsequent generations could understand sacred texts and historical documents. Modern grammarians aim to describe rather than prescribe linguistic forms and their uses. Dictionary makers also strive for descriptive accuracy in reporting which words are in use and which senses they carry.
Basic Principles of Grammar
There are two types of grammars: descriptive and prescriptive.
Productivity in Linguistics
The amount a native speaker uses a particular grammatical or syntactic process in their language. A reference to the extend that a given process is not bound in its application to a certain input. For instance the prefixation of re- to verbs in modern English is productive because this can be done with practically all verbs. The term also refers - in syntax- to the ability of speakers to produce an unlimited number of sentences using a limited set of structures.
Ex. re-think, re-do, re-write, re-use.
Productive Rule of Language
The property of the language-system which enables native speakers to construct and understand an indefinitely large number of utterances, including utterances that they have never previously encountered.
“Humans are continually creating new expressions and novel utterances by manipulating their linguistic resources to describe new objects and situations. This property is described as productivity (or ‘creativity’ or ‘open-endedness’) and it is linked to the fact that the potential number of utterances in any human language is infinite.
Productivity is a general term in linguistics referring to the limitless ability to use language—any natural language—to say new things. It is also known as open-endedness or creativity.
The term productivity is also applied in a narrower sense to particular forms or constructions (such as affixes) that can be used to produce new instances of the same type. In this sense, productivity is most commonly discussed in connection with word-formation.
Distinction between Deep structure and Surface Structure
Proposed by Chomsky in his Standard Theory of Transformational Grammar: Every sentence has 2 levels of structure, one which is obvious on the surface and another which is deep and abstract. These are related by a processes called Transformations.
Classification of language into families and branches
A set of languages deriving from common ancestor or “parent.” Language with a significant number of common features in phonology, morphology and syntax are said to belong to the same language family. Subdivisions of a language family are called “branches.”
Different Perspectives on the study of language
Synchronic vs. Diachronic, how the system works at a point in time (synchronic) vs. how the language has changed over a period of time (diachronic).
Synchronic Linguistics
Analysis of language at a single point in time
Diachronic Linguistics
Historical linguistics or the study of language change.
The different types of changes that languages undergo at all levels
Phonetic and phonological
morphological and syntactic
lexical and semantic
Mechanisms by which language change occurs
Umlaut, phonemic splits, mergers, borrowing, euphemisms, folk etymologies, metaphors and taboos
Utterances
Manner of speaking. Any speech sequence consisting of one or more words and preceded and followed by silence: it may be coextensive with a sentence.
A bit of spoken language. It could be anything from “Ugh!” to a full sentence. It means “to say.” So when you’re saying something, you’re doing this. Saying “24” in math class is doing this. A police officer yelling “Stop!” is doing this. Saying “Good boy!” to your dog is this. Even a long speech by the President is this. If you can’t hear it, it’s not this..
Umlaut
The change of a vowel (as \ü\ to \ē\ in goose, geese) that is caused by partial assimilation to a succeeding sound or that occurs as a reflex of the former presence of a succeeding sound which has been lost or altered
Phonemic Merger
Where two (or more) phonemes merge and become indistinguishable. Ex. The ‘cot-caught merger’… the sound change causes the vowel in caught, talk, and small to be pronounced like the vowel in cot, rock, and doll, so that cot and caught, for example, become homophones, and the two vowels merge into a single phoneme. The change does not affect a vowel followed by /r/, so barn and born remain distinct, and starring and warning do not rhyme.
Phonemic Split
A split in phonology is where a once identical phoneme diverges in different instances. In this case a phoneme at an early stage of the language is divided into two phonemes over time. Usually this happens when a phoneme has two allophones appearing in different environments, but sound change eliminates the distinction between the two environments.
