LINGUISTICS: ILTS World Languages Spanish (260)

Phonology

The study of the sound patterns of a language

Phonemes

________ are meaning-distinguishing sounds in a language.

Allophones

___________ are the physical sounds used to produce speech. One phoneme may have several allophones.

For example, in Spanish the phoneme /v/ may be pronounced /v/ or /b/.

Segmentals

__________ are the phonemes used to create utterances in a language.

Suprasegmentals

________________ are the non-phonemic factors used in speaking a language.

Examples: stress, intonation, and word juncture are examples of Suprasegmentals. They can be functional (create different meaning) or non-functional.

Minimal pairs and sets

_______ _____ and ____ are pairs or groups of words that vary only by one phoneme.

English MP: Bat & Rat

English MS: Bat, Cat, Hat, Mat, Gnat, Pat, Rat, Sat, Tat, Vat.

Spanish MP: Caro & Carro

Syllables and Clusters

________ must contain a vowel or a vowel like sound. They may have a consonant or a consonant cluster before and/or after the vowel.

Syllable: At = VC

Bat = CVC

BRAT = CCVC

Bank = CVCC

Coarticulation

When one sound is made at almost the same time as a second sound because of our speed of speech.

Assimilation

for example: say I CAN GO quickly. The /n/ at the end of can and the /g/ at the beginning of go are pronounced almost together as the sound /ng/

Elision

when one sound is just left out (for example: say SHE OPENED THE DOOR quickly. The /d/ at the end of opened is not heard.

Morphology

The study of the basic meaning-carrying forms of language, or what words and other meaningful chunks of language are and how they are formed.

Morpheme

a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.

Affix

a chunk or a bound morpheme that is attached to a free morpheme in order to produce a new word.

They can be prefixes (attached to the beginning of a word: disobey/desobedecer), suffixes (attached to the end of the word

Derivational Morphology

the process by which a new word is created or a word is changed to be another part of speech by adding bound morphemes.

In Spanish -dor is a similar Derivational suffix, changing the verb jugar into a noun meaning a person who plays: jugador.

Inflectional morphology

the process by which a word is modified to indicate grammatical function such as singular or plural, present tense or past tense.

Spanish has a much wider variety of inflectional morphemes (-o, -as, -a, -amos, -áis, -an) are all employedSpanish has a much wider variety of inflectional morphemes (-o, -as, -a, -amos, -áis, -an) are all employed

Roots

a morpheme without any affixes, either Derivational or inflectional. You may have heard it called a base word.

Stem

any word that has been inflected, minus the inflection. A stem may contain many Derivational morphemes

Allomorphs

a set of morphs that communicate the same inflectional information

 -o (hablar -> hablo), -oy (estar -> estoy), and -go (tener -> tengo) all communicate the inflectional information that the first person (I/yo) is completing the action in the present tense.

Syntax

The study of the structure and order of components within phrases and sentences.

Generative Grammar

The set of rules for a given language from which all well-formed sentences can be generated. A

Only well-formed sentences will be generated if these rules are applies. This set of rules is finite, but can result in an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences.

Deep and Surface Structure

It is possible for two sentences to look different but still contain the same basic syntactic structure.

Yo escribí el libro and El libro fue escrito por mi have different surface structure

However, on an underlying level (deep structure) they are both formed with the same syntactic components . A first person pronoun, a verb, and the noun phrase el libro.

Semantics

The study of the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences.

This is considered distinct from syntax because an utterance can be syntactically correct but ____________ odd, example: The cake ate the children.

Lexical Relations

Words and phrases can be thought of in relationship to each other. Words can be synonyms (start/begin, empezar/comenzar), antonyms (tall/short, alto/bajo), and hyponyms (perro/animal)

Semantic Roles

Words and phrases can be thought of and classified in terms of the role they play in a sentence. Verbs typically play the role of action, Nouns and noun phrases can be the agent (doing the action), the theme (affected by the action), and when used with prepositions, the instrument (the means of doing the action) the location, the source, or the destination.

Homophones

Words with different written forms and two different meaning but the same pronunciation.

English: (two, to, too) (bare, bear)

Spanish: (ola, hola)

Homonyms

Words with the same written form and same pronunciation but two or more unrelated meanings.

English: bat (sports equipment, flying mammal), bank (financial institution, side of a river

Spanish: calle (street, subjunctive of verb callar)

Polysemy

When two or more words have the same form and different but related meanings

English: bright (more than sufficient amount of light, more than sufficient amount of intelligence)

Spanish: cuello (neck of an individual, collar of a shirt)