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Linguistics Exam I
terms for linguistics exam I
83
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Undergraduate 1
09/29/2011

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Term
displacement
Definition
The ability to communicate about events at times and places other than those of their occurrence; enables a person to talk and think about things not directly in front of him or her.
Term
form to meaning
Definition
The forms of words to their meanings are, for the most part, arbitrary. Saussure's thory!!!!
Term
recursion
Definition
Linguist Noam Chomsky theorizes that unlimited extension of a language such as English is possible using the recursive device of embedding phrases within sentences. Recursion in linguistics enables 'discrete infinity' by embedding phrases within phrases of the same type in a hierarchical structure.
Term
creativity
Definition
Native speakers can understand and produce they have never heard or said before. They can construct an infinite number of sentences from a limited set of building blocks (words).
Term
openness
Definition
Readily admitting new words to a language.
Term
duality
Definition
Language is structurally organized on two abstract levels. At the first, higher level, language is analyzed in terms of combinations of meaningful units. At the lower level, it is seen as a sequence of segments that lack any meaning in themselves but which combine to form units of meaning.
Term
discreteness
Definition
a fundamental property of human language in which larger linguistic units are perceived to be composed of smaller linguistic units
Term
cultural transmission
Definition
Transmission from one generation to the next through membership of a society.
Term
innateness
Definition
Children are born with an innate capacity for learning human language. Humans are destined to speak.
Term
universal grammar
Definition
The innate principles and properties that pertain to the grammars of all human languages.
Term
universal grammar
Definition
The innate principles and properties that pertain to the grammars of all human languages.
Term
poverty of the stimulus
Definition
The incomplete, noisy, and unstructured utterances the children hear, including slips of the tongue, false starts, and ungrammatical and incomplete sentences, together with a lack of concrete evidence about abstract grammatical rules and structure.
Term
linguistic competence
Definition
The knowledge of a language represented by the mental grammar that accounts for speakers' linguistic ability and creativity.
Term
linguistic performance
Definition
The use of linguistic competence in the production and comprehension of language; behavior as distinguished from linguistic knowledge.
Term
lexicon
Definition
The component of the grammar containing speakers' knowledge about morphemes and words; a speaker's mental dictionary.
Term
mental grammar
Definition
The internalized grammar that a descriptive grammar attempts to model.
Term
prescriptive grammar
Definition
Rules of grammar brought about by grammatarians' attempts to legislate what speakers' grammatical rules should be, rather than what they are.
Term
descriptive grammar
Definition
A linguist's description or model of the mental grammar, including the units, structures, and rules. An explicit statement of what the speakers know about their language.
Term
characteristics of language
Definition
1. Arbitrariness of form to meaning 2. Displacement 3. Recursion 4. Creativity 5. Openness 6. Duality 7. Discreteness 8. Cultural transmission 9. Innateness
(Universal Grammar Poverty of the Stimulus)
Term
lexicon (what we know about words)
Definition
1. pronunciation 2. spelling (not universal) 3. definition (meaning) 4. usage 5. morphology 6. word class (syntactic behavior)
Term
adposition
Definition
preposition/postposition
Term
auxiliary
Definition
Helping verbs that co-occur with, and qualify, the main verb in a verb phrase with regard to such properties as tense (have, be, will)
Term
determiner
Definition
the, a, this, that, every, each, etc.
Term
open word classes
Definition
Category of words which constantly adds new words.
Term
closed word classes
Definition
A category that rarely has new words added to it. Ex: prepositions, conjunctions
Term
function words
Definition
Closed class.
Ex: prepositions, pronouns, etc.
Term
content words
Definition
Open class words.
Ex: nouns
Term
morphology
Definition
The study of the structure of words, includes the rules of word formation.
Term
morpheme
Definition
Smallest unit of linguistic meaning or function.
Ex: sheepdogs sheep+dog+s
Term
root
Definition
The morpheme that remains when all the affixes are stripped from a complex word.
Term
stem
Definition
The base to which an affix is attached to create a more complex form that may be another stem or a word.
Term
bound root
Definition
A morpheme that must be attached to other morphemes.
Ex: cran in cranberry
Term
free root
Definition
A single morpheme that constitutes a word.
Term
reduplication
Definition
A morphological process that repeats or copies all or part of a word to produce a new word.
Ex: wishy-washy, teensy-weensy
Term
inflectional morpheme
Definition
A bound grammatical morpheme that is affixed to a word according to rules of syntax. dog --> dogs
Term
derivational morpheme
Definition
A morpheme added to a stem or root to form a new stem or word, possibly but not necessarily resulting in a change in syntactic category. dark --> darken
Term
productive morphology
Definition
Refers to morphological rules that can be used freely and apply to all forms to create new words.
Term
analytic morphology
Definition
A language in which most words contain a single morpheme, and there is little if any word morphology.
Term
polysynthetic morphology
Definition
Languages with extraordinarily rich morphologies in which a single word may carry the semantic content of an entire sentence.
Term
synthetic morphology
Definition
Languages in which words often contain multiple morphemes.
Term
syntax
Definition
The rules of sentence formation.
