WRI 2550 - Quiz 01

ARBITRARY

The principle that there is no natural or inherent connection between a word's speech sounds and the concept it represents.

CONVENTIONAL

Meanings that are established by agreement or social custom rather than by nature.

SIGN

A meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a signifier + signified.

SIGNIFIER

The physical form of a sign, such as a sequence of sounds or a written word.

SIGNIFIED

The abstract concept or meaning associated with a linguistic sign.

LANGUE

The underlying, abstract system of rules and signs shared by a speech community.

PAROLE

The actual, individual instances of speech produced by speakers based on the linguistic system.

ICONIC

A sign that physically resembles the object or concept it represents.

INDEXICAL

A sign that serves as a reliable indicator or evidence of the thing it represents. Example: smoke indicates fire.

LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE

The unconscious knowledge of a language's grammar and lexicon that allows a speaker to produce and understand sentences.

LINGUISTIC PERFORMANCE

The actual use of linguistic knowledge in the production and comprehension of speech, which may be affected by physiological or psychological limitations.

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG)

The biologically endowed blueprint or system of principles common to all human languages.

GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

A finite system of rules that assigns sound and meaning to an infinite class of possible sentences.

DISCRETENESS

The property of language being composed of individual units, such as sounds, words, and phrases, that can be combined and rearranged to create new meanings.

DISPLACEMENT

The capacity to communicate about things or events that are removed in time or space from the immediate environment.

SYSTEM

A rule-governed structure in which the meaning of a linguistic sign is determined partly by its relationship to other signs within the language.

CREATIVITY (LINGUISTIC)

The ability of speakers to produce and understand an infinite number of novel sentences that they have never heard before.

RECURSION

The ability to make a sentence or linguistic structure indefinitely longer by adding additional clauses or modifiers.

DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR

A model that explains how speakers actually use their language without making value judgments about whether those forms are "correct" or "incorrect."

PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR

A set of rules that attempts to dictate how speakers "should" use language, often based on prestige or socially preferred forms.

LINGUISTIC DETERMINISM

The strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which claims that language determines how we perceive and think about the world.

LINGUISTIC RELATIVISM

The claim that differences between languages influence how speakers categorize, perceive, remember, or think about the world.

SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS

The general theory that the structure of a language influences its speakers' thoughts, perceptions, and understanding of the world.

SEMIOTICS

The study of signs, symbols, and their interpretation.

LEXICON

The mental dictionary containing the words a speaker knows in their language.

CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS

The hypothesis that children must be exposed to language within a specific developmental window to reach full native-like linguistic competence.

ONOMATOPOEIA

Words whose pronunciations imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.

TEACHING GRAMMAR

A grammar used to learn a foreign language or a different dialect by comparing it to one's native language.

GLOSS

A parallel word or explanation in a student's native language used to provide the meaning of a word in the language being learned.

PHONOLOGY

The component of grammar that contains the rules for combining sounds into words.

SAUSSURE'S SIGN

A sign consists of two components: signifier + signified.

SIGNIFIER VS. SIGNIFIED

The signifier is the physical form of a sign (such as the sound or written word), while the signified is the abstract concept or meaning associated with that form.

ARBITRARY AND CONVENTIONAL

The relationship between a signifier and signified is generally arbitrary because there is no natural connection between them, and conventional because speakers of a language collectively agree on the meanings of linguistic forms.