A unit of speech, made up of an onset and rhyme.
Syllable
A class of speech sounds identified by a native speaker as the same sound; a mental entity (or category) related to various allophones by phonological rules, written between slashes, for example, /t/.
Phonemes
Smallest linguistic unit that has a meaning or grammatical function.
Morphemes
A linguistic expression that must occur in a sentence if some other expression occurs in that sentence as well.
If the occurrence of an expression X in a sentence requires the occurrence of an expression Y in that sentence, we say that Y is a(n) ______ of X.
Argument
A component of linguistic meaning that relates the sense of some expression to entities in the outside world.
Reference
A phonetic characteristic of speech sounds, such as length, intonation, tone, or stress, that “rides on top of” segmental features.
Must usually be identified by comparison to the same feature on other sounds or strings of sounds.
Suprasegmentals
The occurrence of sounds in a language such that they are never found in the same phonetic environment.
Sounds that are in this type of distribution are allophones of the same phoneme.
Complementary distribution
1. Bound morpheme that attaches to a stem.
2. The base, consisting of one or more morphemes, to which some affix is added. It always includes the root and may also include one or more affixes.
1. Affix
2. Stem
A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional, also called modifier.
Adjunct
A relationship between propositions where a proposition p is said to _____ another proposition q just in case if p is true, q has to be true as well.
Entailment
Sounds produced with the velum raised
nasal sounds
Two words that differ only by a single sound in the same position and that have different meanings.
Minimal pair
Process of forming words by combining two or more independent words.
Compounding
A recipe for syntactically combining expressions of certain syntactic categories.
Along with the lexicon, they are a part of a descriptive grammar of some language.
They have the general form X -> Y1 . . . Yn where X is a syntactic category and Y1 . . .Yn is a sequence of syntactic categories.
The categories to the right of the arrow Y1 . . .Yn correspond to the immediate syntactic constituents of the expression whose category is X.
Phrase structure rules
An adjective whose reference is determined independently from the reference of the noun that it modifies.
Intersective adjectives
Sounds produced without the vibration of the vocal folds
voiceless sounds
Restriction on possible combinations of sounds, often in particular environments.
Phonotactic constraints
A morphological process that changes a word’s lexical category or its meaning in some predictable way.
Derivation
The phenomenon where a single string of words (or morphemes) is the form of more than one distinct phrasal expression (or word).
It arises because the same expressions can combine differently syntactically, resulting in distinct phrases that happen to have the same form.
Structural ambiguity
The set of conditions that would have to hold in the world in order for the proposition expressed by some sentence to be true.
Truth condition
A property of the production of vowels having to do with how advanced or retracted the body of the tongue is.
Tongue advancement/backness/Frontness
Group of sounds in a language that satisfy a given description to the exclusion of other sounds in that language.
Natural class
A morphological process whereby the form of a word is modified to indicate some grammatically relevant information, such as person, number, tense, gender, etc.
Inflection
The notion that the meaning of a phrasal expression is predictable from the meanings of the expressions it contains and how they were syntactically combined.
The principle of compositionality
An underlying assumption that a speaker believes (and that the speaker behaves as though other participants in the discourse believe) prior to making an utterance.
In order for an utterance to make sense or for it to be debatable, they must be either satisfied or accommodated.
Presupposition