Phonetics
This manner of articulation involves completely stopping the airflow in the vocal tract before releasing it suddenly.
What are Stops?
Two words that differ by only a single sound and have different meanings.
What is a Minimal Pair?
A group of words that "go together" as a unit in the structure of a sentence, which can be identified using tests like substitution.
What is a Constituent?
Verbs like "hit" or "bake" expect specific elements in the sentence to complete their meaning; these expected elements are called this.
What are Arguments?
Words in different languages that are historically related and often share a similar form and meaning.
What are Cognates?
A vowel sound that starts in one position and glides to another.
What is a Diphthong?
When two sounds never appear in the same phonetic environment, they are said to be in this type of distribution.
What is Complementary Distribution?
These rules describe how different syntactic categories (like NP, VP) combine to form larger phrases and sentences and specify their ordering.
What are Phrase Structure Rules?
Words like 'write' and 'right' that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings are examples of this.
What are Homophones?
The ability of speakers of different language varieties or languages to understand each other.
What is Mutual Intelligibility?
Vowels are primarily described by these three properties of the tongue and lips.
What are Height, Frontness/Backness, and Rounding?
This type of phonological rule involves sounds changing to become less like their neighbours.
What is Dissimilation?
Sentences like "I saw the man with the telescope" demonstrate this phenomenon, where differing constituent structures lead to multiple possible interpretations.
What is Structural Ambiguity?
This relationship exists between sentences where the truth of one sentence logically and necessarily guarantees the truth of another, regardless of context.
What is Entailment?
ASL is considered to be historically descended from this signed language.
What is French Sign Language (LSF)?
This part of the vocal anatomy, when raised or lowered, controls whether air flows through the nasal cavity, affecting whether a sound is nasal or oral
What is the Velum?
This phonological concept refers to the study of which sounds and combinations of sounds are considered "legal" or permissible in a language.
What is Phonotactics?
This constituency test involves seeing if a string of words can serve as a complete, isolated answer to a question.
What is the Standalone Answer Test?
When a speaker intentionally disobeys a Gricean maxim in an obvious way to convey a non-literal meaning (like sarcasm), they are doing this to the maxim.
What is Flouting?
This type of grammar describes the rules of language, dialect, and sociolect as they are actually used.
What is Descriptive Grammar?
The three primary properties used to describe consonants, involving where the airflow is constricted, how it is constricted, and whether the vocal folds are vibrating.
What are Place of Articulation, Manner of Articulation, and Voicing?
Different phonetic realisations of a single phoneme that occur in predictable environments.
What is an Allophone?
This property allows phrase structure rules to generate infinitely many unique sentences from a finite set of rules.
What is Recursion?
This Gricean maxim advises speakers to be as informative as needed, but no more so.
What is the Maxim of Quantity?
A saying expressing the notion suggesting that the distinction between a language and a dialect is often a political choice, not a purely linguistic one.
What is "A language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy?"