Unit 1

Grammar the rules of a language

Phonology the sound system of a language
Morphology the structure and properties of words
Lexicon a speaker’s mental dictionary
Syntax words may be combined into phrases and sentences
Semantics the study of linguistic meaning
Arbitrary the sound and meaning of individual words
Onomatopoeic words whose pronunciation suggest their meaning (meow, buzz)
Linguistic competence speaker’s unconscious linguistic knowledge
Linguistic performance how we use in actual speech production and comprehension
Descriptive grammar unconscious linguistic knowledge of its speakers (mental gra.)
Prescriptive grammar standard of usage
Teaching grammar help people learn a foreign language
Universal Grammar (UG) the blueprint for the grammar of all possible language
Sign language use by deaf people (structure as spoken language)
Bird calls short notes that convey messages (danger, feeding, flocking)
Bird songs a complex pattern of note used to mark territory
American Sign Language (ASL) language used by the deaf community in U.S.
Chinese Sign Language (CSL) language used the deaf community in Chinese world
Creativity speaker’s ability to combined the units into grammatical S.
Creative aspect being able to produce new sentences never spoken before
Discreteness larger linguistic units are composed by smaller units
Displacement allow human to talk about things about future, past…
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf
Linguistic determinism 100% the language we speak = how we perceive the world
Linguistic relativism different languages have different conceptual categories
 Unit 7

Idiolect the language of individual speaking way

Dialect systematic differences in the way groups speak a language
Dialect continuum dialects merge into each other
Dialect leveling movement toward greater uniformity and less variation
Regional dialect linguistic differences/version in a geographic region
Accents regional phonological or phonetic distinctions
Phonological differences dialect differences in AE involve differences in pronunciation
Lexicon differences difference word for same object or phonology
Syntactic differences different way to form the sentences
Dialect maps pub. by Hans Kurath, shows dialect differences on the map
Dialect atlases pub. by Hans Kurath, a book of dialect map
Dialect areas different word usages and varying pronunciation in dif. areas
Isogloss a line drawn on the map to separate the areas
Social dialects dialect differences because of social factors
Social boundary class people based on socioeconomic status, origin…etc.
Standard refer to prescriptive grammar, but good and bad no longer exist
Prestige standard dialect, no one really speak this dialect
Standard American English (SAE) a dialect of English that many Americans nearly speak
U-class >< Non-U-class propose by Alan Ross, means upper class
Hypercorrections Non-U-class often try too hard to speak “proper English”
African American English is spoken by a large population of Americans
Chicano English is spoken by Mexican Americans who is Spanish speaker
Sociolinguistic variables switch different dialect between social situation
Bidialectal (AAE, ChE) who can speak more than one dialect
Sociolinguistic analysis propose by William Labov, three class dif. Of using r-dropping
r-dropping rule [r] is not pronounced after a vowel
 Unit 8

Language change include phonological, morphology, syntactic, lexical, semantic ch.

Old English 449-1100 CE, no auxiliary; use verb, SOV (Dutch, German)
Middle English 1100-1500
Modern English 1500-present, auxiliary use; do/did/does, SVO
Historical and comparative how language change, what kind of change occur and why they
linguistics occurred
Regular sound correspondence sound change, occurred different pronunciations
Sound shift phonological change
Genetically related one or more languages that developed from a earlier language
Proto-Germanic the early form of English and German
Romance language (Latin) the early form of French, Spanish, and Italian
Protolanguage the ancestral language from which related lang. have developed
Proto-Indo-European the older language of Latin and Proto-Germanic
Phonological change phonemes and phonological rules of language
Great Vowel Shift between 1400-1600, new phonemic representations of words
and morphemes; the seven long, or tense, vowels
Morphological change rules of morphology may be lost, added, or changed
Early Middle English Vowel the vowel in the second word of each pair were shortened; for
Shortening example: sign→ signal; crime→ criminal
Case ending suffixes on the noun base; for example: Rober’s dog
Declension list of cases; change based on nominative(主), genitive(屬),
dative(與), accusative(受), ablative(離), and vocative(呼)
Syntactic change
Lexical change changes in the syntactic categories of words (part of speech)
Word coinage specific brans names, or created from existing words
Eponyms a name taken from a proper name, ex: sandwich; denim
Blends smoke+fog=smog; info+commercial= informercial
Carroll’s portmanteau brilling=broiling+dinner; slithy=lithe+slimy
Clipping clip the beginning a word, the end of a word, or both end
Ex: phone for telephone; fridge for refrigerator
Acronyms takes initial words of phrase, but still pronounce like a word
Alphabetic abbreviation from acronyms, OMG; AIDS; UCLA
Borrowing borrowing word from other languages, “ensemble” from French
Loan word one language adds word from another to its own lexicon
Loan translation directly translate a whole phrase from another language
Etymology a native word is one whose history can be traced back
Semantic change the meaning or semantic representation of words may change
Boarding means everything it used to mean and more, holy day=holiday
Narrower “deer” meant “beast, animal”; narrowed to particular animal
 Unit 8

Shifting a shift in meaning; fond→foolish

Sound shift (sound change) sound correspondences by means of rules of phonological chang.
Grimm’s Law published by Jakob Grimm, [p]→[f]; [t]→[0]; [k]→[h]
Cognate words in related lan. that developed from the same ancestral root
Verner’s Law Karl Verner explained some of the exceptions to Grimm’s Law
Ex:[p]-[f]; [t]-[0]; [k]-[x]
Non-Grammarian hypothesis says that sound shifts are not merely tendencies
Neogrammarians viewed linguistics as a natural science and believed that laws of
sound change were exceptionalness
Comparative reconstruction determined that several language are related
Comparative method use to deduce forms in an ancestral language by examining
corresponding forms in several of its descendant languages
Unconditioned sound change historical phonological change that occur in all phonetic context
Conditioned sound change historical phonological change that occur in specific phonetic co.
Internal reconstruction method is applied to earlier and later forms of a language process
Polyglot persons who speak and understand several language
Language isolates language have no demonstrable genealogical relationship with
other living language
Isolating/analytic language may be classified according to the richness of verb and
noun morphology. Ex: Vietnamese
Synthetic lan. that average more that one morpheme per words; ex: Russian
Polysynthetic have rich morphologies, a word have ten or more affixes; Mohawk
Agglutinative words may be formed by a root and multiple affixes where they’re
Easily separated and always retain the same meaning; Swahili
Fusions (Indo-Euro) the morphemes are fused together, it’s hard to identify their base
Analogic change a generalization of rules that reduces the number of exceptional
Petroglyph cave art
Pictographs picture writing (甲骨文)
Emoticons (emoji) use by electronic communication; Email, Instagram, Twitter…
Ideogram when the drawing of pictograms become less literal (指事字)
Cuneiform wedge-shaped 楔形文字
Logographic (word writing) cuneiform script represent words of the language directly
Logograms the symbols of word writing
Syllabic writing (syllabary) each syllable in the lan. is represented by its own symbol
Photographic symbol standing for the sounds that represent the work 同音不同字
Rebus principle if # means sun, sentence like “My # is a doctor.”
Consonantal alphabet (abjad)
Hieroglyphics a writing system used in Egypt that began as Photographic writing
Alphabetic writing a system in which both consonants and vowels are symbolized