| descriptive linguistics | The part of anthropological linguistics that focuses on the mechanics of language.
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| phonology | The general study of the sounds used in human speech.
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| phoneme | The smallest unit of sound in speech that will indicate a difference in meaning.
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| morpheme | The smallest combination of sounds in human speech that carry a meaning.
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| syntax | The manner in which minimum units of meaning (morphemes) are combined.
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| historical linguistics | The study of the history of languages including their development and relationship to other languages.
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| ethnolinguistics | A field of study in linguistics that analyzes the relationship between a language and culture.
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| Sapir-Whorf hypothesis | A hypothesis about the relationship between language and culture that states that language constructs perceptions.
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| sociolinguistics | A subfield of linguistics that analyzes the relationship between language and culture with a focus on how people speak in social contexts.
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| displacement | The ability of humans to communicate symbolically about distant time and space.
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| lexigrams | Geometric figure symbols used to teach apes symbolic communication.
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| silent language | All of a culture's nonverbal symbolic systems of communication, including kinesics and proxemics.
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| kinesics | The use of the body to communicate—gestures, posture, and facial expression.
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| proxemics | The study of the use of space in communication.
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