Language Change (Modern) Flashcards
What is Amelioration?
The process of a word’s meaning changing and picking up more positive connotations over time.
What is Pejoration?
The process of a word’s meaning changing and picking up more negative connotations over time.
What is Broadening?
The process of a word’s meanings becoming generalised over time.
What is Narrowing?
The process of a word’s meanings becoming more specialised over time.
What is Descriptivism?
A way of viewing language as being standard or non-standard, not making judgements about correctness.
What is Prescriptivism?
A way of viewing language as correct or incorrect, prescribing a ‘correct’ way to use language.
What is Declinism?
A tendency noted by Robert Lane Greene for prescriptivists to view language as being in a state of constant decline from a once great peak.
What is a Lexicon?
The vocabulary of language.
What is Linguistic Purism?
A pejorative label used for a view that sees a language as needing preservation from things that might make it change, such as dialect variation and borrowings from other languages.
What is Uptalk?
A way of speaking in which the intonation pattern moves up towards the end of a declarative utterance.
What is a Speech Community?
Any socially or regionally defined group in which its members share a number of linguistic characteristics.
What is an Acronym?
First letters are taken for a series of words to create a new term.
What is Affixation?
One or more free morphemes are combined with one of more bound morphemes.
What is Back Formation?
A verb is created from an existing noun by removing a suffix.
What is Blending?
A combination of clipping and compounding. Words are abbreviated and joined together to form a new word.
What is Borrowing?
The process of taking a word from another language and inserting it into the lexicon of another.
What is Clipping?
Words are shortened and the shortened form becomes the norm.
What is Compounding?
Words are combined together to form new words. These can be open, hyphenated or solid.
What is Functional Shift?
A word shifts from one word class to another, usually from a noun to a verb.
What is an Eponym?
Names of a person or company are used to define particular objects. Often they are the inventors or distributors of the product.
What is Initialism?
The first letters from a series of words form a new term, but each letter is pronounced.
What is a Loan Word?
A word that has been borrowed into a lexicon.
What is a Neologism?
A completely new word
What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?
This states that the certain thoughts of an individual in one language cannot be understood by those who live in another language. The way people think is strongly effected by their native languages.