Spanish Language Components Flashcards
(40 cards)
What is phonology?
The study of speech sounds and manual units, and how they change in different contexts within and among languages.
What are phonemes?
The smallest meaningful speech sounds in a language that differentiate words. Example: /f/ in “fish” vs. /w/ in “wish.
What are allophones?
Different variants of the same phoneme that don’t change word meaning but alter pronunciation. Example: The /t/ sound in “kitten” vs. “toy.”
What are morphemes?
The smallest units of meaning in language, which may be words or word parts. Example: “re-“ always means “again.”
What is the difference between phonology and phonetics?
Phonology studies how speech sounds behave in relation to words and syllables, while phonetics studies speech sounds in isolation.
What are phonological rules?
Rules that predict how speech sounds change in different contexts. Example: The pronunciation of final “-s” sounds in English depends on preceding sounds.
What is morphology in linguistics?
The study of the grammatical structure of words and how they are formed and varied within a language.
What is the difference between a morpheme and a lexeme?
A lexeme is the minimal word unit with independent content meaning, while a morpheme may or may not be meaningful by itself.
What are free morphemes?
Morphemes that can stand alone as individual words with content meaning (e.g., “dog,” “house”).
What are bound morphemes?
Morphemes that must be attached to other morphemes to convey meaning (e.g., suffixes “-ed,” “-s”).
What is an inflectional affix?
A type of bound morpheme that modifies a word’s form without changing its meaning (e.g., “-s” for plural, “-ed” for past tense).
What is a derivational affix?
A bound morpheme that creates a new word with a different meaning (e.g., “un-“ in “unhappy,” “-or” in “actor”).
What is the difference between morphology and syntax?
Morphology studies word structures and relations among morphemes, while syntax studies sentence structures and relations among words.
What is syntax?
The study of sentence structure and the rules that govern word arrangement in languages.
What is the primary goal of syntax?
To understand how words combine to form grammatically correct sentences.
What are the basic syntactic units?
Phrases, clauses, and sentences each play a role in sentence construction.
What are the four main sentence types in English?
Simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences.
What is a simple sentence?
A sentence with one independent clause (e.g., “She loves books.”).
What is a compound sentence?
A sentence with two or more independent clauses, joined by conjunctions (e.g., “I studied, and she read.”).
What is a complex sentence?
A sentence with one independent clause and at least one dependent clause (e.g., “Because it was raining, we stayed inside.”).
What is a compound-complex sentence?
A sentence with at least two independent clauses and one dependent clause (e.g., “Although she was tired, she studied, and then she slept.”).
What is the subject-verb-object (SVO) order in English?
The standard English syntax structure is where the subject comes first, followed by the verb, and then the object (e.g., “The cat eats fish.”)
What is semantics?
The study of meaning in language and how words, phrases, and sentences convey information.
What are the three main types of semantics?
Formal semantics (logic-based meaning), lexical semantics (word meanings and relationships), and conceptual semantics (how words relate to concepts)
