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Drift (linguistics)
Two types of language change can be characterized as linguistic drift: a unidirectional short-term and cyclic long-term drift. Short-term unidirectional drift According to Sapir, drift is the unconscious change in natural language. He gives the example ''Whom did you see?'' which is grammatically correct but is generally replaced by ''Who did you see?'' Structural symmetry seems to have brought about the change: all other ''wh-'' words are monomorphic (consisting of only one morpheme). The drift of speech changes dialects and, in long terms, it generates new languages. Although it may appear these changes have no direction, in general they do. For example, in the English language, there was the Great Vowel Shift, a chain shift of long vowels first described and accounted for in terms of drift by Jespersen (1860–1943). Another example of drift is the tendency in English to eliminate the ''-er'' comparative formative and to replace it with the more analytic ''more''. Thus, in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language Change
Language change is variation over time in a language's features. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify three main types of change: systematic change in the pronunciation of phonemes, or sound change; borrowing, in which features of a language or dialect are altered as a result of influence from another language or dialect; and analogical change, in which the shape or grammatical behavior of a word is altered to more closely resemble that of another word. All living languages are continually undergoing change. Some commentators use derogatory labels such as "corruption" to suggest that language change constitutes a degradation in the quality of a language, especially when the change originates from human error or is a prescriptively discouraged usage. Modern linguistics rejects this concept, since from a scientific point of view such inn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subject–object–verb
Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *'' Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness, or a relationship with another entity Linguistics * Subject (grammar), who or what a sentence or a clause is about * Subject case or nominative case, one of the grammatical cases for a noun Music * Subject (music), or 'theme' * The melodic material presented first in a fugue * Either of the two main groups of themes (first subject, second subject), in sonata form Sonata form (also ''sonata-allegro form'' or ''first movement form'') is a musical structure generally consisting of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation. It has been used widely since the middle of the 18th c ... * ''Subject'' (album), a 2003 album by Dwele Science and technology * The individual, whether an adult person, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robin Lakoff
Robin Tolmach Lakoff (; born November 27, 1942) is a professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book ''Language and Woman's Place'' is often credited for making language and gender a major debate in linguistics and other disciplines.Sergio Bolaños Cuellar,Women's Language: A struggle to overcome inequality, ''Forma Y Función 19, 2006. Biography Lakoff was born in 1942 in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a B.A. at Radcliffe College, a M.A. from Indiana University, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard University (1967). She was married to linguist George Lakoff. She taught at University of California, Berkeley from 1972 until her retirement. While an undergraduate at Radcliffe College (in Cambridge, MA), Lakoff audited Noam Chomsky's classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and became connected to the MIT Linguistics Department. During this time, as Chomsky and students were creating Transformational Generative Gram ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Talmy Givon
Thomas Givon (also known as Talmy Givón) (born June 22, 1936) is a linguist and writer. He is one of the founders of "West Coast Functionalism", today classified as a usage-based model of language, and of the linguistics department at the University of Oregon. Givón advocates an evolutionary approach to language and communication. Education Givón earned his bachelor of science degree cum laude in agriculture from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1959. Attending UCLA, he received a Master of Science degree in horticulture in 1962, a C.Phil in Plant Biochemistry, a Master of Arts degree in linguistics in 1966, and a PhD in linguistics in 1969, as well as an TESL certificate in 1965. Career In 1966 Givón worked for System Development Corporation as a research associate in lexicography. The following year he went to University of Zambia where he researched Bantu languages. In 1969 he became an assistant professor of Linguistics and African Languages at University of Cal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carleton Taylor Hodge
Carleton may refer to: Education establishments * Carleton College, a liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota, United States *Carleton School in Bradford, Massachusetts, United States *Carleton University, a university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada *Ottawa-Carleton District School Board Human names * Carleton (surname) * Baron Carleton * Carleton (given name) Places Canada * Ontario: ** Carleton (Ontario electoral district) (1867–1966, 2015–present) ** Carleton (Ontario provincial electoral district) (1867–1995, 2018–present) **Carleton County, Ontario (historic) **Carleton Place, Ontario **West Carleton Township, Ontario ** Carleton Ward of Ottawa, AKA College Ward * New Brunswick: ** Carleton, New Brunswick, now part of Saint John **Carleton Parish, New Brunswick, in Kent County ** Carleton (New Brunswick federal electoral district) (1867–1914) ** Carleton (New Brunswick provincial electoral district) (1995–present) **Mount Carleton, New Brunswick **Moun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henri Wittmann
