Glossary : American Structuralism

Glossary

B: inside speakers

A: outisde speakers

C: speech

Mere: Is a syntcategorematic expression: it lacks both sense and reference; is not quantifiable, and does not function as subject or predicate in falsifiable assertions. It is used to inform about attitudes, not facts.

Objectivity: It refers to the connection between the outside speakers, inside speakers and the speech.

Subjective: The connection is only between inside speakers and speech, excluding the outside speakers.

Mentalism: It assumes that there are factors in mental operations inside speakers exempt from physical laws in the empirical realm outside speakers. However inside speaker was affected by outside speaker, this precluded physical determination of inherited language conventions speech by the physical constitution of outside speakers. It opposes: wholes or parts to material and formal principles, mind to brain, functions of the mind to triggering of the nervous system, understanding to experiencing, deciding to reacting, preferring to being reinforced, speaking to uttering, heroism or insanity to environmental conditioning.

It is being as dualistic because it recognizes two kinds (mental and material) of data, experience, perception, insight, causality, evidence, explanation, study goals and methods of study.

 Mechanism: Takes it for granted that there is a casual continuity from outside speakers, through inside speakers to speech.

Behaviorism: It offered and objective approach. It assumed the fundamental identity of physically determined speech-behavior with any other kind of nonlinguistic outside speakers-behavior. But it was conceded that while all inside speakers-behavior is the immediate consequence of outside speakers´ factors, speech-behavior is mediate.

Behaviorism is monistic because it admits only a single kind of data, erroneously distinguished by mentalists into experience, insight, perception, causality, evidence, explanation, study goal and method of study.

Language: The totality of mutually effective substitute responses.

Utterance: An act of speech.

Speech-Community: It refers to any community which speaks the same language

Language: The total of utterances that can be made in a speech- community.

Same: It refers to what is alike.

Forms: The vocal features common to same or partly same utterances.

Meanings: The corresponding stimulus-reaction- features.

Morpheme: The minimum form.

Sememe: The meaning of the morpheme.

Free: A form which may be an utterance.

Bound: A form which is not free.

Word: A form which has more than one morpheme.

Phrase:  A non-minimum free form.

Formative: A bound form which is part of a word.

Phoneme: A minimum same of vocal feature.

Homonyms: Different forms which are alike as to phonemes.

Constructional meaning: the corresponding stimulus- reaction features.

Morphologic construction: The construction of formatives in a word.

Syntactic construction: The construction of free forms in a phase.

Sentence: a maximum construction in any utterance.

Functional meaning: the meaning of a position.

Functions: positions in which a form occurs.

Form-class: All forms having the same functions.

Class- meaning: the functional meaning in which the forms of a form-class appear.

Categories: the functional meanings and class-meanings of a language.

Word-class: a form-class of words.

BEHAVIORAL CORRELATES FOR DETERMINING TRADITIONAL CONCERNS ABOUT LANGUAGE:

Literary standard: Is accessible though general or personal educational effort transcends geographic and social barriers, and is used on occasions described as formal.

Colloquial standard: Is observed in situations lacking formal behaviors among observably privileged classes within a larger speck community.

Provincial standard:  Is observed among those remote geographically from the formative environments of cultural centers.

Sub-standard speech behavior:  Is found among those who must interact daily as peers with each other, but only occasionally, and as subordinates to the privileged: their goals, satisfactions, reinforcement and opportunities differ markedly from those of standards speakers.

Local dialect:  Is that of an interacting group with which others have so little contact that dialect speakers are incomprehensible without considerable attention.

Phonetics: Is the branch of science that deals with the sound-production. It provides an objective record of gross acoustic features, only part of which are distinctive for particular languages, while phonology or practical phonetics, determines which features are the distinctive ones.

Acting as though:  An empirical procedure called the minimal pair test.

Modification: Presumes some standard from which a departure is made, and the criteria for establishing the base can vary, legitimately or inconsistently.

Duration: The relative length of time through which the vocal organs are kept in a position.

Stress: It consists in greater amplitude of sound waves and is produce by means of more energetic movements, which can vary in the manner of application, or where increase of loudness sets in.

Pitch: Frequency of vibration in the musical sound of the voice.

Palatalization: During the production of a consonant, the tongue and lips take up, as far as compatible with the main features of the phoneme, the position of a front vowel.

Velarization: Refers to the process in which the tongue is retracted as far a back vowel-

Labialized: When the lips are rounded during the production of the consonants.

Labiovelarized: The manner in which the vocal organs pass from inactivity to the formation of a phoneme, or from the formation of one phoneme to that of the next, or from the formation of a phoneme to inactivity.

Reference: Is the static relation, dynamic process or action linking speech to outside speakers, mediated by inside speakers.

Sense: The state, process or action within inside speakers, by which speech is related to outside speakers.

Referent: Is the thing. A bit of objective outside speakers or subjective inside speakers now regarded as part of speech.

Denotation Is reference.

Connotation: Is a subjective or socialized relation of the referent for speaker to other referents and properties.

Meaning of a linguistic form: The situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer.

Displaced speech: A speaks of absent apples to inside speaker who relay´s outside speaker´s message to speech.

Apple: Lying, irony, jesting, poetry, narrative fiction and the like.

Language: Is the expression of ideas, feelings, or volitions.

Hypostasis: Is closely related to quotation, the repetition of a speech, and like onomatopoeia, consists in deviations from the ordinary tie-up of phonetic form with dictionary meaning, which still shows considerable complexity.

Synchronic linguistic description: Proceeds on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, signaled through linguistic forms containing a discrete number of combinable phonemic contrasts.

Taxeme: A simple feature of grammatical arrangement.

Tagmemes: Meaningful units of grammatical form.

Episemes: The meaning of tagmemes.

Sandhi: Is the label for features of modulation and phonetic modification important to many syntactic structures.

Endocentric: When free forms combining can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of which the form-class of one member may be determinative of the phrase´s grammatical behavior.

Exocentric:  When the phrase pr construction does not follow the grammatical behavior of either constituent.