1.
English grammar
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English grammar is the way in which meanings are encoded into wordings in the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, There are historical, social, cultural and regional variations of English. Divergences from the described here occur in some dialects of English. There are differences in grammar between the forms of British, American, and Australian English, although these are minor compared with the differences in vocabulary. Eight word classes or parts of speech are commonly distinguished in English, nouns, determiners, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. Interjections are another class, but these are not described here as they do not form part of the clause. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs form open classes – word classes that readily accept new members, such as the noun celebutante, the others are considered to be closed classes. For example, it is rare for a new pronoun to enter the language, English words are not generally marked for word class. It is not usually possible to tell from the form of a word which class it belongs to except, to some extent, on the other hand, some words belong to more than one word class. For example, run can serve as either a verb or a noun, lexemes may be inflected to express different grammatical categories. The lexeme run has the forms runs, ran, runny, runner, words in one class can sometimes be derived from those in another. This has the potential to rise to new words. The noun aerobics has recently given rise to the adjective aerobicized, a phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class. For example, my good friend Peter is a phrase that can be used in a sentence as if it were a noun. Similarly, adjective phrases and adverb phrases function as if they were adjectives or adverbs, Nouns form the largest English word class. There are many common suffixes used to form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words, such as -age, -hood, Nouns are also often created by conversion of verbs or adjectives, as with the words talk and reading. Unlike in many related languages, English nouns do not have grammatical gender, Nouns are sometimes classified semantically as proper nouns and common nouns or as concrete nouns and abstract nouns. A grammatical distinction is made between count nouns such as clock and city, and non-count nouns such as milk and decor
2.
Linguistics
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Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning, phonetics is the study of speech and non-speech sounds, and delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties. While the study of semantics typically concerns itself with truth conditions, Grammar is a system of rules which governs the production and use of utterances in a given language. These rules apply to sound as well as meaning, and include componential sub-sets of rules, such as those pertaining to phonology, morphology, modern theories that deal with the principles of grammar are largely based within Noam Chomskys ideological school of generative grammar. In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between the notions of langue and parole in his formulation of structural linguistics. According to him, parole is the utterance of speech, whereas langue refers to an abstract phenomenon that theoretically defines the principles. This distinction resembles the one made by Noam Chomsky between competence and performance in his theory of transformative or generative grammar. According to Chomsky, competence is an innate capacity and potential for language, while performance is the specific way in which it is used by individuals, groups. The study of parole is the domain of sociolinguistics, the sub-discipline that comprises the study of a system of linguistic facets within a certain speech community. Discourse analysis further examines the structure of texts and conversations emerging out of a speech communitys usage of language, Stylistics also involves the study of written, signed, or spoken discourse through varying speech communities, genres, and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida, for instance, further distinguished between speech and writing, by proposing that language be studied as a linguistic medium of communication in itself. Palaeography is therefore the discipline that studies the evolution of scripts in language. Linguistics also deals with the social, cultural, historical and political factors that influence language, through which linguistic, research on language through the sub-branches of historical and evolutionary linguistics also focus on how languages change and grow, particularly over an extended period of time. Language documentation combines anthropological inquiry with linguistic inquiry, in order to describe languages, lexicography involves the documentation of words that form a vocabulary. Such a documentation of a vocabulary from a particular language is usually compiled in a dictionary. Computational linguistics is concerned with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective, specific knowledge of language is applied by speakers during the act of translation and interpretation, as well as in language education – the teaching of a second or foreign language. Policy makers work with governments to implement new plans in education, related areas of study also includes the disciplines of semiotics, literary criticism, translation, and speech-language pathology. Before the 20th century, the philology, first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the science of language
3.
