GENERAL CONCEPTS OF LIGUISTICS

Ambiguity and disambiguation: Ambiguity is a phenomenon that arises when an utterance, be it a word or a sign
or a sentence, has more than one interpretations possible at the same time. Ambiguous expressions permit more
than one meaning. The possible meanings that make an expression ambiguous may be slightly related or
completely unrelated. Ambiguity can be lexical or structural. The lexical ambiguity occurs due to the polysemous
or homonymous nature of the words. For example, consider the sentence I love walking to the bank. The word
bank in this sentence may refer to the ‘water body’ as well as the ‘monetary institution.’ Alternatively, the
structural ambiguity occurs when the constituents of an expression can be arranged in multiple ways leading to
different interpretations. For example, consider the sentence I saw a baby with binoculars. In this utterance,
either the baby or the speaker can have the binoculars. The linking of the constituent with binoculars with the
rest of the utterance is resulting in ambiguity here. Ambiguity can be local or global. The language users handle
the ambiguous utterances by associating it with a context. The context of an utterance is the background in
which the language users interpret its meaning. The process such as associating a context to an ambiguous
expression or paraphrasing it is called disambiguation.

Lect, dialect and variety: Lect is a particular form of language. The term is applicable when it is not clear whether
something is an independent language or a variety of it. Idiolect is the language use that is typical of an
individual. It exhibits distinct and unique usages at the level pronunciation, vocabulary choice and sentence
formations. Sociolect (or social dialect) is the language use that exhibits the social background and characteristics
of the speakers. These speakers may belong to a particular social group including caste, class, ethnicity, etc.
Arguably, it is possible to find different sociolects within the same geographical boundary. The term dialect refers
to a kind of speech that is typical of a geographical region. For some scholars the terms dialect and language are
coterminous, and the distinction between them is superficial. Many scholars make a distinction between
language and dialect and admit that the dialects of a language are mutually intelligible. However, it is important
to note that a dialect is not inferior to a language in any way and the distinction is more political than linguistic.
In this connection, the term variety is neutral. The study of regional dialects is called dialectology.

LSRW and vocabulary: LSRW is an abbreviation referring to the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.
These are the four skills that are easily demonstrable and inter-linked. While reading and listening are
comprehension skills, writing and speaking are production skills. It is important to note that the speakers of a
language may be able to develop listening and speaking skills without formal instructions, but reading and
writing skills require training. Vocabulary is a general term that refers to the set of words of a language. It is
synonymous with lexicon that is more technical of the two. Articulation, utterance expression and speech: The
terms articulation, utterance, expression and speech are significant in the study of phonetics and phonology, and
they may be perceived in the ascending order of length. The term articulation is a physical activity of the organs
coming together for the production of speech. An utterance is an instance of language use that can vary in size
and is isolatable and analyzable. An utterance whether a word or a phrase can be either contextual (in other
words context-sensitive) or free of any context (in other words context-free). The term expression signifies
elements larger than individual words. The term speech is multidimensional, and it refers to a range of
phenomena such as spoken communication, style, etc.

Applied linguistics, language acquisition and learning: The term applied linguistics refers to applications of ideas
and theoretical postulations for the purpose of understanding problems and solving them. The term is often
synonymous with language teaching; however, hybrid subfields like sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics qualify
as applied linguistics. Acquisition and learning are two terms that refer to the development of language in
humans. Though both the terms are synonymous and are used interchangeably there exists a fundamental
difference between them. The term acquisition refers to the process by which humans, mostly children, attain
the ability to use language without formal training. The term learning, in contrast, refers to the process by which
humans achieve the ability to use language with the help of formal training.
Psycholinguistics: Psycholinguistics is a subfield of applied linguistics that has a regular exchange with other
disciplines. Psycholinguistics is a hybrid term in which one can easily identify the participation of the terms
Psychology and Linguistics. Therefore, psycholinguists utilize and integrate ideas and concepts from Psychology
and Linguistics. Obviously, their primary concern is to understand the collaborative functions of language and
mind/brain. Psycholinguists are interested in exploring how human beings acquire/learn a language(s),
comprehend and produce their everyday speech. Arguably, storage and access of language, language/speech
disorders and language therapy are quite relevant to Psycholinguistics. Language processing and aphasiology are
significant concerns of Psycholinguistics. The term language processing refers to comprehension and production
of language by humans or by machines. However, processing involves a continuous form of encoding & decoding,
identification & and analysis and interpretation. Aphasia refers to the impairment and disorders of language use
due to the disease or damage to the language representing areas of the brain. Aphasiology is the systematic
study of aphasia. Aphasia can affect the ability to comprehend language or produce language or both. Lying,
stuttering, lisping, stammering and garrulousness of old age do not qualify as aphasic speech because they are
not the results of damage to the brain. The aphasic syndromes are sometimes recoverable through speech
therapy. Language processing and linguistic aphasia operate at various levels of language.

