All languages have rules. These rules together form the grammarof that language. These rules are what enables a person to produce an infinite number of phrases/sentences from a finite number of possibilities, that is understood by both the speaker and the listener. It would be rather difficult to learn any language if each sentence had to be learnt separately! Syntax is the areas of linguistics...
Lexical semantics is the subfield of linguistics that studies how and what words of a language denote and thus involves the meaning of individual words. Lexical semantics focuses on theories of: classification and decomposition of word meaning differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure between different languages the relationship of word meaning to sentence meaning and syntax The...
Validity is the extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure. Testing is a matter of making judgments about test-takers competence in view of their performance on certain tasks. These judgments are inferences as tests do not collect concrete evidence about test-takers’ ability, in the natural state, but only abstract inferences Evidence of test performance is used to draw...
Word structure In morphology, word structure is described in terms of roots and affixes Simple words consist one morpheme – the root fun, go, danger Complex words consist more that one morpheme – the root + affix(es) funny, goes, endanger Languages have three principal ways of extending their vocabulary: invention of entirely new words borrowing from other languages formation of new...
There are three main types of meaning: Referential meaning Social Meaning Affective Meaning Referential Meaning This is the object, notion, or state of being described by a word, phrase or sentence e.g. Safaru Kaidha the meaning of this is the person who goes by that particular name. Hadigilla’s trousers This refers to the particular piece of clothing that belongs to that particular person...
In linguistics, grammatical aspect is a property of a verb that defines the nature of temporal flow in the described event or state. In most modern Indo-European languages, including English, the concept of aspect has become conflated with the concept of tense. It is somewhat difficult to explain the idea of aspect in English because it uses the same patterns to encode in tense both the time and...
Technically, a word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetic value. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses, and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound. It is...
A new theory of language and language use that exerted significant influence on language teaching and therefore language testing from the early 1970s was the theory of communicative competence Communicative competence is a linguistic term which refers to a learner’s second language ability. It refers to a learner’s ability to: apply and use grammatical rules form correct utterances...
All language tests are not of the same kind. They differ mainly in terms of design (method) and purpose. In terms of method, a broad distinction can be made between pen-and-paper language tests and performance tests Paper-and-pen tests are typically used for the assessment of separate components of language (grammar, vocabulary …) receptive understanding (listening & reading...
Lexicon is a word of Greek origin meaning vocabulary. It is a list of words together with additional word-specific information (i.e. a dictionary) In linguistics the definition of lexicon is slightly more specialized – it includes lexemes used to form words A lexeme is a unit of linguistic analysis that: belongs to a particular syntactic category has particular meaning. Lexemes may be:...