Introduction to Linguistics Exam 1

prestige dialect - answer-the dialect usually spoken by people in positions of power, and the one deemed correct by prescriptive grammarians standard dialect - answer-the dialect considered to be the norm teaching grammar - answer-a set of language rules written to help speakers learn a foreign language or a different dialect of their language gloss - answer-a word in one language given to express the meaning of a word in another language Universal Grammar (UG) - answer-the innate principles and properties that pertain to the grammars of all human languages linguistic theory - answer-a theory of the principles that characterize all human languages American Sign Language (ASL) - answer-the sign language used by the deaf community in the United States monogenetic theory of language origin - answer-the belief that all languages originated from a single language Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - answer-the proposition that the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive the world around them linguistic determinism - answer-the strongest form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that the language we speak establishes how perceive and think about the world linguistic relativism - answer-a weaker form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that different languages encode different categories, and that speakers of different languages therefore think about the world in different ways phonology - answer-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 morphology - answer-the study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation lexicon - answer-the component of the grammar containing speakers' knowledge about morphemes and words; a speakers' mental dictionary syntax - answer-the rules of sentence formation; the component of the mental grammar that represents speakers' knowledge of the structure of phrases and sentences semantics - answer-the study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences mental grammar - answer-the internalized grammar that a descriptive grammar attempts to model recast - answer-the repetition with "corrections" of a child's utterance by an adult analogy - answer-the use of one form as an exemplar by which other forms can be similarly constructed connectionism - answer-modeling grammars through the use of networks consisting of simple neuron-like units connected in complex ways so that different connections vary in strength, and can be strengthened or weakened through exposure to linguistic data child-directed speech (CDS) - answer-the special intonationally exaggerated speech that some adults sometimes use to speak with small children, sometimes called baby talk innateness hypothesis - answer-the theory that the human species is genetically equipped with a Universal Grammar, which provides the basic design for all human languages impoverished data - answer-also called poverty of the stimulus; 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 structure dependent - answer-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; the way children construct rules using their knowledge of syntactic structure irrespective of the specific words in the structure of their meaning babbling - answer-speech sounds produced in the first few months after birth that gradually come to include only sounds that occur in the language of the household holophrastic stage - answer-the stage of child language acquisition in which one word conveys a complex message similar to that of a phrase or sentence trochaic - answer-stress on the first syllable of a two-syllable word iambic - answer-stress on the second syllable of a two-syllable word