Spanish Cset 1 Part 2 Flashcards
Universal Grammar. (UG)
According to some linguists, we are born with a pattern of grammar in our head just as are born with a heart and lungs.
The Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Ability to assimilate the language we heard and begin to use it systematically.
The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a controversial claim from language acquisition research proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. The LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language.
Minimal pairs
Word pairs such as pit and bit, where one sound changes the meaning of the word
Phonemes
Take the words pit and bit for example and think about how just a single sound changes the meaning of the word. P and b are two distinctive sounds within the English sound system and are referred to as phonemes. Phonemes then are defined as the smallest distinctive or contrastive units of the sound system of a language.
Most phonemes can be put into groups; for example, in English we can identify a group of plosive phonemes / p t k b d g /, a group of voiceless fricatives / f s h / and so on.
Phonetics
Phonetics tries to differentiate among the sounds with the highest possible degree of accuracy.
Allophones
any of the speech sounds that represent a single phoneme, such as the aspirated k in kit and the unaspirated k in skit, which are allophones of the phoneme k.
Homophones
each of two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling.
each of a set of symbols denoting the same sound or group of sounds.
Examples of Homophones ad, add ate, eight know, no meet, meat one, won their, there, they're theirs, there's to, too, two who's, whose your, you're
Homophones
Ball Bawl 3 Caret Carrot 4 Dual Duel 5 Eye I a written element that represents the same spoken unit as another, as ks, a homophone of x in English.
Collocations
definition of collocation refers to a group of words that often go together or that are likely to occur together. Two words that often go together, such as light sleeper or early riser are an example of collocation.
Here are a number of common collocations in English:
to make the bed I need to make the bed every day. to do homework My son does his homework after dinner. to take a risk Some people don't take enough risks in life. to give someone advice The teacher gave us some advice on taking tests.
Inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation, in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness.
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).
Concord or agreement
is an interconnection between words, especially
marked by their inflections. Thus, “The bird sings” and “The birds sing”
illustrate subject-verb concord. (It is just a coincidence that the singular ending
of some verbs is identical in form with the plural ending of some nouns.)
Similarly, in “this day” both words are singular, and in “these days” both are
plural; some languages, such as Spanish, require that all modifiers agree with
the nouns they modify in number, but in English only this and that change
their form to show such agreement.
Function words
are minor parts of speech (for example, articles, auxiliaries,
conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and certain adverbial particles) that serve
as grammatical signals used with word order to serve some of the same
functions as inflections. For example, in English the indirect object of a verb
can be shown by either word order (“I gave the dog a bone”) or a function
word (“I gave a bone to the dog”)
A language like English whose
grammar depends heavily on the use of word order and function words is said
to be analytic.
Prosodic Signals
such as pitch, stress, and tempo, can indicate grammatical
meaning. The difference between the statement “He’s here” and the question
“He’s here?” is the pitch used at the end of the sentence. The chief difference between the verb conduct and the noun conduct is that the verb has a stronger stress on its second syllable and the noun on its first syllable. In “He died happily” and “He died, happily,” the tempo of the last two words makes an importance difference in meaning.
Etymology
Knowing a word’s early history,
allomorph
A morpheme may, however, have more than one pronunciation or spelling. For
example, the regular noun plural ending has two spellings (-s and -es) and three
pronunciations (an s-sound as in backs, a z-sound as in bags, and a vowel plus
z-sound as in batches). Each spoken variation is called an allomorph of the plural
morpheme. Similarly, when the morpheme -ate is followed by -ion (as in activateion), the t of -ate combines with the i of -ion as the sound “sh” (so we might spell
the word “activashon”). Such allomorphic variation is typical of the morphemes of
English, even though the spelling does not represent it.
compound
A word that has
two or more bases (such as applejack) is called a compound.
Idiom
An idiom is a combination of words whose
meaning cannot be predicted from its constituent parts. One kind of idiom is the
combination of a verb with an adverb, a preposition, or both—for instance, turn
on (a light), call up (on the telephone), take over (a business), ask for (a job), come
down with (an illness), and go back on (a promise). Such an expression is a single
semantic unit: to go back on is to ‘abandon’ a promise. But from the standpoint of
grammar, several independent words are involved.
kinesics
Such specialized gestures as the indifferent shrug of the shoulders, the admonitory
shaking of the finger, the lifting up of the hand in greeting and the waving of it in
parting, the widening of the eyes in astonishment, the scornful lifting of the brows,
the approving nod, and the disapproving sideways shaking of the head—all these
need not accompany speech at all; they themselves communicate. Indeed, there is
some reason to think that gestures are older than spoken language and are the matrix
out of which it developed. Like language itself, such gestures vary in use and meaning
from one culture to another. In India, a sideways wagging of the head indicates that
the head-wagger understands what another person is saying. When gestures accompany speech, they may be more or less unconscious, like the crossed arms of a person
talking with another, indicating a lack of openness to the other’s ideas. The study of
such communicative body movements is known as
Ellipsis
Ellipsis happens when we leave out (in other words, when we don’t use) items which we would normally expect to use in a sentence if we followed the grammatical rules. The following examples show ellipsis. The items left out are in brackets [ ]:
I am absolutely sure [that] I have met her somewhere before.
A:
[Have you] Seen my gloves anywhere?
B:
They’re in the kitchen.
She sang and [she] played the violin at the same time.
A:
[Are] You ready yet?
B:
Yes. [I’m] Ready now. [I’m] Sorry to keep you waiting.
dialect
The term dialect refers to any variety of a language, and from the point of view of sociolinguistics, all dialects are equally correct, systematic, logical, and meaningful.
Standard variety vd. Non-standard variety
The issue of standard vs. non-standard variety of a language is not a linguistic one, but political. The standard dialect is associated with prestige in the society. That is why many people prefer it to other varieties. Some people feel pressured to use the standard dialect to conform to the rules of the society. However, some speakers of a non-standard dialect prefer to use it to demonstrate their sense of belonging to their community or social/ethnic group.
