Vocabulary & Terminology Flashcards
Linguistic Competence
The innate (unconscious) knowledge of a language that allows a speaker to use and understand that language.
Linguistic Performance
The ability to produce and understand sentences in a language.
Performance Error
Mistakes made by a speaker or heard by a listener, including mispronunciations, uncommonly long pauses during speech, syntax errors, semantic errors, phonological errors, or “slips of the tongue.”
Speech Communication Chain
The path language follows from thought to speech to auditory reception to mental processing.
Speech Communication Chain Steps
- Speaker has a thought.
- Speaker chooses how to express the thought using their existing knowledge of words and phrases (lexicon).
- Speaker uses syntax (rules) to put the words and phrases into proper order.
- Speaker makes speech sounds using their vocal system (articulation).
- Speech sounds are transmitted to the listener.
- Speech sounds become neural activity in the listener’s auditory system.
- The listener’s auditory system transcribes the sounds into recognizable words and sentences.
- The listener uses their own lexicon to assign meaning to the words.
- The listener understands the speaker’s intention.
Noise
a sound, especially one that is loud or unpleasant or that causes disturbance.
Lexicon
the vocabulary of a language, an individual speaker or group of speakers, or a subject
myths about signed languages (list 4)
- There is only one sign language.
- Sign languages are not real languages.
- All deaf/hard of hearing people know sign language.
- Sign language hinders the learning of speech.
differences between codes and languages (list 4)
- Code is defined by rules. Language is not.
- Language is ambiguous. Code is not.
- Meanings of words change over time. Code remains the same.
- Language has gendered nouns and pronouns. Code is non-binary.
Semanticity
the quality that a linguistic system has of being able to convey meanings, in particular by reference to the world of physical reality
interchangeability
Refers to the idea that humans can give and receive identical linguistic signals; humans are not limited in the types of messages they can say/hear.
Cultural transmission
the idea that while humans are born with innate language capabilities, language is more learned after birth through a social setting.
arbitrariness
Spoken words are really nothing like the objects they represent.
discreteness
Linguistic representations can be broken down into small discrete units which combine with each other in rule-governed ways. They are perceived categorically, not continuously.
displacement
Refers to the idea that humans can talk about things that are not physically present or that do not even exist.
productivity
Refers to the idea that language-users can create and understand novel utterances. Humans are able to produce an unlimited amount of utterances.
modality
refers to linguistic devices that indicate the degree to which an observation is possible, probable, likely, certain, permitted, or prohibited.
mental grammar
the generative grammar stored in the brain that allows a speaker to produce language that other speakers can understand. It is also known as competence grammar and linguistic competence.
language variation
there is more than one way of saying the same thing
descriptive grammar
refers to an objective, nonjudgmental description of the grammatical constructions in a language. It’s an examination of how a language is actually being used, in writing and in speech. Linguists who specialize in descriptive grammar examine the principles and patterns that underlie the use of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences.
prescriptive grammar
refers to a set of norms or rules governing how a language should or should not be used rather than describing the ways in which a language is actually used.
prescribe
attempt to assign rules to an established language.
Charles Hockett’s nine design features
- Vocal-auditory channel
- Broadcast transmission and directional reception
- Transitoriness
- Interchangeability
- Total feedback
- Specialization
- Semanticity
- Arbitrariness
- Discreteness
mode of communication
a way of communicating
pragmatic function
the meaning a speaker wishes to convey to the person they are speaking to
linguistic sign
“sound-image” a signifier and the meaning of the signifier
convention
a principle or norm that has been adopted by a person or linguistic community about how to use, and therefore what the meaning is of, a specific term.
non-arbitrariness
- some feature of the language directly imitates the referent, as in onomatopoeia.
- statistical regularities can be detected between similar sounds and similar meanings
iconic
well-established, widely recognized
onomatopoeia
the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named
conventionalized
using artistic forms and conventions to create effects; not natural or spontaneous
sound symbolism
refers to the apparent association between particular sound sequences and particular meanings in speech. Also known as sound-meaningfulness and phonetic symbolism.
reasons some people believe writing to be superior to speech (list 3 reasons)
- Writing is more suitable to recording long and complex pieces of information.
- Speech is transient, whereas the written word is more stable.
- Readers absorb and retain information better than listeners do.
evidence that writing and language are not the same (list 4 reasons)
- Speech is significantly older and has been used much longer by humans than the written word.
- Humans are inherently capable of speech; writing must be learned.
- Speech is flexible and changes over time; writing is more rigid and stable.
- Speech, via tone, conveys more explicit information than writing does.
