English language and linguistics (terminology)

English Language and Linguistics (5 ETCS) at Turku university

Medium

physical form of a message (e.g. written and spoken)

Channel

phsycial means by message is transmitted (e.g. radio, phone, printed book, computer screen, …)

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish meaning. These differ from language to language.

(e.g., swapping /p/ for /b/ turns pat into bat)

Allophone

A variant pronounciation (for example, that changes in context)

e.g. the voiceless plosive /t/ and the aspirated form /θ/

Grapheme

A grapheme is a letter, or group of letters, that acts as the smallest unit in a written language. It’s a symbole to used to represent a phoneme.

Allograph

a variant of a grapheme (like the style, cursive, capital,…)

alphabet

Each symbol generally represents a single consonant or vowel sound (e.g., English, Greek, Cyrillic). Mixing these small sounds together creates words

syllabary

Each symbol represents a complete sound unit (syllable) like "ka", "mi", or "no" (e.g., Japanese Hiragana/Katakana or Cherokee).

logographic

a script where each written character or symbol represents a complete word or a meaningful unit of language (morpheme) rather than a specific speech sound

phonographic

a type of writing where symbols or characters represent the sounds of a spoken language rather than units of meaning

• Alphabets: Symbols represent individual consonants and vowels (e.g., the Latin alphabet, used for English, French, and Spanish).

• Syllabaries: Each symbol stands for an entire syllable (e.g., Japanese Kana).

pictogram

resembles what it means (looks like an apple if it means apple)

ideogram

picture for an abstract idea or concept

logogram

represents a word or morpheme in a language

orthography

the standardized system of conventions used to write a language

elicitation

Drawing conclusion based on informants’ intuition

phonetics

A science that studies the characteristics of human sound-making (especially those used in speech)

phonology

A branch of linguistics which studies the sound systems of languages

generative phonology

Emphasis on the phonological features or components of sounds

Phonotactics

the specific rules of a language that decide which sound combinations are allowed and where they can go in a word