Language acquisition
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Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition is one of the human traits, because non-humans do not communicate by using language. Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants acquisition of their native language and this is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition of additional languages. The capacity to use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. Language can be vocalized as in speech, or manual as in sign, human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand a number of sentences. Evidence suggests that individual has three recursive mechanisms that allow sentences to go indeterminately. These three mechanisms are, relativization, complementation and coordination, some early observation-based ideas about language acquisition were proposed by Plato, who felt that word-meaning mapping in some form was innate. In a more modern context, empiricists, like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, proponents of behaviorism argued that language may be learned through a form of operant conditioning. In B. F. Skinners Verbal Behaviour, he suggested that the use of a sign, such as a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus. Some empiricist theories of language include the statistical learning theory. Charles F. Hockett of language acquisition, relational frame theory, functionalist linguistics, social interactionist theory, Skinners behaviourist idea was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky in a review article in 1959, calling it largely mythology and a serious delusion. Arguments against Skinners idea of language acquisition through operant conditioning include the fact that children often ignore language corrections from adults. Instead, children follow a pattern of using an irregular form of a word correctly, making errors later on. For example, a child may learn the word gave. Eventually, the child will go back to learning the correct word. The pattern is difficult to attribute to Skinners idea of operant conditioning as the way that children acquire language. Chomsky argued that if language were solely acquired through behavioral conditioning, children would not likely learn the use of a word
4.
Forensic linguistics
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It is a branch of applied linguistics. The discipline of linguistics is not homogenous, it involves a range of experts. The phrase forensic linguistics first appeared in 1968 when Jan Svartvik, during the early days of forensic linguistics in the United Kingdom, the legal defense for many criminal cases questioned the authenticity of police statements. At the time, customary police procedure for taking suspects statements dictated that it be in a specific format, statements by witnesses are very seldom made in a coherent or orderly fashion, with speculation and backtracking done out loud. The delivery is often too fast-paced, causing important details to be left out, early work of forensic linguistics in the United States concerned the rights of individuals with regard to understanding their Miranda rights during the interrogation process. An early application of linguistics in the United States was related to the status of trademarks as words or phrases in the language. In the 1980s, Australian linguists discussed the application of linguistics and sociolinguistics to legal issues and they discovered that a phrase such as the same language is open to interpretation. Aboriginal people have their own understanding and use of English, something that is not always appreciated by speakers of the dominant version of English, the Aboriginal people also bring their own culturally based, interactional styles to the interview. The range of topics within forensic linguistics is diverse, but research occurs in the following areas and that includes the study of text types and forms of analysis. Any text or item of spoken language can potentially be a text when it is used in a legal or criminal context. It can also refer to the attempts at making legal language more comprehensible to laypeople. Intonational emphasis, voice pitch and the extent to which there is cooperation between the caller and the recipient at any one time are very important in analysing an emergency call. Full cooperation includes frank and timely responses, urgency plays a role in emergency calls, so hesitations, signs of evasiveness, and incomplete or overly short answers indicate that the caller might be making a false or hoax call. A genuine call has distinctive interlocking and slight overlap of turns, the recipient trusts the caller to provide accurate information and the caller trusts the recipient to ask only pertinent questions. If the caller uses a pitch at the end of every turn, it might represent a lack of commitment. The call ideally moves from nil knowledge on the part of the recipient to an amount of knowledge in a minimum possible period of time. This makes the emergency call unlike any other kind of service encounter, threat is a counterpart of a promise and is an important feature in a ransom demand. Ransom demands are also examined to identify genuine and false threats
5.
