chap 1 what is L Flashcards
(35 cards)
American Sign Language (ASL)
The sign language used by the deaf community in the United States.
arbitrary
Describes the property of language, including sign language, whereby there is no natural or intrinsic relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning.
bird song
A complex pattern of notes used to mark territory and to attract mates.
birdcall
One or more short notes that convey messages associated with the immediate environment, such as danger, feeding, nesting, and flocking.
conventional
The agreed-on, although generally arbitrary, relationship between the form and meaning of words.
creativity
Speakers’ ability to combine the finite number of linguistic units of their language to produce and understand an infinite range of novel sentences.
critical period
The time between early childhood and puberty during which a child can acquire a native language easily, swiftly, and without external intervention. After this period, the acquisition of the grammar is difficult and, for some individuals, never fully achieved.
descriptive grammar
A linguist’s description or model of the mental grammar, including the units, structures, and rules. An explicit statement of what speakers know about their language.
discreteness
A fundamental property of human language in which larger linguistic units are perceived to be composed of smaller linguistic units: e.g., cat is perceived as the phonemes /k/, /æ/, /t/; the cat is perceived as the and cat.
form
The phonological or gestural representation of a morpheme or word
gloss
A word in one language given to express the meaning of a word in another language: e.g., ‘house’ is the English gloss for the French word maison.
grammar
The mental representation of a speaker’s linguistic competence; what a speaker knows about a language, including its phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and lexicon. A linguistic description of a speaker’s mental grammar.
grammatical
Describes a well-formed sequence of words, one conforming to rules of syntax.
lexicon
The component of the grammar containing speakers’ knowledge about morphemes and words; a speaker’s mental dictionary.
linguistic competence
The knowledge of a language represented by the mental grammar that accounts for speakers’ linguistic ability and creativity. For the most part, linguistic competence is unconscious knowledge.
linguistic determinism
The strongest form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that the language we speak establishes how we perceive and think about the world.
linguistic performance
The use of linguistic competence in the production and comprehension of language; behavior as distinguished from linguistic knowledge: e.g., linguistic competence permits one-million-word sentences, but linguistic performance prevents this from happening.
linguistic relativism
A weaker form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that different languages encode different categories, and that speakers of different languages therefore think about the world in different ways. For example, speakers of languages that have fewer color words will be less sensitive to gradations of color.
linguistic theory
A theory of the principles that characterize all human languages
meaning
The conceptual or semantic aspect of a sign or utterance that permits us to comprehend the message being conveyed. Expressions in language generally have both form—pronunciation or gesture—and meaning.
mental grammar
The internalized grammar that a descriptive grammar attempts to model.
morphology
The study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation.
onomatopoeic
Words whose pronunciations suggest their meanings: e.g., meow, buzz.
phonology
The sound system of a language; the component of a grammar that includes the inventory of sounds (phonetic and phonemic units) and rules for their combination and pronunciation; the study of the sound systems of all languages.
