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Malapropism
A malapropism (; also called a malaprop, acyrologia or Dogberryism) is the incorrect use of a word in place of a word with a similar sound, either unintentionally or for comedic effect, resulting in a nonsensical, often humorous utterance. An example is the statement attributed to baseball player Yogi Berra, regarding switch hitters, "He hits from both sides of the plate. He's amphibious", with the accidental use of '' amphibious'' rather than the intended '' ambidextrous''. Malapropisms often occur as errors in natural speech and are sometimes the subject of media attention, especially when made by politicians or other prominent individuals. Etymology The word "malapropism" (and its earlier form, "malaprop") comes from a character named "Mrs. Malaprop" in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play '' The Rivals''. Mrs. Malaprop frequently misspeaks (to comic effect) by using words which do not have the meaning that she intends but which sound similar to words that do. Sheridan ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speech Error
A speech error, commonly referred to as a slip of the tongue (Latin: , or occasionally self-demonstratingly, ) or misspeaking, is a deviation (conscious or unconscious) from the apparently intended form of an utterance.Bussmann, Hadumod. Routledge dictionary of language and linguistics. Routledge: London 1996, 449. They can be subdivided into spontaneously and inadvertently produced speech errors and intentionally produced word-plays or puns. Another distinction can be drawn between production and comprehension errors. Errors in speech production and perception are also called performance errors. Some examples of speech error include sound exchange or sound anticipation errors. In sound exchange errors, the order of two individual morphemes is reversed, while in sound anticipation errors a sound from a later syllable replaces one from an earlier syllable. Slips of the tongue are a normal and common occurrence. One study shows that most people can make up to as much as 22 slips of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yogi Berra
Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra (born Lorenzo Pietro Berra; May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015) was an American professional baseball catcher who later took on the roles of Manager (baseball), manager and Coach (baseball), coach. He played 19 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) (1946–1963, 1965), all but the last for the New York Yankees. He was an 18-time Major League Baseball All-Star Game, All-Star and won 10 World Series championships as a player—more than any other player in MLB history. Berra had a career batting average (baseball), batting average of .285, while hitting 358 home runs and 1,430 Run batted in, runs batted in. He is one of only six players to win the American League Major League Baseball Most Valuable Player Award, Most Valuable Player Award three times. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spoonerism
A spoonerism is an occurrence of speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched (see metathesis) between two words of a phrase. These are named after the Oxford don and priest William Archibald Spooner, who reportedly commonly spoke in this way. Examples include saying "blushing crow" instead of "crushing blow", or "runny babbit" instead of "bunny rabbit". While spoonerisms are commonly heard as slips of the tongue, they can also be used intentionally as a word play. The first known spoonerisms were published by the 16th-century author François Rabelais and termed . In his novel '' Pantagruel'', he wrote ("insane woman at Mass, woman with flabby buttocks"). Etymology Spoonerisms are named for the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Warden from 1903 to 1924 of New College, Oxford, who was allegedly susceptible to this mistake. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' records the word ''spoonerism'' as early as 1900. The term was well-es ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or Sentence (linguistics), sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in Tone (linguistics), tone. The terms ''stress'' and ''accent'' are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called ''Pitch-accent language, pitch accent'', and when produced through length alone, it is called ''quantitative accent''. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called ''stress accent'' or ''dynamic accent''; English uses what is called ''variable stress accent''. Since stress can be realised through a wide range of Phonetics, phonetic properties, such as loudness, vowel length, and pitch (which are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neologisms
In linguistics, a neologism (; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered a neologism once it is published in a dictionary. Neologisms are one facet of lexical innovation, i.e., the linguistic process of new terms and meanings entering a language's lexicon. The most precise studies into language change and word formation, in fact, identify the process of a "neological continuum": a '' nonce word'' is any single-use term that may or may not grow in popularity; a '' protologism'' is such a term used exclusively within a small group; a ''prelogism'' is such a term that is gaining usage but is still not mainstream; and a ''neologism'' has become accepted or recognized by social institutions. Neologisms are often driven by changes in culture and technology. Popular examples of neologisms can be found in science, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Part Of Speech
