Chapter 12 : Language And Brain
1. neurolinguistics: It is the study of relationship between brain and language. It includes
research into how the structure of the brain influences language learning, how and in
which parts of the brain language is stored, and
how damage to the brain affects the ability to use language.
2. psycholinguistics: the study of language processing. It is concerned with the processes
of language acqisition, comprehension and production.
3. brain lateralization: The localization of cognitive and perceptive functions in a
particular hemisphere of the brain.
4. dichotic listening: A technique in which stimuli either linguistic or non-linguistic are presented through headphones to the left and right ear to determine the
lateralization of cognitive function.
5. right ear advantage: The phenomenon that the right ear shows an advantage for the
perception of linguistic signalsid known as the right ear advantage.
6. split brain studies: The experiments that investigate the effects of surgically severing
the corpus callosum on
cognition are called as split brain studies.
7. aphasia: It refers to a number of acquired language disorders due to the cerebral lesions
caused by a tumor, an accident and so on.
8. non-fluent aphasia: Damage to parts of the brain in front of the central
sulcus is called non-fluent aphasia.
9. fluent aphasia: Damage to parts of the left cortex behind the central sulcus results in a
type of aphasia called fluent aphasia.
10. Acquired dyslexia: Damage in and around the angular gyrus of the parietal lobe often
causes the impairment of reading and writing ability, which is referred to as acquired dyslexia.
11. phonological dyslexia: it is a type of acquired dyslexia in which the patient seems to have lost the ability to use
spelling-to-sound rules.
12. surface dyslexia: it is a type of acquired dyslexia in which the patient seems unable to recognize words as whole but
must process all words through a set of spelling-to-sound rules.
13. spoonerism: a slip of tongue in which the position of sounds, syllables, or words is reversed, for example, Let’s have
chish and fips instend of Let’s have fish and chips.
14. priming: the process that before the participants make a decision whether the string of letters is a word or not,
they are presented with an activated word.
15. frequency effect: Subjects take less time to make judgement on frequently used words than to judge less commonly used
words . This phenomenon is called frequency effect.
16. lexical decision: an experiment that let participants judge whether a string of letter is a word or not at a certain time.
17. the priming experiment: An experiment that let subjects judge whether a string of letters is a word or not after
showed with a stimulus word, called prime.
18. priming effect: Since the mental representation is activated through the prime, when the target is presented, response
time is shorter that it otherwise would have been. This is called the priming effect. (06F)
19. bottom-up processing: an approach that makes use principally of information which is already present in the data.
20. top-down processing: an approach that makes use of previous knowledge and experience of the readers in analyzing and processing
information which is received.
21. garden path sentences: a sentence in which the comprehender assumes a particular meaning of a word or phrase but
discovers later that the assumption was incorrect, forcing the comprehender to backtrack and reinterpret the sentence.
22. slip of the tongue: mistakes in speech which provide psycholinguistic evidence for the way we formulate words and phrases.
Chapter 11 : Second Language Acquisition
1. second language acquisition: It refers to the systematic study of how one person acquires a second language subsequent to
his native language.
2. target language: The language to be acquired by the second language learner.
3. second language: A second language is a language which is not a native language in a country but which is widely used as
a medium of communication and which is usually used alongside another language or languages.
4. foreign language: A foreign language is a language which is taught as a school subject but which is not used as a medium
of instruction in schools nor as a language of communication within a country.
5. interlanguage: A type of language produced by second and foreign language learners, who are in the process of learning a
language, and this type of language usually contains wrong expressions.
6. fossilization: In second or foreign language learning, there is a process which sometimes occurs in which incorrect
linguistic features become a permanent part of the way a person speaks or writes a language.
7. contrastive analysis: a method of analyzing languages for instructional purposes whereby a native language and target
language are compared with a view to establishing points of difference likely to cause difficulties for learners.
8. contrastive analysis hypothesis: A hypothesis in second language acquisition. It predicts that where there are
similarities between the first and second languages, the learner will acquire second language structure with ease, where
there are differences, the learner will have difficulty.
9. positive transfer: It refers to the transfer that occur when both the native language and the target language have
the same form, thus making learning easier. (06F)
10. negative transfer: the mistaken transfer of features of one’s native language into a second language.
