Chapter 12

Question 1

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’

Answer 1

abstraction

Question 2

process by which speakers seek to repair perceived irregularities in their language; speakers remodel ‘exceptions’ by analogy to other patterns

Answer 2

analogy

Question 3

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

Answer 3

assimilation

Question 4

the incorporation of a word or grammatical element from one language into another

Answer 4

borrowing

Question 5

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

Answer 5

cognates

Question 6

procedure by which sounds, morphemes, and vocabulary of an earlier language can be reconstructed by comparing forms in the daughter languages

Answer 6

comparative method

Question 7

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

Answer 7

complementary distribution

Question 8

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

Answer 8

conditioned sound change

Question 9

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.

Answer 9

decategorialization

Question 10

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

Answer 10

diachrony

Question 11

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

Answer 11

dialect

Question 12

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

Answer 12

family tree or Stammbaum

Question 13

relationship among all languages and dialects descended from the same parent language; English and German are genetically related, but not English and Japanese

Answer 13

genetic relationship

Question 14

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

Answer 14

grammaticalization/grammaticization

Question 15

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

Answer 15

Great Vowel Shift

Question 16

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

Answer 16

language

Question 17

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

Answer 17

language contact

Question 18

all of the languages and dialects that have developed from a single, common ancestral language

Answer 18

language family

Question 19

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”

Answer 19

lenition

Question 20

the phonological and grammatical integration of a lexical item from one language into another language; (noun) a loanword from a lexical word class

Answer 20

lexical borrowing (verb)

Question 21

the reconstruction of aspects of the life and culture of the speakers of a proto‑language based on reconstructed vocabulary

Answer 21

linguistic paleontology

Question 22

the phonological process by which two sounds are transposed

Answer 22

metathesis

Question 23

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

Answer 23

onomatopoeia

Question 24

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

Answer 24

palatalization

Question 25

the merger of two phonemes into one, e.g., the vowels of English beat and beet were originally separate phonemes

Answer 25

phonemic merger

Question 26

a reconstruction of the Indo‑European language; the language ancestral to English and all other languages genetically related to it

Answer 26

Proto‑Indo‑European

Question 27

a reconstruction of the common parent language ancestral to a group of related languages

Answer 27

proto‑language

Question 28

refreshment of language through the replacement of words and grammatical constructions whose impact has faded through frequent use

Answer 28

renewal

Question 29

a single point in time (typically the present) for which a language is described; contrasts with diachrony

Answer 29

synchrony