Linguistics Flashcards
(253 cards)
What is the difference between language acquisition and language learning?
Acquisition is a natural and unconscious process of language development in humans that occurs without instruction. Learning is a process of gaining conscious knowledge of language through instruction.
The design features of language
Proposed by Hockett, the features that distinguish human language from other communication systems. These include semanticity, arbitrariness, discreteness, displacement, productivity, and duality of patterning.
What is semanticity?
Specific signals can be matched with specific meanings. In short, words have meanings.
What is arbitrariness?
There is no logical connection between the form of the signal and the thing it refers to.
What is discreteness?
Messages in the system are made up of smaller repeatable parts rather than indivisible units. A word, for example, can be broken down into units of sound.
What is displacement?
The language user can talk about things that are not present - the messages can refer to things in remote time (past and future) or space (here or elsewhere).
What is productivity?
Language users can understand and create never-before-heard utterances.
What is duality of patterning?
A large number of meaningful utterances can be recombined in a systematic way from a small number of discrete parts of language.
What is grammar?
Linguistic rule system that we use to produce and understand sentences
What are the phonetics in a language?
The inventory of sounds in a language.
What is phonology?
Rules of how sounds are combined in a language.
What is morphology?
The rules of word formation in a language.
What is syntax?
Rules of sentence formation in a language.
What are semantics?
Rules that govern how meaning is expressed by words and sentences in a language.
What is the difference between descriptive grammar and prescriptive grammar?
Descriptive grammar is based on the language we speak, while prescriptive grammar is the rules prescribed by a language authority.
How do prescriptive and descriptive grammar overlap?
Some prescriptive rules aren’t descriptive rules at all, like split infinitives. Others are descriptive rules, like double negative rules. Modification is another way they overlap.
What is modification, and how is it related to prescriptive and descriptive grammar?
Adjustment, change, and modification of grammatical systems based on various social factors. Prescriptive grammar makes some people modify their grammar.
What is a continuum of language varieties?
Grammars that share enough of a historical and grammatical relationship to be recognized as varieties of one language.
What is a dialect?
A variety of a language that differs from other varieties in grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary and that is spoken and understood by a particular group, which might be identified by region, ethnicity, social class, etc.
What is the Universal Grammar?
The set of linguistic rules common to all languages; hypothesized to be part of human cognition. An example is how all languages seem to combine subjects and predicates.
What are linguistic parameters?
Binary settings (switches) of universal grammatical principles proposed to account for differences among language.
How is sign language a full linguistic system?
Sign language Sign languages have syntax, morphology, and semantics, as well as phonology (called primes). They also have Hockett’s design features.
How is sign language different from body language?
Body language has no duality of patterning, productivity, displacement. And most of it is instinctive.
True or false? We all have unconscious knowledge of a linguistic rule system.
True.