名词解释
1.Inflection: it is the manifestation of grammatical relationship through the addition of
inflectional affixes such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and cases to which they are
attached.
2.Suprasegmental feature： The phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments
are called suprasegmental features; these are the phonological properties of such units as the
syllable, the word, and the sentence. the main suprasegmental ones includes stress, intonation,
and tone.
3.Speech variety：It is a term sometimes used instead of language, dialect, sociolect, pidgin,
creole,etc. because it is concered more neutral than such terms. It may also be used for different
varieties if one language, e.g. American English, Australian English, Indian English.
4.Standard language：It is also called standard variety. It is the variety of a language which has the
highest status in a community or nation and which is usually based on the speech and writing of
educated native speakers of the language.
5.Predication：Predication is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence. It is the basic unit in
the semantic analysis of the a sentence. A predication consist of argument and predicate.
6.Deep structure：It is a central theoretical term in generative grammar, opposed to surface
structure. It is the abstract syntactic representation of a sentence--an underlying level of
structural organization which specifies or the facters governing the way the sentence should be
interpreted.
7.Semantics：It is the study of meaning communicated through language. The basic task in
semantics is to show how people communicate meanings with pieces of language.
8.Euphemism：It is a mild, indirect or less offensive words or expression that replace a taboo
word.
9.Bound morpheme：It is a morpheme which can not stand by itself as a complete utterance. It
must appear with at lest one other morpheme,free or bound , like un-?? in unhappy, past tense
morpheme in worked.
10.Slang：It refers to casual, very informal speech, using expressive but informal words and
expressions.
11.Conceptualism：It is the view which holds that there is no direct link between a linguistic form
and what it refers to; rather , in the interpretation of meaning they are linked through the
medaition of concepts in the mind.
12.Phonic medium of language：the limited range of sounds that are used in human language
communication, i.e. the speech sounds
nguage acquisition device (LAD)：A hypothetical innate mechanism every normal human
child is believed to be born with, which allow them to acquire language
14.Universal Grammar：It is the genetically endowed information consisting of principles and
parameters that enable the child to deduce a grammar from the primary linguistic data.
15.Diachronic linguistics： It is a study of a language through the course of its history; therfore, it
is also called historcial linguistics.
16.Apocope：It is known as a process in which final vowels may be lost. For example, the Old
English word helpe developed into help in Modern English.
17.Truth condition：It is the fact that would have to obtain in reality to make a proposition true or
false. 18.Displacement：It means that human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events
and concepts, which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of communication.
19.Voicing：It is a phonetic feature of some sounds. It is is caused by the viberation of the vocal
cords.
20.Sentence meaning：It refers to a sentence and is a grammatical concept, and the meaning of a
sentence is often studied as the abstract , intrinsic property of the sentence itself in terms of
predication.
21. Registers：language varieties appropriate for use in particular speech situations, in contrast to
language varieties that are associated with the social or regional grouping of their customary
users. Registers are also called situational dialects
22. Performatives：They are sentences that do not state a fact or describe a state and are not
verifiable, in other words, performatives are utterances that prefome an act —"do things".
24. universal grammar：it is system of linguistic knowledge and a human species-specific gift
which exists in the mind of a normal humanbeing. It consists of a set of general conditions, or
general principles, that generate phrases and sentences.
26. Morpheme：the smallest unit of language in terms of the relationship between expression
and content, a unit that cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying or
drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.
28. Minimal pair：When two different phonetic forms are identical in every way except in one
sound element that occurs in the same position in the string, the two forms are said two form a
minimal pair.
31. Morpheme：the smallest unit of language in terms of the relationship between expression
and content, a unit that cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying or
drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.
32. Design features： Design features refers to defining properties of human language that
distinguish it from any other animal system of communication. They are arbitrariness,
productivity, duality, displacement, cultural transimission
34. Telegraphic speech：Children's telegraphic speech: Children's early multiword speech that
contains content words and lacks function words and inflectional morphemesthat contains
content words and lacks function words and inflectional morphemes.
35. Semantic shift：It means that the meaning of a word takes a departure from its original
domain as a result of its metaphorical usage. For example, the meaning of teeth has a semantic
shift when it is used in the phrase the teeth of a comb.
36. synonymy：It refers to the samesness or close similarity of meaning.The relation between
lorry and truck, room and chamber are examples of synonymy.
37. Illocutionary act：It is using a sentence to perform a function. for example, shoot the
snake may be intended as an order or a piece of advice
39. Componential analysis：a way proposed by the structural semanticists to analyze word
meaning., which believe that the meaning of a word can be further divided into smaller units
called semantic features.
40. Voicing：It is a phonetic feature of some sounds. It is is caused by the viberation of the
vocal cords.
41. Diachronic linguistics：It is a study of a language through the course of its history; therfore, it
is also called historcial linguistics.