Week Two - The Structure of Language Flashcards
What is a minimal pair?
A pair of words that differ by only one sound, with different meaning because of this e.g., pin/bin
How do we make speech sounds?
Column of air expelled from lungs, through vocal tract
Air unobstructed =
undifferentiated noise
Air obstructed =
a particular sound
Sound is what in consonants?
Stopped or restricted
Sound is what in vowels?
Sound is just constrained
What does the IPA do?
Represents sounds unambiguously
What are syllables?
Rhythmic units of words
What is monosyllabic?
Only one syllable
What is bisyllabic?
Two syllables
What is polysyllabic?
More than two syllables
What are inflectional morphemes?
Bound morphemes that provide info about a word and its grammatical function
What are derivational morphemes?
Bound or free morphemes that can create new meaning and change the grammatical function of a word (un+happy)
Syntax sentence structure
Subject: The person/thing that is doing something
Object: The person/thing that is having something done to them
Verb: The doing word
What is stored in the mental lexicon?
Meaning
Syntactic category
Sound
Written appearance
How can words and their meanings be dissociated?
- Translation of words between languages
- Ambiguity and synonymy (some word have more than one meaning
- Influence of context
Two types of synonyms?
True: car/automobile
Near: chair/seat
Two types of antonyms?
Mutually exclusive: push/pull
Gradable: deep/shallow
What are Homophony words?
Words that sound the same but have different meanings (may be spelled the same)
What are heterographic homophones?
Sounds the same but have different meaning and spelled differently
What are homography words?
Words that are spelled the same but have different meanings/pronunciations
What is polysemy?
Multiple meanings for the same word eg bank, plane
What is a concept?
A mental representation of a category
Categorisation of the world is influenced by? 2
- Perceived structure of the world
- Cognitive economy
Associative network of meaning?
Word meaning = sum of all associations to a word
- no structure, relationships, hierarchy info, no cog economy
Not sufficiently powerful to capture meaning
Semantic network of meaning?
Associations between items have semantic value themselves
- much more powerful way of capturing word meaning
3 stages of hierarchical relationship word meaning?
Superordinate Basic Subordinate eg Su = food eg Ba = potato eg Sub = kennebec
Criticisms of C & Q Model?
too hierarchical
semantic distance vs conjoint frequency
incorrect predictions
Labial consonant sounds are made?
With the lips eg., p, b, m and w
Labiodental consonant sounds are made?
With the lips and teeth eg., f and v
Dental consonant sounds are made?
Between the teeth eg., th
Alveolar consonant sounds are made
at the alveolar ridge eg., t, d, s, z, n, r and l
Post-alveolar consonant sounds are made?
at the alveolar ridge and palate eg., sh, zh, ch, j, and y
Velar consonant sounds are made?
at the velum eg., k, g, ng
Glottal consonant sounds are made?
at the glottis eg., h and uh
