1. *Prescriptive grammar:* The grammar that we are taught in school. Typically a prescriptive grammar is about the "shoulds and shouldn'ts" in a language rather than a description of what speakers actually know when they know a language. Prescriptive grammars typically reflect the grammar of a written standard and are concerned with making determinations about the "correct" choice when there are potential variants (e.g. in English, we can choose to either separate a preposition from the noun it modifies [What did you play with?] or not to do so [With what did you play]). The prescriptive grammar of English says that only one of those is "correct" even though all speakers of English have the option.
2. *Standard language:* The variety of a language that serves as the model for what is "correct" and "incorrect" for a given language. The standard language is generally the one that is written.
3. *Dialect:* A variety of a language with a grammar that differs in predictable ways from other varieties of the language. In many places, “dialects” are especially tied to different regions or geographic areas.
4. *Generative grammar:* The idea that a finite set of rules or constraints can generate [e.g. produce as an output] an infinite number of utterances, many of them novel. This model shows that native speakers of a language acquire a set of rules and a lexicon rather than specific sentences.
5. *Phonetics:* The study of the sounds we use to produce/interpret speech.
6. *Phonology:* The study of the sounds that occur in specific languages and the rules or constraints that govern when they occur.
7. *Morphology:* The study of the units of meaning (words, prefixes etc.) in a language and their patterns of occurrence.
8. *Lexicon:* The set of morphemes in a language.
9. *Root:* The main meaning morpheme in a word and the morpheme to which affixes attach (e.g. in 'untie', the root is 'tie').
10. *Inflection:* The morphology that governs grammatical relationships between words (e.g. the 3rd person, present verb marker in English [-s] tells us something about the relationship between the noun and the verb).
11. *Derivation:* The morphology that governs how new meanings are created (e.g. if I attach the prefix 'un-' to a verb like 'tie', I create a new meaning--namely the opposite of the original word).
12. *Syntax:* The study of the construction of sentences in a language. This includes the linear order (e.g. Subject Verb Object vs. Subject Object Verb) as well as the relationships between the parts of the sentence.
13. *Semantics:* The study of meaning (e.g. what does "open" mean).
14. *Pragmatics:* The study of meaning in context (e.g. "the door is open" can have different interpretations depending on the context).
15. *Diachronic:* The study of language across time (e.g. the history of the changes in a language).
16. *Synchronic:* The study of language at a specific point in time.
17. *Pidgin:* A language that often has a simplified grammar and lexicon and that is used as a kind of lingua franca among speakers who don't share a native language. Pidgins are typically not anyone's native language.
18. *Creole:* A pidgin that has been expanded to fulfill all the functions of a human language and that has become some group of speakers' native language. Of some potential confusion is the fact that creoles are often called pidgins by their speakers.
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