Discourse: Discourse deals with coherent language use such as conversation, debate, speech, discussions etc.
with a focus on units larger than sentences. Discourse analysis also known as Discourse Studies refers to the
practice of studying texts larger than the sentence. The units in consideration for discourse analysis are
interpretable according to the context and socio-cultural conventions.

Sociolinguistics: The term sociolinguistics refers to the study of language in society. Sociolinguistics examines the
variations in a language and explains their occurrence. Arguably, it is an applied area of Linguistics, and the
people who study it are known as sociolinguists. They try to reason out why people speak differently even when
they speak the same language. So, they study variations in language use. Both sociolinguistics and
psycholinguistics have developed their own methods while they also follow methods from other sciences and
subfields of Linguistics.

Native speakers and speech community: The concept of native speakers is important in language analysis. The
native speakers are competent speakers of a language and they can judge whether an utterance is possible or
not in their language. Linguists mostly depend on the intuition of the native speakers when they have to analyse
the grammaticality and acceptability of an utterance. An important point about the native speakers is as follows:
once a native speaker, always a native speaker. The term speech community derives from the German word
sprachgemeinschaft. Speech community or linguistic community is often coterminous with language. Basically, it
is the community of native speakers of a language who inherit and transfer the knowledge of language across
generations.

Mother tongue: The term mother tongue or first language (L1) is the language that develops in an individual
before any other language. Many scholars have raised concerns for mother tongue education and education in
mother tongue. In bilingual communities the mother tongue or first language can be a combination of two or
more languages.

Articulators: The term articulators refer to the parts of the vocal tract that are capable of forming a constriction
for the purpose of producing a speech sound. The articulators can be either active (those that move such as lips
and tongue) or passive (the ones that do not move such as hard palate).

Airstream mechanism: Airstream mechanism is the manner in which an airstream is set in motion for the
purpose of speech. Speech sounds are produced with one of the three airstream mechanisms, or occasionally by
a combination of two of these. The airstream mechanisms include Pulmonic (related to the lungs), Glottalic
(Pharyngeal) and Velaric. Airstream mechanisms may produce ingressive (inward) or egressive (outward) airflow.

Phoneme: The speech sounds belonging to a language are called phonemes. The phoneme is the minimally
distinguishable unit of speech. The phoneme is abstract, but an important concept in the study of phonology
because it is not possible to divide a phoneme into smaller constituents. A phoneme can be either a vowel or a
consonant and sometimes it is identical with the individual letters of the script of a language. Some phonemes
can have variants known as allophones. The allophonic variants of a phoneme are in complementary distribution.
Therefore, only one variant can occur in an utterance, two or more variants cannot occur together.

Syllable: Syllable is an important concept in phonology. It is the most basic unit for perception and a source for
the derivation of phonemes. The presence of a vowel sound and only one vowel sound is the most distinguishing
characteristics of a syllable. A syllable can be small as having just a vowel sound or medium-sized or big having a
vowel and a consonant cluster.

Syllable

Onset, Rhyme, Nucleus, Coda

There often exist asymmetries between the way words are written and the way they are pronounced.

CV formula: The CV formula or CV skeleton refers to the pattern in which the consonant and vowels are present
in a syllable/word. For example, the syllable belt has a CVCC pattern while the word organic has a VCCVCVC
pattern. CV skeletons are useful in analyzing the structure of the syllables/words. They also help in counting the
number of sounds and their types in the given syllable/word.

Minimal pair: The term minimal pair refers to such word forms that differ only for a single sound. For example,
the words table, cable and fable differ due to variation in their first sound. Minimal pairs are useful in
understanding the sound patterns of a language.

Transliteration and transcription: Transliteration refers to the method of mapping from one system of writing
into another based on phonetic similarity. This mapping can happen from word to word or even sound to sound
or letter to letter. In simple, the term transliteration means representing a text (spoken or written) in a

script/writing system. It signifies the conversion of a source text from one script to another. The term
transcription refers to a representation of speech sounds using phonetic symbols. Transliteration differs from
transcription in the sense that it maps the sounds of one language to the letter combinations of the script of
another language.

Words: Words are most distinguishable units of language. Words are important because they carry meaning and
grammatical information such number, person, gender, tense, aspect and mood. Following are the two broad
categories of words: (a) content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives etc., and (b) function words such as
determiners, prepositions, conjunctions etc. Words are formed by the inflexions, derivations and word formation
processes. Inflexion refers to instances when a word produces another word by adding an affix (suffix or prefix).
For example, book and books. Inflexion carries grammatical aspects. It is the final modification on the word form
and usually does not cause a change in its category. Derivation, on the other hand, produces words from an
existing word. For example, consider and consideration. Derivation also makes use of affixes, however, the
category of the resultant word changes.

