160 terms
Caregiver Language and Motherese
Caregiver speech (often called motherese or baby talk) is the distinctive register used when speaking to infants and you
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Cohort Effect
A cohort effect refers to systematic linguistic patterns associated with a generation or age group because they share hi
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Language Change
Language change refers to systematic alterations in linguistic systems over time. Changes may affect phonology, morpholo
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Language Contact and Convergence
Language contact occurs when speakers of different languages interact regularly; convergence refers to the process where
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Language Variation
Language variation encompasses the systematic differences in how language is used across speakers, geographical regions,
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Linguistic Competence
Linguistic competence refers to the internalized knowledge of language that enables a speaker to produce and understand
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Linguistic Relativity and Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) proposes that language influences or shapes speakers' thought patterns, p
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Metalanguage and Metalinguistic Awareness
Metalanguage is language used to discuss and analyze language itself; metalinguistic awareness is the ability to reflect
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Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one thing is applied to another, suggestin
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Paper 1, Individual Variation, Social Factors: Language and Gender
Language and gender examines how gender (social categories of masculinity and femininity) influences language use and ho
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Paper 1, Individual Variation, Social Factors: Language and Gender
Language and age examines how age influences language use, including differences between children and adults, age-gradin
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Paper 1, Individual Variation, Social Factors: Language and Gender
Language and class examines how socioeconomic class (determined by education, income, and occupation) influences languag
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Paper 1, Individual Variation, Social Factors: Language and Gender
Language and ethnicity examines how ethnic group membership influences language use and how language serves as a marker
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Paper 1, Individual Variation, Social Factors: Language and Gender
Language and occupation examines how different professions and work contexts develop distinctive language varieties, inc
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Paper 1, Individual Variation, Social Factors: Language and Gender
Cameron's framework challenges essentialist views of gender differences in language, arguing instead that language and g
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Phonetics is the branch of linguistics that studies the physical properties of speech sounds, including their production
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized into systems within particular languages and how sound patterns contr
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Prosody refers to the suprasegmental features of speech—stress, rhythm, and intonation—that extend beyond individual sou
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words, including morphemes (the smallest units of meaning), word fo
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Syntax is the study of the rules governing how words are arranged into phrases and sentences. It examines sentence struc
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Semantics is the study of meaning in language, examining how words, sentences, and utterances convey meaning and how con
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Pragmatics is the study of how language is used in social contexts to accomplish communicative goals. It examines speake
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Graphology is the study of the writing system of a language and the visual presentation of written text, including choic
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Discourse refers to extended language use in context—texts, conversations, and extended utterances—and the patterns that
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Lexis refers to the vocabulary or word stock of a language. Lexical analysis examines word choice in texts, word relatio
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Determiners are words that precede and modify nouns or noun phrases to specify or quantify them. They include articles (
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Prepositions are words that establish relationships between nouns (or pronouns) and other sentence elements, expressing
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Conjunctions are words that link grammatical elements—words, phrases, or clauses—creating complex structures and relatio
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Paper 1, Language Levels, Key Frameworks: Phonetics
Modal verbs (can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, ought to) are auxiliary verbs that express modali
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Accent and Dialect: Estuary English
Estuary English is an accent variety emerging in Southeast England that blends features of Received Pronunciation with f
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Accent and Dialect: Estuary English
Multicultural London English (MLE) is a dynamic variety emerging in ethnically diverse London communities, incorporating
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Accent and Dialect: Estuary English
Yorkshire English features include distinctive pronunciation (broad Yorkshire vowel system), grammatical features (use o
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Accent and Dialect: Estuary English
Scottish English features a distinctive phonological system (rhoticity, vowel distinctions), grammatical forms (modal ve
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Content: Mode
Mode refers to the medium of communication available to language users. The three primary modes are spoken (communicatio
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Content: Mode
