English Linguistics — LET Practice Questions

Semantics is the linguistic study of meaning—what words, phrases, and sentences denote and convey. When we ask 'What does the word dog mean?' or 'What does the sentence He left last night mean?', we are asking semantic questions. Semantics focuses on the literal, dictionary-based meaning of language units. Pragmatics, by contrast, asks 'What did the speaker intend?' and considers context. A semantic question asks what is meant; a pragmatic question asks what the speaker meant to accomplish.

/p/ is the voiceless bilabial plosive. Three features locate it on the IPA chart: voicing — the vocal cords are silent (voiceless); place of articulation — both lips come together to block airflow (bilabial); manner of articulation — the airflow is briefly stopped, then released (plosive, also called a stop). /b/ has all the same features except voicing — voiced bilabial plosive — which is why /p/ and /b/ differ only in vibrating vs. silent vocal cords. /m/ is bilabial but the air goes through the nose (nasal), not stopped and released. /w/ is bilabial but glides into a vowel (approximant), not stopped.

Diglossia (Greek for 'two tongues') is a sociolinguistic situation where a community uses two distinct languages or varieties for clearly different functions. One variety is called the high (H) form — used in formal domains like school, government, and religious settings — and the other is called the low (L) form — used at home and in casual conversation. The labels 'high' and 'low' describe the SOCIAL STATUS each variety carries, not the quality of the language itself. In the Philippines, English is often the H variety in formal settings and Tagalog or another local language is the L variety at home, even though both are equally rich linguistically. This is different from bilingualism, where a speaker uses both languages freely across all contexts.