Yule Bold Terms Flashcards
Glossolalia
Individuals speaking in tongues, producing speech-like sounds that lack a logical meaning, often in a religious context.
Reflexivity
Reflexive words show that the person who does the action is also the person who is affected by it.
Displacement
The capability of language to communicate about things that are not immediately present.
Arbitrariness
The principle that there is no inherent connection between linguistic signs (words) and their meanings; the relationship is largely conventional.
Cultural transmission
Language is learned and passed down through social interaction within a culture, rather than inherited genetically.
Fixed reference
The characteristic of animal communication systems where specific signals correspond to particular meanings or contexts, without flexibility.
All animal signals have a feature called fixed reference that means each signal is fixed as relating to a particular object or occasion
Onomatopoeia
Words that phonetically imitate or resemble the sound they describe (e.g., “buzz,” “bang”).
Acoustic phonetics
The study of the physical properties of speech sounds as they travel through the air.
Articulatory phonetics
The study of how speech sounds are produced by the movement of the articulators (e.g., tongue, lips).
Vocal folds
The pair of muscle-controlled folds in the larynx that vibrate to produce sound during phonation.
Voiced and voiceless sounds
Voiced sounds are produced with vocal fold vibration (e.g., “b”), while voiceless sounds are produced without such vibration (e.g., “p”).
Auditory phonetics
The study of how speech sounds are perceived by the ear and processed by the brain.
Dentals and interdentals
Dentals are sounds produced with the tongue against the upper teeth (e.g., “t,” “d”), while interdentals are produced with the tongue between the teeth (e.g., “th” in “think”).
Post-alveolars
Speech sounds produced with the tongue just behind the alveolar ridge (e.g., “sh,” “zh” - [ʒ].
Flap
A quick, light contact of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, producing a sound like the American English “t” or “d” in “water” or “butter.”
Natural class of phonemes
A group of phonemes that share one or more phonetic features (e.g., voiceless stops: /p/, /t/, /k/).
Neologism
A newly coined word or expression that may not yet be widely accepted or recognised.
Etymology
The study of the origin and historical development of words and their meanings.
Loan-translation / calque
A type of borrowing in which a foreign expression is translated directly into the target language (e.g., “skyscraper” from the French “gratte-ciel”).
Blending
The creation of a new word by combining parts of two existing words (e.g., “brunch” from “breakfast” and “lunch”).
Hypocorism
A term of endearment or affectionate nickname (e.g., “Billy” for “William”).
Backformation
The creation of a new word by removing an affix from an existing word (e.g., “edit” from “editor”).
Conversion
The process of changing a word’s grammatical category without altering its form (e.g., using “run” as a noun or a verb).
Coining
The act of inventing a new word or phrase.
Eponyms
Words derived from the names of people or places (e.g., “sandwich” from the Earl of Sandwich).
Analogy
A process by which words or forms are created or altered based on the patterns of other words (e.g., forming “runned” based on “ran” and “runned”).
Morphemes
The smallest units of meaning in a language, which can be words or parts of words.
Free and bound morphemes
Free morphemes can stand alone as words (e.g., “book”), while bound morphemes must attach to other morphemes (e.g., “un-“ in “unhappy”).
Functional morphemes
Morphemes that serve a grammatical purpose rather than carrying substantial meaning (e.g., “and,” “but,” “the”).
Derivational morphemes
Morphemes added to a base word to create a new word with a different meaning or category (e.g., “happy” to “unhappy”).
Inflectional morphemes
Morphemes that modify a word to express grammatical features such as tense, mood, or number (e.g., “cat” to “cats”).
Allomorphs
Variations of a morpheme that occur in different contexts but have the same meaning (e.g., plural “s” in “cats” vs. “es” in “buses”).
Reduplication
The process of repeating all or part of a word to create a new meaning or grammatical form (e.g., “bye-bye”).
Content morphemes
Words that have a clear semantic meaning (like book, luck, un-, –y, boy) .