11. error analysis: the study and analysis of errors made by second and foreign language learners in order to identify
causes of errors or common difficulties in language learning.
12. interlingual error: errors, which mainly result from cross-linguistic interference at different levels such as phonological, lexical, grammatical etc.
13. intralingual error: Errors, which mainly result from faulty or partial learning of the target language, independent
of the native language. The typical examples are overgeneralization and cross-association.
14. overgeneralization: The use of previously available strategies in new situations, in which they are unacceptable.
15. cross-association: some words are similar in meaning as well as spelling and pronunciation. This internal interference
is called cross-association.
16. error: the production of incorrect forms in speech or writing by a non-native speaker of a second language, due to his incomplete knowledge of the rules of that target language.
17. mistake: mistakes, defined as either intentionally or unintentionally deviant forms and self-corrigible, suggest failure in performance.
18. input: language which a learner hears or receives and from which he or she can learn.
19. intake: the input which is actually helpful for the learner.
20. Input Hypothesis: A hypothesis proposed by Krashen , which states that in second language learning, it’s necessary
for the learner to understand input language which contains linguistic items that are slightly beyond the learner’s present
linguistic competence. Eventually the ability to produce language is said to emerge naturally without being taught directly.
21. acquisition: Acquisition is a process similar to the way children acquire their first language. It is a subconscious
process without minute learning of grammatical rules. Learners are hardly aware of their learning but they are using language
to communicate. It is also called implicit learning, informal learning or natural learning.
22. learning: learning is a conscious learning of second language knowledge by learning the rules and talking about the rules.
23. comprehensible input: Input language which contains linguistic items that are slightly beyond the learner’s present
linguistic competence. (06F)
24. language aptitude: the natural ability to learn a language, not including intelligence, motivation, interest, etc.
25. motivation: motivation is defined as the learner’s attitudes and affective state or learning drive.
26. instrumental motivation: the motivation that people learn a foreign language for instrumental goals such as passing
exams, or furthering a career etc. (06C)
27. integrative motivation: the drive that people learn a foreign language because of the wish to identify with the
target culture. (06C/ 05)
28. resultative motivation: the drive that learners learn a second language for external purposes. (06F)
29. intrinsic motivation: the drive that learners learn the second language for enjoyment or pleasure from learning.
30. learning strategies: learning strategies are learners’ conscious goal-oriented and problem-solving based efforts
to achieve learning efficiency.
31. cognitive strategies: strategies involved in analyzing, synthesis, and internalizing what has been learned. (07C/ 06F)
32. metacognitive strategies: the techniques in planning, monitoring and evaluating one’s learning.
33. affect/ social strategies: the strategies dealing with the ways learners interact or communicate with other
speakers, native or non-native.
Chapter 10: Language Acquisition
1. language acquisition: It refers to the child’s acquisition of his mother tongue, i.e. how the child comes to
understand and speak the language of his community.
2. language acquisition device (LAD): A hypothetical innate mechanism every normal human child is believed to be born
with, which allow them to acquire language. (03)
3. Universal Grammar: A theory which claims to account for the grammatical competence of every adult no matter what
language he or she speaks.
4. motherese: A special speech to children used by adults, which is characterized with slow rate of speed, high pitch,
rich intonation, shorter and simpler sentence structures etc.----又叫child directed speech，caretaker talk.(05)
5. Critical Period Hypothesis: The hypothesis that the time span between early childhood and puberty is the critical
period for language acquisition, during which children can acquire language without formal instruction successfully and
effortlessly. (07C/ 06F/ 04)
6. under-extension: Use a word with less than its usual range of denotation.
7. over-extension: Extension of the meaning of a word beyond its usual domain of application by young children.
8. telegraphic speech: Children’s early multiword speech that contains content words and lacks function words and
inflectional morphemes.
9. content word: Words referring to things, quality, state or action, which have lexical meaning used alone.
10. function word: Words with little meaning on their own but show grammatical relationships in and between sentences.
11. taboo: Words known to speakers but avoided in some contexts of speech for reasons of religion, politeness etc. (07C)
12. atypical development: Some acquisition of language may be delayed but follow the same rules of language development
due to trauma or injury.
