Concepts

Here you will find the definition of the concepts that we find during the study of the subject in alphabetical order.

- Accent: the way in which people in a particular area, country or social group pronounce words.

- Actuation: Why particular changes take place at a particular time.

- Ancestor language: see Genetic Tree Theory.

- Arbitrariness: when we talk about arbitrariness, we mean that any choices and actions which are considered to be done not by means of any underlying principle or logic. So when say that there is arbitrariness in the name we give to things (their spelling, pronunciation, etc.) we mean that there is no real reason for that choice above another.

- Assimilation: Language shift, sometimes referred to as language transfer or language replacement or assimilation, is the progressive process whereby a speech community of a language shifts to speaking another language. The rate of assimilation is the percentage of individuals with a given mother tongue who speak another language more often in the home. The data is used to measure the use of a given language in the lifetime of a person, or most often across generations within a linguistic community. The process whereby a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shift allegiance to the second language is called assimilation. When a linguistic community ceases to use their original language, we speak of language death.

This term can also be used to explain a common phonological process by which the phonetics of a speech segment becomes more like that of another segment in a word (or at a word boundary). A common example of assimilation would be "don't be silly" where the /n/ and /t/ in "don't" become /m/ and /p/, where said naturally in many accents and discourse styles ("dombe silly"). Assimilation can be synchronic being an active process in a language at a given point in time or diachronic being a historical sound change.

- Centum languages: Indo-European is divided into two big branches, centum and satem languages. Centum languages at the same time have different families: Greek, Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Anatolian and Tocharian.

- Community (also Vernacular) norms: follow this link to the book of Christina Bratt Paulston and G. Richard Tucker where you can find a very good explanation: http://books.google.es/books?id=bVG5XCa1DkkC&pg=PA266&lpg=PA266&dq=vernacular+norms+norms&source=bl&ots=3jBrlHhVeb&sig=_E5icC4GV1gyqB9E4id_to8X-cY&hl=es&ei=MZoiSqXMMaaOjAfwjPmrBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

- Constraints: which changes are possible and which are not.

- Creole: it is a language that has developed from a mixture of languages. It is also an American or West Indian language, which is a combination of a European language and another language and which is a main language in the southern US and Caribbean.

- Daughter language: see Genetic Tree Theory.

- DEF is a procedure for determining older non-recorded or not very attested stages of a language based on our knowledge of possible types of change (e.g. a possible sound change).

- Diachronic: changes between periods of time. The diachronic study of a language involves its study considering its evolution throughout history, as a global thing which changes overtime, instead of taking it in each stage of history as a different thing from what it is in other periods of time (synchronic approach) and studying it at that stage.

- Dialect: a form of a language that people speak in a particular part of a country, containing some different words, grammar, etc.

- Dialect displacement: as Milroy explains, another pattern of change in more general levels is dialect displacement. This is “displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time”. The reasons for dialect displacement can be various: contact with another language during enough time for the change to take place (for political, geographical, economical, etc. reasons), a matter of prestige, imitating a more prestigious zone, or people we admire…

He gives two examples:

- “much New Zealand English in the nineteenth century was southern British in type (favoured by males), and it was displaced by an Australian type (favoured by females) with some effects of mixing and residue.”

- “the gradual displacement of heavily inflected West Midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected East Midland dialects, which led to morphological simplification of the grammar of English.”

- Diglosia: when two languages co-exist in an area.

- Dissimilation: In phonology, particularly within historical linguistics, dissimilation is a phenomenon whereby similar consonant or vowel sounds in a word become less similar. For example, when one /r/ sound occurs before another in the middle of a word in rhotic dialects of English, the first tends to drop out, as in "beserk" for berserk, "supprise" for surprise, "paticular" for particular, and "govenor" for governor (note this doesn't affect the pronunciation of government, which has only one /r/).

- Elocution: the art of careful public speaking using clear pronunciation and good breathing to control the voice. It is the study of formal speaking in pronunciation, grammar, style, and tone. Elocution emerged as a formal discipline during the eighteenth century.

- Empirical foundations: of Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968). They are directed towards a theory of language change, focusing on locating the linguistic patterns of change. They think that linguistic innovations move in an orderly manner through space, affecting linguistic structure in an orderly manner too. When they explain linguistic change, it is divided into five parts: constraints, embedding, evaluation, transition and actuation:

Constraints: what changes are possible and what are not.

Embedding: how change spreads from a central point through a speech community.

Evaluation: social responses to language change (prestige overt and covert attitudes to language, linguistic stereotyping and notions on correctness).

