Discussion Board

Language and the Mind
Some Characteristics of Human Language

From Brown University

arbitrary adj. with respect to linguistics, refers to the fact that the sounds of words typically have no relationship to their meanings (with the exception of cases of sound symbolism)

articulation n. the movements made by the vocal apparatus in pronouncing speech sounds.

aspirated adj. pertaining to stop consonants that are followed by a minute puff of air when pronounced, e.g. the /p/ in pin vs. /p/ in spin.

automatized adj. refers to behavior that is "overlearned" to the point not only of being performed rapidly and unconsciously, but of being incapable of being interrupted or modified by conscious effort. Speech perception and sometimes parsing are often considered to be automatized processes.

clause n. a sentence or its equivalent, usually consisting of a subject and a predicate.

closed class n., see grammatical symbols; the term closed refers to the fact that new members of this class rarely enter the language.

continuant n. a kind of consonant that can be produced continuously, e.g. /m/ or /z/, as opposed to a stop.

conventional adj. based on usage or custom; with respect to language, refers to the fact that aspects of language are regulated by social norms.

conversational turn n. one of the alternating units that make up a discourse among several speakers.

creative adj. refers to the capacity of language users to produce and understand an indefinitely large number of sentences, most of which they have not heard or used before; this property is also known as productivity

diachronic adj. across a period of time; at different times.

discrete adj. refers to the properties of language that (a) continuous changes in the acoustic signal result not in continuous changes in a perceived speech sounds but in perceptually distinct sounds (a phenomenon also known as categorical perception), and (b) semantically, changes in meaning result from the combination of discrete units (e.g., phonemes, words) rather than from continuous modulation in the signals.

discrete infinity n. the property that languages are able to produce an infinity of utterances (and meanings) as result of being discrete (see definition (b) above) and recursive.

discourse n. a spoken or written text of some length - monologue or dialogue; a set of connected utterances.

distributional adj. refers to the regular positional, contextual or "environmental" relationships among linguistic units (e.g., phonemes, morphemes, grammatical categories or phrases); for example, the regularity in English that articles appear before nouns (or nouns preceded by adjectives) to form noun phrases is a distributional aspect of those classes.

dorso-velar adj. pertaining to a place of articulation where the dorsal surface (top) of the tongue touches the velum (rear part of the roof of the mouth), as in producing, e.g., /g/ or /k/.

duality of patterning n. the "design feature" (In Hockett's terminology) of language such that a small stock of meaningless sounds can be combined in numerous permutations to make up a very large number of meaningful units (words).

formant n. one of several distinct sound frequencies at which maximal energy passes through the oral cavity when a vowel is produced; different vowels have different sets of formant frequencies which give them their distinct sound.

functional symbols n. see grammatical symbols.

grammatical symbols n. the little words belonging to those grammatical categories that seem to bear little semantic content in sentences, but rather appear to serve primarily syntactic purposes, e.g., articles, pronouns, complementizers, quantifiers, perhaps prepositions, as well as inflectional morphemes.

grammar, -atical n. in general, a language user's knowledge of his/her language, sometimes described as a set of rules or conditions which generate all and only the well-formed words, phrases and clauses in a language; in the narrower sense here, the rules of phrase structure.

grammatical categories n. groups of words with common syntactic and distributional properties, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, etc.

hierarchical adj. organized in multiple levels such that each level bears some principled relationship to the ones above and below; e.g., in language, perception at the phonological level is often taken to be necessary before processes at the syntactic level can occur, and syntactic processes are in turn thought to logically precede the reconstruction of meaning at the semantic level.

hierarchically combinatoric adj. refers to the property of language that discrete units at one level of description combine in systematic fashion (often characterized as rule-based) to generate units at a higher level, as when phonemes combine to form words, words to form phrases, etc.

hierarchical structure n. the structure embodying the hierarchically combinatoric property of language; the "layers" of language from phonetic to phonological to morphological, etc. up to semantics and beyond.

inflection n. a morpheme added to a word that changes its meaning, e.g. the plural "-s" or past tense "-ed" of English.

intonation, -al n. the varying pitch across an utterance, as distinct from the sounds of individual consonants and vowels.

labial adj. pertaining to the lips, or to sounds produced by closing or constricting the lips, e.g. /p/ or /b/.

learnable adj. 1. with respect to a given language (natural or artificial), refers to the property that a learner can generate a grammar for that language.  2. with respect to a class or set of languages, refers to the property that all members of the class are learnable by definition 1.

