Vocabulary

In this section, you can find the meaning of some terms that are used very often in the different branches of Linguistics.

• Linguistics: it is the scientific study of language. It involves analyzing language form, language meaning, and language in context.
• Language: is a system of communication that consists of a set of sounds and written symbols which are used by the people of a country or region for talking or writing.

• Phonetics: is the science or study of speech sounds and their production, transmission, and reception, and their analysis, classification, and transcription.

•  Phoneme: is the smallest structural unit that distinguishes meaning in a language.

•  Phone: is a unit of speech sound.

•  Pronunciation: it is how a word or a language is spoken.

•  Intonation: it describes how the voice rises and falls in speech. It is particularly important in expressing questions in spoken English.

•  Stress: is relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word, or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence.

•  Syntax: is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in each language, usually including word order.

•  Morphology: is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.

•  Morpheme: is a meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word.

• Root Word: is a word or word element from which other words grow, usually through the addition of prefixes and suffixes.

• Affix: is one or more than one syllable or letter added at the beginning or at the end of a root word, to change its meaning. Simply, it is an attachment to the root word that creates a new word.

•  Prefix: is a group of letters placed before the root of a word.

•  Suffix: is a group of letters placed after the root of a word.

•  Pragmatics: is a branch of linguistics concerned with the use of language in social contexts and the ways people produce and comprehend meanings through language.

• Semantics: it is the meaning and interpretation of words, signs, and sentence structure. It determines our reading comprehension, how we understand others, and even what decisions we make as a result of our interpretations.

• Denotation: is a translation of a sign to its meaning, precisely to its literal meaning, like dictionaries, try to define it.

• Connotation: is an idea or feeling that the word invokes in addition to its literal meaning.

• Speech acts: is an utterance defined in terms of a speaker's intention and the effect it has on a listener. Speech acts might be requests, warnings, promises, apologies, greetings, or declarations.

• Perlocutionary act: it is a speech act that produces an effect, intended or not and brings about a consequence to the audience. They influence the hearer, in feelings, thoughts, or actions.

• Illocutionary act: refers to the use of a sentence to express an attitude with a certain function or "force”. It might be a promise, an order, an apology, or an expression of thanks—or merely an answer to a question, to inform the other person in the conversation.

• Sociolinguistics: is concerned with how language use interacts with or is affected by, social factors such as gender, ethnicity, age or social class.

• Lexicon: is the collection of words—or the internalized dictionary—that every speaker of a language has. It may also refer to a stock of terms used in a profession, subject or style.

• Language acquisition: is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.

• Language development: is the process by which children come to understand and communicate language during early childhood. Language development begins before birth.