Language and Communication: Key Concepts Defined

Key Concepts in Language and Communication

Translate: to change words into a different language or to decide that words, behavior, or actions mean a particular thing.

Translation: something which is translated or the process of translating something from one language to another.

Language: a system of communication consisting of sounds, words, and grammar, or the system of communication used by the people of a particular country or profession.

Culture: the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs of a particular group of people at a particular time and place.

Code: a set of rules which are accepted as general principles, or a set of written rules which state how people in a particular organization or country should behave.

Assertion: a statement that you strongly believe is true.

Sentence: a group of words, usually containing a verb, which expresses a thought in the form of a statement, question, instruction, or exclamation and starts with a capital letter when written.

Proposition: A statement that affirms or denies something; the meaning expressed in such a statement, as opposed to the way it is expressed.

Word: a single unit of language which has meaning and can be spoken or written.

Dialect: a form of language that people speak in a particular part of a country, containing some different words and grammar.

Message: a short piece of information that you give to a person when you cannot speak to them directly.

Text: the written words in a book, magazine, etc. Not the pictures.

Context: the text or speech that comes immediately before and after a particular phrase or piece of text and helps to explain its meaning.

Meaning: Something that is conveyed or signified; sense or significance; something that one wishes to convey, especially by language.

Grammar: the rules about how words change their form and combine with other words to make sentences.

Linguistics: the systematic study of the structure and development of a language in general or of particular languages.

Vocabulary: all the words known and used by a particular person.

Lexicon: all the words used in a particular language or subject, or a dictionary.

Propositional meaning: of a word or an utterance arises from the relation between it and what it describes in a real or imaginary world, as conceived by the speakers of a particular language to which the world or utterance belongs.

Expressive meaning: cannot be judged as true or false. This is because expressive meaning relates to the speaker’s feelings or attitude rather than to what words and utterances refer to.

Presupposed meaning: arises from co-occurrence restrictions, i.e., restrictions on what other words or expressions we expect to use before or after a particular lexical unit.

Selectional: these are a function of the propositional meaning of a word. Selectional restrictions are deliberately violated in the case of figurative language but are otherwise strictly observed.

Collocational Restrictions: these are semantically arbitrary restrictions, which do not follow logically from the propositional meaning of a word.

Evoked meaning: arises from dialect and register.