Transition: “the intervening stages which can be observed, or which must be posited, between any two forms of a language defined for a language community at different times” Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 101)

Actuation: Why particular changes take place at a particular time.

- Empirical methods: methods of study which involve experiment, using data.

- Evaluation: social responses to language change (prestige overt and covert attitudes to language, linguistic stereotyping and notions on correctness).

- Field: see “Register”.

- Formalize: to make something official or decide to arrange it according to a fixed structure.

- Genetic Tree Theory: (August Schleicher 1861-2): the origin of individual languages is caused by “branching off” from older languages. Differentiation into daughter languages is abrupt and clear cut. Genetic relationships between languages, according to the Genetic Tree Theory, exist if there’s a clear linguistic evidence of a close relationship between those languages:

ancestor language: it is the parent language (i.e. Latin)

daughter language (as Italian or Spanish would be in relation to Latin)

sister languages (as Italian and Spanish would be between them)

- Iconic words: there is arbitrariness between the thing or object (let’s take for the example a dog) and the name we give to it (we decide to call this animal dog, for no certain reason). But in iconic words, there is a relationship between the referent and the reference.

- Idiolect: individual style.

- Idiosyncrasy: a strange or unusual way of behaving or feature that something has.

- Language family in the narrow sense or language branch: if the group is composed only of parent languages and its daughters.

- Language family in the broad sense: when the group is formed by related languages.

- Language-internal reconstruction: if historical forms are reconstructed on the basis of systematic relationships within a single language (e.g. ablaut in Indo-European based on Greek).

- Language-external (comparative) reconstruction: if historical forms are reconstructed on systematic relationships between different presumably genetically related languages.

Pater – Vater – Father

Pod – Fuss – Fast

- (reconstruction by comparing. We don’t know it in OE but we do it by comparing for example Latin, German).

- Lenisization: see “Weakening”.

- Lexical diffusion: In historical linguistics, lexical diffusion is both a phenomenon and a theory. The phenomenon is that by which a phoneme is modified in a subset of the lexicon, and spreads gradually to other lexical items. For example, in English, /uː/ has changed to /ʊ/ in good and hood but not in food; some dialects have it in hoof and roof but others do not; in flood and blood it happened early enough that the words were affected by the change of /ʊ/ to /ʌ/, which is now no longer productive. The related theory, proposed by William Wang in 1969 is that all sound changes originate in a single word or a small group of words and then spread to other words with a similar phonological make-up, but may not spread to all words in which they potentially could apply. The theory of lexical diffusion stands in contrast to the Neogrammarian hypothesis that a given sound change applies simultaneously to all words in which its context is found. William Labov, in Principles of Linguistic Change, takes the position that there are two types of sound changes: regular sound change (respecting the Neogrammarian hypothesis) and lexical diffusion. Labov lists a typology, according to which certain phenomena are typically or exclusively regular (example, vowel quality changes), while others (example, metathesis, or vowel shortening) tend to follow a lexical diffusion pattern. Paul Kiparsky, in the Handbook of Phonology (Goldsmith editor), argues that under a proper definition of analogy as optimization, lexical diffusion is not a type of sound change. Instead, Kiparsky claims it is similar to leveling, in that it is a non-proportional type of analogy. From Wikipedia.

- Metathesis: when deriving the forms in the daughter languages. (e.g. [er] > [re])

bren > burn

hros > horse

- Mode: see “Register”.

- Monoglosia: only one language exists or rules in one area.

- Non-professional attitudes: they are attitudes towards languages which normally derive from misunderstanding or lack of knowledge about linguistics. These attitudes involve judging wrongly an aspect of a language or a language itself for reasons like prejudices, tastes, political ideologies –like nationalism- , influence… But none of these based on objective and reasonable linguistic theory.

- Phonetically motivated changes: Simplicity in the articulation (e.g. hævtu > hæftu). *

- Phonologically motivated changes: maximal distinctiveness of speech sounds (e.g. ƟeofƟ > Ɵeoft –theft-. The /Ɵ/ > /t/ after another fricative).

- Pidgin languages: a mixture of European and African or Asian languages, normally for trading purposes. / A pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common, in situations such as trade. Pidgins are not the native language of any speech community, but are instead learned as second languages. Pidgins usually have low prestige with respect to other languages.

- Polyglossia: the coexistence of multiple languages in the same area.

- Prestige: we imitate the most prestigious zone/people we look up to. The opposite would be solidarity constraint.

- Proselitism: when you try to get people to join a religion, etc.

