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Chapter 1 arbitrary Describes the property of language, including sign language, whereby there is no natural or intrinsic relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning. descriptive grammar A linguists description or model of the mental grammar, including the units, structures, and rules. An explicit statement of what speakers know about their language. Cf. prescriptive grammar, teaching grammar. grammar The mental representation of a speakers linguistic competence; what a speaker knows about a language, including its phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and lexicon. A linguistic description of a speakers mental grammar. lexicon The component of the grammar containing speakers knowledge about morphemes and words; a speakers mental dictionary. morphology The study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation. phonology The sound system of a language; the component of a grammar that includes the inventory of sounds (phonetic and phonemic units) and rules for their combination and pronunciation; the study of the sound systems of all languages. semantics The study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. sign languages The languages used by deaf people in which linguistic units such as morphemes and words as well as grammatical relations are formed by manual and other body movements. syntax The rules of sentence formation; the component of the mental grammar that represents speakers knowledge of the structure of phrases and sentences. Universal Grammar (UG) The innate principles and properties that pertain to the grammars of all human languages. Chapter 2 anomia A form of aphasia in which patients have word-finding difficulties. aphasia Language loss or disorders following brain damage. cortex The approximately ten billion neurons that form the outside surface of the brain; also referred to as gray matter. critical age hypothesis The theory that states that there is a window of time between early childhood and puberty for learning a first language, and beyond which first language acquisition is almost always incomplete. lateralization, lateralized Term used to refer to cognitive functions localized to one or the other side of the brain. magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) A technique to investigate the molecular structures in human organs including the brain, which may be used to identify sites of brain lesions. neurolinguistics The branch of linguistics concerned with the brain mechanisms that underlie the acquisition and use of human language; the study of the neurobiology of language. positron-emission tomography (PET) Method to detect changes in brain activities and relate these changes to localized brain damage and cognitive tasks. savant Individual who shows special abilities in one cognitive area while being deficient in others. Linguistic savants have extraordinary language abilities but are deficient in general intelligence. specific language impairment (SLI) Difficulty in acquiring language faced by certain children with no other cognitive deficits. Chapter 3 acronym Word composed of the initials of several words, e.g., PET scan from positron-emission tomography scan. compound A word composed of two or more words, e.g., washcloth, childproof cap. form Phonological or gestural representation of a morpheme or word. lexicon The component of the grammar containing speakers knowledge about morphemes and words; a speakers mental dictionary. meaning The conceptual or semantic aspect of a sign or utterance that permits us to comprehend the message being conveyed. Expressions in language generally have both form pronunciation or gesture and meaning. Cf. extension, intension, sense, reference. morpheme Smallest unit of linguistic meaning or function, e.g., sheepdogs contains three mor morphological rules Rules for combining morphemes to form stems and words. morphology The study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation. open class The class of lexical content words; a category of words that commonly adds new words, e.g., nouns, verbs. orthography The written form of a language; spelling. Chapter 4 complement The constituent(s) in a phrase other than the head that complete(s) the meaning of the phrase. In the verb phrase found a puppy, the noun phrase a puppy is a complement of the head verb found. deep structure Any phrase structure tree generated by the phrase structure rules of a transformational grammar. The basic syntactic structures of the grammar. direct object The grammatical relation of a noun phrase when it appears immediately below the verb phrase (VP) and next to the verb in deep structure; the noun phrase complement of a transitive verb, e.g., the puppy in the boy found the puppy. functional category One of the categories of function words, including determiner, aux, complementizer, and preposition. These categories are not lexical or phrasal categories. Cf. lexical categories, phrasal categories. lexicon The component of the grammar containing speakers knowledge about morphemes and words; a speakers mental dictionary. phrase structure tree A tree diagram with syntactic categories at each node that reveals both the linear and hierarchical structure of phrases and sentences. rules of syntax Principles of grammar that account for the grammaticality of sentences, their hierarchical structure, their word order, whether there is structural ambiguity, etc. Cf. phrase structure rules, transformational rules. structure dependent (1) A principle of Universal Grammar that states that the application of transformational rules is determined by phrase structure properties, as opposed to structureless sequences of words or specific sentences; (2) the way children construct rules using