Final Exam: Vocabulary

Question 1

accidental gap

Answer 1

phonological or morphological form that constitutes possible bub non-occurring lexical items; word that follows a language’s morphological rules but is not an actual word

Question 2

acronym

Answer 2

word composed of the initials of several words and pronounced as such (ex. “PET scan” from Positron-Emission-Tomography scan)

Question 3

affricate

Answer 3

a sound produced by a stop closure followed immediately by a slow release characteristic of a fricative; phonetically a sequence of stop + fricative like the “ch” in “chip” [tʃ]

Question 4

allophone

Answer 4

a predictable phonetic realization of a phoneme (ex. p and p^h)

Question 5

alveolar ridge

Answer 5

the part of the hard palate directly behind the upper front teeth

Question 6

antonyms

Answer 6

words that are opposite with respect to one of their semantic properties (definitions); ex: tall/short are both alike in that they describe height, but opposite in regard to the extent of the height

Question 7

aphasia

Answer 7

language loss or disorder following brain damage (ex: Broca’s aphasia as a result of damage to Broca’s area of the brain)

Question 8

assimilation

Answer 8

a phonological process that changes feature values of segments to make them more similar (ex: a vowel becomes nasalized when followed by a nasal consonant); also called feature-spreading

Question 9

babbling

Answer 9

speech sounds produced in the first few months after birth that gradually come to include only sounds that occur in the language of the household; deaf children do this with hand gestures

Question 10

back-formation

Answer 10

creation of a new word by removing an affix from an old word (ex: donate from donation); or by removing what is mistakenly considered an affix (ex: edit from editor)

Question 11

bilabial

Answer 11

a sound articulated by bringing both lips together

Question 12

blend

Answer 12

a word composed of the parts of more than one word (ex: smog from smoke + fog)

Question 13

Broca’s area

Answer 13

a front part of the left hemisphere of the brain, damage to which causes agrammatism or Broca’s aphasia; also called Broca’s region

Question 14

case endings

Answer 14

suffixes on the noun based on its grammatical function, such as ‘s of the English genitive case indicating possession (ex: Robert’s dog)

Question 15

circumfix

Answer 15

a bound morpheme, parts of which occur in a word both before and after the root (ex: in German, g—-t in geliebt, “loved,” from the root lieb)

Question 16

cocktail party effect

Answer 16

an informal term that describes the ability to filter out background noise and focus on a particular sound source or on a particular person’s speech

Question 17

codeswitching

Answer 17

the movement back and forth between two languages or dialects within the same sentence or discourse

Question 18

coinage

Answer 18

the construction and/or invention of new words that then become part of the lexicon (ex: podcast)

Question 19

complement

Answer 19

the constituent(s) in a phrase other than the head that complete(s) the meaning of the phrase and which is C-selected by the verb.
In the verb phrase "found a puppy", the noun phrase "a puppy" is a complement of the verb "found"

Question 20

complementary distribution

Answer 20

the situation in which phones never occur in the same phonetic environment (ex: p and p^h in English); allophones are in complementary distribution

Question 21

concordance

Answer 21

an alphabetical index of the words in a text that gives the frequency of each word, its location in the text, and its surrounding context

Question 22

consonant

Answer 22

a speech sound produced with some constriction of the air stream

Question 23

constituent

Answer 23

a syntactic unit in a phrase structure tree (ex: “the girl” is a noun phrase constituent in the sentence “the boy loves the girl”)

Question 24

continuant

Answer 24

a speech sound in which the air stream flows continually through the mouth; all speech sounds except stops and affricates

Question 25

cortex

Answer 25

the approximately ten billion neurons that form the outside surface of the brain; also referred to as gray matter

Question 26

count nouns

Answer 26

nouns that can be enumerated (ex: one potato, two potatoes)

Question 27

creole

Answer 27

a language that begins as a pidgin and eventually becomes the native language of a speech community

Question 28

cuneiform

Answer 28

a form of writing in which the characters are produced using a edge-shaped stylus, and most notably utilized by ancient civilizations of the Middle East such as the Sumerians

Question 29

deictic/deixis

Answer 29

refers to words or expressions whose reference relies on context and the orientation of the speaker in space and time

Question 30

determiner (Det)

Answer 30

the syntactic category, also functional category, of words and expressions which when combined with a noun form a noun phrase; includes the articles "the" and "a", demonstratives such as "this" and "that"; quantifiers such as "each" and "every", etc.

