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14 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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all living languages
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change
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reason for why they change
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through contact with other languages
children learn imperfect versions of adult language new words are developed for new concepts, ideas, items of technology etc |
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types of grammatical changes
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phonological
moropholigal syntactic rules may be oversimplified through the generations irregular forms can- slowly slip out of use |
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genetic relations between the world's languages
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languages that evolve from a common source are genetically related
e.g. german, english and sweedish were dialects of an earlier form of germanic called Proto-Germanic e.g. Spanish, French and Italian were dialects of Latin |
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words, morphemes and phonemes and rules of all types
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may be added, lost or altered
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meaning of words or morphemes
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may broaden, narrow or shift
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lexicon may expand by
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borrowing --> results in loan words entering the language e.g. the word cockatoo comes from malay 'kakatua'
englsih full of high status borrowing from latina nd greek Malsy is full of high status borrowings from sanskrit and arabic |
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also grows through
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word coinage, blends, compounding, acronyms and other processes of word formation
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lexicon may shrink
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as certain words such as typewriter- are rarely used and become obsolete
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number of languages
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somewhat less than 7000, plus 100 or more sign languages
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there are methods of classifying languages such as
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basic clause element order
English is: SVO Japanese is: SOV Yoda: OSV |
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2nd method of classifying langauegs
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according to extent to which their grammatical distinctions are made at the level of inflectional morphology or syntactic order
(configurational/ non-configurational): english is configurational, word order matters |
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isolating (or analytical) languages include
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e.g. thai
have little morphology |
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multimorphemic langauges are
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synthetic
maybe agglutinative or polysythetic (many indigenous Nth american languages) |