Word formation processes: The expression word formation process refers to the process by which new words
are added to the language. Following are some of most commonly occurring word processing processes:

a) Conversion as in the words google or WhatsApp

b) Derivation as singer that is derived from the word sing.

c) Compounding as in school bus, table-fan, lamppost.

d) Acronyms such as UNESCO, LASER, and NATO

e) Abbreviations as in WHO, ILO and MOU

f) Initialism as in ad and doc referring to advertisement and doctor respectively.

g) Blending as in brunch, cyborg and bromance.

h) Back-formation as in the word act that has come from actor.

i) Coinage or invention of new words as in xerox,

j) Borrowing or loanword as in Zeitgeist and kindergarten

Clause: A clause is a string of words that can act as the constituent of a sentence. A clause can be either
dependent or independent. A dependent clause cannot stand alone as a sentence whereas an independent
clause can exist alone as a sentence. The structure of the sentence depends on the number of independent
clauses it has.

Sentence: A sentence is a set of grammatically linked words and is complete in itself. It is a unit that is larger than
the words, phrases and clauses. It is the main concern of a syntactic analysis. A punctuation mark such as full
stop, question mark, mark of exclamation occurs at the end of a sentence. There are four major types of
sentence according to the function they perform:

a) Declarative: A sentence that provides information. For example, this is a laptop.

b) Imperative: A sentence that works as a request or command. For example, Please sing a song.

c) Interrogative: A sentence that seeks information and has the punctuation mark ? at its end. These sentences
often have a wh-word. For example, who broke the window glass?

d) Exclamatory: A sentence that expresses excitement and emotion such as surprise, regret etc. Such a sentence
has an exclamation mark ! at its end. For example, what a nice pen!

According to the structure the sentence can be of the following types:

a) Simple sentence: A simple sentence has only one independent clause. For example, The table is big.

b) Complex sentence: A complex sentence has at one dependent clause in addition to an independent clause. For
example, Cricket is an excellent game unless you are watching it.

c) Compound sentence: A compound sentence has a minimum of two independent clauses joined by a
conjunction. For example, Do good things and let the world be a good place to live.

d) Compound-complex: A compound-complex sentence has a minimum of two independent clauses and a

dependent clause. For example, consider the following: Although I like to play cricket, I have not had enough time
to play it recently, and there is hardly anyone to accompany me in this game.

Word/phrase order: Words and phrases act as the constituents of the sentence. The order in which the subject
(S), verb (V) and object (O) represented by words and phrases are arranged in a simple declarative sentence of
the language decides the word/phrase order of the language. For instance, the word order in a simple declarative
sentence of English is SVO.

Grammar: The term grammar refers to set of rules or formal models or descriptions that help in identifying and
analysing the sound patterns, word parts and sentence structures. Grammar is a very fundamental aspect of
human language. It exists in the minds of the speakers who can notice even minor deviations in the use of
grammar of their language. It is important to note that grammar exists even if there is no written/printed book
illustrating the rules and usages of the language. Sometimes scholars employ the term grammar to mainly
referring to syntax, which focuses primarily on the structure of phrases, clauses and sentences. Since grammar
also deals with the structure of syllables and morphemes, its scope is wider than that of syntax. Accordingly, the
activity of a fieldworker who tries to document a language is called writing the grammar. Following are two
diametrically opposite ways of writing the grammar of a language: prescriptive grammar and descriptive
grammar. A grammar that states how the language use including word and sentence formation ideally should be
is a prescriptive grammar. In contrast, a grammar that demonstrates how the language is actually being used is a
descriptive grammar. There is yet another important type of grammar that Chomsky popularised in through his
early writings. This grammar is known as Universal Grammar (UG). It is important to understand that UG is not
the grammar of a language. According to Chomsky, human children are born with UG, which is abstract and
includes such rules that are common across the languages of the world. When children grow the exposure to the
language(s) in their surroundings sets the principles and parameters on UG.

Semiotics: Semiotics is the study of signs. A sign is an entity that refers to some other entity in communication.
Many scholars treat language as an organised system of signs. The term sign refers to an entity that stands for or
means another entity. For example, red light at the traffic signal means stop. In the context of human language, a
sign can be either oral or visual or both. Further, a sign becomes a sign either spontaneously or conventionally.
According to Saussure, a sign has two components, a signifier (that is its form) and a signified (that is the concept
or the entity)