language Flashcards
(13 cards)
reflexiveness
The possibility of using language to talk about language; this is one of its delimiting characteristics with respect to other communication systems.
article
A grammatical word — or affix — used to specify a noun as definite or indefinite. It may vary for gender and case in languages with gender distinctions and a formal case system such as German.
inflection
An alteration made to a word to indicate a certain grammatical category, e.g. number and case with nouns or person, number and tense with verbs. The number of inflections in a language can be taken as an indication of its type, a large number being characteristic of synthetic languages
function word
A word which serves the purpose of indicating a grammatical category or relationship. It contrasts explicitly with a content word which has lexical meaning.
declension
A term which refers to the inflections of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, i.e. of nouns and the elements which can qualify them. It is the equivalent with nouns of the term conjugation with verbs.
word class
A group of words which are similar in their grammatical characteristics: the kinds of inflections they take, their distribution in sentences and the relations they enter with other sets of words. Typically word classes are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions.
lexicon
the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge.
“the size of the English lexico
syntax
the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, specifically word order
empty word
A word which does not carry any meaning of its own but which frequently plays a role in indicating a grammatical category or expressing a syntactic relationship, e.g. it in It’s Patrick’s turn to sing a song. It contrasts explicitly with a content word
connotation
Additional meaning which arises due to the associations a word has.
denotation
the relationship between a word and the non-linguistic, ‘outside’ world. For instance one could say that the denotation of cup is a small vessel-like object for holding beverages.
semantic field
A collective term for sets of meanings which are taken to belong together, e.g. colour, furniture, food, clothes. Most of the vocabulary of any language is organised into such fields, i.e. there are few if any words which are semantically isolated
plosive consonants
p,t,k,b,d,g