Field refers to the subject domain or professional/social area of a text. It encompasses the topic being discussed and t
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Content: Mode
Function refers to the communicative purpose or intended outcome of a text. Different functions require different langua
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Content: Mode
Audience refers to the real or imagined person or group for whom a text is produced. Speakers and writers adapt their la
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Individual Variation: Dialect
A dialect is a variety of a language associated with a particular region or social group and distinguished by consistent
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Individual Variation: Dialect
An accent is a variety of language distinguished by characteristic pronunciation patterns and phonological features. Acc
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Individual Variation: Dialect
A sociolect is a language variety defined by social variables such as class, age, gender, ethnicity, or occupation rathe
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Individual Variation: Dialect
An idiolect is the personal language system of an individual, comprising their unique combination of vocabulary choices,
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Individual Variation: Dialect
Code-switching is the practice of moving between different language varieties, dialects, sociolects, or languages within
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Paper 1, Language Variation, Individual Variation: Dialect
Received Pronunciation (RP) is a non-regional accent of English historically associated with speakers from the Southeast
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Paper 1, Register and Formality: Colloquialism
Colloquialism refers to informal language, words, and expressions typical of casual conversation rather than formal spee
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Paper 1, Register and Formality: Colloquialism
Slang refers to highly informal vocabulary and expressions that are typically used by specific social groups, often for
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Change: Prescriptivism
Prescriptivism is an approach to language based on establishing and enforcing rules about correct language use. Prescrip
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Change: Prescriptivism
Descriptivism is the approach to language study based on observing and describing how language is actually used by speak
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Change: Prescriptivism
Standardisation is the historical and social process through which one variety of a language becomes codified, promoted,
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Change: Prescriptivism
Standard English is the codified variety of English used in formal writing, education, law, and formal speech. It is bas
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Change: Prescriptivism
The Great Vowel Shift is a major historical phonological change affecting Middle English long vowels, occurring over sev
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Levels: Phonological Change
Phonological change refers to shifts in the sound systems of languages, affecting which sounds exist, how they are produ
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Levels: Phonological Change
Semantic change is the process through which the meaning of a word or expression alters over time. Changes may involve n
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Levels: Phonological Change
Lexical change refers to transformations in a language's vocabulary over time, including the birth of new words, the dea
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Levels: Phonological Change
English spelling history traces the evolution from variable medieval spelling practices through the gradual standardizat
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Levels: Phonological Change
Punctuation history traces the development of marks used to organize written text and indicate meaning, from medieval mi
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Levels: Phonological Change
Lexical innovation refers to the creation of new words or new meanings for existing words, driven by technological chang
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Levels: Phonological Change
A pidgin is a simplified contact language created when speakers of mutually unintelligible languages interact, typically
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Paper 1, Variation Over Time, Language Levels: Phonological Change
A creole is a language that develops when speakers of a pidgin have children who grow up speaking the pidgin as their fi
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Paper 2, Assessment Objectives: Assessment Objective 1 (AO1)
AO1 assesses students' ability to apply appropriate methods of language analysis using associated terminology with coher
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Paper 2, Assessment Objectives: Assessment Objective 1 (AO1)
AO2 assesses students' critical understanding of concepts and issues relevant to language use, including how language re
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Paper 2, Assessment Objectives: Assessment Objective 1 (AO1)
AO3 assesses students' ability to analyse and evaluate how contextual factors (audience, purpose, medium, social context
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Paper 2, Assessment Objectives: Assessment Objective 1 (AO1)
AO4 assesses students' ability to explore connections across texts informed by linguistic concepts and methods, demonstr
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Paper 2, Child Language Development: Child Language Development
Child Language Development is the systematic study of how children acquire linguistic competence across phonological, le
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Paper 2, Child Language Development: Child Language Development
Lexical development encompasses the acquisition of vocabulary items and their semantic representations, including both r
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Paper 2, Child Language Development: Child Language Development
The nature vs nurture debate in language acquisition concerns whether children have innate linguistic capacity (Universa
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Paper 2, Child Language Development: Child Language Development
Social interactionism proposes that language acquisition is fundamentally social, developing through interaction between
