LINGVISTIKA – KOLOKVIJ 2

 SYNTAX – the subdiscipline of linguistics that concerns the study of the structure of components
(words) within phrases and sentences; the SUBJECT OF STUDY OF SYNTAX is the issue of the word
order
 TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR – the study of well-formed structures found in various languages, it has its
origin in the description of languages like classical Latin and Greek
 PARTS OF SPEECH – grammatical categories in which words are divided
o THE TRADITIONAL PARTS OF SPEECH:
 NOUN (table, boy)
 VERB (to do, may, to see)
 PREPOSITION (on, in, under, below)
 CONJUNCTION (and, or)
 ADJECTIVE (tall, nice, good)
 ADVERB (nicely, greatly)
 PRONOUN (I, he, she, we)
 INTERJECTION (ah!)
 ARTICLE (a, the)
 (PARTICIPLES – looking, taken)
 SENTENCE - a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that are grammatically connected
o SENTENCES can be:
 SIMPLE – just one clause (The girl is singing.)
 COMPLEX – sentence of at least two clauses (John writes and Mary sings.)
 COMPOUND – compromises at least one subordinate (embedding) clause (John said
that Mary would come.)
 English is frequently referred to as an SVO language – the most frequent word order for English is
Subject – Verb – Object
 all languages have rules that govern the combination of these constituents into some basic order; no
language allows a totally random ordering of its constituents
 CONCORD or AGREEMENT – traditional grammatical notion which relates to the compatibility of two
elements in terms of their grammatical markers
 CATEGORIES OF CONCORD:
o NUMBER – singular, plural
o PERSON – 1st, 2nd, 3rd
o TENSE – past, present, future
o VOICE active, passive
o GENDER – male, female, sexless entities
 CATEGORIES THAT ARE NOT MORPHOLOGICALLY MARKED IN ENGLISH:
o ASPECT – perfective vs. imperfective
o CASE – nominative, genitive, accusative
o MOOD – indicative, subjunctive, optative
 PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR - a set of norms or rules governing how a language should or should not be
used rather than describing the ways in which a language is actually used
 DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR – a grammar that describes the grammatical constructions of a language; the
core of the descriptive approach to grammar is to try and categorise speaker’s knowledge of language
in terms of grammatical or well-formed sentences vs. the ungrammatical or the ill-formed

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 GENERATIVE GRAMMAR - a precisely formulated set of rules whose output is all (and only) the
sentences of a language—i.e., of the language that it generates
 CONSTITUENT STRUCTURE TREE – a diagram used to represent the grammatical structure of a
sentence
 NODES – all the branching nodes of the constituent structure tree, including the uppermost or the
root
 LANGUAGE – apart from following certain structural rules, needs to be used systematically and
coherently from the point of view of meaning; language is a means of connecting form and meaning
 SEMANTICS – the study of meaning in language
 Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure defined the notion of ‘form + meaning’ and pointed out that
every linguistic sign has two components:
o the signifier – the sound image or form
o the signified – the concept represented, meaning
 the ARBITRARINESS of the sign – any meaning can, in principle, be associated with any form
 LEXICAL SEMANTICS – the branch of semantics which studies the meaning of words; the aim of it is to
answer two main challenges:
o representing the meaning of each word in a language
o showing in which ways the meanings of words in a language are connected (interrelationships
between meanings)
 DEFINITION – a kind of paraphrase the scope of which is that of making the term being defined easier
to understand and use
 some of the most frequent problems with dictionary definitions:
o OBSCURITY – when definitions contain terms that are more complex than the original term
being defined
o CIRCULARITY – definitions in which a term is explained in terms of paraphrases which employ
the same term
o SUPERFLUIUS COMPONENTS – elements in a definition that actually do not contribute to the
definition itself
o PROBLEMS OF ACCURACY – inaccurate or too accurate definitions
o OPEN – ENDEDNESS – definitions that end with etc., and so on, and similar
 the aim of lexicography is the systematic collection and explication of ‘all’ the words of a language
 SEMANTIC FEATURE – a method of notation used to express the existence or non-existence of some
semantic properties of words, by way of plus and minus signs
o some basic semantic features are: animate (inanimate), human (non-human), male (female),
adult (non adult)
 LEXICAL RELATIONS – characterising words in terms of the relationships of words to other words
 TYPES OF LEXICAL RELATIONS:
o SYNONYMY – synonyms are two or more lexical forms, the meanings of which are very closely
related (restrictions on how words can be used together are known as collocations) (broad-
wide, almost-nearly, cab-taxi)
o ANTONYMY – two forms with opposite meanings (quick- slow, long-short, male-female)
 GRADABLE ANTONYMS – can be used in comparative constructions (bigger than,
smaller than) and the negative member of the pair does not necessarily imply the
other (not big is not necessarily small, it can also be medium)
 NON-GRADABLE ANTONYMS – also known as complementary pairs; comparative
constructions are not normally used, and the negative members do imply the other
(not dead implies alive)