Question 31

dissimilation

Answer 31

phonological rules that change feature values of segments to make them less similar; ex: a fricative dissimilation rule: /θ/ is pronounced [t] following another fricative; in English dialects with this rule, sixth is pronounced [sikst]

Question 32

entailment

Answer 32

the relationship between two sentences, where the truth of one necessitates the truth of the other

Question 33

epenthesis

Answer 33

the insertion of one or more phones in a word (ex: the insertion of /ə/ in /tʃɪldrɛn/ to make it /tʃɪlədrɛn/)

Question 34

eponym

Answer 34

a word taken from a proper name, such as Hertz for "unit of frequency"

Question 35

etymology

Answer 35

the history of words; the study of the history of words

Question 36

fricative

Answer 36

a consonant sound produced with so narrow a constriction in the vocal tract as to create sound through friction (ex: /s/, /f/)

Question 37

function word

Answer 37

a word that does not always have a clear lexical meaning but has a grammatical function; function of words include conjunctions, preposition, articles, auxiliaries, complementizers, and pronouns

Question 38

garden path sentences

Answer 38

sentences that appear at first blush to be ungrammatical, but with further syntactic processing turn out to be grammatical (ex: The horse raced past the barn fell.)

Question 39

glide

Answer 39

a speech sound produced with little or no obstruction of the air stream that is always preceded or followed by a vowel

Question 40

Grimm's Law

Answer 40

the description of a phonological change in the sound system of an early ancestor of the Germanic languages formulated by Jakob Grimm

Question 41

hierarchical structure

Answer 41

the groupings and subgroupings of the parts of a sentence into syntactic categories (ex: [the/bird//sang]; the groupings and subgroupings of morphemes in a word (ex: [un//lock/able] vs. [un/lock//able]; hierarchical structure is generally depicted in a tree diagram

Question 42

hypercorrection

Answer 42

deviations from the "norm" thought by speakers to be "more correct" such as saying "between he and she" instead of "between him and her"

Question 43

ideogram, ideograph

Answer 43

a character of a word-writing system, often highly stylized, that represents a concept, or the pronunciation of the word representing that concept; pictograms that represent ideas and are not as direct/literal

Question 44

implicature

Answer 44

an inference based not only on an utterance, but also on assumptions about what the speaker is trying to achieve (ex: "Are you using the ketchup?" to mean "Please pass the ketchup.")

Question 45

impoverished data

Answer 45

refers to theincomplete, noisy, and unstructured utterances that children hear, including slips of the tongue, false starts, and ungrammatical/incomplete sentences, together with a lack of concrete evidence about abstract grammatical rules and structure

Question 46

infix

Answer 46

a bound morpheme that is inserted into the middle of another morpheme; do not exist in English except in profane words (ex: "unbelievable" to "un-f*cking-believable")

Question 47

intransitive verb

Answer 47

a verb that must not have a direct object complement (ex: sleep, rise)

Question 48

jargon

Answer 48

special words peculiar to the members of a profession or group (ex: "glottis" for phoneticians); also the nonsense words sometimes used by Wernicke's aphasia

Question 49

late closure principle

Answer 49

a psycholinguistic principle of language comprehension that states: attach incoming material to the phrase that was most recently processed (ex: "he said that he slept yesterday" associates "yesterday" with "he slept" rather than "he said")

Question 50

lateralization, lateralized

Answer 50

terms used to refer to cognitive functions localized to one or the other hemisphere of the brain

Question 51

lexicon

Answer 51

the component of the grammar containing speakers' knowledge about morphemes and words; a speaker's mental dictionary

Question 52

lingua franca

Answer 52

a language common to speakers of diverse languages that can be used for communication and commerce (ex: English is the lingua franca of international airline pilots)

Question 53

liquids

Answer 53

a class of consonants including /l/ and /r/ and their variants that share vowel-like acoustic properties and may function as syllabic nuclei

Question 54

manner of articulation

Answer 54

the way the air stream is obstructed as it travels through the vocal tract; stop, nasal, affricate, and fricative are some manners of articulation