Henri Wittmann (born 1937) is a Canadian linguist from Quebec. He is best known for his work on Quebec French. Biography Henri (Hirsch) Wittmann was born in Alsace in 1937. After studying with André Martinet at the Sorbonne, he moved to North America and taught successively at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Alberta in Edmonton, the University of Windsor and McGill University in Montreal before teaching in the French university system of Quebec, the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and at Rimouski as well as the Université de Sherbrooke. He retired from teaching in 1997, after an extensive tour of teaching and conferencing in France. In the following years, he became the first Director of the Presses universitaires de Trois-Rivières and emeritus researcher at the Centre d’Analyse des Littératures Francophones des Amériques (CALIFA) at Carleton University in Ottawa. As a comparatist, Wittmann contributed to the study of the morphology of a n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Warren Cowgill
Warren Cowgill (; December 19, 1929 – June 20, 1985) was an American linguist. He was a professor of linguistics at Yale University and the Encyclopædia Britannica's authority on Indo-European linguistics. Cowgill was unusual among Indo-European linguists of his time in believing that Indo-European should be classified as a branch of Indo-Hittite, with Hittite as a sister language of the Indo-European languages, rather than a daughter language. Warren Cowgill and his twin brother, anthropologist George Cowgill, were born near Grangeville, Idaho. Along with his brother, he graduated from Stanford University in 1952 and received a Ph.D. from Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ... in 1957. He was a member of the Yale faculty in the Department of Linguistics until h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph H
Joseph is a common male given name, derived from the Hebrew Yosef (יוֹסֵף). "Joseph" is used, along with "Josef", mostly in English, French and partially German languages. This spelling is also found as a variant in the languages of the modern-day Nordic countries. In Portuguese and Spanish, the name is "José". In Arabic, including in the Quran, the name is spelled '' Yūsuf''. In Persian, the name is "Yousef". The name has enjoyed significant popularity in its many forms in numerous countries, and ''Joseph'' was one of the two names, along with ''Robert'', to have remained in the top 10 boys' names list in the US from 1925 to 1972. It is especially common in contemporary Israel, as either "Yossi" or "Yossef", and in Italy, where the name "Giuseppe" was the most common male name in the 20th century. In the first century CE, Joseph was the second most popular male name for Palestine Jews. In the Book of Genesis Joseph is Jacob's eleventh son and Rachel's first son, and k ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Areal Feature
In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a proto-language, or, common ancestor language. That is, an areal feature is contrasted to lingual-genealogically determined similarity within the same language family. Features may diffuse from one dominant language to neighbouring languages (see "sprachbund"). Genetic relationships are represented in the family tree model of language change, and areal relationships are represented in the wave model. Characteristics Resemblances between two or more languages (whether in typology or in vocabulary) have been observed to result from several mechanisms, including lingual genealogical relation (descent from a common ancestor language, not principally related to biological genetics) ; borrowing between languages ; retention of features when a population adopts a new language ; and chance coincidence. When little or no direct do ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language Families
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the ''daughter languages'' within a language family as being ''genetically related''. According to ''Ethnologue'' there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. A living language is defined as one that is the first language of at least one person. The language families with the most speakers are: the Indo-European family, with many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi and Bengali); and the Sino-Tibetan fa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals. Etymology The word ''syntax'' comes from Ancient Greek roots: "coordination", which consists of ''syn'', "together", and ''táxis'', "ordering". Topics The field of syntax contains a number of various topics that a syntactic theory is often designed to handle. The relation between the topics is treated differently in different theories, and some of them may not be considered to be distinct but instead to be derived from one another (i.e. word order can be seen as the result of movement rules derived from grammatical relations). Se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Analytic Language
In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily by way of ''helper'' words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections (changing the form of a word to convey its role in the sentence). For example, the English-language phrase "The cat chases the ball" conveys the fact that the cat is acting on the ball ''analytically'' via word order. This can be contrasted to synthetic languages, which rely heavily on inflections to convey word relationships (e.g., the phrases "The cat chase''s'' the ball" and "The cat chase''d'' the ball" convey different time frames via changing the form of the word ''chase''). Most languages are not purely analytic, but many rely primarily on analytic syntax. Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect to inflectional morphemes. A grammatical construction can similarly be ''analytic'' if it uses unboun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
