General Linguistics: Language as a System
What is tested
General linguistics items ask you to analyze language, not to speak it. Expect terminology drawn from phonetics/phonology (phone vs. phoneme vs. allophone, minimal pairs, complementary distribution, natural classes, syllable structure), morphology (free vs. bound morphemes, roots and affixes, inflection vs. derivation, allomorphy, compounding), syntax (constituency, phrase structure, recursion, structural ambiguity), semantics (sense vs. reference, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, homonymy vs. polysemy), pragmatics (deixis, speech acts, implicature, Gricean maxims), sociolinguistics (dialect vs. register vs. idiolect, diglossia, code-switching), and historical linguistics (regular sound change, cognates, the comparative method).
Traps that appear
- Treating spelling as sound. Letters are not phonemes; orthography is an unreliable guide to pronunciation.
- Confusing an allophone (positional variant) with a phoneme (contrastive unit).
- Labeling every affix "derivational." Inflection changes grammatical form without changing lexical category (hablo → hablaba); derivation creates a new word (hablar → hablante).
- Blending diachronic (change over time) with synchronic (one moment in time) analysis.
Worked example
Run the minimal-pair test, then the distribution test. English aspirated [pʰ] in pot and unaspirated [p] in spot never contrast in the same environment; they are allophones of /p/. In Hindi and Quechua the same two sounds do distinguish words, so there they are separate phonemes. Conclusion: phonetic identity does not determine phonological status - distribution and contrast do. Spanish /b/ shows the same logic: a stop after pause or nasal (un beso), an approximant between vowels (nuevo), one phoneme, two allophones.