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Paper 2, Child Language Development: Child Language Development
Cognitive development theory proposes that language acquisition depends on the development of underlying cognitive capac
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Paper 2, Child Language Development: Child Language Development
Motherese (also called child-directed speech or CDS) is the modified speech register adults spontaneously adopt when com
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Paper 2, Child Language Development: Child Language Development
Over-regularization is a grammatical error in which children apply productive morphological rules to words that form irr
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Paper 2, Child Language Development: Child Language Development
Written language development encompasses the acquisition of reading and writing abilities, from emergent literacy throug
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Paper 2, Child Language, Development: First Words
First words are the initial meaningful utterances that children produce, typically appearing around 12 months of age. Fi
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Paper 2, Child Language, Development: First Words
Vocabulary development refers to the gradual acquisition and expansion of words a child understands (receptive vocabular
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Paper 2, Child Language, Development: First Words
Grammatical development refers to children's acquisition of the morphological and syntactic structures of their language
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Paper 2, Child Language, Development: First Words
Overregularization is a feature of grammatical development in which children apply productive morphological rules to irr
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Paper 2, Child Language, Development: First Words
Phonological development refers to children's gradual acquisition of the sounds, sound distinctions, and pronunciation p
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Paper 2, Child Language, Development: First Words
Semantic development refers to children's gradual acquisition of word meanings and understanding of how language conveys
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Paper 2, Child Language, Development: First Words
Pragmatic development refers to children's gradually improving ability to use language as a social tool to achieve commu
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Paper 2, Child Language, Development: First Words
Overextension (or overgeneralization) is a pattern in early semantic development in which children apply a word to a bro
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Paper 2, Child Language, Development: First Words
Underextension (or undergeneralization) is a pattern in early semantic development in which children restrict a word's a
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Paper 2, Child Language, Phonological Development: Phonetic Inventory
A child's phonetic inventory is the set of sounds they can produce, gradually expanding from early consonants and vowels
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Paper 2, Child Language, Phonological Development: Phonetic Inventory
Consonant cluster acquisition refers to children's gradual learning to produce and recognize sequences of consonants wit
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Paper 2, Child Language, Stages: Babbling
Babbling is an early stage of speech development in which infants produce repeated sequences of vowel and consonant soun
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Paper 2, Child Language, Stages: Babbling
The holophrastic or one-word stage is a developmental period in which children express complex meanings through single w
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Paper 2, Child Language, Stages: Babbling
The telegraphic stage is a period of early multi-word speech in which children combine content words (nouns, verbs, adje
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Paper 2, Child Language, Stages: Babbling
The post-telegraphic stage refers to language development after the telegraphic stage, in which children gradually acqui
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Paper 2, Child Language, Theories: Skinner's Behaviorism
Skinner's behaviorist theory proposes that language acquisition occurs through operant conditioning: children imitate ad
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Paper 2, Child Language, Theories: Skinner's Behaviorism
Innatism (Chomsky) proposes that children possess innate linguistic knowledge (Universal Grammar) that predisposes them
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Paper 2, Child Language, Theories: Skinner's Behaviorism
Piaget's theory proposes that language development is linked to children's cognitive development. Language emerges as ch
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Paper 2, Child Language, Theories: Skinner's Behaviorism
Bruner's theory emphasizes the role of social interaction and caregiver support in language development. Caregivers prov
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Paper 2, Child Language, Theories: Skinner's Behaviorism
Vygotsky's theory emphasizes that language development is inherently social and culturally embedded. Children develop la
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Paper 2, Child Language, Theories: Skinner's Behaviorism
Universal Grammar (UG) is the hypothesis that all human languages share fundamental structural principles reflecting the
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Paper 2, Child Language, Theories: Skinner's Behaviorism
The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is Vygotsky's theory that there is a gap between what children can accomplish ind
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Paper 2, Child Language, Theories: Skinner's Behaviorism
Aitchison's theory proposes that language acquisition involves cognitive processes of pattern recognition, categorizatio
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Paper 2, Child Language, Theories: Skinner's Behaviorism
Crystal's model provides detailed stage-based descriptions of language development from birth to age 8, examining phonol
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Paper 2, Child Language, Writing Development: Scribbling and Emergent Writing
Scribbling and emergent writing are early developmental stages in which children produce marks on paper, initially rando