their knowledge of syntactic structure irrespective of the specific words in the structure or their meaning. surface structure The structure that results from applying transformational rules to a deep structure. It is syntactically closest to actual utterances. Cf. transformational rule. transformational rule, transformation A syntactic rule that applies to an underlying phrase structure tree of a sentence (either deep structure or an intermediate structure already affected by a transformation) and derives a new structure by moving or inserting elements, e.g., the transformational rules of wh movement and do insertion relate the deep structure sentence John saw who to the surface structure Who did John see. Chapter 5 coreferential Describes noun phrases (including pronouns) that refer to the same entity. heteronyms Different words spelled the same (i.e., homographs) but pronounced differently, e.g. bass, meaning either “low tone” bes or “a kind of fish” bs. homographs Words spelled identically, and possibly pronounced the same, e.g., bear meaning “to tolerate,” and bear the animal; or lead the metal and lead, what leaders do. hyponyms Words whose meanings are specific instances of a more general word, e.g., red, white, and blue are hyponyms of the word color; triangle is a hyponym of polygon. lexical semantics The subfield of semantics concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning relationships among words. pragmatics The study of how context and situation affect meaning. semantic features A notational device for expressing the presence or absence of semantic properties by pluses and minuses, e.g., baby is + young, + human, abstract, etc. semantic properties The components of meaning of a word, e.g., “young” is a semantic property of baby, colt, puppy. semantics The study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Chapter 7 accidental gap Phonological or morphological form that constitutes possible but nonoccurring lexical items, e.g., blick, unsad. complementary distribution The situation in which phones never occur in the same phonetic environment, e.g., p and ph in English. Cf. allophones. epenthesis The insertion of one or more phones in a word, e.g., the insertion of E in children to produce CIlEdrEn instead of CIldrEn. free variation Alternative pronunciations of a word in which one sound is substituted for another without changing the words meaning, e.g., pronunciation of bottle as batEl or ba/El. geminate A sequence of two identical sounds; a long vowel or long consonant denoted either by writing the phonetic symbol twice as in biiru, sakki or by use of a colon bi:ru, sak:i. intonation Pitch contour of a phrase or sentence. length A prosodic feature referring to the duration of a segment. Two sounds may contrast in length, e.g., in Japanese the first vowel is + long in /biiru/ “beer” but long, therefore short, in /biru/ “building.” metathesis The phonological process that reorders segments, often by transposing two sequential sounds, e.g., the pronunciation of ask /sk/ in some English dialects as ks. minimal pair (or set) Two (or more) words that are identical except for one phoneme that occurs in the same position in each word, e.g., pain /pen/, bane /ben/, main /men/. phonetic features Phonetic properties of segments (e.g., voice, nasal, alveolar) that distinguish one segment from another. Chapter 8 babbling Sounds produced in the first few months after birth that gradually come to include only sounds that occur in the language of the household. Deaf children babble with hand gestures. bilingual language acquisition The (more or less) simultaneous acquisition of two or more languages before the age of three years such that each language is acquired with native competency. holophrastic The stage of child language acquisition in which one word conveys a complex message similar to that of a phrase or sentence. interlanguage grammars The intermediate grammars that second language learners create on their way to acquiring the (more or less) complete grammar of the target language. motherese, child directed speech (CDS) The special intonationally exaggerated speech that some adults sometimes use to speak with small children, sometimes called baby talk. overgeneralization Childrens treatment of irregular verbs and nouns as if they were regular, e.g., bringed, goed, foots, mouses, for brought, went, feet, mice. This shows that the child has acquired the regular rules but has not yet learned that there are exceptions. poverty of the stimulus, impoverished data Refers to the incomplete, noisy, and unstructured utterances that children hear, including slips of the tongue, false starts, and ungrammatical and incomplete sentences, together with a lack of concrete evidence about abstract grammatical rules and structure. second language acquisition The acquisition of another language or languages after first language acquisition is under way or completed. Also L2 acquisition. sign languages The languages used by deaf people in which linguistic units such as morphemes and words as well as grammatical relations are formed by manual and other body movements. telegraphic stage The period of child language acquisition that follows the two-word stage and consists primarily of telegraphic speech. Chapter 9 blend A word composed of the parts of more than one word, e.g., smog from smoke + fog. computational linguistics A subfield of linguistics and computer science that is concerned with computer processing of human language. formant In the frequency analysis of speech, a band of frequencies of higher intensity than surrounding frequencies, which appears as a dark line on a spectrogram. Individual vowels display different formant patterns. fundamental frequency In speech, the rate at which the vocal cords