Chapter 12 Flashcards
a shift in meaning from more concrete to more abstract, e.g., the English adverb besides was used earlier for concrete spatial location, but is now used with the more abstract meaning ‘in addition, moreover’
abstraction
process by which speakers seek to repair perceived irregularities in their language; speakers remodel ‘exceptions’ by analogy to other patterns
analogy
the process whereby one sound comes to share some phonetic property or cluster of properties with another sound in its environment; the most common type of phonological process; can involve voicing, nasalization, or point of articulation
assimilation
the incorporation of a word or grammatical element from one language into another
borrowing
words in genetically related languages that are descended from the same word in a common parent language, e.g., Breton dek, Irish deich, Latvian desmit, Czech deset, Greek déka, Farsi dah, Hindi das, Dutch tien, Frisian tsien, Norwegian ti, Icelandic tíu, and English ten
cognates
procedure by which sounds, morphemes, and vocabulary of an earlier language can be reconstructed by comparing forms in the daughter languages
comparative method
the situation in which two or more sounds occur in mutually exclusive environments, i.e., there is no single environment in which more than one of the allophones could occur; sounds in complementary distribution are allophones of a single phoneme
complementary distribution
a sound change that occurs only in certain environments, e.g., Old English k has been lost in present‑day English, but only at the beginning of words before n, as in knight or knuckle
conditioned sound change
process by which a word from a major lexical class, such as a noun, verb, or adjective, loses characteristics typical of that class, particularly inflection, e.g., English modals, which have developed from full verbs, but no longer show agreement: He will have run, not He will‑s ha‑s run.
decategorialization
referring to two (dia‑) or more points in time (‑chrony); an example of a diachronic description would be a comparison of the vowel system of Old English with the vowel system of English today; contrasts with synchrony
diachrony
a variety of a language that is characteristic of a group defined on the basis of geographic or social factors, and that is mutually intelligible with other dialects of the same language despite differences in phonology or grammar
dialect
a schematic representation of the relationships among languages in a family, that is, all of those languages descended from a common ancestral language; typically represented in a branching ‘tree’ structure
family tree or Stammbaum
relationship among all languages and dialects descended from the same parent language; English and German are genetically related, but not English and Japanese
genetic relationship
the development of a lexical item, such as a noun or verb, into a grammatical morpheme, or the shift of a grammatical morpheme into a more grammatical morpheme
grammaticalization/grammaticization
a series of changes in English beginning around 1400 by which originally long vowels were raised, that is, pronounced with the tongue rising higher in the mouth
Great Vowel Shift
a mode of communication used by humans, usually spoken but also written or signed; distinguished from a dialect by mutual intelligibility: speakers of two separate languages are unable to understand each other
language
the situation in which speakers of two or more distinct languages interact with each other, leading to changes in one or more of the languages
language contact
all of the languages and dialects that have developed from a single, common ancestral language
language family
the phonological process by which consonants become less consonant‑like and more vowel‑like, e.g., shifts from voiceless to voiced stops (such as p > b), stops to fricatives (b > v), and fricatives to glides (v > w); also known as “weakening”
lenition
the phonological and grammatical integration of a lexical item from one language into another language; (noun) a loanword from a lexical word class
lexical borrowing (verb)
the reconstruction of aspects of the life and culture of the speakers of a proto‑language based on reconstructed vocabulary
linguistic paleontology
the phonological process by which two sounds are transposed
metathesis
sound symbolism in words; terms for birds and certain other animals, whose names in some way mimics their calls, as well as terms for various actions and sounds effects
onomatopoeia
a phonological process by which a non‑palatal consonant takes on a palatal or palato‑alveolar articulation; typically triggered by high vowels, front vowels, or the palatal approximant
palatalization
the merger of two phonemes into one, e.g., the vowels of English beat and beet were originally separate phonemes
phonemic merger
a reconstruction of the Indo‑European language; the language ancestral to English and all other languages genetically related to it
Proto‑Indo‑European
a reconstruction of the common parent language ancestral to a group of related languages
proto‑language
refreshment of language through the replacement of words and grammatical constructions whose impact has faded through frequent use
renewal
a single point in time (typically the present) for which a language is described; contrasts with diachrony
synchrony
