Intro to Linguistics - Assessment #4 Study Guide

dialect

dialect

a variety of a language whose grammar differs in systematic ways from other varieties

endangered languages

a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language

influence of Native American languages

• have examples

• provided us with some words

• names of U.S. states

Great Vowel Shift

a sound change that took place in English some time between 1400 and 1600 CE in which seven long vowel phonemes were changed

AAVE

African American Vernacular English - dialects of English spoken by some Americans of African descent, or by any person raised from infancy in a place where AAE is spoken

code-switching

a bilingual person's movement back and forth between two languages or dialects within the same sentence or discourse

pidgin

A simple but rule-governed language developed for communication among speakers of mutually unintelligible languages

creole

a language that begins as a pidgin and eventually becomes the native language of a speech community

marked form

in a masculine/feminine pair, the word that contains a derivational morpheme, usually the feminine word

unmarked form

in a masculine/feminine pair, the word that does NOT contain a derivational morpheme, usually the masculine word

argot / jargon

the specialized words used by a particular group

synthetic

a language in which words often contain multiple morphemes

SOV

subject - object - verb

protolanguage

the earliest identifiable language from which genetically related languages developed

epithet

adjective or descriptive phase expressing a quality characteristics of the person or thing mentioned

habitual be

the use of an uninflected form of the verb "to be" to indicate that a state or activity is habitual

diphthong

A sequence of two vowels run together as a single phonological unit

comparative reconstruction

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

internal reconstruction

the application of the comparative method to earlier and later forms of the same language

narrowing

A semantic change in which the meaning of a word changes in time to become less encompassing

neogrammarians

a group of nineteenth-century linguists who claimed that sound shifts took place without exceptions

taboo

words or activities that are considered inappropriate for "polite society"

prestige

the dialect usually spoken by people in positions of power, and the one deemed correct by prescriptive grammarians

case

a characteristic of nouns and pronouns, and in some languages articles and adjectives, determined by their function in the sentence, and generally indicated by the morphological form of the word

Indo-European

the descriptive name given to the ancestor language of many modern language families

semantics

the study of the linguistic meanings of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences

pragmatics

study of how context and situation affect meaning