Chapter 1: Introduction
1. Linguistics: Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language. 8. langue: Lange refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community.
9. parole :Parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use.
10. competence : The ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language.
11.performance : The actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication.
12. language : Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.
13.design features : Design features refer to the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication.
14. arbitrariness: Arbitrariness refers to no logical connection between meaning and sound.
15. productivity: Users can understand and produce sentences that they have never heard before.
16. duality: Language consists of two sets of structure, with lower lever of sound, which is meaningless, and the higher lever of meaning.
17. displacement: Language can be used to refer to the contexts removed from the immediate situation of the speaker no matter how far away from the topic of conversation in time or space.
18. cultural transmission: Language is culturally transmitted. It is taught and learned from one generation to the next, rather than by instinct. Chapter 2: Phonology
1. phonic medium : The meaningful speech sound in human communication.
2. phonetics : The study of phonic medium of language and it is concerned with all sounds in the world’s languages.
3. articulatory phonetics : It studies sounds from the speaker’s point of view, i.e. how a speaker uses his speech organs to articulate the sounds.
4. auditory phonetics: The studies sounds from the hearer’s point of view, i.e. how the sounds are perceived by the hearer.
5. acoustic phonetics: It studies the way sounds travel by looking at the sound waves, the physical means by which sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to another.
6. voicing: the way that sounds are produced with the vibration of the vocal cords. 7. voiceless: the way that sounds are produced with no vibration of the vocal cords. 8. broad transcription: The use of letter symbols only to show the sounds or sounds sequences in written form.
9. narrow transcription: The use of letter symbol, together with the diacritics to show sounds in written form.
10. diacritics: The symbols used to show detailed articulatory features of sounds.
11. IPA: short for International Phonetic Alphabets, a system of symbols consists of letters and diacritics, used to represent the pronunciation of words in any language. 12. aspiration: A little puff of air that sometimes follows a speech sound.
13. manner of articulation : The manner in which obstruction is created. 14. place of articulation : The place where obstruction is created.
15. consonant: a speech sound in which the air stream is obstructed in one way or another.
16. vowel : a speech sound in which the air stream from the lung meets with no obstruction.
17. monophthong : the individual vowel.
18. diphthong : The vowel which consists of two individual vowels, and functions as a single one.
19. phone : The speech sound we use when speaking a language.
20. phoneme : The smallest unit of sound in a language which can distinguish two sounds.
21. allophone : any different forms of the same phoneme in different phonetic environments.
22. phonology : The description of sound systems of particular languages and how sounds function to distinguish meaning.
23. phonemic contrast : two similar sounds occur in the same environment and distinguish meaning.
24. complementary distribution : allophones of the same phoneme and they don’t distinguish meaning but complement each other in distribution.
25. minimal pair: two different forms are identical in every way except one sound and occurs in the same position. The two sounds are said to form a minimal pair.
26. sequential rules: The rules to govern the combination of sounds in a particular language.
27. assimilation rule: The rule assimilates one sound to another by copying a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones similar.
28. deletion rule: The rule that a sound is to be deleted although it is orthographically represented.
29. suprasegmental features: The phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments----syllable, word, sentence.
30. tone: Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords.
31. intonation: When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation. Chapter 3: Morphology
1. morphology: A branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words and rules for word formation.
2. open class: A group of words, which contains an unlimited number of items, and new words can be added to it.
3. closed class: A relatively few words, including conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns, and new words are not usually added to them.
4. morpheme: The smallest unit of meaning of a language. It can not be divided without altering or destroying its meaning.
5. affix: a letter or a group of letter, which is added to a word, and which changes the
meaning or function of the word, including prefix, infix and suffix.
6. suffix: The affix, which is added to the end of a word, and which usually changes the part of speech of a word.
7. prefix: The affix, which is added to the beginning of a word, and which usually changes the meaning of a word to its opposite.
8. bound morpheme: Morpheme that can not be used alone, and it must be combined wit others. E.g. –ment.
9. free morpheme: a morpheme that can stand alone as a word.
10. derivational morpheme: Bound morpheme, which can be added to a stem to form a new word.
11. inflectional morpheme: A kind of morpheme, which are used to make grammatical categories, such as number, tense and case.
12. morphological rules: The ways words are formed. These rules determine how morphemes combine to form words.
13. compound words: A combination of two or more words, which functions as a single words
14. inflection: the morphological process which adjusts words by grammatical modification, e.g. in The rains came, rain is inflected for plurality and came for past tense.
Chapter 4: Syntax
1. syntax: A branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences.
2. category: It refers to a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such as a sentence, a noun phrase or a verb.
6. phrase: syntactic units that are built around a certain word category are called phrase, the category of which is determined by the word category around which the phrase is built.
8. head: The word round which phrase is formed is termed head.
9. specifier: The words on the left side of the heads are said to function as specifiers. 10. complement: The words on the right side of the heads are complements.
11. phrase structure rule: The special type of grammatical mechanism that regulates the arrangement of elements that make up a phrase is called a phrase structure rule. 14. coordination: Some structures are formed by joining two or more elements of the same type with the help of a conjunction such as and or or. Such phenomenon is known as coordination.
15. subcategorization: The information about a word’s complement is included in the head and termed suncategorization.
16. complementizer: Words which introduce the sentence complement are termed complementizer.
17. complement clause: The sentence introduced by the complementizer is called a complement clause.
18. complement phrase: the elements, including a complementizer and a complement clause is called a complement phrase.
19. matrix clause: the contrusction in which the complement phrase is embedded is