Question 55

metathesis

Answer 55

the phonological process that reorders segments, often by transposing two sequential sounds (ex: the pronunciation of "ask" in some dialects as "aks")

Question 56

morphology

Answer 56

the study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation

Question 57

narrowing

Answer 57

a semantic change in which the meaning of a word changes in time to become less encompassing (ex: "deer" once meant "animal")

Question 58

node

Answer 58

a labeled branch point in a phase structure tree; part of the graphical depiction of a transition network represented as a circle, pairs of which are connected by arcs

Question 59

Optimality Theory

Answer 59

the hypothesis that a universal set of ranked phonological constraints exists, where the higher the constraint is ranked, the more influence it exerts on the language (ex: in English, one constraint--Obstruent sequences may not differ with respect to their voice feature at the end of a word.)

Question 60

overgeneralization

Answer 60

children's treatment of irregular verbs and nouns as if they were regular (ex: bringed, goed, foots, mouses for brought, went, feet, mice); this shoes that the child has acquired the regular rules but has not yet learned that there are exceptions

Question 61

paradox

Answer 61

a sentence to which it is impossible to ascribe a truth value (ex: "This sentence is false.")

Question 62

parse

Answer 62

the act of determining the grammaticality of sequences of words according to rules of syntax, and assigning a linguistic structure to the grammatical ones

Question 63

petroglyph

Answer 63

a drawing on a rock made by prehistoric people

Question 64

phonotactics/phonotactic constraints

Answer 64

rules stating permissible strings of phonemes; ex: within a syllable in English, a word-initial nasal consonant may be followed only by a vowel

Question 65

pidgin

Answer 65

a simple but rule-governed language developed for communication among speakers of mutually unintelligible languages, often based on one of those languages (called the lexifier language)

Question 66

Pinyin

Answer 66

an alphabetic writing system for Mandarin Chinese using a Western-style alphabet to represent individual sounds

Question 67

place of articulation

Answer 67

the part of the vocal tract at which constriction occurs during the production of consonants

Question 68

prosodic feature

Answer 68

the duration (length), pitch, or loudness of speech sounds

Question 69

rebus principle

Answer 69

in writing, the use of a pictogram for its phonetic value (ex: using a picture of a bee to represent the verb "be" or the sound [b])

Question 70

recursive rule

Answer 70

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

Question 71

reflexive pronoun

Answer 71

a pronoun ending with -self that generally requires a noun-phrase antecedent within the same S (ex: myself, herself, ourselves, itself)

Question 72

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Answer 72

the proposition that the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive the world around them; it is often presented in its weak form, linguistic relativism, and its strong form, linguistic determinism

Question 73

semantics

Answer 73

the study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences

Question 74

sentence (S)

Answer 74

a syntactic category of expressions consisting minimally of a noun phrase (NP) followed by a verb phrase (VP) in d-structure; also called a TP (tense phrase); the head of this is the category Aux

Question 75

spectrogram

Answer 75

a visual representation of speech decomposed into component frequencies, with time on the horizontal axis, frequency on the vertical axis, and intensity portrayed on a gray scale--the darker, the more intense (aka a voiceprint)

Question 76

spoonerism

Answer 76

a speech error in which phonemic segments are reversed or exchanged (ex: "You have hissed my mystery lecture" instead of "You have missed my history lecture"); named after Revered William Archibald Spooner

Question 77

suppletive forms

Answer 77

a term used to refer to inflected morphemes in which the regular rules do not apply (ex: "went" as the past tense form of "go")

Question 78

tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon

Answer 78

the difficulty encountered from time to time in retrieving a particular word or expression from the mental lexicon; anomic aphasics suffer from an extreme form of this problem

Question 79

Universal Grammar (UG)

Answer 79

the innate principles and properties that pertain to the grammars of all human languages

Question 80

velar

Answer 80

a sound produced by raising the back of the tongue to the soft palate, or velum

Question 81

Verner's law

Answer 81

the description of a conditioned phonological change in the sound system of certain Indo-European languages wherein voiceless fricatives were changed when the preceding vowel was unstressed; it was formulated by Karl Verner as an explanation to some of the exceptions to Grimm's Law