Paper 3 Definitions ~ AICE AL English Language

Early Modern English

English used in the period between approximately 1500 and 1800 CE, marked by a relatively sudden and distinct change in pronunciation and the inclusion of European Leix and the classical lexis of Latin and Greek

Graphology

the study of writing forms such as the alphabet

Grammar

has a wide meaning but is generally understood to relate to the rules for the appropriate use of a language. Word order and meaning are included in this as part of a language.

Pragmatics

is the study of the ways in which language is used in its social context.

Semantics

is the study of the meanings of words.

Old English

the language of the Anglo-Saxon settlers in Britain which was the main language until approximately 1100 CE. It is very different in structure from modern English, although a significant amount of modern English lexis is closely derived from it.

Middle English

the spoken and written English language which emerged after the Norman invasion and which eventually developed into Early Modern English in about 1500.

Great Vowel Shift

a series of changes, which lasted approximately 200 years from 1350 CE onwards, in the pronunciation of English, affecting the vowels.

Late Modern English

the English used in the timer period after 1800 CE until the present day - the change was initiated by scientific and social developments, and a desire to establish rules of language.

Colonialism

when a country claims ownership and takes control of another land, usually accompanied by an intention to gain wealth from the products of that country.

British English

the variety of English spoken by people in Britain.

Archaic

belonging to the past.

Obsolete

no longer in use; often the meaning is no longer understood.

Lexis

all the words in a language.

Derivation

forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as '-ness' or 'un-' (e.g. 'happiness' is derived from 'happy').

Coinage

the creation of a new word which people start to use.

Neologism

a newly invented word.

Eponym

a word which takes the name of its inventor or discoverer.

Prefix

a group of letters added to the beginning of a word to make a new word.

Suffix

a group of letters added at the end of a word to make a new word.

Root/stem

the part of a word which cannot be changed and which can be added to for a

change in meaning.

Conversion

creating a new word, or a new word class, from an existing one, or from a different word class (e.g. the noun 'green' in golf being derived from the adjective 'green').

Telescoping

the contraction of a phrase, word, or part of a word, on the analogy of a telescope being close (e.g 'biodegradable' for 'biologically degradable').

Compounding

forming a word from two or more units that are themselves words (e.g. 'blackboard' from 'black' and 'board').

Blending

forming a new word by joining the beginning of one word to the end of another (e.g. 'smog', formed from 'smoke' and 'fog').

Coalescence

the phonological process whereby two sounds merge into one (e.g. 'assume', pronounced as 'ashume').

Backformation

the formation of a simpler word from an existing one that appears to be derived from it (e.g. 'enthuse', from the earlier 'enthusiasm').

Reduplication

where sounds are repeated with identical or only very slight change; characteristic of infant speech.

Borrowing

the introduction of specific words, constructions, or morphological elements from one language to another (e.g 'table' into English from Old French, or 'weekend' into French from English).

Neuter

in language terms, neither male nor female.

Inflection

any form or change of form which distinguishes grammatical forms of the same

lexical unit (e.g. plural 'books' is distinguished from singular 'book

by the inflection '-s').

Archaism

in the English language, words which are no longer in everyday use or have lost a particular meaning in current usage.

Etymology

the study of the historical relation between a word and the earlier for or forms from which it has developed.

Amelioration

when a word takes on a more positive connotation over time (e.g. 'nice' which originally mean 'foolish' or 'absurd').

Pejoration

the reverse process of amelioration; the word becomes gradually more negative.

Broadening

the process where a word expands from its original meaning and becomes more general (e.g. 'business or 'cool').

Narrowing

the opposite of broadening (e.g. 'girl' mean 'young person' and 'meat' meant any form of food).

Prescriptivism

the view that language should have a strict set of rules that must be obeyed in speech and writing.

Descriptivism

the view that no use of language is incorrect, and that variation should be acknowledged and recorded rather than corrected.

Discourse genres

styles of written & spoken communication.

Computer-mediated discourse

the specialized form of language between online users.

Transmission

the learning and passing on of information between people in a group.

Estuary English

a 20th century English accent, often used by younger people, which originated in the areas around the River Thames in London. It was first recognized as a distinct accent in the early 1980s. It is a mixture of Received Pronunciation and London speech and is now found in many areas of the English-speaking world.

Protolanguage

a common ancestor of modern languages.

Language family

a group of languages that are related in structure and which have evolved from a common protolanguage.

Pidgin

a simplified mix of languages, used to communicate between people who do not share the same language.

Creole

a natural language, spoken by native speakers, which has developed from a mixture of languages.

Hypothesis

a statement of what the researcher is trying to investigate from carrying out the study.

Bibliography

a list of all books and other sources used in the research.

Field of study

a specific area within a broader topic from which an investigation can develop.

Null hypothesis

a hypothesis that says that there is no statistical difference between two variables or conditions - a researcher aims to disprove it.

