Linguistics Midterm

Language

Language

Conventional system of signs allowing the creative communication of meanings

Primary Purpose of Language

To allow people to communicate and express their ideas, thoughts, and feelings

Grammar

The rules that govern a language

What fundamentally separates one language from another?

Conventions or words and their assigned meanings, systems or rules/organization (such as grammar), and creative communication or abstract ideas represented in a new way by a speaker

Metathesis

When there is a reversal of sounds, such as aks and ask

Deletion

Omits sound from a word, such as family

Insertion

Adds sound to a word, such as athlete or alarm

Phonology

The study of sound

Phonetics

Description and classification of sounds

Phoneme

Smallest unit of sound

Alphabet

Visual representation (characters/symbols) of phonemes

Linguistics

The principled study of language as a system

Morphology

The study of how words form; How sounds come together to shape language

Syntax

The combination of words in order to convey meaning; How words come together to form phrases, clauses, and sentences

Semantics

The study of meaning in language and how meaning is created and understood

Assimilation

2 sounds become more alike, such as cupboard and spaceship

Dissimilation

2 sounds become less alike, such as chimney and diphthong

Morpheme

Smallest unit of language that has meaning

Free Morphemes

Carry meaning all by themselves; Cannot be broken down any further

Bound Morphemes

Have meaning, but not by themselves

Inflectional Affix

Change number, tense, or person; Always a suffix

Derivational Affix

Change meaning or part of speech

Subject

Main noun idea; Thing that does the action or idea or what someone is doing

Predicate

Built around main predicate verb

Ways speakers establish/comprehend meaning other than the simple lexical definition of a word

1. Referential Meaning: The object is what defines the meaning

2. Associative/Personal: Personal experience defines the concept or experience that is imagined

Hyponymy

Hierarchical relationships

Hypernym

General category such as dogs

Hyponyms

Specific; Words in the same lexical category such as German Shepard, Beagle, Golden Retriever

Meronym

Parts of a whole (whiskers, tail, and fur are parts of a cat)

Synonymic

Same/similarity (ex. Associate, companion, friend)

Antonymic

Oppositional meaning (ex. Darkness and lightness, good and bad)

Idiom described in terms of semantics

An exaggerated way of expressing an idea that is influenced by culture