Chapter 9: Language And Culture
1. culture : The total way of life of a person, including the patterns of belief, customs, objects, institutions, techniques,
and language that characterizes the life of human community.
2. discourse community : It refers to the common ways that members of some social group use language to meet their needs.
3. acculturation : A process in which changes on the language, culture and system of values of a group happen through
interaction with another group with a different language, culture and a system of values.
4. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis : The interdependence of language and thought is now known as Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
5. linguistic relativity : A belief that the way people view the world is determined wholly or partly by the structure
of their native language-----又叫Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. (06C)
6. linguistic determinism: It refers to the idea that the language we use, to some extent, determines the way in which
we view and think about the world around us. (06C)
7. denotative meaning: It refers to the literal meaning, which can be found in a dictionary.
8. connotative meaning: The association of a word, apart from its primary meaning.
9. iconic meaning: The image of a word invoked to people.
10. metaphors: A figure of speech, in which no function words like like, as are used. Something is described by stating
another thing with which it can be compared.
11. euphemism: a word or phrase that replace a taboo word or is used to avoid reference to certain acts or subjects,
e.g. powder room for toilet.
12. cultural overlap:The situation between two societies due to some similarities in the natural environment and psychology of human being
13. cultural diffusion: Through communication, some elements of culture A enter culture B and become part of culture B,
thus bringing about cultural diffusion. (05/03)
14. cultural imperialism: The situation of increasing cultural diffusion all over the world.(06C)
15. linguistics imperialism: it is a kind of kind of linguicism which can be defined as the promulgation of global
ideologies through the world-wide expansion of one language. (06C)
16. linguistic nationalism: In order to protect the purity of their language, some countries have adopted special
language policy. It is called linguistic nationalism.
17. intercultural communication: It is communication between people whose cultural perceptions and symbols are distinct
enough to alter the communication event.
18. language planning: planning, usually by a government, concerning choice of national or official language(s), ways of
spreading the use of a language, spelling reforms, the addition of new words to the language, and other language problems.
Chapter 8: Language And Society
1. sociolinguistics: The subfield of linguistics that study language variation and language use in social contexts.
2. speech community: A group of people who form a community and share at least one speech variety as well as similar linguistic norms. (05)
3. speech varieties: It refers to any distinguishable form of speech used by a speaker or a group of speakers.
4. regional dialect: A variety of language used by people living in the same geographical region.
5. sociolect: A variety of language used by people, who belong to a particular social class.
6. registers : The type of language which is selected as appropriate to the type of situation.
7. idiolect : A person’s dialect of an individual speaker that combines elements, regarding regional, social, gender and age variations. (04)
8. linguistic reportoire : The totality of linguistic varieties possessed by an individual constitutes his linguistic repertoire.
9. register theory : A theory proposed by American linguist Halliday, who believed that three social variables determine
the register, namely, field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse.
10. field of discourse : the purpose and subject matter of the communicative behavior..
11. tenor of discourse: It refers to the role of relationship in the situation in question: who the participants in the
communication groups are and in what relationship they stand to each other.
12. mode of discourse: It refers to the means of communication and it is concerned with how communication is carried out.
13. standard dialect: A superposed variety of language of a community or nation, usually based on the speech and writing
of educated native speakers of the language.
14. formality: It refers to the degree of formality in different occasions and reflects the relationship and conversations.
According to Martin Joos, there are five stages of formality, namely, intimate, casual, consultative, formal and frozen.
15. Pidgin: A blending of several language, developing as a contact language of people, who speak different languages, try
to communication with one another on a regular basis.
16. Creole : A pidgin language which has become the native language of a group of speakers used in this daily life.
17. bilingualism : The use of two different languages side by side with each having a different role to play, and language
switching occurs when the situation changes.(07C)
18. diaglossia : A sociolinguistic situation in which two different varieties of language co-exist in a speech community, each having a definite role to play.
19. Lingua Franca : A variety of language that serves as a medium of communication among groups of people, who speak
different native languages or dialects
20. code-switching: the movement back and forth between two languages or dialects within the same sentence or discourse. (04)
Chapter 7: Language Change
1. historical linguistics: A subfield of linguistics that study language change.
