Glossary

Arbitrariness: the relationship between a symbol and its referent (meaning), in which there is no obvious connection between them.

Bound morpheme: a unit of meaning that cannot stand alone; it must be attached to another morpheme.

Closed system: a form of communication that cannot create new meanings or messages; it can only convey pre-programmed (innate) messages.

Code-switching: using two or more language varieties in a particular interaction.

Creole: a language that develops from a pidgin when the pidgin becomes so widely used that children acquire it as one of their first languages. Creoles are more fully complex than creoles.

Critical age range hypothesis: research suggesting that a child will gradually lose the ability to acquire language naturally and without effort if he or she is not exposed to other people speaking a language until past the age of puberty. This applies to the acquisition of a second language as well.

Cultural transmission: the need for some aspects of the system to be learned; a feature of some species’ communication systems.

Design features: descriptive characteristics of the communication systems of all species, including that of humans, proposed by linguist Charles Hockett to serve as a definition of human language.

Dialect: a variety of speech. The term is often applied to a subordinate variety of a language. Speakers of two dialects of the same language do not necessarily always understand each other.

Discreteness: a feature of human speech that they can be isolated from others.

Displacement: the ability to communicate about things that are outside of the here and now.

Duality of patterning: at the first level of patterning, meaningless discrete sounds of speech are combined to form words and parts of words that carry meaning. In the second level of patterning, those units of meaning are recombined to form an infinite possible number of longer messages such as phrases and sentences.

Gesture-call system: a system of non-verbal communication using varying combinations of sound, body language, scent, facial expression, and touch, typical of great apes and other primates, as well as humans.

Historical linguistics: the study of how languages change.

Interchangeability: the ability of all individuals of the species to both send and receive messages; a feature of some species’ communication systems.

Kinesics: the study of all forms of human body language.

Language: an idealized form of speech, usually referred to as the standard variety.

Language death: the total extinction of a language.

Language shift: when a community stops using their old language and adopts a new one.

Language universals: characteristics shared by all languages.

Larynx: the voice box, containing the vocal bands that produce the voice.

Lexicon: the vocabulary of a language.

Linguistic relativity: the idea that the structures and words of a language influence how its speakers think, how they behave, and ultimately the culture itself (also known as the Whorf Hypothesis).

Minimal response: the vocal indications that one is listening to a speaker.

Morphemes: the basic meaningful units in a language.

Morphology: the study of the morphemes of language.

Open system: a form of communication that can create an infinite number of new messages; a feature of human language only.

Palate: the roof of the mouth.

Paralanguage: those characteristics of speech beyond the actual words spoken, such as pitch, loudness, tempo.

Pharynx: the throat cavity, located above the larynx.

Phonemes: the basic meaningless sounds of a language.

Phonology: the study of the sounds of language.

Pidgin: a simplified language that springs up out of a situation in which people who do not share a language must spend extended amounts of time together.

Pragmatics: how social context contributes to meaning in an interaction.

Productivity/creativity: the ability to produce and understand messages that have never been expressed before.

Proxemics: the study of the social use of space, including the amount of space an individual tries to maintain around himself in his interactions with others.

Register: a style of speech that varies depending on who is speaking to whom and in what context.

Semanticity: the meaning of signs in a communication system; a feature of all species’ communication systems.

Semantics: how meaning is conveyed at the word and phrase level.

Speech act: the intention or goal of an utterance; the intention may be different from the dictionary definitions of the words involved.

Standard: the variant of any language that has been given special prestige in the community.

Symbol: anything that serves to refer to something else.

Syntax: the rules by which a language combines morphemes into larger units.

Taxonomies: a system of classification.

Universal grammar (UG): a theory developed by linguist Noam Chomsky suggesting that a basic tem- plate for all human languages is embedded in our genes.

Unbound morpheme: a morpheme that can stand alone as a separate word.

Vernaculars: non-standard varieties of a language, which are usually distinguished from the standard by their inclusion of stigmatized forms.