core grammarn
within the framework of Chomsky’s universal grammar, a grammar
which contains all the universal principles of language as well as special con-
ditions or rules (parameters) which can be “set” for particular languages.
Parameters may vary from one language to another. For example, in some
languages, e.g. English, the headof a phrase is first, in Japanese the head is
last. Aspects of a language which are not predictable from the Universal
Grammar are considered not to belong to the core grammar but to the
periphery or peripheral grammar.
It is claimed that, in first language acquisition, the initial universal grammar
of a child consists of fixed principles and open (that is “unset”) parameters.
As the child receives input from his or her first language, the open parameters
are fixed for a particular language and the child’s L1 core grammar results.
Researchers have investigated the role of core grammars in second language
acquisition.
core vocabularyn
in language teaching, the essential words together with their meanings that
are needed in order to be able to communicate and understand at a basic
level.
coronalsn
the class of sounds that includes labials, alveolars, and palatals.
corpus n
a collection of naturally occurring samples of language which have been
collected and collated for easy access by researchers and materials devel-
opers who want to know how words and other linguistic items are actually
used. A corpus may vary from a few sentences to a set of written texts or
recordings. In language analysis corpuses usually consist of a relatively
large, planned collection of texts or parts of texts, stored and accessed by
computer. A corpus is designed to represent different types of language use,
e.g. casual conversation, business letters, ESP texts. A number of different
types of corpuses may be distinguished, for example:
1 specialized corpus: a corpus of texts of a particular type, such as
academic articles, student writing, etc.
2 general corpus or reference corpus: a large collection of many different
types of texts, often used to produce reference materials for language
learning (e.g. dictionaries) or used as a base-line for comparison with
specialized corpora
corpus