Gcom Ch.5

Front 1

Language

Back 1

A structured system of symbols for communicating meaning.

Front 2

symbols, referents

Back 2

Arbitrary representations of frequently ambiguous referents; the objects, events, ideas, or relationships referred to by the words.

Front 3

phoneme, morpheme, syntax

Back 3

The individual sounds that compose a specific spoken language(letter); the smallest unit of meaning in a language(word); the rules that govern appropriate combinations of words into sentences.

Front 4

productivity

Back 4

the capacity of language to transform a small number of phonemes into whatever words, phrases, and sentences we require to communicate our abundance of thoughts, ideas, and feelings.

Front 5

displacement

Back 5

The human ability to use language to talk about objects, ideas, events, and relations that don't just exist in the here and now.

Front 6

self-refexiveness

Back 6

The ability to us language to talk about language. Ex. "My sentence is ungrammatical."

Front 7

abstracting

Back 7

The process of selective perception whereby we formulate increasingly vague conceptions of our world by leaving out details associated with objects, events, and ideas.

Front 8

inferences

Back 8

conclusions about the unknown based on the known.

Front 9

judgments

Back 9

subjective evaluations of objects, events, or ideas.

Front 10

linguistic determinism, linguistic relativity, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Back 10

Claims we are the prisoners of our native language, unable to think certain thoughts or perceive in certain ways because of the grammatical structure and lexicon of our language; Claims the grammar and lexicon of our native language powerfully influences but does not imprison our thinking and perception; these two versions are both referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Front 11

signal response

Back 11

An automatic, conditioned reponse to a symbol.

Front 12

framing

Back 12

the influence wording has on our perception of choices.

Front 13

denotation, connotation.

Back 13

The socially agreed upon meaning of words; the volatile, personal, subjective meaning of words.

Front 14

false dichotomy

Back 14

using either-or language to frame a choice as though only two opposing possibilities exist when at least a third option is clearly availible.

Front 15

jargon, euphemism

Back 15

Specialized language of a proffesion, trade, or group; a form of linguistic novocaine whereby word choices numb us to or camofo

Front 16

euphemism

Back 16

a form of linguistic novocaine whereby word choices numb us to or camouflage unpleasent or offensive realities.