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Paper 2, Child Language, Writing Development: Scribbling and Emergent Writing
Letter formation development involves children learning to produce recognizable letter shapes and understanding directio
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Paper 2, Child Language, Writing Development: Scribbling and Emergent Writing
Literacy acquisition refers to the developmental process through which children learn reading and writing skills, from e
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Paper 2, Discourse Analysis: Turn-Taking
Turn-taking is the system by which speakers organize the distribution of talk in conversation, allocating who speaks whe
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Paper 2, Discourse Analysis: Turn-Taking
Adjacency pairs are sequences of two utterances by different speakers where the first part (first pair part) creates a n
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Paper 2, Discourse Analysis: Turn-Taking
Repair encompasses the mechanisms by which speakers address problems in speaking, comprehension, or hearing during conve
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Paper 2, Discourse Analysis: Turn-Taking
Topic management involves the strategies speakers use to initiate new topics, develop and sustain existing topics, shift
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Paper 2, Discourse Analysis: Turn-Taking
Face-threatening acts are utterances or actions that inherently damage either the speaker's or listener's face (public s
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Paper 2, Discourse Analysis: Turn-Taking
Discourse analysis encompasses approaches to examining language beyond sentence-level, including analysis of how texts a
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Paper 2, Language and Technology: Texting Language
Texting language (text speak, SMS language) refers to the modified written variety used in short message service (SMS) a
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Paper 2, Language and Technology: Texting Language
Social media discourse encompasses language use specific to social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook
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Paper 2, Language and Technology: Texting Language
Computer-mediated communication encompasses all language use through digital technologies. CMC removes non-verbal cues,
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Paper 2, Language Diversity and Change: Language and Power
Language and power examines how linguistic choices and structures reinforce or challenge existing power dynamics, includ
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Paper 2, Language Diversity and Change: Language and Power
Language and technology examines how communication technologies shape language use, including new linguistic forms (emot
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Paper 2, Language Diversity: Standard Language and Standardization
Standard language is the variety of a language established through social and institutional processes as the accepted fo
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Paper 2, Language Diversity: Standard Language and Standardization
Prestige refers to the social value and status attached to linguistic varieties. Prestige varieties are perceived as mor
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Paper 2, Language Features: Metaphor in Language
Metaphor is a figure of speech where a word or phrase from one semantic domain is applied to another domain to create me
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Paper 2, Language Features: Metaphor in Language
Collocation refers to the tendency of certain words to appear frequently together in language. Collocations are establis
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Paper 2, Language Features: Metaphor in Language
Audience and purpose analysis involves identifying who a text is designed for and what it aims to achieve, then analyzin
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Paper 2, Language Features: Metaphor in Language
A semantic field (also called lexical field or word field) is a set of words with related meanings that form a conceptua
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Paper 2, Language Features: Metaphor in Language
Synonymy and antonymy are semantic relationships: synonyms share similar meanings while antonyms express opposite meanin
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Paper 2, Language Features: Metaphor in Language
Multimodal communication integrates language with other modes: visual images, layout, color, typography, sound, and gest
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Paper 2, Language Theories: Robin Lakoff
Robin Lakoff is a prominent sociolinguist whose 1975 work 'Language and Woman's Place' proposed that women and men use l
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Paper 2, Language Theories: Robin Lakoff
Deborah Tannen is a prominent sociolinguist whose work focuses on conversational style and how differences in socializat
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Paper 2, Language Theories: Robin Lakoff
Peter Trudgill is a sociolinguist whose research examines language variation and dialectology, particularly the relation
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Paper 2, Language Theories: Robin Lakoff
William Labov is a foundational sociolinguist whose quantitative methods and research on language variation and change h
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Paper 2, Language Theories: Robin Lakoff
Basil Bernstein was a sociologist of education whose concept of restricted and elaborated codes proposed that different
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Paper 2, Language Theories: Robin Lakoff
Norman Fairclough is a linguist who developed critical discourse analysis (CDA), an approach examining how language is i
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Paper 2, Spoken Language Features: Fillers
Fillers (also called filled pauses or hesitation markers) are vocal pauses or words inserted into spontaneous speech, ty
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Paper 2, Spoken Language Features: Fillers
False starts (also called self-repairs or restarts) are utterances where a speaker begins speaking, stops, and initiates
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Paper 2, Spoken Language Features: Fillers
