PSY-0064: Intro to Linguistics Exam 1

Mutual Intelligibility

The ability for speakers to understand each other

Idiolect

Version of a language spoken by an individual

Dialect/Variety

A relatively uniform set of idiolects

Language

A collection of relatively similar varieties

Extinct language

No proficient native speakers

Dormant language

No proficient native speakers, but a cultural community exists that is associated with the language

Language endangerment

Language is no longer being taught to children; in danger of becoming dormant or extinct

Mentalist Approach

Linguistics studies the cognition of linguistic knowledge

Productivity

The ability of language users to produce and understand novel utterances

Mental grammar

Held by a speaker of a language; allows them to understand and produce well-formed utterances. Essentially, the rules

Competence

Knowledge of a language: lexicon of words, sounds, rules of words and sentences

Performance

What you must do to use the knowledge of a language: recognize and produce speech, retrieve words from long-term memory, putting words in right order

Descriptivism

Seeks to understand and describe language’s naturally occurring patterns, use, and structures

Prescriptivism/Normativism

Seeks to dictate the rules of how language should be used and structured; assigns value to linguistic patterns

Grammaticality

An utterance is grammatical if native speakers of the language regularly produce and understand it

Prestige variety

A variety held in high regard socially

Low prestige variety

A variety held in low social regard

Standard variety

A variety of a language that has been codified (written/transcribed) can be official or unofficial. Is almost always a prestige variety. Used in government, education, etc.

Vernacular variety

Spoken by a community; often not codified/written down/recorded; often low prestige

Semanticity

One of Hockett’s design features of a language. The property of a language that every utterance has a meaning

Arbitrariness

One of Hockett’s design features of a language. The property of a language that utterances are not inherently similar to the real world concept they are meant to represent

Discreteness

One of Hockett’s design features of a language. The property of a language that everything is distinct with clear divisions rather than continuous.

Productivity

One of Hockett’s design features of a language. The property of a language that language users can produce and understand novel utterances

Words

Entities that function on their own in a sentence

Morphemes

The smallest meaningful unit of language

Monomorphemic

Words with only one morpheme

Multimorphemic

Words with multiple morphemes

Free morphemes

Can be used on their own

Bound morphemes

Must be used in combination with another morpheme

Affixation

The addition of a prefix, suffix, infix, or circumfix

Reduplication

All or part of a root is copied

Conversion/Zero Derivation

a word changing part of speech without changing structurally

Inflectional morphology

Expresses required morphosyntactic features of a language, such as plurality, tense, nominal/accusative case, person (1st/2nd/3rd), gender, perfect/imperfect, familiarity, etc

Derivational Morphology

Changes meaning; not obligatory, can change part of speech or meaning of word

Consonant

made with relatively constricted vocal tract

Vowel

made with relatively open vocal tract

Active articulator

Part that moves to produce sound: lips, tongue

Passive articulator

Part that makes sound but are fixed in place: teeth, alveolar ridge, etc

Dipthong

vowel produced by moving articulators to 2 positions

Syllable

groups of sounds organized around vowels

Nucleus

vowel at the center of a syllable

onset

any consonants in a syllable that come before a vowel

coda

any consonants in a syllable that come after a vowel

rhyme

the nucleus and coda of a syllable

stress

linguistic prominence given to a syllable

phonemes

sounds of a language that native speakers consider distinct

allomorphs/allophone

different sounds considered the same phoneme; used in different environments

contrast

the ability of sounds to distinguish one word from another in a language