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Contrastive Distribution
Contrastive distribution in linguistics, as opposed to complementary distribution or free variation, is the relationship between two different elements in which both elements are found in the same environment with a change in meaning. Phonology In phonology, two sounds of a language are said to be in contrastive distribution if replacing one with the other in the same phonological environment results in a change in meaning. If a sound is in contrastive distribution, it is considered a phoneme in that language. For example, in English, the sounds and can both occur word-initially, as in the words ''pat'' and ''bat'' (minimal pairs), which are distinct morphemes. Therefore, and are in contrastive distribution and so are phonemes of English. Note that two sounds that are in contrastive distribution in one language can be in complementary distribution or free variation in another. These sounds occur in English, as in the word ''team'' and ''steam'' , but their occurrence is pure ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguistics is concerned with both the cognitive and social aspects of language. It is considered a scientific field as well as an academic discipline; it has been classified as a social science, natural science, cognitive science,Thagard, PaulCognitive Science, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). or part of the humanities. Traditional areas of linguistic analysis correspond to phenomena found in human linguistic systems, such as syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences); semantics (meaning); morphology (structure of words); phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages); phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language); and pragmatics (how social con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indicative Mood
A realis mood (abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences. Most languages have a single realis mood called the indicative mood, although some languages have additional realis moods, for example to express different levels of certainty. By contrast, an irrealis mood is used to express something that is not known to be the case in reality. An example of the contrast between realis and irrealis moods is seen in the English sentences "He works" and "It is necessary that he work". In the first sentence, ''works'' is a present indicative (realis) form of the verb, and is used to make a direct assertion about the real world. In the second sentence, ''work'' is in the subjunctive mood, which is an irrealis mood – here ''that he work'' does not necessarily express a fact about the real world (he could be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Variable Rules Analysis
Variable rules analysis is a set of statistical analysis methods in linguistics that are commonly used in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics to describe patterns of variation between alternative forms in language use. It is also sometimes known as Varbrul analysis, after the name of a software package dedicated to carrying out the relevant statistical computations (''Varbrul'', from "variable rule"). The method goes back to a theoretical approach developed by the sociolinguist William Labov in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and its mathematical implementation was developed by Henrietta Cedergren and David Sankoff in 1974. A variable rules analysis is designed to provide a quantitative model of a situation where speakers alternate between different forms that have the same meaning and stand in free variation, but in such a way that the probability of choice of either the one or the other form is conditioned by a variety of context factors or social characteristics. Such a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.) and/or geographical barriers (a mountain range, a desert, a river, etc.). Such studies also examine how such differences in usage and differences in beliefs about usage produce and reflect social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and it is t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west of England, the sound patterns (''sin'') and (''sing'') are two separate words that are distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, , for another phoneme, . Two words like this that differ in meaning through the contrast of a single phoneme form a ''minimal pair''. If, in another language, any two sequences differing only by pronunciation of the final sounds or are perceived as being the same in meaning, then these two sounds are interpreted as phonetic variants of a single phoneme in that language. Phonemes that are established by the use of minimal pairs, such as ''tap'' vs ''tab'' or ''pat'' vs ''bat'', are written between slashes: , . To show pronunciation, linguists use square brackets: (indicating an aspirated ''p'' in ''p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minimal Pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate that two phones represent two separate phonemes in the language. Many phonologists in the middle part of the 20th century had a strong interest in developing techniques for discovering the phonemes of unknown languages, and in some cases, they set up writing systems for the languages. The major work of Kenneth Pike on the subject is ''Phonemics: a technique for reducing languages to writing''. The minimal pair was an essential tool in the discovery process and was found by substitution or commutation tests. As an example for English vowels, the pair "let" + "lit" can be used to demonstrate that the phones (in let) and (in lit) actually represent distinct phonemes and . An example for English consonants is the minimal pair of "pat" + "bat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Variation
In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers. Sociolinguists argue that describing such variation as "free" is very often a misnomer, since variation between linguistic forms is usually constrained probabilistically by a range of systematic social and linguistic factors, not unconstrained as the term "free variation" suggests. The term remains in use in studies focused primarily on language as systems (e.g. phonology, morphology, syntax), however, since " e fact that variation is 'free' does not imply that it is totally unpredictable, but only that no ''grammatical'' principles govern the distribution of variants." Effects When phonemes are in free variation, speakers are sometimes strongly aware of the fact (especially if such variation is noticeable only across a dialectal or sociolectal divide), and will note, for example, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Complementary Distribution
In linguistics, complementary distribution, as distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation, is the relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other element is found in a non-intersecting (complementary) set of environments. The term often indicates that two superficially-different elements are the same linguistic unit at a deeper level, though more than two elements can be in complementary distribution with one another. In phonology Complementary distribution is the distribution of phones in their respective phonetic environments in which one phone never appears in the same phonetic context as the other. When two variants are in complementary distribution, one can predict when each will occur because one can simply look at the environment in which the allophone is occurring. Complementary distribution is commonly applied to phonology in which similar phones in complementary distribut ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''stop'' ) and the aspirated form (as in ''top'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Thai. On the other hand, in Spanish, (as in ''dolor'' ) and (as in ''nada'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English. The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants, but some allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible. Native speakers of a given languag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allomorph
In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning. The term ''allomorph'' describes the realization of phonological variations for a specific morpheme. The different allomorphs that a morpheme can become are governed by morphophonemic rules. These phonological rules determine what phonetic form, or specific pronunciation, a morpheme will take based on the phonological or morphological context in which they appear. In English English has several morphemes that vary in sound but not in meaning, such as past tense morphemes, plural morphemes, and negative morphemes. Past tense allomorphs For example, an English past tense morpheme is ''-ed'', which occurs in several allomorphs depending on its phonological environment by assimilating the voicing of the previous segment or the insertion of a schwa after an alveolar stop: *as or in verbs whose stem ends with the alveolar st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement of fact, of desire, of command, etc.). The term is also used more broadly to describe the syntactic expression of modality – that is, the use of verb phrases that do not involve inflection of the verb itself. Mood is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although the same word patterns are used for expressing more than one of these meanings at the same time in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages. (See tense–aspect–mood for a discussion of this.) Some examples of moods are indicative, interrogative, imperative, subjunctive, injunctive, optative, and potential. These are all finite forms of the verb. Infinitives, gerunds, and participles, which are non-finite forms of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subjunctive
The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of the utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude towards it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as: wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used vary from language to language. The subjunctive is one of the irrealis moods, which refer to what is not necessarily real. It is often contrasted with the indicative, a realis mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact. Subjunctives occur most often, although not exclusively, in subordinate clauses, particularly ''that''-clauses. Examples of the subjunctive in English are found in the sentences "I suggest that you ''be'' careful" and "It is important that she ''stay'' by your side." Indo-European languages Proto-Indo-European The Proto-Indo-European ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
