Linguistics Ch 13

All languages change except

Languages without any native speakers left

Describing phonological processes, syntactic rules, or other aspects of a language at a particular point in time is called synchronic analysis. Which of the following would constitute this type of linguistic analysis?

Cataloging the current morphemes of a particular language

Studying language development through time is called diachronic analysis. Which of the following would be an example of this type of analysis?

Studying the phonology of the past tense in African American English across time

The branch of linguistics concerned with language change is known as historical linguistics. Which of the following is the primary focus of linguists engaging in this particular field of study?

What types of linguistic changes occur, don't occur, and why

Linguists believe that many ancient European and Asian languages, and their modern descendants, have evolved from a single ancestor language called Proto-Indo- European. What pieces of evidence might have been useful in reconstructing this language?

Knowledge of types of sound changes that commonly occur

Family trees of currently spoken languages and their linguistic ancestors

Phonetic inventories of currently spoken languages

All of the above

all

Groups of related languages are called language families. Which of the following is a relationship that could be held by two languages?

Mother-daughter

Languages change in all aspect of their grammars, including phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Which of the following is a change that could take place in a language?

Disappearance of a phoneme

Emergence of a phoneme

Disappearance of a grammatical tense

Broadening of the meaning of a set of words

All of the above

all

Languages can change for many reasons, including geographical and social division, language contact, and more. Which of the following situations would most likely lead to language change?

Two language communities engage in trade frequently and learn new words from

each other that describe the products they exchange

True or False: language change is bad and degrades the quality and status of a language.

F

Languages that are not genetically related to each other can have similar words for the

same concepts. Which of the following situations could lead to this occurring?

English did not have a word to describe this food, so it borrowed the Spanish word, empanadas

/m/ and /a/ are common early phonemes across many world languages, so many languages share words similar to “mama” to describe a mother

Two languages in contact forged a new word for a shared concept

All of the above

all

Onomatopoetic words from different languages can sound similar because there is an iconic connection between the form of the word and the meaning. Which of the following is an example of this?

The sound of a clock is described as [tɪktɑk] in English, [tɪktɪk] in Arabic

The relatedness hypothesis states that a language can split into two different varieties, and over time each variety may undergo changes such that they can be considered separate languages but can still bear similarities. To determine if two languages are related to each other, we should consider:

The cognates between the languages and whether or not they systematically vary

A ______ is an earlier, common language ancestor from which similar languages descended.

Protolanguage

Sister languages occur adjacently on the family tree, sharing a “parent” language. Which of the following are sister languages on the Proto-Indo-European family tree above?

English and Afrikaans

A mother or parent language is a language’s most similar or nearest ancestor language: a mother or parent language is the older stage of a language. Which of the following is the mother or parent language of Farsi?

Iranian

Languages form speech communities with internal variation and contact with their neighbor languages. Given what you know about the complexity of language change and how language communities mix and influence each other, does the family tree model encompasses this aspect of language change?

no

True or False: All languages of the same generation were spoken at the exact same time.

F

Languages can bear influence from other languages outside their subgroup or language family. Which of the following language pairs could share similarities?

Bulgarian, Russian

Pashto, Farsi

Welsh, Irish Gaelic

All of the above

all

______ recognizes the gradual spread of language change throughout a dialect, language, or group of language families as similar to the ripple effect caused by dropping a pebble in a body of water.

Wave theory

True or False: if languages show similarities, they must be related.

F

True or False: once a word has been changed in some contexts, like informal speech, a sound change is considered to have taken place.

F

________ refers to a change in pronunciation of an allophone in a language, while _______ causes the loss of a phoneme or a change in the distribution of allophones.

Phonetic change, phonological change

True or False: phonetic changes and phonological changes can happen at the same time.

T

True or False: sound change can lead to the loss of a phoneme, but not the creation of a new phoneme.

F

Regular sound change occurs when the change occurs for every instance of the sound in question. Which of the following would be an example of regular sound change?

Old English: [k] becoming [tʃ] before [i:] in every word that contained [k] before

[i:]

When a sound changes because of the influence of a neighboring sound, the change is called a conditioned sound change. Which of the following changes is a conditioned sound change?

Sound X becomes Y when it comes after C, or Xà Y / C__

If you cannot determine the environment of the sound change, or when the sound change occurs in all environments, and you can only write a rule that says sound X becomes Y, or XàY, then the sound change must be _____.

Unconditioned

Assimilation is a sound change in which one sound becomes more like another sound. Because this change only happens in certain environments, and those environments are determined by the sound that triggers the change, assimilation must be what type of sound change?

Conditioned

Diphthongization is the change from a simple vowel to a complex one within the nucleus of a syllable. The opposite, sound change, which in one example reduced [aʊ] to [ɔ] in the word daughter [daʊɾɹ] to [dɔɾɹ], is called:

Monophthongization

Raising and lowering refer changes in the height of the tongue in the production of a vowel. Which of the following changes represents raising?

The sound change [ʊ] to [u]

Backing and fronting refer to alternations in the frontedness or backness of the tongue in the production of vowels. Which of the following changes represents fronting?

The sound change [a] to [æ]

Morphological change is change in the morphological structure of a word, the introduction of new words, or the introduction of new morphological processes. Which of the following is an example of morphological change?

Several hundred years ago, the past tense of climb was clomb [klom]. Now, the past tense of the word climb is climbed [klɑɪmd]

Back formation is the creation of a new stem form following reanalysis of a word form. Which of the following is an example of back formation?

The creation of the word burgle from the word burglar

The influence of one form or set of forms over another is called analogical change. When this type of morphological change can be schematized as a four-part proportion, such as A : B :: C : D, or A is to B as C is to D, it is called proportional analogy. Use proportional analogy to select the proper past tense of a new verb, [glæp].

[glæpt]

Extensions in meaning occur when a word takes on new appropriate contexts or referents. Is this type of change semantic, syntactic, morphological, or a sound change?

semantic

The word knight initially meant “youth” or “military follower,” but now refers to people of somewhat more romantic and expressive terms. This semantic change, which resulted in a word gaining a more socially positive meaning is called semantic

elevation

. Comparative reconstruction involves the systematic comparison of multiple related languages to hypothesize about the protolanguage they descended from, while _______ involves the analysis of data from a single language.

internal reconstruction

The following example illustrates sound changes that took place in the development of Marathi from Old Indic. What type of sound change took place when [arka] became [akka]?

assimilation

What type of sound change took place when [bhakti] became [bhatti]?

assimilation