Linguistics II Lecture Notes

Vocabulary flashcards from Linguistics II lecture notes.

Linguistics

The study of language,

classified as a science,

positioned between hard and soft sciences

in between social / behavioral sciences

Hard Science

Like physics: easurable, precise, predictive, quantitative

In Linguistics: acoustic phonetics.

Soft Science

Like literature: argumentative, interpretive, descriptive, qualitative

In Linguistics: discourse analysis.

Semantics

The study of meaning in language, focusing on how languages systematically structure meaning in words and sentences.

the Linguistis Sign

every word or linguistic item

• signifier

• signified

Meaning

complex and varies on the context

Signifier

The form of the word: the sound or the written letters

Signified

The meaning or concept behind the word, the idea or image

Referential Meaning

The expression refers to an actual person, object, notion in the world.

Constant Referent

same entity, only one

the moon, the sun, Pluto

Constant Referent

the moon, the sun, Pluto

Variable Referent

the entity can change

Variable Referent

my sister’s car, the president of the USA

Sense Meaning

Additional information/concepts about a word and how it relates to other words.

Meaning in the language system

linguistic signs and sense relations

Social Meaning

Relates to the social information conveyed through language, like the speaker’s identity or context.

Affective Meaning

Refers to the emotional impact or connotation of words and expressions.

Denotation

Core meaning of word/expression

= linguistic meaning

Connotation

secondary meaning, associated with a given concept

Social and affective meaning

Content Words

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs;

• lexical meaning

• concrete objects or abstract concepts

• express feeling.

Function Words

'if', 'the', 'and'

• meaning only if related to other words

Lexical Semantics

The study of how word meanings are organized and related.

Lexicon

The full set of words in a language.

Semantic Fields

A group of words that share related meanings or belong to the same conceptual category.

Less marked words

• easier to learn

• only one morpheme

• used more frequently

• broader in meaning

More marked words

• specific meaning

• learned later

• used less often

• derived from metaphor

less marked words

blue, red, yellow

more marked words

indigo, aquamarine

Hyponymy

The meaning of one word is included within the meaning of another more general word.

Hypernym

A more general category.

vehicle

Hyponym

A more specific word.

car, lorry, van

Meronymy

A relationship in which one word is a part of something that another word has.

Meronym

The part.

hand

Holonym

The whole.

finger

Metonymy

One characteristic item mentioned for the whole concept.

The Buckingham Palace = the royal fam

Metonymy

The Buckingham Palace = the royal family

Synonymy

Words that have the same or very similar meanings.

Antonymy

Words with opposite meaning.

Gradable Antonyms

Ordered on a scale, intermediate degrees are possible, can have comparative and superlative forms.

Gradable antonyms

hot / cold

Non-gradable antonyms

dead / alive

Non-gradable antonyms

Mutually exclusive pairs, something is either one or the other.

Conversness

A relationship from opposite perspectives, but reciprocal - one cannot exist without the other

Converseness

parent / child

teacher / pupil

buy / sell

Polysemy

A single word having multiple meanings, depending on context and other factors.

Homonymy

Words that share the same form (spelling or pronunciation) but have unrelated meanings.

Homophones

Sound the same.

Homographs

Spelled the same.

Metaphor

Figurative extensions of literal terms - one concept (target domain) expressed by means of another (source domain).

Tense

Expresses temporal location - past, present, future

Modality

Expression of likelihood of an event.

Epistemic modality

Certainty or belief, something is perceived as likely or not.

Deontic modality

Obligation, permission, or necessity, or suggestion.

Reference

Whether a word or phrase in a sentence refers to something real in the world.

Non-referencial

I’d like to find a shor biography of James Joyce.

Deixis

The use of words & expressions to point to a place, time or context.

Personal Deixis

Expressions used to refer to persons that put them in relation to one another.

Spatial Deixis

Expressions used to refer to places, spaces, any location, or physical relation of an entity to another.

Temporal Deixis

Expressions used to refer to time, when an event took or will take place.

Textual Deixis

Refers to other sentences, to parts of discourse or text, instead of to people, places, or times.

The speaker in Deixis is

the main point of reference

Semantic Roles

The role played by each noun phrase in relation to verbs.

Agent

The part of a phrase that carries out action.

Patient

Is affected by an action, or undergoes change in some way.

Experiencer

Does not directly undergo change, but feels something or has a sensation.

Instrument

Non-human intermediaries or tools used by the agent to perform an action.

Cause

The reason of an action, does not have an agent that voluntarily acts, usually a natural force.

Recipient

Entity which receives a physical object/item from somewhere/someone.

Benefactive

Benefits from or receives something as a result of an action (not necessarily a physical object).

Locative

Expresses the location of an action or state.

Temporal

Expresses the time at which an action or state occurs.

Corpus Linguistics

Large, structured collection of texts (written or spoken) stored digitally and used for linguistic research.

Monitor Corpus

A constantly updated collection of texts.

Finite Corpus

A fixed collection of texts, designed to represent language use at a specific point in time

Principles of Corpus

Balanced across genres, media, books

Principles of Corpus

include meta-information

meta-information

details about the source

speaker’s age, gender

type of text

Principles of Corpus

words are annotated or tagged with grammatical information

POS

Part of Speech

LIST

To find out how many attestations (occurrences) of a given token there are in the corpus.

CHART

See the frequency of a word sorted by genre.

COLLOCATES

Identify the most common words that appear near your search word, and how frequent.

COMPARE

Compare the results of two word searches side by side.

KWIC (Keyword In Context)

Shows you the word in its surrounding context, helps understand the word's meaning and usage in real sentences.

Information Structure

How speakers organize and express information in sentences based on context.

Information asymmetry

• Relational categories

• Non-relational categories

Given Information

Associative reference = some information can always count as known

New Information

• stressed

• indefinire NP

Topic

the thing being talked about, overall thing.

Comment

further information; what is being said about it;

• often corresponds to the new info.

Focus

The element that carries the most important information of the sentence

• what exactly is someone saying

Background

Information that was introduced before and therefore is only there to provide context and cohesion to a sentence.

Intonation

is a marker of information structure

Fronting

A NP is moved to the front.

• no pronoun

• no comas

Left Dislocation

A NP is moved to the front, leaving pronouns behind.

Cleft Structures

A simple sentence is split into main clause and relative clause.

Passives

Strategy for taking focus away from the agent.

Negative Politeness

Respect others privacy; giving people space—not intruding or making demands.

Positive Politeness

Show interest in the other person; compliment others; inquiring after one’s health / feelings.

Speech Events

Any situation where people communicate