Term
constituent
Definition
A syntactic unit in a phrase structure tree.
"The girl" is a noun phrase constituent in the sentence "The boy loves the girl."
Term
head of a phrase
Definition
The central word of a phrase whose lexical category defines the type of phrase.
Ex: [the man] who came to dinner
Term
constituency tests
Definition
a)Replacement test
b)Move as a unit test
c)Stand alone test
Term
subject
Definition
The grammatical relation of a noun phrase to a sentence when it appears immediately below that S in a phrase structure tree.
Term
recursive rule
Definition
A phrase structure rule that repeats its own category on its right side (ex: VP-->VP PP, hence permitting phrase structures of potentially unlimited length, corresponding to that aspect of speakers' linguistic competence.
Term
pro-form
Definition
A word that replaces another word or expression found elsewhere in discourse, or understood from the situational context. Pronouns are the best known pro-forms.
Term
complement
Definition
The constituent in a phrase other than the head that completes the meaning of the phrase and which is C-selected by the verb.
Ex: "puppy" is complement of word found in the VP "found a puppy"
Term
transitive verb
Definition
A verb that C-selects an obligatory noun-phrase complement.
Ex: "find"
Term
intransitive verb
Definition
A verb that must not have a direct object complement.
Ex: sleep, rise
Term
complementizer
Definition
A syntactic category, also functional category, of words, including "that", "if", "whether", that introduce an embedded sentence.
Term
complementizer phrase
Definition
Complementizer + sentence
Term
structural ambiguity
Definition
A sentence with multiple meanings.
Term
subcategorization/C-selection
Definition
The classifying of verbs and other lexical items in terms of the syntactic category of the complements that they accept.
Term
S-selection
Definition
The classifying of verbs and other lexical items in terms of the semantic category of the head and complements that they accept.
Ex: The verb "assissinate" S-selects for a human subject and a prestigious, human NP complement.
Term
semantics
Definition
The study of the linguistic meaning or morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences.
Term
lexical semantics
Definition
The subfield of semantics concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning relationships among words.
Term
compositional semantics
Definition
A theory of meaning that calculates the truth value or meaning of larger units by the application of semantic rules to the truth value or meaning of smaller units.
Term
pragmatics
Definition
The study of how context and situation affect meaning.
Term
reference
Definition
That part of meaning of a noun phrase that associates it with some entity. That part of the meaning of a declarative sentence that associates it with a truth value.
Term
referent
Definition
The entity designated by an expression.
Term
sense
Definition
The inherent part of an expression's meaning that, together with context, determines its referent. Also called intension.
Term
prototype
Definition
mental image
Term
hyponyms
Definition
Words whose meanings are specific instances of a more general word.
Ex: red, white, blue ---> color
Term
gradable antonyms
Definition
Two antonyms related in such a way that more of one is less of the other.
Ex: warm and cool
Term
complementary antonyms
Definition
Two antonyms related in such a way that the negation of one is the meaning of the other.
Ex: "alive" means "not dead"
Term
relational antonyms
Definition
A pair of antonyms in which one describes a relationship between two objects and the other describes the same relationship when the two objects are reversed.
Term
homonyms/homophones
Definition
Words pronounced, and possibly spelled, the same.
Ex: to, two, too
Term
metonyms
Definition
A word substituted for another word or expression with which it is closely associated.
Term
deictic expressions
Definition
1) pronomial
2) spatial
3) temporal
Term
truth conditions
Definition
The circumstances that must be known to determine whether a sentence is true, and therefore part of the meaning.
Term
truth-conditional semantics
Definition
A theory of meaning that takes the semantic knowledge of knowing when sentences are true and false as basic.
Term
truth value
Definition
TRUE or FALSE; used to describe the truth of declarative sentences in context; the reference of a declarative sentence in truth-conditional semantics.
Term
tautology
Definition
A sentence that is true in all situations; a sentence true from the meaning of its words alone.
Term
paradox
Definition
A sentence to which it is impossible to ascribe a truth value.
Ex: This sentence is false.
Term
contradiction
Definition
Describes a sentence that is false by virtue of its meaning alone, irrespective of its context.
Term
entailment
Definition
The relationship between two sentences, where the truth of one necessitates the truth of the other.
Ex: Corday assassinated Marat. Marat is dead.
Term
implicature
Definition
An inference based not only on an utterance, but also on assumptions about what the speaker is trying to achieve. "Are you using the ketchup?" to mean "Please pass the ketchup."
Term
presupposition
Definition
Implicit assumptions about the world required to make an utterance meaningful or relevant.
Ex: :sme tea has already been taken" is a presupposition of "Take more tea!"
Term
Grice's maxims
Definition
maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relevance, maxim of manner
Term
compositional semantics
Definition
A theory of meaning that calculates the truth value or meaning of larger units by the application of semantic rules to the truth value or meaning of smaller units.
Term
clitics
Definition
Like affixes, but their placement is dependent on syntactic structure, but not word structure.
Term
hypernym
Definition
Major category of hyponyms. Tree is a hypernym for oak.
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