Introduction to Linguistics
What are the elements in Jakobson's (1960) communication model?
Addresser, addressee, message, channel, code, context
What is phonetics?
The study of how sounds are produced, what are their physical properties, and how they are interpreted
What is a phoneme? What is an allophone?
A phoneme is a class of speech sounds that seem to be variants of the same sound. An allophone is each member of a particular phoneme class.
What is a morpheme?
The minimal unit of language that has both sound and meaning, or sound and grammatical function.
What is the difference between competence and performance?
•Linguistic competence: a person’s potential to speak a language, which is stored in the mind
•Linguistic performance: the way that speakers produce and comprehend language, which is revealed in speech
Name and explain the articulatory features of consonants and vowels.
Consonants: voicing, place of articulation, manner of articulation
Vowels: Tongue height, tongue advancement, tenseness and lip rounding
What is the distribution of phonemes and allophones?
Allophones are predictable and they are in complementary distribution.
What is the difference between free and bound morphemes?
Free morphemes can be used as words all by themselves.
Bound morphemes have to be attached to the root of some word in order to be used.
Prescriptive and descriptive rules of language
Prescriptive rules tell you how to speak or write, according to someone’s idea of what is “good” or “bad”. Rules that are “prescribed,” like a physician’s prescription: “Never end a sentence with a preposition”.
Descriptive rules describe what happens in spoken language – not what should or should not happen in a language. “Some English speakers end a sentence with a preposition”
Features of speech that “ride of top of” segments, and often apply to entire strings of consonants and vowels
Suprasegmental features
What is a natural class?
A group of sounds in a language that share one or more articulatory or auditory property, to the exclusion of all other sounds in that language.
The word “smaller” is composed of…
A root “small” and an inflectional suffix “er”.
“All signals in a communication system must have a meaning”
Semanticity
Consonants are produced with a constriction in the vocal tract that impedes airflow and vowels allow air to flow freely through the oral cavity.
What kind of evidence do you need to provide if you claim that two or more sounds are separate phonemes? What kind of evidence do you need to provide if you claim that two or more sounds are allophones of the same phoneme?
For separate phonemes: minimal pairs/minimal sets.
For allophones of the same phoneme: list the conditioning environments and write a phonological rule.
Name and explain four word formation processes that are not derivation or inflection.
Compounding, reduplication, alternation, suppletion
Name and explain 9 of Hockett's design features of language.
Mode of communication, Semanticity, Pragmatic function, Interchangeability, Cultural transmission, Arbitrariness, Discreteness, Displacement, Productivity/Creativity.
A consonant made by forming a nearly complete obstruction of the vocal tract, such that the air is released through a very narrow opening making a “hissing” sound.
Fricative
What kind of evidence do you need to provide if you claim that two or more sounds are allophones of the same phoneme?
For allophones of the same phoneme: list the conditioning environments and write a phonological rule.
What is the difference between derivation and inflection?
Derivation is a morphological process by means of which words are created out of other words. The result of derivation is always a new word with new meaning, perhaps from a different lexical category.
Inflection is the creation of different grammatical forms of words. (No new meaning, no new word!). It is the use of affixes to indicate grammatical relationships (number, case, person, tense, etc.). Inflectional affixes do not change the lexical category of the inflected word