lexical adj. pertaining to words (or morphemes) and their characteristics.

lexical access n. the process by which a member of the lexicon is identified on the basis of an acoustic or orthographic representation.

lexical symbols n. the members of those grammatical categories that bear the most semantic content (or at least the most obvious content) in sentences, i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives, perhaps some adverbs.

lexicon n. psycholinguistically, all the words (and/or morphemes) stored in an individual's mental dictionary, along with associated information about each wordís phonological form, grammatical category, and other syntactic properties; often thought of as the point of contact between a wordís sound and its syntactic, semantic, etc. properties.

lingual adj. pertaining to the tongue.

morpheme n. minimal linguistic unit of meaning, e.g., a stem or an inflection; a minimal "word".

morphology, -ical n. the system of combining morphemes to form words in a language, sometimes described as word-formation rules .

nasal n. a kind of consonant produced by diverting air through the nose, e.g. /n/ or /m/.

open adj. able to accept new members indefinitely or without limit; see, e.g., open class.

open class n., see lexical symbols; the term open refers to the fact that new members of this class can and frequently do enter the language.

parsing n. the process by which a listener or reader assigns the words of a sentence to their appropriate grammatical categories so as to determine the syntactic structure of the sentence.

phone n. a speech sound considered as a physical event without regard to its place in the sound system of a language (i.e., the phonology of that language).

phoneme n. minimal distinctive sound unit (e.g., consonant or vowel) used to form morphemes in a language.

phonetic adj. pertaining to the acoustic properties or pronunciation of speech sounds.

phonology, -ical n. the systematic sound structure of a language; sometimes, the mental "rules" that generate well-formed sound structures.

phrase n. an element of grammatical structure containing more than one word but lacking the subject-predicate structure typical of clauses.

phrase structure n. the characteristic patterns according to which words of certain grammatical categories can join to become phrases and clauses in a language; e.g., a basic Noun Phrase may consist of an article + optional adjective + noun + optional prepositional phrase, as in the big dog in the yard. 

pragmatics n. 1. the relationship between the uses of language (communication, social exchange, etc.) the context of utterance, speakerís intentions, etc., on the one hand, and linguistic form, on the other. 2. the subfield of linguistics that deals with this relationship.

predicate n. the part of a sentence that expresses the action or condition of the subject, usually a verb and words associated with it; sometimes just the verb itself.

prosody n. the intonation contour, stress pattern, and tempo of an utterance.

segmentation n. the process by which psycholinguistically discrete constituents (e.g., words or morphemes) are identified within an acoustically continuous speech stream.

semantics n. the systematic relationship between the forms of a language and their denotations (meanings) in the world.

sentence n.the largest structural unit in terms of which the grammar of a language is organized; traditionally described as the smallest unit expressing a complete thought.  The sentence appears to be a psychologically real unit of sentence planning and perception, with sentences of different types (e.g., assertions, questions) having characteristic patterns of stress, pitch, and pauses.  In generative grammar, the term "sentence" is often used for what is commonly called a clause; thus a sentence in the common sense of the term may contain several embedded sentences in this technical sense.

sound symbolism n. a semi-regular relationship between sound and meaning, as in the frequent correspondence in English between words beginning with sl- and meanings having to do with smoothness (slick, slip, sleek, etc.); there may also be less obvious relationships between phonological properties and grammatical categories.

stem n. the "root" of a word, after all inflections have been removed.

stop n. a kind of consonant that is produced by closing off the airway at some point in the throat or mouth, e.g. /p/ or /g/ or /d/.

syllable n. basic metrical (rhythmic) unit of spoken language, usually consisting of at least a vowel, with one or more consonants before or after it.

synchronic adj. at a single (or the same) point in time.

syntax, syntactic n. the systematic phrase structure of a language; sometimes, the "rules" that generate well-formed phrases and clauses.

utterance n. an instance of speech, e.g. a spoken sentence.

vowel color n. the characteristic combination of formants (sound wave frequencies, harmonics) that distinguishes one vowel from another.

word n. unit of expression that is intuitively recognized by native speakers of a language,  but notoriously hard to define in relation to other categories of linguistic description and in comparing languages of different structural types. One proposed characterization is the intermediate unit in linguistic analysis between morphemes and phrases (words are minimally one free morpheme). Also described as the most "stable" of linguistic units, with constituent parts that are fixed in order, as opposed to the positional mobility of, e.g., sentence constituents. In normal speech, words are relatively "uninterruptible" compared with larger units; few pauses occur midword.

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Last Updated 07/07/2007