Linguistics; Language Acquisition (All Correct Answers)

Language acquisition Correct Answers Natural, unconscious process of language development in humans that occurs without instruction. language learning Correct Answers process of gaining conscious knowledge of language through instruction. design features of language Correct Answers proposed by Hockett, the features that distinguish human language from other communication systems. Semanticity Correct Answers Specific signals can be matched with specific meanings. In short, words have meanings. Arbitrariness Correct Answers There is no logical connection between the form of the signal and the thing it refers to. For example, dog in English is Hund in German and perron in Spanish. Discreteness Correct Answers Messages in the system are made up of smaller, repeatable parts rather than indivisible units. A word, for example, can be broken down into units of sound. Displacement Correct Answers The language user can talk about things that are not present- the messages can refer to things in remote time (past and future) or space (here or elsewhere). Productivity Correct Answers Language users can understand and create never-before-heard utterances. Duality of patterning Correct Answers A large number of meaningful utterances can be recombined in a systematic way from a small number of discrete parts of language. For example, suffixes can be attached to many roots, and words can be combined to create novel sentences. Grammar Correct Answers Linguistic rule system that we use to produce and understand sentences. Descriptive grammar Correct Answers set of grammatical rules based on what we say, not on what we should say according to some language authority. Perspective grammar Correct Answers set of grammatical rules prescribed by a language authority.