2. coinage: A new word can be coined to fit some purpose. (03)
3. blending: A blend is a word formed by combining parts of other words.
4. clipping: Clipping refers to the abbreviation of longer words or phrases.
5. borrowing: When different culture come into contact, words are often borrowed from one language to
another. It is also called load words.
6. back formation: New words may be coined from already existing words by subtracting an affix mistakenly
thought to be part of the old word. Such words are called back-formation.
7. functional shift: Words may shift from one part of speech to another without the addition of affixes.
8. acronyms: Acronyms are words derived from the initials of several words.
9. protolanguage: The original form of a language family, which has ceased to exist.
10. Language family: A group of historically related languages that have developed from a common ancestral language.
Chapter 6: Pragmatics
1. pragmatics: The study of how speakers uses sentences to effect successful communication.
2. context: The general knowledge shared by the speakers and the hearers. (05)
3. sentence meaning: The meaning of a self-contained unit with abstract and de-contextualized features.
4. utterance meaning: The meaning that a speaker conveys by using a particular utterance in a particular context. (03)
5. utterance: expression produced in a particular context with a particular intention.
6. Speech Act Theory: The theory proposed by John Austin and deepened by Searle, which believes that we are performing
actions when we are speaking. (05)
7. constatives: Constatives are statements that either state or describe, and are thus verifiable. (06F)
8. performatives: Performatives are sentences that don’t state a fact or describe a state, and are not verifiable.
9. locutionary act: The act of conveying literal meaning by virtue of syntax, lexicon and phonology.
10. illocutionary act: The act of expressing the speaker’s intention and performed in saying something. (06F)
11. perlocutionary act: The act resulting from saying something and the consequence or the change brought about by the utterance.
12. representatives: Stating or describing, saying what the speaker believes to be true.
13. directives: Trying to get the hearer to do something.
14. commisives: Committing the speaker himself to some future course of action.
15. expressives: Expressing feelings or attitude towards an existing state.
16. declaration: Bring about immediate changes by saying something.
17. cooperative Principle: The principle that the participants must first of all be willing to cooperate in making
conversation, otherwise, it would be impossible to carry on the talk.
18. conversational implicature:The use of conversational maxims to imply meaning during conversation.
19. formality: formality refers to the degree of how formal the words are used to express the same purpose.
Martin Joos proposed five stages of formality, namely, intimate, casual, consultative, cold, and frozen. (06F)
Chapter 5: Semantics
1. semantics: Semantics can be simply defined as the study of meaning.
2. Semantic triangle: It is suggested by Odgen and Richards, which says that the meaning of a word is not directly
linked between a linguistic form and the object in the real world, but through the mediation of concept of the mind.
3. sense : Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. It is the collection of all the features
of the linguistic form. It is abstract and de-contexturalized. It is the aspect of meaning dictionary compilers are interested in.
4. reference : Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real, physical world. It deals with the relationship
between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience.
5. synonymy: Synonymy refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning. Words that are close in meaning are called synonyms.
6. dialectal synonyms: synonyms that are used in different regional dialects.
7. stylistic synonyms: synonyms that differ in style, or degree of formality.
8. collocational synonyms: Synonyms that differ in their colllocation, i.e., in the words they go together with.
9. polysemy : The same word has more than one meaning.(05/03)
10. homonymy: Homonymy refers to the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form, i.e., different
words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both. (04)
11. homophones: When two words are identical in sound, they are homophones.
12. homographs: When two words are identical in spelling, they are homographs.
13. complete homonymy: When two words are identical in both sound and spelling, they are complete homonyms.
14. hyponymy: Hyponymy refers to the sense relation between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific word.
15. superordinate: The word which is more general in meaning is called the superordinate.
16. co-hyponyms: Hyponyms of the same superordinate are co-hyponyms.
17. antonymy: The term antonymy is used for oppositeness of meaning.
18. gradable antonyms: Some antonyms are gradable because there are often intermediate forms between the two members of
a pair. e.g, antonyms old and young, between them there exist middle-aged, mature, elderly.
