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Meta Language Notes (VCE)

This document provides a metalanguage list summarizing the five subsystems of the English language: phonetics and phonology, morphology and lexicology, syntax, discourse, and semantics. For each subsystem, it lists relevant metalinguistic terms and concepts. The list is intended to help students learn the technical vocabulary needed to discuss language structure and use when analyzing texts.

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Atif
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408 views

Meta Language Notes (VCE)

This document provides a metalanguage list summarizing the five subsystems of the English language: phonetics and phonology, morphology and lexicology, syntax, discourse, and semantics. For each subsystem, it lists relevant metalinguistic terms and concepts. The list is intended to help students learn the technical vocabulary needed to discuss language structure and use when analyzing texts.

Uploaded by

Atif
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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METALANGUAGE LIST

Note: Below are the five subsystems of the English language, and the relevant metalanguage and
metalinguistic terms for each. Dont worry if you dont know them yet, just make a conscious effort to learn
bit by bit and solidify this knowledge by including them in your essay responses.
Phonetics and Phonology

Prosodic features: pitch, stress, volume, tempo and intonation


Vocal effects: coughs, laughter, breath
Paralinguistic features: hand gestures, body language, facial expressions
Assimilation, vowel reduction, elision, insertion
o Elision: Elision and assimilation is the removal of certain consonants or vowels in words and
assimilating words to sound differently than once originally pronounced.
Features of Broad, General and Cultivated accents:
Alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, rhythm, rhyme
IPA International Phonetic Alphabet

Morphology and Lexicology

Auxiliary verbs, modal verbs, determiners, interjections


o Auxiliary verbs are verbs that often followed by other verbs (e.g. can, will, should, shall,
could, be etc.)
o Modal verbs are also auxiliary verbs that indicates modality
Affixation: prefix, suffix, infix
o Prefix: before the word (e.g. un-happy, where un is the prefix)
o Suffix: after the initial morpheme (e.g. ly, -ing)
o Infix
Inflection and derivation
o Inflection still retains the meaning of the word (e.g. s, -ed, -ing, etc.)
o Derivation changes the meaning of the word or the type of word (e.g. adjective into an
adverb clear into clearly, with ly as the suffix)
Root, bound and free morphemes
o Free morphemes can function as independent words (e.g. town)
o Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with root
morphemes (e.g. bound: consideration, root: -ation)
Suffixation in Australian English
o Tradie, Ambo etc. all evidence of egalitarianism, friendliness and a common social bond
Formation of words: blend, acronyms, initialisms, shortenings, compounding, contractions,
collocations, neologisms
Morphological and lexical patterning in texts

Syntax

Phrases, clauses and sentences


o Phrase, then clause, then sentence
o Clauses contain a predicate and a subject
o Phrases do not have a subject and predicate (e.g. the amusement park)
Sentence types and their function in texts:
o Declarative: I am going to the shops now.
o Imperative: Eat your food!
o Interrogative: Can you please sleep now?
o Exclamatives: I hate you!
Sentence Structure:
o Fragments
o Simple: I ate the food.
o Compound: We can eat all day and then go home.
o Complex: The students are studying tomorrow because they have an upcoming test.
o Compound-complex: Although I like to go camping, I havent had the time to go recently,
and I havent found anyone to go with.
o Ellipsis: The economic crisis affected me more than her.
o Nominalisation
o Coordination: and, but, so
o Subordination: because, if, after, when, therefore
Active and passive voice
Syntactic patterning:
o Antithesis
o Listing
o Parallelism
o Parenthesis: brackets, sidenotes

Discourse

Coherence
o Cohesive text
o Inference
o Logical ordering
o Formatting
o Consistency
o Conventions
o Parenthesis
o Paragraphing
o Repetition
Cohesion
o Information flow (importance of information placement)
Clefting: it was him that stole the cookie (it-clefting)
front focus: On the 3rd of September, the man vacated the apartment

end focus: The man vacated the apartment, on the 3rd of September
there-construction: There were three people at the carnival today
Left dislocation: Those dementors, theyre horrible things
Right dislocation: theyre horrible things, those dementors
Passives: The book was written by me
o Anaphoric and Cataphoric reference:
Anaphoric: Pam went home because she felt sick (she referring back to Pam).
Anaphoric refers to previous information in the text
Cataphoric: Refers to future information, therefore placing greater importance and
emphasis on the information (e.g. When he arrived, John noticed the door was open).
o Deictics:
Deixis is reference by means of an expression whose interpretation is relative to the
(usually) extralinguistic context of the utterance
E.g. I, we, me, then, here, there etc.
A tree was planted over there where is over there?
o Repetition
o Synonymy
o Antonymy
o Collocation
Two or more words commonly used together in English
Fish and chips
To feel free
o Ellipses
Omission of certain words
o Substitution
o Conjunctions
o Semantic field
o Auxiliary verb do
Features of spoken discourse
o Adjacency pairs:
Hello, how are you
Have a good night, bye
o Pauses (e.g. umm, err)
o Interrogative tags
o Discourse particles
o Overlapping speech
Strategies in spoken discourse
o Minimal response:
Hmm, yeah, right, oh
o Holding the floor, topic management, turn-taking
Prosody

Conversational Strategies:
1. Minimal Responses
2. Adjacency Pairs

3. Topic Management
4. Floor holding
5. Discourse Markers
Floor Holding:
1. Connectors
2. Hesitations
3. Fixed Expressions
Non Fluency:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Minimal Responses
Discourse
Self-corrections
False Starts
Pause Fillers/Hesitations

Semantics

Semantic field
Lexical choice and semantic patterning in texts: irony, metaphor, oxymoron, simile, personification,
animation, puns, lexical ambiguity etc.
Lexical meaning, especially sense relations: synonymy, antonymy, idiom, denotation and
connotation etc.
Euphemistic and dysphemistic terms

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