ARTS1691 - Definitions
- A description of the speaker's competence (e.g. a list constructed of all their knowledge)
- The competence of a speaker
- E.g. dindin, booboo.
- Aphasia
- Loss of ability to understand or express speech, due to brain damage
- Transition Network
- A graphical (network) representation of syntactic and semantic grammatical connections
- Reduplication
- The process of repeating part of a word or syllable with at most a slight modification. Often used in motherese.
- Agrammatic
- A form of speech aphasia which prevents you from speaking with correct grammar
- Alphabetic Language
- A language translated by ear.
- Brain
- All neurological structures above the spinal cord
- Calque
- A word translated from one language to another by literally translating each concept. E.g. Ubermensch to Superman.
- Collocation
- In frequency analysis, the return of appearances of multiple search terms together
- Concordance
- In frequency analysis, the return of search terms together with their immediate context
- Content Words
- Words with semantic context - nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
- Elision
- The omission of a sound or syllable (often for purposes of sound flow)
- Epenthesis
- The addition of a sound or syllable (often for purposes of sound flow)
- Euphemisms
- Alternate, softer, words for taboo words.
- Function Words
- Words there purely for grammatical reasons - pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions
- Garden Path Sentences
- Anything designed to deliberately trick your mental parser into reading it wrong/confusingly
- Grammar
- Gyri
- The folded out tissue of the cerebral cortex
- Human Language Processing
- Area of linguistics concerned with how we use linguistic competence in production and comprehension of language.
- Interlinear Gloss
- Words written in between the lines of a text to comment on the text or its translations (e.g. metawriting).
- Intuition
- Conscious application of knowledge/competence (e.g. when you look at a sentence and conclude it is wrong, without knowing quite why).
- Kenning
- A metaphorical compound phrase (e.g. oar-steed = ship)
- Language
- a dialect with an army and a navy. I.e. the dialect spoken by those in power becomes the language.
- Lateralisation
- When a cognitive function takes place in only one hemisphere it is said to be lateralised.
- Linguistic Competence
- What we know (basically see above)
- Linguistic Determinism
- (Rubbish). The theory (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) that our language controls how we understand our world.
- Linguistic Knowledge
- Knowledge of sound system, words and sentences+non-sentences
- Linguistic Performance
- How we use what we know in actual speech comprehension and production.
- Linguistic Relativism
- (Also rubbish). Weaker theory of linguistic determinism – speakers of different languages think about the world in different ways. Theories against this include bilinguality.
- Longitudinal Fissure
- the large fissure that runs from front to back of the cerebral cortex. It separates the left and right cerebral hemispheres.
- Metathesis
- Transposition of Sounds
- Morphology
- rules for word formation (e.g. “happiness” not “nesshappy”)
- Neurolinguistics
- Language and the Brain
- Orthographical
- A method of representing sounds of a language by transcribing them (essentially writing).
- Paleography
- The science of reading texts
- Phonology
- Rules for combining sounds into words (e.g. bat not abt)
- Psycholinguistic Processing
- the area of linguistics concerned with how we use linguistic competence in production and comprehension of language
- Psycholinguistics
- Language and the Mind
- Referentiality
- The ability to talk about things that aren't there. This distinguishes human language from others (except bees)
- Retronyms
- words combined to create a more clarified meaning of a phrase, based on differentiation from more common meanings.
- Semantics
- Rules for assigning meaning (agreed upon convention)
- Slang
- colloquial use of language.
- Sound System
- Knowledge of sounds within the language, and what sounds can start words, end words, and follow other sounds.
- Sulci
- The folded in tissue of the cerebral cortex
- Superstratum
- The language of the imposing nation/group of people.
- Syntax
- Rules for combining words → phrases → sentences (e.g. “the boy” not “boy the”)
- Taboo
- Acts that are forbidden, or at the least to be avoided. Sometimes referential words take on these taboo properties.
- The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax
- that the eskimoes have 234923490234 words for snow, which is wrong but also kind of irrelevant – English speakers who spend time in snow (skiers etc) have just as many words.
- Universals
- The features all languages have in common
- Words (knowledge thereof)
- Knowledge of the sound sequences that make up concepts and meanings, and of the arbitrary relationship between them (sounds and meanings).
page revision: 15, last edited: 05 Sep 2011 11:12