Final Exam: Vocabulary Flashcards Preview

Linguistics [Spring 2013] > Final Exam: Vocabulary > Flashcards

Flashcards in Final Exam: Vocabulary Deck (81)
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1
Q

accidental gap

A

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

2
Q

acronym

A

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

3
Q

affricate

A

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]

4
Q

allophone

A

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

5
Q

alveolar ridge

A

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

6
Q

antonyms

A

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

7
Q

aphasia

A

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

8
Q

assimilation

A

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

9
Q

babbling

A

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

10
Q

back-formation

A

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)

11
Q

bilabial

A

a sound articulated by bringing both lips together

12
Q

blend

A

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

13
Q

Broca’s area

A

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

14
Q

case endings

A

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

15
Q

circumfix

A

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)

16
Q

cocktail party effect

A

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

17
Q

codeswitching

A

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

18
Q

coinage

A

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

19
Q

complement

A
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"
20
Q

complementary distribution

A

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

21
Q

concordance

A

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

22
Q

consonant

A

a speech sound produced with some constriction of the air stream

23
Q

constituent

A

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

24
Q

continuant

A

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

25
Q

cortex

A

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

26
Q

count nouns

A

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

27
Q

creole

A

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

28
Q

cuneiform

A

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

29
Q

deictic/deixis

A

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

30
Q

determiner (Det)

A

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.

31
Q

dissimilation

A

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]

32
Q

entailment

A

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

33
Q

epenthesis

A

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

34
Q

eponym

A

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

35
Q

etymology

A

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

36
Q

fricative

A

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

37
Q

function word

A

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

38
Q

garden path sentences

A

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.)

39
Q

glide

A

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

40
Q

Grimm’s Law

A

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

41
Q

hierarchical structure

A

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

42
Q

hypercorrection

A

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

43
Q

ideogram, ideograph

A

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

44
Q

implicature

A

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.”)

45
Q

impoverished data

A

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

46
Q

infix

A

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”)

47
Q

intransitive verb

A

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

48
Q

jargon

A

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

49
Q

late closure principle

A

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”)

50
Q

lateralization, lateralized

A

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

51
Q

lexicon

A

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

52
Q

lingua franca

A

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)

53
Q

liquids

A

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

54
Q

manner of articulation

A

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

55
Q

metathesis

A

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

56
Q

morphology

A

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

57
Q

narrowing

A

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

58
Q

node

A

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

59
Q

Optimality Theory

A

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.)

60
Q

overgeneralization

A

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

61
Q

paradox

A

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

62
Q

parse

A

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

63
Q

petroglyph

A

a drawing on a rock made by prehistoric people

64
Q

phonotactics/phonotactic constraints

A

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

65
Q

pidgin

A

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)

66
Q

Pinyin

A

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

67
Q

place of articulation

A

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

68
Q

prosodic feature

A

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

69
Q

rebus principle

A

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])

70
Q

recursive rule

A

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

71
Q

reflexive pronoun

A

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

72
Q

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

A

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

73
Q

semantics

A

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

74
Q

sentence (S)

A

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

75
Q

spectrogram

A

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)

76
Q

spoonerism

A

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

77
Q

suppletive forms

A

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”)

78
Q

tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon

A

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

79
Q

Universal Grammar (UG)

A

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

80
Q

velar

A

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

81
Q

Verner’s law

A

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