Course:ASTU402/2019WT1/Course Glossary

Accent : In sociolinguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation (New Oxford American Dictionary, Ed 2 2005)

Articulator: Speech organs, or articulators, produce the sounds of language. Organs used for speech include the lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum (soft palate), uvula, glottis and various parts of the tongue. (Knight, Phonetics – a coursebook, 2012)

Cognition: the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. (Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2016)

Creole: a pidgin that has become consistent and acquired as a first language.

Pidgin: a simplified means of communication developed through contact of two different languages.

Dialect : A variety of language associated with a subset of a language’s speakers (Oxford Living Dictionary 2019)

Gesture: Non-verbal communication used in place of or alongside spoken or signed language.

Grammar: the principles that govern the composition of phrases, clauses, and words. (Chung and Pullum, Grammar, Linguistics Society of America). Thus, grammar minimally includes both syntax and morphology, but to some, also phonology.

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): one-to-one system of phonetic notation, used to represent all the sounds of spoken language. (International Phonetic Association, Handbook)

Intonation: how the voice rises and falls in speech (Cambridge Dictionary).

Language family : A group of "genetically related" languages, that is, languages which share a linguistic kinship by virtue of having developed from a common ancestor. Examples of language families include Indo-European, Algonquian and Austronesian. (Campbell 2013:173, 'Historical Linguistics')

Language revitalization : “At its most extreme, [it] refers to the development of programs that result in re-establishing a language which has ceased being the language of communication in the speech community and bringing it back into use in all walks of life. […] [It] can also begin with a less extreme case of loss […] [where a language is] still the first language of many children and used in many homes as the language of communication, though [the language] is losing ground. For these speech communities, revitalization would mean turning this decline around. (Hinton Green Book pg 5)

Morpheme: the smallest unit of language that carries its own meaning (Cambridge Dictionary)

Morphology: the study of the form of words and phrases (Cambridge Dictionary)

Orthography: written representation of a language.

Perception: most commonly refers to the perceptual mapping from the highly variable acoustic speech signal to a linguistic representation, whether it be phonemes, diphones, syllables, or words (Holt & Lotto, Speech perception as categorization, Atten Percept Psychophys (2010) 72: 1218)

Phone: a unit of sound (Cambridge Dictionary)

Phoneme: a unit of speech that can be used to differentiate between words (Cambridge Dictionary)

Phonetics: the study of speech sounds (Cambridge Dictionary)

Phonology: the study of how sounds are organized and used in natural languages (SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms)

Pragmatics: a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. (Mey, Pragmatics: An Introduction, 1993)

Semantics: the study of meaning in a language (Cambridge University)

Stress: Stress, in phonetics, intensity given to a syllable of speech by special effort in utterance, resulting in relative loudness (Encyclopedia Britannica).

Syntax: the rules that govern the structure of sentences, including their word order.

Transcription: a written record of words (Cambridge Dictionary)

Voicing: descriptor used to distinguish if a speech sound is produced by the vibration of the vocal cords (Encyclopedia Britannica).