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100

[weɪdɚ]

wader 

100

U.S. linguist and political critic. His theory of language structure, transformational generative grammar, superseded the behaviorist view of Bloomfield.

Noam Chomsky

100
voiced bilabial stop 

[b]

100

"if a language has structure X, then it must also have structure Y." For example, X might be "mid front rounded vowels" and Y "high front rounded vowels"

implicational universals, Joseph Greenberg

100

Name one famous cognitive linguist

Noam Chomsky, Wallace Chafe, Charles Fillmore, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, and Leonard Talmy

200

[maɪlz]

miles 

200

Widely recognised as one of the first linguists to analyse gender as a powerful, complex and nuanced influence on linguistic form and language as a social practice. Her position as a feminist-sociolinguist pioneer rests against a broader concern with power, discourse and linguistics.

Robin Lakoff

200

voiceless velar stop

[k]

200

...to highlight and interpret systematic phonological and semantic correspondences between two or more attested languages. If those correspondences cannot be rationally explained as the result of language contact (borrowings, areal influence, etc.), and if they are sufficiently numerous and systematic that they cannot be dismissed as chance similarities, then it must be assumed that they descend from a single proto-language.

comparative method 

200

Explain descriptive vs. prescriptive linguistic approaches 

Descriptive grammar is the linguistic approach which studies what a language is like, as opposed to prescriptive, which declares what a language should be like. In other words, descriptive grammarians focus analysis on how all kinds of people in all sorts of environments, usually in more casual, everyday settings, communicate, whereas prescriptive grammarians focus on the grammatical rules and structures predetermined by linguistic registers and figures of power.

300

[jaɪks]

yikes 

300

Swiss linguist. The founder of structural linguistics, he declared that there is only an arbitrary relationship between a linguistic sign and that which it signifies.

Ferdinand de Saussure

300

voiceless labiodental fricative

[f]

300

study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics.

philology 

300

a process of word formation,[1] in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness

inflection

400

[ɛgbitɚ]

eggbeater 

400

U.S. linguist, born in Russia. His publications include Children's Speech (1941) and Fundamentals of Language (1956).

Roman Jakobson

400

voiced palatal glide

[j]

400

a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages

typology

400

Synthetic languages?

uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combination of two or more morphemes into one word. The information added by morphemes can include indications of a word's grammatical category, such as whether a word is the subject or object in the sentence. Morphology can be either relational or derivational

500

[paɪɹomɛniak]

pyromaniac 

500

Polish-born U.S. linguist and anthropologist. He was a founder of ethnolinguistics, which considers the relationship of culture to language, and a principal developer of the American (descriptive) school of structural linguistics.

Edward Sapir

500

voiceless labialized velar approximate 

[ʍ]

500

language entirely determines the range of cognitive processes

linguistic determinism 

500

Draw a syntax tree for the following sentence:


The dog chased the cat down the street

syntactic ambiguity, two possibilities