Skip to content
Useful Vocabulary
Basic Subfields
- Phonetics: the physical properties of speech
- Phonetics focuses on the physiology of sound production (the vocal tract) and the corresponding acoustic properties (pitch, intensity, etc.).
- Phonology: the relationship between different sounds in a language
- Phonology often takes a more abstract approach to speech than phonetics, looking at how speakers perceive and categorize sounds.
- Morphology: the structure of words
- Morphology looks at words both a complete unit and in terms of their parts (stems, suffixes, prefixes, etc.).
- Semantics: meaning, particularly its relationship to signs
- The focus in semantics is typically on individual words or phrases and the way they function in larger structures (sentences).
- Pragmatics: meaning in context
- While semantics looks at internal meaning, pragmatics is concerned with how meaning is negotiated through use, analyzing how features such as intonation, reference, and setting affect discourse.
- Syntax: the rules and processes that govern how smaller lexical units (nouns, verbs, etc.) are organized to form sentences
- Syntax often goes together with semantics, and, like semantics, is a very theoretical field that deals heavily with abstract representations of grammar.
Other Terms
- Grammar: a set of rules that outline the structure and use of a language
- Descriptivism: analyzing speech as it is naturally produced, without applying value judgments
- Highly encouraged in linguistic research, particularly sociolinguistics
- Prescriptivism: measuring speech against a “standard” dialect (often one determined by the dominant social group)
- Discouraged in most linguistic research
- Ungrammatical: an utterance that we would not expect a native speaker to produce
- Reconstruction: what we predict the historical form of a word or sound would have looked/sounded like
- Narrow/phonetic transcription: writing sounds as they are produced
- Broad/phonemic transcription: writing sounds as abstract representations
- Dialect: a language variety spoken by members of a group (usually connected by region or social characteristics). Encompasses the entire language structure, including syntax, lexicon, pronunciation, etc.
- Accent: a speaker’s pronunciation patterns; one specific aspect of a dialect
- Lexicon: a collection of words; usually refers to a language/speaker’s vocabulary
- Corpus: a set of collected linguistic data; used to analyze the frequency of words and other linguistic features in a language or specific data set
- Phoneme: the smallest meaningful units of sound in a language (e.g. [p], [b])
- Morpheme: the smallest meaningful word units in a language (e.g. -ing)
- Native speaker: a fluent speaker of a language, having acquired it in early childhood
- Diphthong: a vowel with two parts (e.g. [eɪ] as in day)