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Linguist

Real-Life Activities

Real-Life Communication

It should come as no surprise that as language professionals, linguists must also have good communication skills.

"If you're teaching in a university or even as an English as a second language teacher overseas, you'll have to be able to communicate to the students," says linguistics professor Irene Mazurkewich.

When linguists identify language patterns, they create terms to describe them. In linguistics, there are terms for almost all the ways people use language, so it is very important for linguists to understand and remember them.

Here is a list of linguistic concepts and definitions. Read over both and see if you can match up the term with the correct definition. Once you have jotted down your choices, compare them with our answers.

  1. Idiom
  2. High vowel
  3. Empty word
  4. Lax vowel
  5. Quantifier
  6. Qualifier
  • A vowel that, when spoken, allows the speaker's jaw to relax more than it would when speaking other vowels. For example, "i" is this kind of vowel, while "u" is not.
  • A vowel sounded with the lower jaw almost totally closed, such as "ee."
  • A word that affects the meaning of an adjective, indicating the degree of importance or relevance, such as "very" or "quite."
  • A word that modifies a noun phrase to indicate a unit of measurement, such as "few" or "many."
  • A word that doesn't have content in itself, but does have a function in grammar, such as "at" or "a."
  • An expression peculiar to a language -- one that doesn't really make sense according to regular grammatical rules such as "put off" to mean postpone, or "next door" to mean the building beside.