Grammatical Change Definitions

Question 1

Analogy

Answer 1

a process where one form in a language becomes more like another with which it is somehow associated.

Question 2

Analogical extension

Answer 2

the extension or generalisation of the morphological pattern of one lexeme to another

Question 3

Analogical levelling

Answer 3

the extension, or generalisation, of one allomorph of a lexeme within a paradigm

Question 4

Sturtevant’s paradox

Answer 4

Sound change is regular but creates irregularity, analogy is irregular but creates regularity

Question 5

Three basic types of changes in the placement of a morpheme boundary:

Answer 5

1. Loss of an original morpheme boundary.
2. Creation of a new morpheme boundary
3. Shift of a morpheme boundary (metanalysis)

Question 6

Humboldt’s Universal

Answer 6

one meaning = one form

Question 7

Lexical words

Answer 7

have own meaning and appear independently of any linguistic context: elephant, large, guitar.

Question 8

Grammatical (or function) words

Answer 8

only have meaning when they occur with other words and they relate those words to form a grammatical sentence: that, on, my, will, not.

Question 9

Grammaticalisaion

Answer 9

The study of the development of grammar or, more specifically, grammatical (functional) categories

Question 10

Examples of grammaticalisation (2)

Answer 10

1. Verbal lexeme to auxiliary verb
2. Temporal adverb to tense marker

Question 11

Four stages in grammaticalisation

Answer 11

1. Desemanticisation
2. Extension
3. Decategorisation
4. Erosion

Question 12

Desemanticisation

Answer 12

loss in meaning content

Question 13

Extension

Answer 13

use in new contexts

Question 14

Decategorisation

Answer 14

loss of morphosyntactic properties characteristic of the source forms, including loss of independent word status

Question 15

Erosion

Answer 15

loss of phonetic substance

Question 16

Three mechanisms of syntactic change:

Answer 16

1. Renanalysis
2. Extension
3. Borrowing

Question 17

Reanalysis

Answer 17

changes the underlying structure of a syntactic construction without altering the surface form

Question 18

Extension

Answer 18

results in changes in surface forms

Question 19

Anti-Doppel Bias

Answer 19

1. There is a force causing lexical change
2. (Anecdotal evidence) this pressure applies more to doppels than non-doppels
3. The pressure can only apply differently in bilinguals, as monolinguals cannot distinguish from non-doppels
4. So: bilinguals have a bias a against doppels

Question 20

Doppel

Answer 20

A form-meaning pair that is recognisably similar across 2 or more languages