General Linguistics - Unit 1 Vocabulary Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards generated from lecture materials covering core concepts in general linguistics, including language properties, language origins, Saussurean structuralism, Chomskyan Transformational Generative Grammar, and subdisciplines.

Langue

Ferdinand De Saussure's term for the abstract system of signs shared by a linguistic community, which is social and possesses no single individual owner.

Parole

Ferdinand De Saussure's term for the individual act of performing speech or utterances.

Signifier

The acoustic image or phonological pole of De Saussure's linguistic sign.

Signified

The concept or semantic pole of De Saussure's linguistic sign.

Arbitrariness of the Sign

The principle formulated by Saussure stating that there is no natural relationship between a word (signifier) and its concept (signified).

Linearity of the Sign

The temporal property of auditory signs wherein elements in an utterance occupy a sequential temporal chain one after another.

Syntagmatic Relations

Linguistic relationships concerning the sequence, order, and linear arrangement of different parts within phrases, clauses, or sentences.

Paradigmatic Relations

Linguistic relationships concerning the choice of possible member elements that can substitute for one another in a given structural position.

Language (Uncountable)

A system of arbitrary symbols used to convey messages, comprising subsystems such as phonological, syntactical, and semantic components.

A Language (Countable)

A specific individual instance of a language system, such as Spanish, English, Mapudungun, or Korean.

Reflexivity

The property of human language that allows it to be used to reflect on and discuss language itself.

Displacement

The property of human language that allows speakers to refer to entities and situations beyond the immediate reality (beyond here and now), including fictional concepts.

Productivity

Also known as creativity or open-endedness, the property that allows humans to manipulate linguistic expressions to convey new ideas.

Cultural Transmission

The process whereby language is acquired through interaction with a speaker's cultural background rather than inherited as a physical trait.

Duality

Also called double articulation, the property where linguistic symbols operate at two distinct levels: physical (sounds or written symbols) and conceptual (meaning).

The Divine Source

The hypothesis that human language is God-given, tested historically through child isolation experiments by figures like Psammethicus and James IV of Scotland.

The Natural Sound Source

The hypothesis proposing that primitive words originated from natural sounds and auditory connections, represented by the bow-wow and pooh-pooh theories.

The Musical Source

The hypothesis claiming that human infants and early humans produced general intonation patterns before developing speech sounds.

The Social Interaction Source

The hypothesis proposing that language developed from the communal physical grunts and sounds made by humans during shared physical efforts.

The Physical Adaptation Source

The hypothesis grounding language development in physical changes such as an upright posture, an L-shaped vocal tract, and specialized oral musculature.

The Tool-Making Source

The hypothesis suggesting that manual gestures and hand motor skills preceded speech, leading to lateralisation and further brain development.

The Genetic Source

The hypothesis (including the innateness hypothesis) stating that human language capacity is genetically hard-wired and pre-programmed in the brain.

Transformational Generative Grammar

An explicit model of language introduced by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as a reaction to American Structuralism, designed to generate all acceptable sentences of a language.

Linguistic Competence

In Transformational Generative Grammar, the ideal speaker-hearer's perfect, internalized knowledge of their language.

Linguistic Performance

In Transformational Generative Grammar, the actual execution and use of language in concrete situations, which may contain hesitations, errors, and slips of the tongue.

Base Component

The subcomponent of the syntactical module in Transformational Generative Grammar that generates structural patterns for tree-diagram representations.

Transformational Component

The subcomponent of the syntactical module in Transformational Generative Grammar that applies transformation rules to base structures to generate surface structures.

Surface Structure

The outer level of structural organization in Chomsky's syntactical component that corresponds to the actual spoken or written form of a sentence.

Deep Structure

The underlying level of structural organization in Chomsky's syntactical component that represents core semantic and structural relationships.

Linguistics

The scientific study of language and its associated processes, such as acquisition, learning, loss, variation, and historical development.

Phonetics

According to the course notes, the study of sound patterns of a particular language or dialect.

Phonology

According to the course notes, the study of the production, acoustics, and hearing of speech sounds.

Morphology

The subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the structure of words and word formation processes.

Syntax

The subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the principles and rules for sentence structuring and word order.

Semantics

The subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the study of the meaning of linguistic symbols.

Pragmatics

The subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the study of language meaning within specific context.

Sociolinguistics

An interdisciplinary field studying language in relation to social factors such as socioeconomic status, gender, occupation, age, bilingualism, and code switching.

Psycholinguistics

An interdisciplinary field studying language in relation to psychological mechanisms involved in language processing, acquisition, and loss.

Applied Linguistics

An interdisciplinary field applying linguistic theories to practical domains such as second language teaching, discourse analysis, evaluation, and speech therapy.

Forensic Linguistics

The application of linguistic expertise and techniques to legal matters, courtroom procedures, and criminal investigations.

Computational Linguistics

An interdisciplinary branch originating from AI research that deals with the computational modeling and processing of natural human language.