Language Change and General Flashcards
Acronym
A word made up out of the initial letters of a phrase.
Agglutinative/Agglutinating Language
A type of language in which words consist of lengthy strings of forms.
Analogy
A change that affects a language when regular forms begin to influence less regular forms.
Aphasia
A language disorder resulting from brain damage, which affects a person’s ability to produce or understand grammatical and semantic structure.
Back-formation
A process of word formation where a new word is formed by removing an imagined affix from another word (editor to edit)
Broca’s Area
An area of the brain that controls the expression of spoken language.
Calque
A borrowed item in which parts are translated separately into the new language.
Coinage
The creation of a new word out of existing elements (post person)
Comparative Method
A technique that compares forms taken from cognate languages to see if they are historically related.
Creole
A pidgin that has become the mother tongue of a speech community.
Critical Period
A period of time in child development during which language is thought to be most easily learned.
Etymology
The study of the origins and history of the form and meaning of words.
Folk Etymology
Altering an unfamiliar word to make it more familiar (asparagus to sparrowgrass)
Idiolect
The linguistic system of an individual speaker.
Inflecting Language
A language in which words express grammatical relationships by using inflections.
Isogloss
A line on a map showing the boundary of an area in which a linguistic feature is used; the lines mark such features as vocabulary (isolex), morphology (isomorph), philology (isophone), semantics (isoseme), or sociocultural use (isopleth).
Isolating Language
A language in which words are invariable and grammatical relations are shown mainly by word order, e.g. Chinese
Jargon
The technical language of a special field, unintelligible utterance with good intonation, used by young children when learning to talk.
Metathesis
Alteration in a normal sequence of elements, esp sounds (aks for ask)
Pidgin
A language with a reduced range of structure and use, with no native speakers.
Speech Community
A group of people, identified regionally or socially, who share at least one language or variety.
Substrate Language
A variety that has influenced the structure or use of a more dominant variety or language (the superstratum) in a community.
Suppletion
The use of an unrelated form to complete a paradigm (go/goes/going/gone/went)
Universal
A property found in the analysis of all languages.