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech ( abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior (they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences), sometimes similar morphological behavior in that they undergo inflection for similar properties and even similar semantic behavior. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner. Other terms than ''part of speech''—particularly in modern linguistic classifications, which often make more precise distinctions than the traditional scheme does—include word class, lexical class, and lexical category. Some authors restrict the term ''lexical category'' to refer only to a par ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean Aitchison
Jean Margaret Aitchison (born 3 July 1938) is a Professor Emerita of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Her main areas of interest include socio-historical linguistics; language and the mind; and language and the media. Biography Aitchison earned her MA from Cambridge, and an AM from Radcliffe College at Harvard. She was an assistant lecturer in Greek at Bedford College London from 1961 to 1965, lecturer and senior lecturer, and reader in linguistics at the London School of Economics from 1965 to 1992. She was the Rupert Murdoch Professor of language and communication at Oxford from 1993 to 2003, Professorial Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford from 1993 to 2003 (emeritus since 2003). In 1996 she gave the BBC Reith lectures on The Language Web. Professor Aitchison is a descendant of Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison, lieutenant governor of the Punjab from 1882 to 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syllable
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are most often consonants). In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre; properties such as stress, tone and reduplication operate on syllables and their parts. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ''ignite'' is made of two syllables: ''ig'' and ''nite''. Most languages of the world use relatively simple syllable structures that often alternate between vowels and consonants. Despite being present in virtually all human languages, syllables still have no precise definition that is valid for all known languages. A common criterion for finding syllable bound ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metrical Phonology
Metrical phonology is a theory of stress or linguistic prominence. The innovative feature of this theory is that the prominence of a unit is defined relative to other units in the same phrase. For example, in the most common pronunciation of the phrase "doctors use penicillin" (if said out-of-the-blue), the syllable '-ci-' is the strongest or most stressed syllable in the phrase, but the syllable 'doc-' is more stressed than the syllable '-tors'. Previously, generative phonologists and the American Structuralists represented prosodic prominence as a feature that applied to individual phonemes (segments) or syllables. This feature could take on multiple values to indicate various levels of stress. Stress was assigned using the cyclic reapplication of rules to words and phrases. Metrical phonology holds that stress is separate from pitch accent and has phonetic effects on the realization of syllables beyond their intonation, including effects on their duration and amplitude. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Utterance
In spoken language analysis, an utterance is a continuous piece of speech, by one person, before or after which there is silence on the part of the person. In the case of oral language, spoken languages, it is generally, but not always, bounded by silence. In written language, utterances only exist indirectly, though their representations or portrayals. They can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways. In spoken language, utterances have several characteristics such as paralinguistic features, which are aspects of speech such as facial expression, gesture, and posture. Prosody (linguistics) , Prosodic features include Stress (linguistics), stress, Intonation (linguistics), intonation, and Paralanguage, tone of voice, as well as ellipsis, which are words that the listener inserts in spoken language to fill gaps. Moreover, other aspects of utterances found in spoken languages are non-fluency features including: voiced/un-voiced pauses (i.e. "umm"), tag quest ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oracular
An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Description The word ''oracle'' comes from the Latin verb ''ōrāre'', "to speak" and properly refers to the priest or priestess uttering the prediction. In extended use, ''oracle'' may also refer to the ''site of the oracle'', and the oracular utterances themselves, are called ''khrēsmoí'' (χρησμοί) in Greek. Oracles were thought to be portals through which the gods spoke directly to people. In this sense, they were different from seers (''manteis'', μάντεις) who interpreted signs sent by the gods through bird signs, animal entrails, and other various methods.Flower, Michael Attyah. ''The Seer in Ancient Greece.'' Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. The most important oracles of Greek antiquity were Pythia (priestes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vernacular
Vernacular is the ordinary, informal, spoken language, spoken form of language, particularly when perceptual dialectology, perceived as having lower social status or less Prestige (sociolinguistics), prestige than standard language, which is more codification (linguistics), codified, institutionally promoted, literary language, literary, or formal. More narrowly, a particular language variety that does not hold a widespread high-status perception, and sometimes even carries social stigma, is also called a vernacular, vernacular dialect, nonstandard dialect, etc. and is typically its speakers' native language, native variety. Regardless of any such stigma, all nonstandard dialects are full-fledged varieties of language with their own consistent grammatical structure, phonology, sound system, body of vocabulary, etc. Overview Like any native language variety, a vernacular has an internally coherent system of grammar. It may be associated with a particular set of vocabulary, and sp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
