Summary
Highlights
An overview of linguistics as a science, focusing on defining features of human language: creativity, generality, parity, universality, and mutability. It also distinguishes between descriptive linguistics (observing usage) and prescriptivist approaches.
Explanation of articulatory phonetics, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and how speech sounds are classified by voicing, place of articulation, and manner of articulation.
Covers phonotactics and syllable structure (onsets, nuclei, codas). Introduces concepts like phones, phonemes, allophones, and phonological processes (assimilation, deletion, etc.) used to describe sound changes.
Explores how words form phrases and sentences. Covers lexical categories, constituent identification, tree diagrams, tense phrases, and complement clauses.
The study of meaning, covering thematic roles (agent, theme, goal), word relations (synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms), and types of ambiguity (lexical, structural, scope).
Examines internal word structure, morphemes (free vs. bound), word formation processes (affixation, clipping, blending, back-formation), and allomorphs.
Explores meaning in conversation, focusing on Grice's Cooperative Principle, conversational maxims (quantity, quality, manner, relation), and how flouting these rules creates implicature and humor.