UGC-NET (NTA) Linguistics, February-2023

Charles A. Ferguson's concept of 'Diglossia' describes a situation where, in a given society, there are two dialects or languages, namely High (H) and Low (L) variants, which serve different functions. The 'High' variant is typically the more prestigious form, associated with formal functions, educated speakers, and the written language. The 'Low' variant is often the colloquial, everyday spoken language of the community.

Charles F. Hockett proposed a set of design features that characterize human language and differentiate it from animal communication. 'Displacement' allows speakers to talk about things that are not present, either spatially or temporally. 'Rapid fading' refers to the transient nature of spoken language, in that the speech signal disappears quickly after being produced. Both these features are unique to human languages.

Click consonants are found predominantly in the languages of Southern Africa
and are distinctive for their 'ingressive' and 'velaric' nature. 'Ingressive' refers to the fact that the airflow is inward, rather than outward as in most sounds. 'Velaric' refers to the place of articulation, where the back of the tongue contacts the velum, or soft part of the roof of the mouth.

Metathesis refers to a phonological process where sounds switch places in a word. In 'risk' to 'riks', and 'ask' to 'aks', the consonants in the syllables have switched places. 'Matlab' to 'matbal' is an example of metathesis in Hindi, where the 'I' and ,q sounds have been switched.

Inflection and Derivation are the two main processes of morphology. Inflection refers to the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, and mood. Derivation is the process of forming a new word on the base of an existing one by adding a derivational affix.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay proposed the Basic Colour Terms theory. According to this theory, there are certain universal patterns in the way different cultures and languages name basic colors. They proposed an evolutionary sequence of color term introduction that all cultures progress through.

A set can be specified in distinct ways: by listing all its members (a), by stating a property which an object must have to qualify as a member (b), or by defining a set of rules which generates its members (c). These are the standard ways of defining sets in set theory, a fundamental part of mathematical logic.

Chomsky's Hierarchy categorizes grammars into types 0 through 3. The given production mechanism A → xB or A → x is compatible with type 3 (regular grammars),type 2 (context-free grammars), and type 1 (context-sensitive grammars). It is not compatible with type 0 (unrestricted grammars), as they have no restrictions on the form of their production rules.

A function, in set theoretic terms, is generally represented as a special kind of relation, but it is not typically characterized as an 'element', 'item', or 'term'. Functions describe a particular type of relationship between different sets, wherein each member of the first set (the domain) is related to exactly one member of the second set (the range).