vibrate, symbolized as F0, called F-zero, perceived by the listener as pitch. lexical decision Task of subjects in psycholinguistic experiments who on presentation of a spoken or printed stimulus must decide whether it is a word or not. parse The act of determining the grammaticality of sequences of words according to rules of syntax, and assigning a linguistic structure to the grammatical ones. primes The basic formal units of sign languages that correspond to phonological elements of spoken language. psycholinguistics The branch of linguistics concerned with linguistic performance, language acquisition, and speech production and comprehension. spectrogram A visual representation of speech decomposed into component frequencies, with time on the x axis, frequency on the y axis, and intensity portrayed on a gray scale the darker, the more intense. Also called voiceprint. spoonerism A speech error in which phonemic segments are reversed or exchanged, e.g., you have hissed my mystery lecture for the intended you have missed my history lecture; named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, a nineteenth-century Oxford University professor.Chapter 10 African American English (AAE) Dialects of English spoken by some Americans of African descent, or by any person raised from infancy in a place where AAE is spoken. Cf. Ebonics. Chicano English (ChE) A dialect of English spoken by some bilingual Mexican Americans in the western and southwestern United States. code-switching The movement back and forth between two languages or dialects within the same sentence or discourse. dialect A variety of a language whose grammar differs in systematic ways from other varieties. Differences may be lexical, phonological, syntactic, and semantic. Cf. regional dialect, social dialect, prestige dialect. dialect map A map showing the areas where specific dialectal characteristics occur in the speech of the region. idiolect An individuals way of speaking, reflecting that persons grammar. isogloss A geographic boundary that separates areas with dialect differences, e.g., a line on a map on one side of which most people say faucet and on the other side of which most people say spigot. lingua franca A language common to speakers of diverse languages that can be used for communication and commerce, e.g., English is the lingua franca of international airline pilots. pidgin A simple but rule-governed language developed for communication among speakers of mutually unintelligible languages, often based on one of those languages. Standard American English (SAE) An idealized dialect of English that some prescriptive grammarians consider the proper form of English. Chapter 11 analogic change A language change in which a rule spreads to previously unaffected forms, e.g., the plural of cow changed from the earlier kine to cows by the generalization of the plural formation rule or by analogy to regular plural forms. Also called internal borrowing. assimilation rules/assimilation A phonological process that changes feature values of segments to make them more similar, e.g., a vowel becomes +nasal when followed by + nasal consonant. Also called feature spreading rules. ease of articulation The tendency of speakers to adjust their pronunciation to make it easier, or more efficient, to move the articulators. Phonetic and phonological rules are often the result of ease of articulation, e.g., the rule of English that nasalizes vowels when they precede a nasal consonant. genetically related Describes two or more languages that developed from a common, earlier language, e.g., French, Italian, and Spanish, which all developed from Latin. Great Vowel Shift A sound change that took place in English sometime between 1400 and 1600 C.E. in which seven long vowel phonemes were changed. Indo-European The descriptive name given to the ancestor language of many modern language families, including Germanic, Slavic, and Romance. Also called Proto-Indo-European. Proto-Germanic The name given by linguists to the language that was an ancestor of English, German, and other Germanic languages. protolanguage The first identifiable language from which genetically related languages developed. regular sound correspondence The occurrence of different sounds in the same position of the same word in different languages or dialects, with this parallel holding for a significant number of words, e.g., aj in non-Southern American English corresponds to a: in Southern American English. Also found between newer and older forms of the same language. sound shift Historical phonological change. Chapter 12 alphabetic writing A writing system in which each symbol typically represents one sound segment. consonantal alphabet The symbols of a consonantal writing system. cuneiform A form of writing in which the characters are produced using a wedge-shaped stylus. hieroglyphics A pictographic writing system used by the Egyptians around 4000 B.C.E ideogram, ideograph A character of a word-writing system, often highly stylized, that represents a concept, or the pronunciation of the word representing that concept. logograms The symbols of a word-writing or logographic writing system. logographic, word writing A system of writing in which each character represents a word or morpheme of the language, e.g., Chinese. pictogram A form of writing in which the symbols resemble the objects represented; a nonarbitrary form of writing. rebus principle In writing, the use of a pictogram for its phonetic value, e.g., using a picture of a bee to represent the verb be or the sound b. syllabic A phonetic feature of those sounds that may constitute the nucleus of syllables; all vowels are syllabic, and liquids and nasals may be syllabic in such words as towel, button, bottom.
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