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 o HYPONYMY – when the meaning of one lexical form is included in the meaning of another
(dog-animal, poodle-dog, carrot-vegetable); a type of hierarchical lexical relation
o HOMOPHONY – when two or more written words have the same pronunciation (bare-bear,
flour-flower, meat-meet)
o HOMONYMY – when we encounter one written form which has two or more unrelated
meanings (bank – of a river and financial institution, mole – small animal and spot on the skin)
o POLYSEMY – cases of words that apart from having the same surface form are related in
meaning (head – can be applied to refer to the ‘thing’ on top of your body, as well as the top
of a glass of beer, the top or just the general manager of company)
o SEMANTIC FIELD – clusters of words that share a large number of semantic components
(lower level fields cluster into higher level fields) e.g. jogging , sprinting – running – human
motion
 VALENCY – ability of a verb that opens a space for other parts of a clause; zero, one, two valencies;
depending on the number of objects verbs select or need from the point of view of their meaning
 the agent (doer) – someone who does the action, the patient (theme), the location, goal (where the
action is directed), source (where the action originated), instrument (referring to the object used to
accomplish the action) = thematic (‘theta’) roles
 COGNITIVE SEMANTICS - holds that language is part of a more general human cognitive ability, can
therefore only describe the world as it is organised within people's conceptual spaces. It is implicit that
there is some difference between this conceptual world and the real world.
 The main tenets of cognitive semantics are:
o That grammar is a way of expressing the speaker's concept of the world;
o That knowledge of language is acquired and contextual;
o That the ability to use language draws upon general cognitive resources and not a special
language module
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS – the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans
to acquire, use, and understand language
 SLIPS OF THE TONGUE – situations when instead of saying one thing, we say another, phonologically
or semantically or otherwise linguistically related (bread and breakfast instead bed and breakfast)
 TIP OF THE TONGUE – the situation when we look for a word that we feel we know but we can’t
retrieve in our mental lexicons
 SEMIOTICS – the science of signs; divided into: syntax – the study of the formal relation of signs to one
another, semantics – the study of meaning, pragmatics – the study of language usage
 PRAGMATICS – that part of linguistic that takes care of the meaning that is left unaccounted for after
syntax and semantics have done their job
 some examples of linguistic phenomena that are studied within pragmatics include:
o violation of semantic rules
o co(n)text dependency
 3 KINDS OF RULE VIOLATION:
o ANOMALY – situations when something semantically uninterpretable can be understood
thanks to some extralinguistic devices (context)
o METAPHOR – a kind of interpretative stretching of the meaning of a word; it occurs when the
literal meaning is so unlikely to be the case, that the listener has to stretch his/her imagination
or contextual reading so as to find a sensible interpretation of the metaphoric expression
o IDIOMACITY (IDIOMS) – fixed phrases consisting of more than one word the meaning of which
cannot be inferred from the meanings of individual words

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 CONTEXT – can be textual ( CO-TEXT, a set of other words used in its immediate proximity and
relation) or physical ( CONTEXT, world, situational event)

 DEICTIC EXPRESSIONS – words that cannot be interpreted without access to surrounding co(n)text;
interpreted either:
o on the basis of the text, co-text (it, there, then)
o on the basis of the physical context (I, you, here, now)
 PRESUPPOSITION – what the speaker assumes is true or known by the hearer
 3 LEVELS OF THE ‘FORCE OF WORDS’ :
o LOCUTION – saying something; all sentences that begin or can be paraphrased beginning with
‘He said that…’; LOCUTIONARY ACT – the act of saying something; PHONETIC ACT – uttering
certain noises
o ILLOCUTION – certain force in saying something; all sentences that begin or can be
paraphrased beginning with ‘He argued that…’ (stating, warning, promising); PHATIC ACT –
uttering of vocables or words that are part of a certain language
o PERLOCUTION – the achieving of certain effects by saying something; all sentences that begin
or can be paraphrased beginning with ‘He convinced me that…’; RHETIC ACT – the
performance of an act of using vocables from a certain vocabulary with a certain more-or-less
definite sense and reference