19. complementary antonyms: a pair of antonyms that the denial of one member of the pair implies the assertion of the
other. It is a matter of either one or the other.
20. relational opposites: Pairs if words that exhibit the reversal of a relationship between the two items are called
relational opposites. For example, husband---wife, father---son, buy---sell, let---rent, above---below.
21. entailment: the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one is inferred from the truth of the other. E.g.
Cindy killed the dog entails the dog is dead.
22. presupposition: What a speaker or writer assumes that the receiver of the massage already knows. e.g. Some tea has
already been taken is a presupposition of Take some more tea.
23. componential analysis: an approach to analyze the lexical meaning into a set of meaning components or semantic features.
For example, boy may be shown as [+human] [+male] [-adult].
24. predication analysis: a way, proposed by British linguist G. Leech, to analyze sentence meaning.
25. predication: In the framework of predication analysis, the basic units is called predication, which is the abstraction
of the meaning of a sentence.
26. predicate: A predicate is something said about an argument or it states the logical relation linking the arguments in a sentence.
27. argument: An argument is a logical participant in a predication, largely identical with the nominal element(s) in a sentence.
28. selectional restriction: Whether a sentence is semantically meaningful is governed by the rules called selectional
restrictions, i.e. constraints on what lexical items can go with what others.
29. semantic features: The smallest units of meaning in a word, which may be described as a combination of semantic components.
For example, woman has the semantic features [+human] [-male] [+adult]. (04)
30. presequence: The specific turn that has the function of prefiguring the coming action. (05)
Chapter 4: Syntax
1. syntax: A branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences.
2. category: It refers to a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such
as a sentence, a noun phrase or a verb.
3. syntactic categories: Words can be grouped together into a relatively small number of classes, called syntactic categories.
4. major lexical category: one type of word level categories, which often assumed to be the heads around which phrases are
built, including N, V, Adj, and Prep.
5. minor lexical category: one type of word level categories, which helps or modifies major lexical category.
6. phrase: syntactic units that are built around a certain word category are called phrase, the category of which is determined
by the word category around which the phrase is built.
7. phrase category: the phrase that is formed by combining with words of different categories. In English syntactic analysis,
four phrasal categories are commonly recognized and discussed, namely, NP, VP, PP, AP.
8. head: The word round which phrase is formed is termed head.
9. specifier: The words on the left side of the heads are said to function as specifiers.
10. complement: The words on the right side of the heads are complements.
11. phrase structure rule:The special type of grammatical mechanism that regulates the arrangement of elements that make up
a phrase is called a phrase structure rule.
12. XP rule: In all phrases, the specifier is attached at the top level to the left of the head while the complement is
attached to the right. These similarities can be summarized as an XP rule, in which X stands for the head N,V,A or P.
13. X^ theory: A theoretical concept in transformational grammar which restricts the form of context-free phrases structure rules.
14. coordination: Some structures are formed by joining two or more elements of the same type with the help of a conjunction
such as and or or. Such phenomenon is known as coordination.
15. subcategorization: The information about a word’s complement is included in the head and termed suncategorization. (07C)
16. complementizer: Words which introduce the sentence complement are termed complementizer.
17. complement clause: The sentence introduced by the complementizer is called a complement clause.
18. complement phrase: the elements, including a complementizer and a complement clause is called a complement phrase.
19. matrix clause: the contrusction in which the complement phrase is embedded is called matrix clause.
20. modifier: the element, which specifies optionally expressible properties of heads is called modifier.
21. transformation : a special type of rule that can move an element from one position to another.
22. inversion : the process of transformation that moves the auxiliary from the Infl position to a position to the left of
the subject, is called inversion.
23. Do insertion : In the process of forming yes-no question that does not contain an overt Infl, interrogative do is inserted into an empty Infl positon to make
transformation work.
24. deep structure : A level of abstract syntactic representation formed by the XP rule.
25. surface structure : A level of syntactic representation after applying the necessary syntactic movement, i.e.,
transformation, to the deep structure. (05)
26. Wh question : In English, the kind of questions beginning with a wh- word are called wh question.
27. Wh movement :The transformation that will move wh phrase from its position in deep structure to a position at the
beginning of the sentence. This transformation is called wh movement.
