Phonetics Quiz: Study Guide
Hockett’s Design features of human language
Productivity
- Knowing a language means being able to produce and understand utterances never spoken before
o Need to know rules of the language
Displacement
- We can refer to things that are not in the present moment (temporally of spatially: past/future, here
elsewhere)
o Animals can’t show displacement in their communication
E.g. cat can “tell” you he wants food, but not that he wants food in 1 hr.
Arbitrariness
- the relationship between a sound of sign representation of a concept in a language and the concept itself is
arbitrary, there is no logical connection
o Think of arbitrariness as more of a continuum than a binary
Semanticity
- specific signals can be matched with specific meanings. Words have meanings
- iconicity: non-arbitrary relationship between form and meaning (e.g. no-smoking sign)
o sound symbolism
o onomatopoeia – not always the same in every language
Duality of patterning
- a large number of meaningful utterances can be recombined in a systematic way from a small number of
discrete parts of language
o each language has a finite # of discrete sounds which are recombined
Discreteness
- messages in the system are made up of smaller, repeatable parts rather than indivisible units
- the sounds of our language are discrete
o e.g. in English, the sounds “p” and “b” are discrete
Cultural transmission
- the language we speak is not genetically inherited Word Formation
Imitation/ “Onomatopoeia”
- Words like slurp and ding are imitative words also words for animal noises (baa, moo, woof, etc.)
- designate a sound that is similar to the sound of the word itself Comment [SJ1]:
Reduplication
- formed by repeating a word usually w/ a change in one sound
o E.g. hodgepodge, nitty-gritty, seesaw, knickknack, etc.
Compound
- created by combining two or more words to make a new word
o e.g. airhead, slingshot, fork lift, slip-on
- compounds sometimes written as single word, two words and sometimes with a hyphen between two parts
- there is no general rule, have to consult dictionary if uncertain
- compounds identifiable by pronunciation, heaviest stress on first element
o phrasal stress is different with emphasis on final element
Idiomatic phrase
- compounds have unpredictable meanings
o e.g. a blackboard is not necessarily black, nest egg not an egg, clotheshorse not a horse, a green
thumb,
- phrases with idiomatic meanings are called idiomatic phrases or lexicalized phrases
o listed in the dictionary
Acronym
- words formed by combining first letter/ first part of each word in a phrase
o two ways: series of letter names like UTM (e.g. of initialism) or as a word such as WASP (white Anglo-Saxon
Protestant)
Initialism
- type of acronym usually consisting of a series of letters not pronouncable as a whole word (e.g. BBC, CNN, UTM)
Shortening
- also called “clipping”
- words often shortened in conversation inconversation; some original long forms or w
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