Language Across Time Vocab

Question 1

Dialect

Answer 1

geographical variety of English

Question 2

Sociolect

Answer 2

social variety of English (eg. Australian teen-speak)

Question 3

Ethnolect

Answer 3

cultural/ethnic variety of English (eg. African American vernacular)

Question 4

Idiolect

Answer 4

Individual variety of English

Question 5

Vernacular

Answer 5

the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region

Question 6

prescriptivism

Answer 6

approach to studying language involving belief that there is ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’

Question 7

descriptivism

Answer 7

approach to studying language involving the acceptance of language as it is.

Question 8

codification

Answer 8

to place lexemes in a dictionary or to formally recognise as being a real word.

Question 9

Borrowing

Answer 9

when you take a word from another language and adopt it into your own.

Question 10

neologisms

Answer 10

Modern, newly created words or expressions. (technology has triggered a number of neologisms)

Question 11

word death

Answer 11

the loss of a word from common recognition and usage in a language

Question 12

Lingua Franca

Answer 12

A common standard language than spans societies

Question 13

commonisation

Answer 13

process in which a brand name or proper noun becomes a common noun

Question 14

acronym

Answer 14

word formed from the initials (laser, scuba)

Question 15

initialism

Answer 15

abbreviation consisting of letters pronounced separately. (BBC, ATM)

Question 16

compounding

Answer 16

formation of word by fusing together two free morphemes, sometimes hyphenated.

Question 17

blends

Answer 17

words or phonemes are blended rather than combined whole (brunch)

Question 18

shortenings

Answer 18

arise from shortened forms of longer words (exam, gym)

Question 19

affixation

Answer 19

creating new words by adding prefixes or suffixes to existing lexemes

Question 20

conversion

Answer 20

when a word is used in a different word class (eg. noun ‘google’ to verb ‘to google’)

Question 21

backformation

Answer 21

where a word is formed by removing an actual or often just a supposed or incorrectly identified affix. (eg. pease - pea)

Question 22

elevation

Answer 22

when unpleasant overtones of a word erode.

Question 23

deterioration

Answer 23

when words lose positive connotations and take on negative ones.

Question 23

broadening

Answer 23

expansion of the contexts in which a lexeme can appear

Question 24

narrowing

Answer 24

reduction of contexts in which a word can appear.

Question 25

semantic shift

Answer 25

a total alteration of the contexts in which a word can be (i.e it changes meaning)

Question 26

taboo

Answer 26

topic an behaviour viewed negatively in a culture

Question 27

euphemisms

Answer 27

a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.