Overlaps occur when speakers' talk overlaps temporally, resulting in simultaneous speech. They range from supportive res
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Paper 2, Spoken Language Features: Fillers
Backchannelling (also called backchannels or listener responses) refers to brief listener utterances that occur during a
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Paper 2, Spoken Language Features: Fillers
Prosody encompasses the suprasegmental features of speech: pitch (frequency of voice), intonation (pitch patterns across
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Paper 2, Written Language Features: Graphological Features
Graphology refers to the visual and physical properties of written text. These features contribute to how texts are read
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Paper 2, Written Language Features: Graphological Features
Cohesion refers to the linguistic mechanisms that create connections between clauses, sentences, and paragraphs, making
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Paper 2, Written Language Features: Graphological Features
Text types are categories of texts defined by their communicative purpose, typical structure, and characteristic languag
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Global English: World Englishes
World Englishes refers to the multiple varieties of English used globally, including those in countries where English is
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Global English: World Englishes
Global English refers to English used as an international or lingua franca language, enabling communication among speake
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Global English: World Englishes
A lingua franca is a language used for communication between speakers of different native languages, serving as a common
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Language and Power: Instrumental Power
Instrumental power refers to language used to exercise direct control over others' behavior or to achieve material goals
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Language and Power: Instrumental Power
Influential power refers to language used to persuade, convince, or shape others' thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes throu
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Language and Power: Instrumental Power
Political discourse encompasses the language, rhetorical strategies, and communicative practices through which political
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Language and Technology: Netspeak
Netspeak refers to the distinctive linguistic features of online communication, including abbreviations (LOL, BRB), emot
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Language and Technology: Netspeak
Hashtags are metadata tags created by prefixing words or phrases with the # symbol, used on social media platforms to ma
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Language and Technology: Netspeak
Emoticons are text-based representations of facial expressions created with keyboard characters (punctuation, letters, n
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Research Methods: Elicitation Technique
Elicitation techniques are research methods in which the investigator prompts language production by asking questions, s
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Research Methods: Elicitation Technique
Corpus analysis is a quantitative research approach that examines large bodies of language data (corpora) using computat
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Research Methods: Elicitation Technique
The comparative method is a historical linguistic approach that compares related languages or varieties to identify regu
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Research Methods: Elicitation Technique
Apparent-time studies track language change by comparing language use across age groups in a single time period, assumin
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Paper 3, Investigating Language, Research Methods: Elicitation Technique
Real-time studies follow speakers or language communities over many years or decades, directly observing language change
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Paper 3, Language Investigation: Language Investigation Methodology
Language investigation methodology encompasses the systematic approaches and procedures for researching language phenome
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Paper 3, Language Investigation: Language Investigation Methodology
A research question articulates the specific aspect of language a researcher aims to investigate. Effective research que
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Paper 3, Language Investigation: Language Investigation Methodology
Data collection methods are the specific approaches used to gather language samples for investigation. Different methods
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Paper 3, Language Investigation: Language Investigation Methodology
Transcription converts audio/video recordings into written representation. Detailed transcription conventions represent
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Paper 3, Language Investigation: Language Investigation Methodology
Sampling is the selection of language data or participants for investigation. Sampling decisions affect whether findings
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Paper 3, Language Investigation: Language Investigation Methodology
Validity concerns whether research actually investigates what it claims to investigate; reliability concerns whether pro
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Paper 3, Language Investigation: Language Investigation Methodology
Ethical research practice requires informed consent, privacy protection, appropriate data use, and minimization of harm.
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Paper 4, Coursework: Original Writing in Coursework
Original writing assignment requires students to produce two substantive pieces of writing in the same genre but differe
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Paper 4, Coursework: Original Writing in Coursework
The commentary is an analytical essay (approximately 1000 words) where students reflect on their writing, analyse langua
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Prescriptive Attitudes vs. Descriptive Practice
Prescriptive attitudes are beliefs about 'correct' language use, while descriptive practice refers to actual language us
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