Linguistics Final

Language Families

Indo-European

Basque

Uralic

Dravidian

Basque

European Isolate

Synthetic-1 word made up of many morphemes

SOV

Ergative and Absolutive: Absolutive is when objects (the teacher sees HER) are the same as subject of an intransitive verb (SHE walks)

Ergative is the subject of a transitive verb (She sees the teacher)

Saami

Agglutinative-each morpheme has one meaning

SOV

No gender in pronouns

Spoken across the northern regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in Russia

negative “to be” verb doesn’t have an attachment that means “not”

Dyirbal Avoidance Language

Extremely limited and vague language that you use with people of opposite gender that you technically could marry but shouldn’t (in-laws)

cannot approach or talk directly to each other

same grammar just different lexicon

Specialization

Communicate just to communicate not always to achieve an actual goal

Arbitrariness

Most signs used to communicate are symbolic not literal (the word for car doesn’t sound like a real car)

Productivity/Creativity

can make and understand an infinite # of utterances (original sentences)

Traditional or cultural transmission

lgs are passed down inside a developed complex cultural setting (you’re not born knowing language)

Duality

smaller signs with no meaning compose larger signs with meaning

Prevarication

Can talk about things that are false, in the future, possible, and non-existent

Reflexivity

Can use language to talk about language

Displacement

Can be used to talk about things not in the here and now

Hmong sound system

Tonal language

high, mid, low, high falling, mid rising, creaky, and breathy

Khoisan Languages

Complex morphology-requires affixes and internal sound changes in root

Has many consonants and uses clicks as consonants

Tonal language

Sinitic Language Family

Subfamily of sino-tibetan language family

includes taiwanese, cantonese, mandarin, wu (called chinese collectively)

Austronesian Language Family

Formosan (Taiwan)

Malayo-Polynesian (Western:malay and tagalog and Eastern:samoan and hawaiian)

Chumash Language Family

Ventureño

Tai-Kadai

Thai Lao Zhuang

Mon-Khmer

Vietnamese and Cambodian

Reduplication

tip-salt tiptip-place with much salt

kuya-to turn ones head. kuyakuya-keep turning ones head

Location of uralic language speakers

Northern Russia and Eastern Europe (finland estonia)

Location of austronesian language speakers

Islands around Australia and south Asia

Malaysia, madagascar, polynesia, phillippines

Geographical origin is Taiwan

Pidgins

NO NATIVE SPEAKERS

When languages come into contact members of each group aren’t able to learn other lg

abrupt contact like slavery, power imbalance, superstrate is codified like english, multiple substrates

pidgin often reduced form of superstrate

no/little morphology, no affixes, every word is a root

no politeness, non-expressive

Creoles

modeled loosely on superstrate

there are native speakers

gradual exposure to a different language'

substrate is language of location, superstrate is lg people are trying to learn (new arrival)

have morphology

substrate vocab

exspressive and has politeness

ex. tok pisin, Haitian creole

linguistically diverse areas in the americas

California, venezuela basin, amazon brazil

altaic hypothesis

most controversial-Ainu

more controversial-including korean and japonic lgs

not controversial-Turkish mongolic and tungusic lgs are from same family

Learnability

able to learn new languages