Interlanguage
A linguistic
system typically developed by a student before acquiring fluency in a foreign
language, and containing elements of both his or her native tongue and of the
target language. (http://www.oed.com)
1. The type of language produced by nonnative
speakers in the process of learning a second language or foreign language.
(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English
Language: Fourth Edition. 2000).
An interlanguage
is an emerging linguistic system that has been developed by a learner of a second language
who has not become fully proficient yet but is only approximating the target language:
preserving some features of their first language
in speaking or writing the target language and creating innovations. An interlanguage is idiosyncratically
based on the learners experiences with the second
language. It can fossilize in any of its developmental stages. The interlanguage consists of: L1 transfer, transfer of
training, strategies of L2 learning (e.g.simplification),
strategies of L2 communication (e.g. do not think about grammar while talking),
and overgeneralization of the target language patterns.
This information is
provided from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlanguage
Unattested
Adjective: Not attested: a series of unattested quotations.
(The
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth
Edition. 2000).
un·at·test·ed / ˌənəˈtestid / •
adj not existing in any documented form: if a
will contains unattested changes, the changes will be disregarded although large
masonry ... From: The Oxford American College
Dictionary | Date: 2009
| Copyright information
Not supported
by attestation, lacking supporting evidence in the form of assurance from an
authority.
This information is provided from: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unattested
Implicature
1. The aspect of meaning that a speaker conveys, implies, or suggests
without directly expressing. Although the utterance “Can you pass the salt?”
is literally a request for information about one's ability to pass salt, the
understood implicature is a request for salt. 2. The process by which such a meaning
is conveyed, implied, or suggested. In saying “Some dogs are mammals,”
the speaker conveys by implicature that not all dogs
are mammals.
(The American Heritage®
Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000).
An implicature
is anything that is inferred from an utterance but that is not a condition for the truth of
the utterance. The expression Some of the
boys were at the party implicates in most contexts Not all of the boys
were at the party. Here are
some kinds of implicatures:
An actual implicature is any potential implicature that is not canceled
by its context.
A potential implicature is an implicature that would arise from any of the components of
a given utterance if that component were uttered in
some linguistic or extralinguistic context, whether
or not the implicature is an actual implicature of the given utterance.
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnImplicature.htm
Implicature is a technical term in the linguistic branch of pragmatics
coined by Paul Grice.
It refers to what is suggested in an utterance, even though not
expressed nor strictly implied (that is, entailed) by the utterance. For example,
the sentence "Mary had a baby and got married" strongly
suggests that Mary had the baby before the wedding, but the sentence would
still be strictly true if Mary had her baby after she got married.
Further, if we add the qualification "— not necessarily in that
order" to the original sentence, then the implicature
is cancelled even though the meaning of the original sentence is not
altered.
This can be contrasted with cases
of entailment. For example, the statement "The president was
assassinated" not only suggests that "The president is
dead" is true, but requires that it be true. The first sentence
could not be true if the second were not true; if the president were not dead,
then whatever it is that happened to him would not have counted as a (successful)
assassination. Similarly, unlike implicatures,
entailments cannot be cancelled; there is no qualification that one
could add to "The president was assassinated" which would
cause it to cease entailing "The president is dead" while also
preserving the meaning of the first sentence.
The specialized
term implicature
was coined by Paul Grice as a technical term in pragmatics for certain kinds
of inferences that are drawn from statements without the additional meanings in
logic
and informal language use of implication.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature)
Proto-language
Noun: A language that is the recorded or hypothetical
ancestor of another language or group of languages. It is also called Ursprache. (The American Heritage®
Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton
Mifflin Company).
A proto-language is a language
which was the common ancestor
of related languages that form a language family.
In historical linguistics, a synonymous term proposed
language is a language for which no direct evidence exists, most commonly
the proto-language of a language family. Assumptions about proposed
languages are based on the comparative method.
The German
term Ursprache (derived from the prefix
Ur-
"primordial" and Sprache
"language") is occasionally used as well.
In all cases, the
ancestral protolanguage is not known directly and it may be reconstructed by comparing different
members of the language family via a technique called the comparative method, by internal reconstruction or other methods.
Through this process only a part of the proto-language's structure and
vocabulary can be reconstructed; the reconstruction remains the more
fragmentary the more ancient the proto-language in question relative to the
number of its descendants. Examples of unattested but (partially) reconstructed
proto-languages include Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Bantu
and Proto-Paman.
