Test 1 Study Guide - Descriptive Grammar English | ENGL 2710, Study notes of English Language

Download Test 1 Study Guide - Descriptive Grammar English | ENGL 2710 and more Study notes English Language in PDF only on Docsity! Chapter 1: A Language like English  Metathesis: a systematic process of sound change, the reversal, or switching places, of two sounds. Ex. Aks for ask  Signifier (the string of sounds) + signified (be that a real-world object or an abstract idea)= sign  Process of Language o Proto-Language: one for which we have no written evidence, but which we can infer from comparison of its descendants and development of the laws according to which it sounds and word-forms changed o Dead languages: are not dead because they do not exist anymore, but are dead because they have ceased to change o William Labov  Internal: those inherent to the structure, especially the phonological structure of the language  Social: those that depend on the behavior of speech communities  Cognitive: those that depend on our comprehension of the language and on our mind’s language processes Chapter 2: Language and Authority  Samuel Johnson  Descriptive approach- how is the word being used?  Prescriptive-established notions of “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, judge the correctness of utterances and try to enforce on formal norm  Who- subject; nomative- he  Whom- objects of preposition, direct object, indirect object- him  Hyper correction: over correcting, an attempt to speak correctly that results in a supposed “error”  Dictionaries: written by people, people who make mistakes and are biased and make up things. Should approach is questioning  Webster- wanted America to have a dictionary  Robert Cowth- Double negative; prescriptive of English language; descriptive and style are equal  George Campbell- grammar- descripitive (how is it used), rhetoric- style- ought; prescriptive Chapter 3: English Phonology  Language is systematic  Phonetics- study of sounds, how sounds work o Articulatory- focuses on how sounds are produced o Acoustic- focuses on how sounds are transmitted o Auditory- focuses on how the ear translate sound waves into electrical impulses to the brain and how the brain perceives these sounds  Phonology- sounds’ relationships to each other  Phonemes- smallest unit of sound that has meaning  Allophones- variant of a sound that does not change meaning for us or we hear it as the same thing  Natural Class- group of symbols that share a common feature; over lap  Voiced fricative: in between vowels (inter vocals), between vowel and voiced sound  Un voiced fricatives: everywhere else  Phonological Rules- describes what happens in linguistic change o Assimilation: describe the ways in which sound becomes more similar to surrounding sounds. Ex. Im- followed by a bilabial o Deletion: a process in which sounds become omitted o Insertion: sounds are added o Metathesis: process where sounds reverse their order o Ablaut- inflect a word by changing the vowel sound  swim, swam, swum Chapter 4: Morphology  Morphology: word structure  Morpheme: units of sound that have and can stand alone, some cannot stand alone  Morphological classes: o Closed class: don’t accept new members often, members don’t change form often (conjunctions, pronouns, determiners, prepositions, and inflectional suffixes), help us distinguish relationships of words o Open class: accept new members and change (noun, verb, adjectives, adverbs, derivational) o Allomorphs: -en, -s, -i (plural markers) o Bound morphemes: morphemes that cannot stand alone and have to attach to other morphemes o Free morphemes: can stand alone and can bind to other morphemes to make a word o Inflectional: change a word so that it is still a part of its lexical category  Conjugation, declension  Inflectional morphemes  Nouns o Plural –s o Possessive –‘s  Verbs o Third-person singular present tense –s o Progressive –ing o Past tense –ed o Past participle –ed/-en  Adjectives o Comparative –er o Superlative –est o Derivational: derive verb from noun- shift in lexical categories  Verb to noun to adjective