Corpus

a large and structured set of texts, usually stored electronically.

Corpus data

the information stored in a corpus comprising written texts and or transcriptions of spoken language.

Acronym

a word formed from the initial letters of two or more successive words (e.g. 'scuba').

Diachrony

a study of the changes in language over time.

Corpus linguistics

the study of language and how it changes over long periods of time, based on the analysis of large collections of different text types.

Sample

a set of data or responses collected from a percentage of the whole population selected by a defined procedure.

Random sample

where everyone who is a member of the population being investigated (e.g. infants under two years old, females under 20, and/or over 60) has an equal chance of being selected for the sample (more information about sampling can be found in specialized publications).

Respondent

the person replying (in this case, someone who answers the questions in a questionnaire).

Open questions

where the respondent is free to put any answer.

Closed questions

where the respondent chooses from the options given.

Pilot survey

a set of questions devised and distributed to a small population to test the questionnaire's questions and the planned analysis procedures before the main survey.

Plagiarism

passing off someone else's work as your own without any acknowledgment.

Research ethics

principles that guide the universally agreed acceptable behavior to be followed in carrying out research investigations.

Synchronic linguistics

the study of language of a particular time, usually the present.

Word Sketch

a page summary of word information derived from the corpus.

Lemma

base or stem word.

Collocation

a relation in a corpus whereby two lexical items (i.e. words) frequently appear together (for example, collocates of 'money' include the verbs 'get', 'make', 'spend', and the nouns 'lot', 'value', and 'amount').

Mutual Information Score

a measure of how frequently two lexical items collate in a corpus, compared to how often they would be expected to do so.

Concordancer

a software program which analyses patterns from the corpus (corpora).

n-gram

a sequence of items from a sample of text which can be different in length according to the phrase being studied

n-gram graph

a line graph based on data from a particular corpus, which displays the change in the frequency of use for particular words or phrases over a given time period.

Discourse

any spoken or written language that is longer than a sentence (in this section, it applies primarily to spoken language).

Utterance

a section of spoken language which is often preceded by silence and followed by silence or a change of speaker. This term is commonly used as an alternative to sentence in conversation analysis, as it is difficult to apply the traditional characteristics of a written sentence to spoken language.

Body language

communication which uses all forms of non-verbal gestures to put across meaning.

Turn-taking

in conversation, people usually wait their turn to speak. Some may interrupt, out of eagerness or rudeness, but the norm is for one speaker to yield the floor by prolonging a pause or glancing at the elected next speaker who then takes their turn.

Adjacency pair

dialogue that follows a set pattern (e.g. when speakers greet each other) of an utterance from one speaker and a response from the other.

Conversational floor

speaking until you have finished what you wish to say, or until someone interrupts you.

Status

the perceived position of a person's authority and influence in relation to those around them.

Topic shift

the point at which speakers move from one topic to another.

Feedback

a group of verbal and non-verbal signals given by the listener to show they are following the conversation.

Back-channelling

feedback in words and sounds which a listener gives a speaker to show they are listening (e.g. 'um', 'agreed').

Elision

the omission of a sounds or syllable from a word, in speech.

Ellipsis

the intentional omission of words from a text, usually indicated by three dots.

Transcription (transcript)

a written record of spoken language which uses symbols and markings to represent the distinctive nature of speech.

Culture

all the values and information for life in a society.

Colloquial

the casual conversation of everyday language.

Metalanguage

language used to describe language (e.g. 'noun'; 'I should have said...').

Phatic communication

communication mainly in the form of greetings, which has a social function to help build a relationship between participants (it is not used to inform) (small talk).

Accent

the characteristic pronunciation associated with a geographical area or social group.

Phonetics

the study of speech sounds in the way they are spoken and pronounced.

Phoneme

the smallest unit of distinguishable sound which distinguishes one word from another in a language (e.g. /f/ in 'fat' and /c/ in 'cat' are two different ones).

Intonation

the rise and fall of the voice while speaking, which can alter the meaning of a word (in British English, the end of an utterance is usually accompanied by falling intonation , though this is changing with high-rising terminals becoming more widely used).

Micropause

a very short pause to take breath.

Tone units

the natural phrases of speech, usually separated by a micropause for breath.

Pitch movement

the physical way that the voice quality changes when people speak: if meaning is added to pitch movement, it becomes the tone (e.g. anger, sarcasm).

Tonic syllable

the main stress in a tone unit.

Babbling

a stage in child language acquisition in which an infant starts to produce patterns of sounds which have no meaning to the child but which start to resemble patterns of syllables in the child's native language.

Caretaker language

the simple style of speech used by those who look after infants and small children.

Holophrastic

in language acquisition, a single word that expresses a complete idea (e.g. 'ball' could mean the child wants it, has found it, likes it) - caregivers need contextual clues to interpret holophrases.