| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Competence | A person's potential linguistic ability based upon his knowledge of the language |
| Performance | The actual performance based upon, but not necessarily equal to, one's linguistic competence |
| Mode of transmission, semanticity, pragmatic function | Both animal "languages" and human languages have... |
| Displacement, creativity, discreetness | The three main things that human language has that animal speak doesn't are... |
| Lateralized | The brain, having two sides, is... |
| Aphasia | One of the strongest pieces of evidence that language function is localized in the brain is... |
| Mental lexicon | The list in our head of the words we have knowledge of |
| Free morphemes | Morphemes that can stand alone and be correct (data, horse, Quizlet) |
| Bound morphemes | Morphemes that cannot stand on their own (un-, -ation, -s) |
| Derivational morpheme | A morpheme that changes the word (it may or may not change the grammatical kind) |
| Constituents of a sentence | The various phrases (VP, NP, PP, etc.) in a sentence are the... |
| Sentiental Complement Verbs | Verbs that require a complementizer (e.g. I think, I say...) |
| Stative adjectives | Adjectives that are essential (red truck, yellow bus) |
| Nonstative adjectives | Adjectives that are not essential (you are cruel, etc.) |
| Abstract nouns | Nouns that refer to abstract things such as love, justice, or mercy |
| Adjunct | A piece of a sentence that you may, but are not forced to, add on (e.g. an adjective in a NP) |
| Echo question | A question according to the model: "You ate what?" |
| Subject-auxiliary inversion | The phenomenon whereby the auxiliary and the subject are inverted so that the aux comes first (e.g. "Which one do you want?") |
| Particle movement | A type of transformation in which a particle is moved |
| Passive transformation | A kind of transformation in which the sentence is changed from the active voice to the passive |
| Ideational Theory of Meaning | A theory related to semantics that says that a word's meaning is the image in the mind's eye that goes with it |
| Referential Theory of Meaning | A theory related to semantics that says that a word's meaning is the real object it refers to |
| Deictic words | Words whose meaning is based upon the context (who, it, her, him) |
| Principal of Compositionality | The idea that a sentence derives its semantic meaning from the words that compose it |
| Locutionary act | A speech act |
| Perlocutionary effect | The effect our speech has |
| Illocutionary force | The effect or response a speaker meant to make in giving a speech |
| International Phonetic Alphabet | A standard alphabet (perhaps the first) for representing all sounds |
| Pulmonic egressive airflow mechanism | The sort of lung-based mechanism most languages employ (although some languages use other mechanisms, e.g. clicks in African languages) |
| Velaric ingressive airflow mechanism | The mechanism whereby some African languages use clicks |
| Vocal folds | Another way of saying vocal cords |
| The restriction of air in the glottis, resulting in vibrations | Voiced sound is produced by... |
| Articulators | With regards to linguistics, the teeth, lips, and tongue are all... |
| Register tone language | A language, like Chinese, that makes semantic distinction between tones of varying pitch |
| Natural class | A group of sounds that share certain features |
| Allomorph | A sub-stratum under phoneme, a particular expression of a given phoneme |
| Minimal pair | A pair of words that differ only in one sound/phoneme |
| Contrastive distribution | If two sounds are of different phonemes and are located in the same phonetic environment, they are said to be in... |
| Free variation | If two sounds are in the same environment but it doesn't make a difference—that is, if they can be switched without changing the word, they are said to be in... |
| Contrastive distribution and free variation | The two types of overlapping distribution |
| Overlapping distribution | Distribution of two different sounds in the same environment |
| Complementary distribution | If two sounds are never in the same environment they are said to be in... (the opposite of overlapping distribution) |
| Allophones of the same phoneme | If two sounds are in complementary distribution they are... |
| Reinforcement | The most obvious theory of language acquisition is that of... |
| Imitation | The second-most-obvious theory of language acquisition is that of... |
| Mutual intelligibility | The basic criterion for a dialect (besides Chinese) is that of... |
| Communicative isolation | Often language change occurs due to geography, due to... |
| Standard dialect | Most languages have their version of SAE, their... |
| Dialectologist hypothesis | The theory that AAE is due to the fact that the slave owners and English-speakers that slaves knew spoke a southern breed of English |
| Creolist hypothesis | The theory that AAE is due to the particular community and society and situation of the slaves in olden times |
| Paradigm leveling | A type of analogic change whereby irregular verb inflections become regular, or leveled |
| Pejoration | The linguistic phenomenon whereby a word acquires a negative connotation |
| Amelioration | The linguistic phenomenon whereby a word acquires a better connotation than it originally had |
| Adstratal, substratal, and suberstratal | The three types of relationships between languages are... |
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