Foundations of Linguistics – Practice Flashcards

A set of fill-in-the-blank flashcards covering key concepts, theorists, and terminology from the lecture notes on linguistics, language features, and major schools of thought.

Traditional school grammar is , whereas modern linguistics is descriptive.

prescriptive

Unlike traditional grammar, linguistics regards the language as primary.

spoken

The symbols we use in language bear no intrinsic link to their meaning; this property is called .

arbitrariness

Charles Hockett listed design features of language; one that allows us to discuss things outside the here-and-now is .

displacement

Combining meaningless phonemes into meaningful words illustrates Hockett’s feature of (also called double articulation).

duality

Humans can produce an unlimited number of novel utterances, a property known as linguistic .

creativity

Language rules operate on internal structure, a property Hockett called .

structure dependence

One precondition for the origin of language was the ‘ ’—realising sounds can stand for objects.

naming insight

The 1786 paper by Sir pointed out similarities among Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, launching historical linguistics.

William Jones

Nineteenth-century linguists reconstructed a common ancestor called

Proto-Indo-European

In Saussure’s sign theory, the ‘sound pattern’ is the , while the concept is the .

signifier-signified

The link between signifier and signified is , meaning it is based on social convention, not necessity.

arbitrary

A relationship based on word order in a sentence is , while one based on substitution in the same slot is paradigmatic.

syntagmatic

In Bloomfield’s model, the smallest meaningful unit is a .

morpheme

Bloomfield avoided analysing it because he considered it unscientific within linguistics.

meaning

In Chomsky’s model, refers to ideal linguistic knowledge, while the other is actual speech.

competence and performance

A parameter that allows languages like Spanish to drop subject pronouns is the

Null Subject Paramenter

Moving a WH-word to the front of a question in English illustrates what parameter?

WH-Movement parameter

Computers struggle with human speech partly due to , the overlap of sounds between neighbouring phonemes.

coarticulation

The process of dividing continuous speech into meaningful units is called .

segmentation

Failure to grasp speaker intentions shows computers’ weakness in the field of (contextual meaning).

pragmatics

According to Bloomfield, a linguistic form that cannot stand alone (like –s for plural) is a .

bound form

Saussure described the exchange of messages between two people as the ‘’.

speaking circuit

In Hockett’s list, the fact that humans must learn language from a community reflects the feature of.

cultural transmission

The Indo-European family tree was later hypothesised to branch from an older language called .

Nostratic