28. move α: a general rule for all the movement rules, where ‘alpha‘ is a cover term foe any element that can be
moved from one place to another.
29. universal grammar: the innateness principles and properties that pertain to the grammars of all human languages.
Chapter 3: Morphology
1. morphology: A branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words and rules for word formation.
2. open class: A group of words, which contains an unlimited number of items, and new words can be added to it.
3. closed class: A relatively few words, including conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns, and new
words are not usually added to them.
4. morpheme: The smallest unit of meaning of a language. It can not be divided without altering or
destroying its meaning.
5. affix: a letter or a group of letter, which is added to a word, and which changes the meaning or
function of the word, including prefix, infix and suffix.
6. suffix: The affix, which is added to the end of a word, and which usually changes the part of speech of a word.
7. prefix: The affix, which is added to the beginning of a word, and which usually changes the meaning
of a word to its opposite.
8. bound morpheme: Morpheme that can not be used alone, and it must be combined wit others. E.g. –ment.
9. free morpheme: a morpheme that can stand alone as a word.
10. derivational morpheme: Bound morpheme, which can be added to a stem to form a new word.
11. inflectional morpheme: A kind of morpheme, which are used to make grammatical categories, such
as number, tense and case.
12. morphological rules: The ways words are formed. These rules determine how morphemes combine to form words.
13. compound words: A combination of two or more words, which functions as a single words
14. inflection: the morphological process which adjusts words by grammatical modification, e.g. in
The rains came, rain is inflected for plurality and came for past tense. (04)
Chapter 2: Phonology
1. phonic medium : The meaningful speech sound in human communication.
2. phonetics : The study of phonic medium of language and it is concerned with all sounds in the world’s languages. (06C)
3. articulatory phonetics : It studies sounds from the speaker’s point of view, i.e. how a speaker uses his speech
organs to articulate the sounds. (03)
4. auditory phonetics: The studies sounds from the hearer’s point of view, i.e. how the sounds are perceived by the hearer.
5. acoustic phonetics: It studies the way sounds travel by looking at the sound waves, the physical means by which
sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to another.
6. voicing: the way that sounds are produced with the vibration of the vocal cords.
7. voiceless: the way that sounds are produced with no vibration of the vocal cords.
8. broad transcription: The use of letter symbols only to show the sounds or sounds sequences in written form.
9. narrow transcription: The use of letter symbol, together with the diacritics to show sounds in written form.
10. diacritics: The symbols used to show detailed articulatory features of sounds.
11. IPA: short for International Phonetic Alphabets, a system of symbols consists of letters and diacritics, used to
represent the pronunciation of words in any language.
12. aspiration: A little puff of air that sometimes follows a speech sound.
13. manner of articulation : The manner in which obstruction is created.
14. place of articulation : The place where obstruction is created.
15. consonant: a speech sound in which the air stream is obstructed in one way or another.
16. vowel : a speech sound in which the air stream from the lung meets with no obstruction.
17. monophthong : the individual vowel.
18. diphthong : The vowel which consists of two individual vowels, and functions as a single one.
19. phone : The speech sound we use when speaking a language.
20. phoneme : The smallest unit of sound in a language which can distinguish two sounds. (06F/ 04)
21. allophone : any different forms of the same phoneme in different phonetic environments.(07C/ 05)
22. phonology : The description of sound systems of particular languages and how sounds function to distinguish meaning. (06C)
23. phonemic contrast : two similar sounds occur in the same environment and distinguish meaning.
24. complementary distribution : allophones of the same phoneme and they don’t distinguish meaning but
complement each other in distribution.
25. minimal pair: two different forms are identical in every way except one sound and occurs in the same
position. The two sounds are said to form a minimal pair.
26. sequential rules: The rules to govern the combination of sounds in a particular language.
27. assimilation rule: The rule assimilates one sound to another by copying a feature of a sequential phoneme,
thus making the two phones similar.
28. deletion rule: The rule that a sound is to be deleted although it is orthographically represented.
29. suprasegmental features: The phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments----syllable, word, sentence.
30. tone: Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords.
31. intonation: When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation,
they are collectively known as intonation.
