Literature 95

Important Questions For Linguistics 1. LANGUAGE 1. Language and its Characteristics 2. Human Language and Animal Communication 3. Language and Speech 4. Language Acquisition 5. Multilingualism 6. Language and Culture 7. Causes of Language Change 8. Descriptive and Prescriptive Approach to the Investigation of Language Notes Prepared By:  Prof.  Masoom Raza 2. LINGUISTICS 9. Linguistics and its Levels 10. Branches of Linguistics and Their Scope 11. Theories of Linguistics 12. Comparative Linguistics 13. Sociolinguistics and its Significance 14. Psycholinguistics 15. Growth and Development of Historical Linguistics 16. Contribution of Ferdinand de Saussure to the Study of Modern Linguistics Notes Prepared By:  Prof.  Masoom Raza 3. PHONETICS & MORPHOLOGY 17. Phonetics and its Main Branches 18. Places and Manners of Articulation 19. Consonants 20. Vowels 21. Plosives and Fricatives 22. Transcription with Examples 23. Morphemes 24. Inflectional and De...

General features of Language : Applied Linguistics The application of insights from theoretical linguistics to practical matters such as language teaching, remedial linguistic therapy, language planning or whatever. Arbitrariness An essential notion in structural linguistics which denies any necessary relationship between linguistic signs and their referents, example objects in the outside world. Areas of Linguistics Any of a number of areas of study in which linguistic insights have been brought to bear, for instance sociolinguistics in which scholars study society and the way language is used in it. Other examples are psycholinguistics which is concerned with the psychological and linguistic development of the child. Competence According to Chomsky in his Aspects of the theory of syntax this is the abstract ability of an individual to speak the language which he/she has learned as native language in his/her childhood. The competence of a speaker is unaffected by...

Description of Phoneme, Phone, Allophone and Morpheme!!!! Phoneme  A phoneme is a basic element of a spoken language or dialect, from which words in that language or dialect are analyzed as being built up. The phoneme is defined by the International Phonetic Association as "the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances". Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic terms. However a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of speech sounds (phones) which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, in English, the "k" sounds in the words kit and skill are not identical but they are perceived as the same sound by speakers of the language, and are therefore both considered to represent a single phoneme, /k/. Different speech sounds representing the same phoneme...

An Introduction to Phonetics & Phonology Introduction This guide is written for students who are in English Language Courses. This resource may also be of general interest to  trainee teachers and anyone with a general interest in language science. What is phonology? Phonology is the study of the sound system of languages. It is a huge area of language theory and it is difficult to do more on a general language course than have an outline knowledge of what it includes. In an exam, you may be asked to comment on a text that you are seeing for the first time in terms of various language descriptions, of which phonology may be one. At one extreme, phonology is concerned with anatomy and physiology - the organs of speech and how we learn to use them. At another extreme, phonology shades into socio-linguistics as we consider social attitudes to features of sound such as accent and intonation. And part of the subject is concerned with finding objective standard ways of r...

Principles and Major Concepts of Linguistics Synchrony and Diachrony The distinction synchrony and diachrony refers to the difference in treating language from different points of view. When we take a synchronic point of view, we are looking at a language as we find it at a given period in time. The diachronic point of view, on the other hand, gives us the historical angle; we look at a language over a period of time along with changes that occurred in it. The principles that introduce this dichotomy enable us to obtain ‘particularly accurate information about a language in its current usage’ (Wilkins). The synchronic linguistics studies how a language works at a given time, regardless of its past history or future blueprint. This has also been called descriptive linguistics. Though the historical character of a language cannot be ignored, its present form being the result of definite historical processes, changes and transformations, it is necessary for a complete unders...