Session 1 Notes: Linguistics – Phonetics to Pragmatics

A set of practice flashcards covering core concepts from phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics based on the provided notes.

What is the difference between a phoneme and a phone?

Phoneme is the abstract minimal sound unit in a language that can distinguish meaning; a phone is the concrete acoustic realization of a phoneme.

What is an allophone?

A non-distinctive variant of a phoneme; context-dependent realization of the same phoneme.

What is Minimal Pair Technique?

Pairs of words that are almost identical except for one sound in the same position, showing a phonemic difference.

Name the three branches of Phonetics and their focus.

Articulatory Phonetics (production of speech), Acoustic Phonetics (transmission of sound as waves), and Perceptual/Auditory Phonetics (perception of sounds by the ear).

What is the IPA used for?

International Phonetic Alphabet; a system of symbols to transcribe speech sounds unambiguously.

What is a syllable in these notes?

A phonological unit consisting of one sound.

Define onset in syllable structure.

Consonants or consonant blends before the rime.

Define rime (rhymes) in syllable structure.

Consists of a nucleus and the consonant following it.

Define nucleus in syllable structure.

Usually a vowel (sometimes a consonant sonorant).

Define coda in syllable structure.

Any consonant following the rime.

What is a monophthong?

A single vowel sound.

What is a diphthong?

A complex vowel sound formed by the combination of two vowels in one syllable.

What is a triphthong?

A three-vowel sound that glides together (diphthong + monophthong).

What is a phoneme’s place in phonology?

Phonology studies the sound system and the rules that govern pronunciation.

Define a vowel and a consonant as described.

Vowels are produced by shaping the oral cavity for color/timbre and are voiced; consonants are produced with partial restrictions and can be voiced or voiceless.

What is the concept of place & manner of articulation?

A table categorizing where in the vocal tract a sound is formed (place) and how it is formed (manner) such as bilabial, alveolar, velar, glottal, etc., with manners like plosive, fricative, nasal, etc.

What is a digraph?

Two or more consonants that, when combined, produce one sound.

What is phonological conditioning?

The phonological differences between allomorphs of a morpheme due to their environment.

What is assimilation (a morphophonemic process)?

A process where a sound becomes more like a nearby sound in terms of one or more phonetic features.

What is dissimilation?

A phonological process where two sounds become less alike articulatorily or acoustically.

What is deletion?

A process that removes a weak segment in certain phonetic contexts (often in rapid speech).

What is insertion?

A process that inserts a syllable or a non-syllabic segment within an existing string.

What is metathesis?

A process that reorders or reverses a sequence of segments.

What is morphology?

The study of word formation; the study of morphemes and words.

What is a morpheme?

The smallest meaningful unit of language that cannot be subdivided without losing its meaning.

What is a lexeme?

The basic unit of the word/root word/base form.

What are morphs?

Physical realizations of morphemes.

What are lexical morphemes?

Also known as content words; include nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs.

What are free morphemes?

Morphemes that can stand alone as words (e.g., talk, in, sing).

What are inflectional morphemes?

Suffixes that mark grammatical information (e.g., plural, present, past, possessive, comparative, superlative, participles); they do not change word category.

What are grammatical morphemes?

Function words that express relationships (prepositions, articles, conjunctions) and do not have standalone lexical content.

What are bound morphemes?

Morphemes that cannot stand alone; they are affixes (inflectional, derivational, zero/empty).

What are derivational morphemes?

Derivational affixes (prefixes or suffixes) that can change the syntactic category and sometimes the sense of a word (e.g., beauty -> beautiful; teach -> teacher).

What is a zero morpheme?

A morpheme that is present in form but has no explicit meaning.

What is an allomorph?

A morph with the same morpheme realized differently depending on context.

What is lexical conditioning?

Conditions that alter the form of a morpheme depending on context (e.g., ox -> oxen).

What is open vs closed word classes?

Open classes readily accept new words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs); closed classes resist new members (prepositions, conjunctions, determiners).

What is graphophonology?

Concerned with graphophonemic awareness; matching letters (graphemes) to sounds (phonemes) in spellings; examples include words like radio vs radiator.

What is syntax?

The study of sentence structure and phrases; left-to-right ordering; S-V-O basic order in English.

What is a phrase?

A constituent that is the expansion of a head and may be realized by a single word.

Name the phrase types listed.

Noun Phrase, Adjective Phrase, Prepositional Phrase, Adverbials.

What is semantics?

The study of word meaning; sense vs reference; includes sense, reference, and truth.

What is lexical decomposition?

Representing the sense of words in terms of semantic features to characterize meanings with a finite set of features.

What are the three areas of semantics?

Sense, Reference, and Truth.

What is hyponymy?

A relationship where a word contains the meaning of a more general word (oak is a hyponym of tree).

What is antonymy?

Two words whose meanings differ on one semantic feature; includes gradable, binary, and converse antonyms.

What is synonymy?

Two words with the same sense; however, there are rarely absolute synonyms in a language.

What is coreference?

Two linguistic expressions that refer to the same real-world entity.

What is anaphora?

A linguistic expression that refers to another expression that appears earlier (antecedent-pronoun pattern).

What is cataphora?

A linguistic expression that refers to another expression that follows (antecedent after).

What is deixis?

A deictic expression has one meaning but can refer to different entities depending on the speaker’s orientation (personal, spatial, temporal).

What is entailment?

A one-way relation where a proposition follows from another sentence (specific to general).

What is presupposition?

A proposition assumed to be true in order to judge the truth of another sentence.

What is pragmatics?

The study of language use in context and the intended speaker-meaning.

What is implicature?

An implied proposition not part of the utterance and not an entailment; multiple implicatures can be possible.

What is the Cooperative Principle?

The assumption that participants in a conversation are cooperating.

What are Grice’s maxims?

Maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relation, and Manner guiding cooperative conversation.

What is a speech act?

An utterance that performs an act; includes Locutionary (what is said), Illocutionary (the act performed by the saying), and Perlocutionary (the effect on the listener).

What is a direct illocutionary act?

When the syntactic form of the utterance matches its illocutionary force (e.g., a command in an imperative sentence).

What is an indirect illocutionary act?

When the syntactic form does not match the illocutionary force (e.g., a statement that has a directive force).