Language 101
a system of rules that allows us to produce and understand language
Grammar
the branch of phonetics which studies the organs of speech and their use in producing speech sounds
Articulatory Phonetics
a unit of sound that makes a difference in meaning
Phoneme
the smallest unit of meaning or grammatical function
Morpheme
objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used by a speech community
Descriptive Grammar
a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract
Consonant Sound
one of a set of multiple possible variations of spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language
Allophone /ˈæləfoʊn/
a suffix that's added to a word to assign a particular grammatical property to that word, such as its tense, number, possession, or comparison.
Inflectional Morpheme
the absence of any natural or necessary connection between a word's meaning and its sound or form
Arbitrariness
height, advancement, tenseness and rounding describe this type of sound
Vowel sound
a set of sounds that have certain phonetic features in common such as labials [f, v, p, b, m, w]
Natural Class
Using grammatical categories as examples, explain what are lexical and grammatical morphemes:
lexical morphemes/open class/content words: N, V, Adj, Adv
grammatical morphemes/closed class/function words such as Prep, Det, Quant, Num, Aux, Mod, Conj
a characteristic of language that allows users to talk about things and events other than those occurring in the here and now
Displacement
a stop and its immediately following release into a fricative that are considered to constitute a single phoneme
Affricate
List 4 of the various kinds of phonological processes we learned about this semester:
Assimilation (palatalization, voicing assimilation), Dissimilation, Deletion, Insertion, Exchange, …
List 4 of the various kinds of morphological processes we studied this semester:
Affixation, Acronyms, Blending, Backformation, Compounding, Conversion, Clipping, Coining
the fundamental language phenomenon consisting of the use of combinations of a small number of meaningless elements to produce a large number of meaningful elements
Duality of Patterning
a sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable, in which the sound begins as one vowel and moves toward another
Diphthong
the distribution of sounds in their respective phonetic environments in which one sound never appears in the same phonetic context as the other. For instance, in English, [p] and [pʰ] are allophones of the phoneme /p/ because they occur in this distribution.
Complementary Distribution
any of the phonological representations of a single morpheme. For example, the final (s) and (z) sounds of bets and beds are allomorphs of the English noun-plural morpheme
Allomorph