Linguistics Glossary

Linguistics Glossary

broadening - a semantic change in which the meaning of a word changes over time to become more encompassing, e.g., dog once meant a particular breed of dog.


comparative method - the technique linguists use to deduce forms in ancestral language by examining corresponding forms in several of its descendant languages.


comparative reconstruction - the deducing of forms in an ancestral language of genetically related languages by application of the comparative method.


content words - the nouns, verbs, adjective, and adverbs that constitute the major part of the vocabulary.

Critical Period, The - the time between early childhood and puberty during which a child can acquire a native language easily, swiftly, and without external intervention. After this period, the acquisition of the grammar is difficult and, for some individuals, never fully achieved.
English
Old English - (5th - 11th century)
Middle English - (11th - 14th century)
Early Modern English - (14th - 17th century)
Modern English - (17th century - present)
function word - a word that does not always have a clear lexical meaning but has a grammatical function; function words include conjunctions, prepositions, articles, auxiliaries, complementizers, and pronouns.

Great Vowel Shift, The - a sound change that took place in English some time between 1400 and 1600 C.E. in which seven long vowel phonemes were changed.

Indo-European - the descriptive name given to the ancestor language of many modern language families, including Germanic, Slavic, and Romance. Also called Proto-Indo-European.

meaning shift - changes in semantic meanings of words through various processes, e.g., broadening, narrowing.

narrowing - a semantic change in which the meaning of a word changes in time to become less encompassing, e.g., deer once met "animal."

Norman Conquest, The - (1066) the invasion of England by William, Duke of Normandy, resulting in several changes leading to what we know how as Modern English.

Old Norman - one of the many dialects of Old French spoken in Normandy and spread to England during the Norman Conquest.

phoneme - a contrastive phonological segment whose phonetic realizations are predictable by rule.

printing press - invented in 1475 by William Caxton, a machine that transferred ink from one document to another and led to the eventual expansion of Old English to include many new Greek and Latin word borrowings.

Proto-Indo-European - See Indo-European.

proto-language - the earliest language from which genetically related languages developed.

reconstruction, comparative - the deducing of forms in an ancestral language of genetically related languages by application of the comparative method.

segment - (1) an individual sound that occurs in a language; (2) the act of dividing utterances into sounds, morphemes, words, and phrases.

viseme* - a representational unit used to specify speech sounds in the visual domain.

Sources used:

Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. An Introduction to Language. 9th. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2011. pp. 570-599. Print.

*http://www.wikipedia.org/

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