The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the
most elaborated example of a proposed language. Although there is no direct
evidence that this language ever existed, there is copious evidence for its
existence in the many similarities of the Indo-European languages. A great amount of work
has been put into the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, but there are no means of determining its success.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-language)
ABLAUT
A vowel change, characteristic of Indo-European languages, that
accompanies a change in grammatical function; for example, i,
a, u in sing, sang, sung. Also called gradation.
(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English
Language: Fourth Edition. 2000).
Vowel
permutation; systematic passage of the root vowel into others in derivation, as
in sing, sang, song, sung, apart from the phonetic
influence of a succeeding vowel as in umlaut. (http://www.oed.com)
THEFT
Noun. 1. The act or an
instance of stealing; larceny. 2. Obsolete Something
stolen.
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English th
efth.
(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English
Language: Fourth Edition. 2000).
The action of a
thief; the felonious taking away of the personal goods of another; larceny;
also, with a and pl., an instance of
this. (http://dictionary.oed.com)
DIACHRONIC
Linguistics. [tr. F. diachronique
(F. de Saussure a 
chronically
adv.; diachrony. (http://www.oed.com)
It refers
to change through time, such as historical or evolutionary change, and more
generally to analytical perspectives that privilege historical development.
Diachronic
analysis is often distinguished from synchronic analysis, which treats a
subject (a society, for example) as a cross section at a single instant.
The
distinction was important in linguistics, notably in early twentieth-century
debates between philology, which was based on the historical explanation of
language patterns, and structuralism , which explained
language in terms of internal structures of differentiation.
This debate
resulted in an enduring opposition between two explanatory logics: historical
(sometimes called genetic) analysis and structural analysis.
(From Dictionary
of the Social Sciences in Politics & Social Sciences).
Linguistics. [tr. F. synchronique
(F. de Saussure a
Contrasting terms in LINGUISTICS, which make a distinction between the
study of the history of language (diachronic linguistics) and the study of a
state of language at any given time (synchronic linguistics).
Language
study in the 19c was largely diachronic, but in the 20c emphasis has been on
synchronic analysis. The terms were first employed by the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure, who used the analogy of a tree-trunk to describe them: a
vertical cut was diachronic, a horizontal cut synchronic.
(From Concise
TRANSITIONAL
Of a word
or words: indicating a change from one state, place, etc. to another. This is
not a widely used grammatical term, but is sometimes applied to conjuncts that
semantically bridge a gap from the subject-matter of one statement to that of
another; e.g.
meanwhile,
in the meantime, incidentally
It is also
applied to the meaning of a verbal form that indicates little or no duration, with a change of state about to result (e.g. The
bus was stopping).
(From The
SAUSSURE, FERDINAND
(1857–1913), Swiss linguistics scholar. He was one of the founders of modern
linguistics and his work is fundamental to the development of structuralism.
Saussure made a distinction between langue and parole, and stressed that
linguistic study should focus on the former.
(From The
LANGUAGE FAMILY
A group of
languages which are assumed to have arisen from a single source: ENGLISH,
FRENCH, GERMAN, GREEK, PERSIAN, RUSSIAN, SANSKRIT, and WELSH are all members of
the INDO-EUROPEAN language family, and are considered to have descended from a
common ancestor.
Common
ancestry is established by finding systematic correspondences between
languages: English repeatedly has /f/ where Latin has /p/ in words with similar
meaning, as in father/pater, fish/piscis,
flow/pluo rain. It also
often has /s/ where Greek has /h/, as in six/héx,
seven/heptá, serpent/hérpein to creep. In addition, English and German compare
adjectives in similar ways, as in rich, richer, richest: reich, reicher, reichste. These and other correspondences indicate that the
languages are cognate (genetically related).
Various
related words can be compared in order to reconstruct sections of a
hypothetical ancestor language. The process of comparison and reconstruction is
traditionally known as comparative PHILOLOGY, more recently as comparative
historical linguistics. This process formed the backbone of 19c language study,
though in the 20c it has become one branch among many.
A ‘family
tree’ diagram (not unlike a genealogy) is commonly used to represent the
relationships between the members of a linguistic family, in which an initial
parent language ‘gives birth’ to a number of ‘daughters’, which in turn give
birth to others. This can be useful, but is rarely an accurate representation
of how languages develop, since it suggests clean cuts between ‘generations’
and between ‘sister’ languages, and implies that languages always become more
divergent. In fact, languages generally change gradually, and there is often considerable
intermixing among those which remain geographically adjacent.
(From Concise