Phonetics & Phonology, Morphology
Elements of speech that exist outside single sounds such as vowels or consonants. The study of these features involves considering the acoustic elements of our voices that affect whole sequences of syllables.
What are prosodic features?
Bonus: Identify the 5 we study.
These function to help the grammar or structure of a sentence by tying all of the words together.
What are function words?
An example of this is: a child might refer to a 'tiger' as a 'kitty' or 'mouses' for 'mice', or call all four-legged animals 'dog'.
At this stage, meaning is attached to the syllables produced by a child, and this characteristic distinguishes a babble from a word, even as the 'words' often exhibit the same structure as babbled syllables, with a CV (consonant-vowel) syllable used as a word. At this stage, one word is used to communicate several meanings, or a whole sentence.
What is the holophrastic stage?
What is Standard English (SE)?
The variety of spoken and written English language that represents a common language standard agreed to by the general population and recorded in dictionaries, style guides and grammar manuals.
The study of how we make speech sounds and how we classify them. Focuses on the physical properties of sounds and speech production.
What is phonetics?
Bonus: What is the difference between phonetics and phonology?
Provide an example of a complex sentence - identify its parts.
Answers differ
These are the features of speech that are considered to be marginal to language (for example, voice quality such as a creaky voice). They include aspects of non-verbal communication such as stance, gesture and gaze.
What are paralinguistic features?
The practice of moving back and forth between languages in a single interaction is a normal and natural feature of the conversations between speakers who know the same two (or more) languages.
What is code-switching?
The process of bringing and promoting uniformity to the writing and speaking of a language.
What is standardisation?
Provide an example of an inflectional affix and a derivational affix.
Answers will vary
These provide extra information about a verb. They often say where, when, how, or how often something occurs. They can be phrases or whole clauses. They provide optional information; they can be deleted without affecting the overall comprehensibility of the clause, and are not critical to the sentence structure.
What is an adverbial?
Bonus: What is the function of this adverbial?
He studied just enough to pass the exam.
The medium of the text - whether it is written or spoken.
What is language mode?
A type of error, where children may say tooths or goed. This is often reflective of a good understanding of standard grammatical features in a language.
What is morphological overgeneralisation?
This refers to the content or subject matter. For example, our language choices vary depending on the nature of the activity performed or the topic discussed by the text (such as the linguistic features of science versus football).
What is the field (a.k.a. semantic field)?
This is a single morpheme that contains the primary meaning of the word. For example, in the word 'cats', the _____ would be 'cat' because, of the two morphemes, it contains the most relevant information regarding the word's primary meaning.
What is a root morpheme?
Bonus: How is a stem morpheme different from a root morpheme?
Use the example unbreaking.
A single word or group of words that are related to each other and, together, form a single structural unit that conveys meaning. They do not contain both a subject (a noun that controls a verb) and a verb, so they require other phrases or words to make a complete sentence. In English, there are five main types, whose names relate to the word class of the primary word (the head) within the _______.
What is a phrase?
Bonus: Can phrases be contained within other phrases?
This refers to the relationships between participants in a language activity and relates especially to social distance. It also involves the level of formality participants adopt (formal, colloquial, etc.). This feature will be affected by how well people know each other and their purpose for participation.
What is tenor?
There is a hypothesis that children are born with innate knowledge about the structure of language; this innate grammar centres around a set of rules for language that are assumed to be universal; that is, shared by all languages of the world. Research in this area has been characterised as prioritising ‘nature’ over ‘nurture’. This theory was proposed by Noam Chomsky.
What is universal grammar?
The conceptual space between individuals or groups in society created or constructed by social class, ethnicity/race, gender, sexuality, education, social and economic status, occupation and social connections.
What is social distance?
Provide an example for each of the following:
assimilation, vowel reduction, elision, insertion
assimilation: samwich/sammich/donʧu /diʤu
vowel reduction: benaneh
elision: sanwich/choklet/libry/em (them)/Nexdoor
insertion: fambly/Annar ate a pancake/ I saw ra movie / athalete
More examples of course!
Bonus: What two processes are active in someone saying "wem' back" = went back
Determiners belong to one of four categories: articles, quantifiers, demonstratives and possessives. Provide an example of each.
Articles: the, a, an
Quantifiers: all, a lot, many, most, much, some, several, few, a couple, one, none
Demonstratives: this, that, these, those
Possessives: my, your, her, his, its, our, their
This involves language variation that is defined by use (as opposed to dialects, sociolects, etc. that refer to language variation defined by user); _______ involve features across a range of subsystems. Often thought of as only a spectrum between formality and informality.
What is register?
What is usage-based theory?
This theory focuses on human cognitive abilities and social behaviours to account for language acquisition. A usage-based account proposes that children build the grammar of their language from tailored interaction, in combination with their general cognitive skills. The theory also emphasises the importance of child-directed speech, which is different from adult-to-adult speech across cultures. This theory is associated with a number of theorists including Michael Tomasello.
What are the six functions of language? Provide a specific examples of each.
referential (conveys information, e.g. statements like ‘The train leaves at 6.00 am.’)
emotive (interprets feelings, desires, etc., e.g. interjections like ‘Yuck!’)
conative (engages the addressee, e.g. commands like ‘Sit down!’)
phatic (establishes a social connection, e.g. greetings like ‘How are you?’)
metalinguistic (talks about language itself, e.g. ‘What does phatic mean?’)
poetic (brings in the aesthetic dimension, e.g. embellishing a message with quotations like ‘To be, or not to be?’).