- Proto-language: a proto-language is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family (a hypothetical lost parent language from which actual languages are derived). Often the proto-language is not known directly. In such cases, it may be reconstructed by comparing different members of the language family through the comparative method. The level of completeness of the reconstruction achieved varies, depending on how complete the evidence is from the descendant languages and on the quality of the effort of the linguists working on it. Some of the many unattested proto-languages for which reconstructions have been devised are Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Dravidian. In other cases, the proto-language is attested in surviving texts. For example, Latin is the proto-language of the Romance language family, which includes such modern languages as French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Likewise, Old Norse, the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages, is attested, albeit in fragmentary form, in ancient runic inscriptions. Although there are no very early Indo-Aryan inscriptions, the Indo-Aryan languages of modern India all go back to Vedic Sanskrit (or dialects very closely related to it), which has been preserved in texts accurately handed down by parallel oral and written traditions for many centuries. The first person to offer systematic reconstructions of an unattested proto-language was August Schleicher for Proto-Indo-European in 1861 (Lehmann 1993:26).

Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-language

- Reconstruction: there are two types of reconstruction depending on the type of synchronic linguistic data. One is language-internal reconstruction (if historical forms are reconstructed on the basis of systematic relationships within a single language –e.g. ablaut in I.E. based on Greek–).

- Register: the style of language, grammar and words used for particular situations.

field: social setting (religion, law, medicine…) *

tenor: relations between the participants (more or less informal, -grade of politeness, etc- ) *

mode: medium of the communication (spoken or written) *

- Satem languages: Indo-European is divided into two big branches, centum and satem languages. Satem languages at the same time have different families: Albanian, Armenian, Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian.

- Shibboleth: it usually refers to features of language, and particularly to a word whose pronunciation identifies its speaker as being a member or not a member of a particular group. Today, in the English language, a shibboleth has a wide meaning, referring to any "in-crowd" word or phrase that can be used to distinguish members of a group from outsiders - even when not used by a hostile other group. The word is also sometimes used in a broader sense to mean jargon, the proper use of which identifies speakers as members of a particular group or subculture.

- Sister language: see Genetic Tree Theory.

- Solidarity constraint: it is the opposite force to prestige. It happens when people from a community reaffirm their own language or variety and feel proud of it and want to use it above the other one which is at that moment considered to have more prestige.

- Standarizing norms: norms which are used in order to make one language be uniform and have no varieties. These norms only consider correct the options of the language they establish making the rest look wrong for not obeying these norms.

- Stratum: this term can be applied to many different things as in its broad sense it means one of the parts or layers into which something is separated. So, depending on the context of the phrase, we can understand its meaning now.

- Synchronic: a synchronic approach looks at language at a particular point in time, rather than over time.

- Synchronic linguistic data: linguistic data that studies a linguistic aspect from a particular point in time (e.g. sounds in today’s languages).

- Tenor: see “Register”.

- Transition: “the intervening stages which can be observed, or which must be posited, between any two forms of a language defined for a language community at different times” Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 101)

- Trope: a word or expression used in a figurative sense. A figure of speech using words in non-literal ways, such as a metaphor.

- Unattested: in linguistic terms, something of which we have no records.

- Vernacular (also Community) norms: the norms in language established by consensus in a community.

- Vowel harmony: it could cause the change of the putative vowel [a] in the first syllable into [e] under the influence of the vowel [e] of the second syllable, resulting in the present French form. (One vowel influences another).

foot, feet (foti: it was the original plural).

- Wave model or Wave theory: (Hugo Schuchardt: 1868). Language change starts in restricted contexts within a certain community. The change spreads to further contexts and social groups until it is realized in all contexts and with all speakers.

“In historical linguistics, the wave model or wave theory (German Wellentheorie) is a model of language change in which new features of a language spread from a central point in continuously weakening concentric circles, similar to the waves created when a stone is thrown into a body of water. This should lead to convergence among dissimilar languages. The theory was directed against the doctrine of sound laws and the strict tree model introduced by the Neogrammarians and laid the foundations of modern sociolinguistics. Advocacy of the wave theory is attributed to Johannes Schmidt and Hugo Schuchardt. In modern linguistics, the wave model has contributed greatly to improve the tree model approach of the Comparative method”.

Labov, William (2007). "Transmission and diffusion". Language 83: 344-387

- Weakening (lenisization): which couldn’t result in the change [t] > [d] > [Ø] in the derivation of the above forms from their common parent form (in agreement with the trend towards simplicity in articulatory effort). Example of weakening: /daðo/ (verbo dar) > /dao/