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The flashcards below were created by user
jennnn
on FreezingBlue Flashcards.
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diachronic
- looking at language across time; i.e., language change
- At every level of the grammar morphological syntactic semantic
- phonetic/phonological (we know the most about this)
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The Uniformitarian Principle
Phonological changes can account for dialect differences, as well as changes over time
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Comparative method
- To reconstruct what sounds existed in previous forms of a language (or in a “parent” Compile cognate sets, eliminating borrowings (“oddballs”)
- Determine sound correspondences
- Reconstruct a sound for each position
- Reconstruct sound that would have undergone the most natural sound change
- If there is more than one rule, determine the rule-ordering
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Natural sound changes
- lenition Latinamica→Portugueseamiga→Spanishamiga→French
- amie
- assimilation late Latin octo ‘eight’ → Italian otto
- other processes include fortition and dissimilation, vowel deletion and vowel epenthesis (insertion)
- also, metathesis (reversal of segments) Latinpericulum‘danger’→Spanish peligro
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Chain Shifts
- Sometimes one sound changes, and that triggers another sound to change in order to remain distinct
- This is called a chain shift One of the most famous cases of this is the Great Vowel Shift, which affected most of the vowels of English
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Great Vowel Shift
- Early Middle English Vowel Shortening Rule
- - affected long vowels divine to divinity
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Complexities of reconstruction
- Only the written record
- -difficult to distinguish similarities due to language contact from similarities due to common ancestry
- - chance similarities (false cognates)
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Why do languages change?
- -imperfect language learning
- - social motivations for change
- -language contact
- -natural articulatory/perceptual processes
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synchronic
- variations in today's language (dialects)
- -evidence of language change in progress
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sociolinguistics
- Variation in language - language varies according to region and social factors such as
- gender
- age
- ethnicity
- socioeconomic status
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stable variation
- (ing)
- used frequently by younger people, change will not become dominant and the other usage is not threatened
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isogloss
- a line on a dialect map separating different areas
- - when several isoglosses coincide it is called an isogloss bundle
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phonemic merger
- two phonemes become one
- cot-caught
- pin-pen
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William Labov
- Department store study
- Upper, middle and lower class and the post-vocalic r
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languages in contact
- languages spoken by bilinguals
- a community of bilinguals vs bilingual communities
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borrowing
words borrowed by bilinguals from one language to another - content words more likely to be borrowed than function words
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codeswitching
-respects phrase boundaries and grammars of the languages
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pidgins and creoles
- pidgins- a rudimentarylanguage with simple grammatical rules and vocabulary taken from a lexifier language.
- creole - when pidgin becomes the first language of children
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reasons for language shift
- “usefulness” can’t use Garifuna in the stores
- marginal status of the language (outsiders) not taught in schools/too difficult other children tease in school
- lack of self-respect (insiders) higher status of Belizean Creole
- as a sign of “Belizean-ness”
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