Introduction to Ling ...

Competence refers to a person's internalised grammar (knowledge) of his language. This means a native speaker's ability to produce and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before. It also includes a person's knowledge of what are and what are not sentences of a particular language.

A constituent is a group of words or morphemes with closer relationships between one another than between the elements of the other groups or constituents within the same sentence.

The deep structure (DS) is much more abstract and is considered to be in the speaker's mind. It refers to certain important generalisationsabout the structure of the sentence which are different from its surface.

 A descriptive grammar  is a set of rules based on how language is actually used.

A diachronic approach to language is the study ofthe history of a language, focussing on language change in pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary.

Generative grammar is a conceptual model whose central tenet is that language is a property for which human beings are biologically prewired.The name ‘generative grammar’ is used to refer to this model since speakers are assumed to possess a grammar capable of generating all the possible sentences in their language (while excluding all the impossible ones).

Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA) is an explicit method of analysing sentences grammatically by dividing them into their component parts.

The Langauge Acquisition Device is an inborn capacity (a genetic mechanism or apparatus) which is present in the brain right from the beginning and which enables children (by the age of 3 to 4) to extract the rules of language from speech when they are exposed to it and to use them productively. Animals do not possess this capacity.

Langue refers to the abstract system shared by all the speakers of the same language, like English, Arabic, French, etc. It is an underlying system of abstract rules of lexicon, grammar and phonology which is implanted in each individual’s mind resulting from his nurture in a given speech community.

Linguistics or modern linguistics refers to the scientific study of language and its structure.

The study of word-structure and  word-formation, especially in terms of morphemes and morphological processes.

Paradigmaticand Syntagmatic  are contrasting terms in (structural) Linguistics. Every item of language has a paradigmatic relationship with every other item which can be substituted for it (such as cat with dog), and a syntagmatic relationship with items which occur within the same construction (for example, in The cat sat on the mat, cat with the and sat on the mat).

Parole refers to the real speech of the individual, an instance of the use of system. It is the concrete side of language.

Performance refers to the realisation of the abstract code (competence) in actual situations. It is the person's concrete use of language in producing and understanding sentences.

"The science which studies the characteristics of human sound-making, especially those sounds used in speech, and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription" ( Crystal 1997b: 289)

A general term that includes phonemics and phonetics. The " establishment and description of the distinctive sound  units of a langauges (phonemes) by means of distinctive features"  (Richards and Schmidt 2010: 435) 

A prescriptive grammar is a set of rules about language based on how people think language should be used. In a prescriptive grammar there is right and wrong language.

The signifié (signified)  refers to an idea or a concept, and the signifiant (signifier) refers  to a form or an acoustic image.

Structuralism is a mode of inquiry that consists in interpreting the phenomena it looks at as made up of relations among the various entities rather than as those entities per se.

The surface structure (SS) is the syntactic structure of the sentence which a person speaks or hears: it is theobservable form of the sentence.

A synchronic approach to language studies investigates the state of language at a particular phase of its development without allusion to its history. Saussure referred to this state as an état de langue.

Traditional grammar refers to the collection of prescriptive rules and concepts about the structure of language.