Linguistics Midterm

Generality

All languages have grammar

Parity

All grammars are equal

Mutability

Grammar changes over time

Prescriptive Rules of Grammar

Don’t end a sentence with preposition

Don’t split infinitives

Descriptive Grammar

Describes language behaviors (what people do say)

Free Morpheme

Un-happy (happy is free)

Bound morpheme

Un-happy (un is bound)

Stem

The main word

Reduplication

Replication of sound

Derivational Morphology

Creating new words by changing the meaning or category of existing words

Inflectional Morphology

Don’t change the basic category or meaning of the element they combine with

Analytic Typology

Most words are simple; each grammatical element is shown as a distinct word (Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.)

Synthetic Typology

Allow complex word forms (3 types: Agglutinative, Fusional, Polysynthetic)

Grammatical categories

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions

Functional categories 

Tense, person, number, case, aspect, voice

Active articulators

Do all or most of the moving during a speech gesture; usually the lower lip or tongue

Passive components

Makes little or no movement; connected to the skull

Consonants

Produced with some restriction or closure in the vocal tract that impedes the flow of air from the lung

Vowels

Are produced without such restriction

Bilabials

Bring both lips together

Labiodentals

Touch bottom lip to the upper teeth

Interdentals

Insert tip of tongue between upper and lower teeth

Alveolars

Raise tongue to the alveolar ridge 

Palatals

Raise the front part of the tongue to the palate (Y sound) (mission, measure, cheap, judge, yoyo)

Velars

Raise the back of the tongue to the soft palate (velum) (back, bag, bang)

Glottals

Let the air flow through the open glottis and past the tongue and lips (Ha)

Stop/Plosive: P, B, M, T, D, N, K, G, N

• The airstream is completely blocked in the oral cavity for a short period

• They are difficult to pronounce without a vowel

Fricative: F, V, S, Z, Sh, 

• The airflow is so obstructed it causes friction

• Easily pronounced without vowel

Affricates: CHa, Ja

These sounds are produced by a total closure followed immediately by a gradual release of the closure that produces an effect characteristic of a fricative

Sonorants: L, R, J, W

There is some obstruction in the airstream, not enough to cause real friction

Voicing

When throat vibrates

Nasality

If plug nose, you can’t pronounce

Rime/Rhyme

Combination of nucleus and coda

Onset

Before nucleus

Coda

After nucleus

Minimal Pairs

Two different words that differ in one sound in the same position

Merger

Start pronouncing vowels the same “a” and “o” in caught and cot

Allophones

Different realizations of a phoneme (tick, stick)

• Not contrastive, do NOT change word meanings

• Do NOT form minimal pairs 

Free Variation

Allophones occur (mock, mop) (fourth floor - higher class, foeth floor - lower class)

Lexically Significant Pitch

Distinguishes the meaning of utterances

Syllable Pitch

Each syllable carries in its nucleus at least one significant pitch unit

Register Tones

Have level, state pitches (low tone, mid tone, high tone)

Contour Tones

Involve pitch shifts (falling tone, rising tone, falling rising, rising falling)

Agglutinative Languages

A word consists of fully segmentable morphemes

Fusional Languages

Many grammatical elements are not clearly segmentable; grammatical affixes have multiple grammatical features

Polysynthetic Languages

A word is composed of many bound morphemes; a whole sentence can be expressed by a word (Mohawk, Chukchi, Ainu, etc.)