Study of English Language Flashcards

Phonetics is the study of the sounds that we produce when we engage in spoken communication.

The organs of speech are the parts of the human body used to produce speech sounds, including the lungs, windpipe, vocal cords, mouth, and nose.

The three branches of phonetics are auditory phonetics (how speech sounds are perceived), acoustic phonetics (how speech sounds are made up of physical properties), and articulatory phonetics (how speech sounds are produced by the organs of speech).

Phonology is the study of sounds as an abstract system within a language, focusing on how sounds are organized, function, and contrast to create meaning.

A phoneme is a set of abstract units that collectively form the sound system of a language, with the essential function of distinguishing meaning.

A minimal pair is a pair of words that differ by only one sound (or phoneme), used to identify the phonemes of a language.

A phoneme is an abstract unit of sound that distinguishes meaning, while a phone is the concrete, physical realization of a phoneme produced by a speaker.

The IPA is a specialized writing system used to create a permanent, written record of speech sounds, providing a more accurate representation than the conventional orthography of English.

A phonemic transcript uses slanted brackets (/) to highlight meaning contrasts between phonemes, while a phonetic realization transcript uses square brackets ([ ]) to represent the exact physical articulation of sounds (phones).

An allophone is a concrete, specific variant of a single, abstract phoneme that exists when it is realized by speakers.

The main articulators include the lips, teeth, tongue, alveolar ridge, hard palate, soft palate, uvula, and vocal cords.

Voiced sounds are produced with vibration of the vocal cords, while voiceless sounds are produced without vocal cord vibration.

The three parts are place of articulation (where the obstruction occurs), manner of articulation (how the airflow is manipulated), and voicing (whether the vocal cords vibrate).

The main categories include bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar, and glottal.

The main categories include stop (plosive), nasal, fricative, approximant, lateral approximant, and affricate.

Vowel sounds are classified based on the shape of the tongue (height and backness), the positioning of the lips (rounded, spread, or neutral), the stability of the position (monophthong or diphthong), and duration.

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language.

A lexeme is what is commonly known as a 'word', the basic form that would be looked up in a dictionary.

A free morpheme can stand alone as a word, while a bound morpheme must be attached to a free morpheme to be meaningful.

The two main areas are grammatical inflection (altering grammatical category) and word-formation (creating new words).

Derivation is the addition of non-inflectional affixes (prefixes or suffixes) to a root to create new words with new meanings.

Compounding is the combination of two or more free morphemes to create a new word.

The three main sources are Germanic/Scandinavian, French, and Latin/Greek.

Clipping is the shortening of words for more colloquial or quicker use.

An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of other words, which can be pronounced as a single word (molecular) or with each letter pronounced separately (atomic).

Back-formation occurs when a presumed affix is mistakenly removed from an existing word, creating a new lexeme or root.

A retronym is a word created anachronistically to distinguish an older object in response to the invention of a new technology or concept.

A neologism is a newly coined word or expression.