Linguistics: Terms

 

Linguistics: Core Areas

A. Syntax

Merge

1. A basic structure-building operation in generative syntax that takes two syntactic objects (X, Y) and combines them into a single hierarchical constituent {X, Y}, forming the basis of phrase structure.
2. Example: Merge(“eat”, “apples”) → [VP eat apples]

Move (Internal Merge)

1. A syntactic operation that remerges an already existing constituent in a higher position to satisfy interface conditions such as feature checking (e.g., EPP, WH-movement).
2. Example: “What did John eat t?” where what moves from object position to clause-initial position.

Feature Valuation

1. A mechanism in Minimalist Syntax where uninterpretable features (e.g., φ-features, case) are assigned values via Agree relations with interpretable counterparts.
2. Example: Subject “she” values Tense features in “She walks.”

X-bar Theory

1. A principle of phrase structure positing that all syntactic projections follow a uniform hierarchical schema (X°, X′, XP), ensuring structural consistency across categories.
2. Example: A noun phrase like “the tall student” is structured as [DP the [NP tall [N student]]].

Functional vs. Lexical Categories

1. Lexical categories carry semantic content (N, V, A, P), while functional categories encode grammatical relations (T, C, D, Agr), often abstract and closed-class.
2. Example: “She will go” → “will” (Tense = functional), “go” (verb = lexical)

B. Morphology

Free Morpheme

1. A morpheme that can stand independently as a word without requiring attachment to another form.
2. Example: “book”, “run”

Bound Morpheme

1. A morpheme that cannot occur independently and must attach to a host stem.
2. Example: “-s” in “cats”, “un-” in “undo”

Inflectional Morphology

1. Morphological processes that modify a word’s grammatical features (tense, number, agreement) without altering lexical category or core meaning.
2. Example: “walk” → “walked”

Derivational Morphology

1. Morphology that creates new lexical items by changing meaning and/or syntactic category.
2. Example: “happy” → “happiness”

Allomorphy

1. The phenomenon where a single morpheme has multiple phonological realizations conditioned by environment.
2. Example: plural {-s} → [s] in “cats”, [z] in “dogs”, [ɪz] in “buses”

Clitics

1. Morphemes that are syntactically independent but phonologically dependent on a host word.
2. Example: English “’s” in “John’s book”

C. Phonetics & Phonology

Phoneme vs. Allophone

1. A phoneme is an abstract contrastive sound unit; allophones are its contextually conditioned surface variants.
2. Example: /p/ is aspirated [pʰ] in “pin” but unaspirated [p] in “spin”

Distinctive Features

1. Binary phonological properties (e.g., [+voice], [-nasal]) that define phoneme contrasts in a language.
2. Example: /b/ = [+voice], /p/ = [-voice]

Syllable Structure

1. The hierarchical organization of speech sounds into onset, nucleus, and coda constituents.
2. Example: “cat” = onset /k/, nucleus /æ/, coda /t/

Phonological Rules

1. Systematic operations that map underlying representations to surface forms via predictable sound changes.
2. Example: Vowel nasalization before nasal consonants: /æ/ → [æ̃] in “man”

D. Semantics & Pragmatics

Compositionality

1. The principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and their syntactic combination.
2. Example: “red car” = red(x) ∧ car(x)

Entailment vs. Presupposition

1. Entailment is a logical consequence that must be true if the sentence is true; presupposition is background assumption that survives negation.
2. Example:

• Entailment: “Ali killed the snake” → “The snake is dead”
• Presupposition: “Ali stopped smoking” → presupposes “Ali used to smoke”

Deixis

1. Context-dependent reference anchored to speaker, time, or location (person, temporal, spatial deixis).
2. Example: “I am here now” depends on speaker identity, place, and time.

Speech Acts

1. Utterances viewed as actions (locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary) that perform functions beyond description.
2. Example: “I apologize” performs the act of apologizing.

2. Applied & Interdisciplinary Subfields

A. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics

Lexical Access

1. The cognitive retrieval process by which stored word representations are accessed during comprehension or production.
2. Example: Recognizing “dog” activates semantic and phonological nodes in the mental lexicon.

Structural Priming

1. The tendency to reuse syntactic structures recently processed or produced.
2. Example: After hearing “The boy gave the girl a book,” a speaker is more likely to say “She sent him a letter.”

Broca’s Area

1. Left inferior frontal gyrus region associated with syntactic processing and speech production.
2. Example: Damage may lead to non-fluent, agrammatic speech.

Wernicke’s Area

1. Posterior superior temporal gyrus region associated with language comprehension and semantic processing.
2. Example: Damage results in fluent but semantically incoherent speech.

ERP Components (N400 / P600)

1. N400 reflects semantic integration difficulty; P600 reflects syntactic reanalysis or repair processes in brain responses.
2. Example: “I drink coffee with socks” elicits a strong N400 response.

B. Computational & Corpus Linguistics

Parsing

1. The computational or cognitive process of assigning syntactic structure to a string of words.
2. Example: Parsing “The cat ate fish” into subject–verb–object structure.

Tokenization

1. The segmentation of text into minimal processing units (tokens) such as words, punctuation, or subwords.
2. Example: “don’t” → “do”, “n’t”

Concordance

1. A corpus analysis method that displays occurrences of a word in its immediate linguistic context.
2. Example: Viewing “run” across multiple sentence contexts in a corpus tool.

Collocation

1. A statistically significant co-occurrence of lexical items within a given context window.
2. Example: “strong tea” (not powerful tea)

Vector Space Models

1. Distributional semantic models representing words as high-dimensional vectors based on contextual co-occurrence patterns.
2. Example: “king” and “queen” have nearby vector representations in embedding space.

C. Translation Studies

Equivalence (Formal vs. Dynamic)

1. Formal equivalence prioritizes structural/literal correspondence; dynamic equivalence prioritizes functional/meaning-based equivalence.
2. Example:

• Formal: “It is raining cats and dogs” → literal translation
• Dynamic: translated as “It is raining heavily”

Skopos Theory

1. A functionalist translation theory asserting that translation strategies are determined by the purpose (skopos) of the target text.
2. Example: A medical manual is translated for clarity rather than stylistic fidelity.

Untranslatability

1. The condition where source-language meanings cannot be fully rendered due to cultural, lexical, or structural gaps.
2. Example: Japanese “wabi-sabi” lacks a direct English equivalent.

3. Major Linguistic Theories

A. Formalism vs. Functionalism

Formalism

1. A theoretical orientation that explains linguistic structure through abstract, rule-governed, often innate systems independent of communicative function.
2. Example: Generative grammar modeling sentence structure via hierarchical rules.

Functionalism

1. A framework that explains linguistic structure in terms of communicative function, usage patterns, and cognitive/social constraints.
2. Example: Word order explained by information structure (topic–comment organization).

B. The Minimalist Program / Generative Grammar

Universal Grammar (UG)

1. A hypothesized innate set of structural principles and parameters that constrain all possible human languages.
2. Example: All languages distinguish nouns and verbs at some abstract level.

Faculty of Language (FL)

1. The cognitive system underlying human linguistic capacity, often divided into FLN (narrow syntax) and FLB (broader cognitive systems).
2. Example: Recursive syntax considered part of FLN.

Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT)

1. The hypothesis that language is optimally designed, consisting of the simplest computational operations that interface efficiently with conceptual-intentional and sensory-motor systems.
2. Example: Complex sentences arise from repeated application of Merge as the only structure-building operation.