How English Works- Exam 1 Prep

English linguistics

Phonology

Phonology

The study of how sounds are organized within a given language.

Phoneme

What natives speakers hear as a distinctive sound within the language. (The smallest unit of sound)

Allophone

Different variations of phonemes. Ex: P in pop and P in spit are different.

3 ways of thinking about phonetics

1. Acoustics

2. Auditory

3. Articulatory.

What are the 3 characteristics of consonants?

1. Voicing

2. Place of Articulation

3. Manner of articulation.

What are the 3 characteristics of Vowels

1. Tongue height

2. Tongue advancement

3. Tense or lax gestures

Natural class

A set of sound that share feature in such a way as to include all sounds in the set and to exclude all others.

Phonological rules

Express the ways in which sound changes predicably change in certain environments and describes patterns or types of sound changes.

Assimilation

A sound becomes more like the sounds around it.

Forward assimilation: A sound becomes more like the sound before it.

Backwards assimilation: a sound becomes more like the sound after it.

Deletion

Sounds are omitted from words

Metathesis

Sounds switch their order

Ex: brid/bird

Morpheme

The smallest unit of language that carries meaning

Agglutinative language

A language in which a words are formed from strings of relatively stable parts

Synthetic Language

A language that uses morphemes to indicate grammatical function.

A language that expresses meaning by word order.

Open vs Closed morphemes

Open classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, derivational affixes

Closed classes: conjunctions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, determiners, prepositions, inflectional affixes.

Free vs Bound morphemes

Free morphemes: can function as words by themselves

Bound morphemes: cannot function as words by themselves. Ex: -s, un, -ed. Bound morphemes can be further divided into 2 categories inflectional and derivational.

Inflectional morphemes

(Provide the nouns, verbs, adjectives/adverbs that fit in this category.

Gives grammatical information: number, tense, ect. There are 8 in english.

Nouns: plural -s, possessive -’s

Verbs: 3rd person sing present tense -s, progressive -ing, past tense -ed, past participle -en.

Adjectives/adverbs: comparative -er, superlative -est.

Derivational morphemes

Changes the meaning and/or the word class of the word they attach to.

Ex: writer + er → writer (changing a verb to a noun)

child + ish → childish (changing a noun to an adjective

Allomorphs

Variations of a morpheme

What are the 4 ways to make new words in English

1. Combining

2. Shortening

3. Blending

4. Shifting

About Combining

Compounding: a combo of free morphemes

Prefixing: attaching a bound morpheme to the beginning of word

Suffixing: attaching a bound morpheme to the ending of a word.

Shortening

Alphabetism/initialism: ROTC, DH

Acronym: FUPO, AIDS, LOL

Clipping: blog, zine, ship

Backformation: beggar → beg, burglar → burgle

Blending

A word blending the sounds and combining the meaning of two others.

Ex: motel, smog, brunch

Shifting

Functional shift: moving a word from one lexical category to another, applying the new category’s inflectional morphemes to the word.

Ex: email, impact, friend (noun → verb)

Email, emails → emailed, emailing,

Lexical semantics

How words means

Compositional semantics

How words and word order work together to make meaning

Limits of Reference

1. The role of cognition: how we categorize

2. The role of linguistic context (ex: my husband Harold was late vs Harold was my late husband)

3. The role of physical and cultural context

Lexical fields

Help us think about words as they relate to each other.

Words can be in more than one lexical field

Hyponymy

The semantic relationship between a more specific word and a broader term.

Hyponym: a word whose meaning is included in the meaning of another word or the subtype of a more general class.
Hypernym: is the supertype or umbrella/blanket term.

Ex: Hypernym = flower, hyponym = lily or rose

Meronymy

describes the part-whole relationship between words

Ex: Ship: sail, keel, rudder, deck, ect

Antonymy

Types of antonyms

Nongradable (complementary) absolutes at opposite conceptual poles. Ex: alive and dead

Gradable: values at 2 ends of a spectrum. Ex: Wet and Dry. (there is range between the two like damp, moist, ect)

Converses: Word A and word B refer to a single relationship from opposite perspectives. Ex: lend vs borrow & parent vs child.

Homonyms

Words with different meanings that share a word form

Ex: bank- land on the side of a river VS bank- a place to keep your money

Homophones

Sound the same. Ex: blue vs blew

Homographs

Share the same spelling but have different meanings. Ex: bass vs bass.

What is language?

Human language is a conventional system of signs that allows for the creative communication of meaning.