Neurolinguistics
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Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, Neurolinguistics is historically rooted in the development in the 19th century of aphasiology, the study of linguistic deficits occurring as the result of brain damage. Aphasiology attempts to structure to function by analyzing the effect of brain injuries on language processing. The work of Broca and Wernicke established the field of aphasiology, harry Whitaker popularized neurolinguistics in the United States in the 1970s, founding the journal Brain and Language in 1974. The N400 was the first language-relevant brain response to be identified, much work in neurolinguistics involves testing and evaluating theories put forth by psycholinguists and theoretical linguists. Neurolinguistics research is carried out in all the areas of linguistics, the main linguistic subfields. Much work in neurolinguistics has, like Brocas and Wernickes early studies, another area of neurolinguistics literature involves the use of electrophysiological techniques to analyze the rapid processing of language in time. Another topic is the relationship between brain structures and language acquisition, ping Li, Jennifer Legault, Kaitlyn A. Litcofsky, May 2014. Since one of the focuses of this field is the testing of linguistic and psycholinguistic models, modern brain imaging techniques have contributed greatly to a growing understanding of the anatomical organization of linguistic functions. Brain imaging methods used in neurolinguistics may be classified into hemodynamic methods, electrophysiological methods, hemodynamic techniques take advantage of the fact that when an area of the brain works at a task, blood is sent to supply that area with oxygen. Such techniques include PET and fMRI, functional near-infrared spectroscopy is another hemodynamic method used in language tasks. Electrophysiological techniques take advantage of the fact that when a group of neurons in the fire together. The technique of EEG measures this electric current using sensors on the scalp, in addition to these non-invasive methods, electrocorticography has also been used to study language processing. On the other hand, the location of activity can be difficult to identify in EEG, consequently. Research using EEG and MEG generally focuses on event-related potentials, which are distinct brain responses elicited in response to a particular stimulus, studies using ERP may focus on each ERPs latency, amplitude, or topography. Some important and common ERP components include the N400, the negativity, the early left anterior negativity, the P600. Neurolinguists employ a variety of techniques in order to use brain imaging to draw conclusions about how language is represented and processed in the brain. These techniques include the subtraction paradigm, mismatch design, violation-based studies, various forms of priming, the mismatch negativity is a rigorously documented ERP component frequently used in neurolinguistic experiments
6.
Phonology
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Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages, the word phonology can also refer to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the systems which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax. Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics, note that this distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid 20th century. The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek φωνή, phōnḗ, voice, sound, according to Clark et al. it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. The history of phonology may be traced back to the Ashtadhyayi, Baudouin de Courtenays work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of alternations, and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure according to E. F. K. Koerner. An influential school of phonology in the period was the Prague school. One of its members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose Grundzüge der Phonologie. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme. Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century, in 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for generative phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features and these features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a fixed set. There are at least two levels of representation, underlying representation and surface phonetic representation, ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation. An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable, furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969. In this view, phonology is based on a set of phonological processes that interact with one another, which ones are active. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups, prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance
7.
Pragmatics
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Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology. In this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, the ability to understand another speakers intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. The sentence You have a light is ambiguous. Without knowing the context, the identity of the speaker, and his or her intent, for example, It could mean that the space that belongs to you has green ambient lighting. It could mean that you are driving through a traffic signal. It could mean that you no longer have to wait to continue driving and it could mean that you are permitted to proceed in a non-driving context. It could mean that your body has a green glow and it could mean that you possess a light bulb that is tinted green. Similarly, the sentence Sherlock saw the man with binoculars could mean that Sherlock observed the man by using binoculars, the meaning of the sentence depends on an understanding of the context and the speakers intent. This suggests that sentences do not have meaning intrinsically, there is not an associated with a sentence or word. The cat sat on the mat is a sentence in English, if someone were to say to someone else, The cat sat on the mat, this is an example of an utterance. Thus, there is no such thing as a sentence, term, expression or word symbolically representing a true meaning, it is underspecified. The meaning of an utterance, on the hand, is inferred based on linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the non-linguistic context of the utterance. In mathematics with Berrys paradox there arose a systematic ambiguity with the word definable, the ambiguity with words shows that the descriptive power of any human language is limited. Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguistics as outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure, in many cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has an analyzable structure, composed of parts that can be defined in relation to others. Pragmatics first engaged only in study, as opposed to examining the historical development of language. However, it rejected the notion that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the space of langue. Meanwhile, historical pragmatics has also come into being, the study of the speakers meaning, not focusing on the phonetic or grammatical form of an utterance, but instead on what the speakers intentions and beliefs are
8.
Sociolinguistics
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Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics. It is historically related to linguistic anthropology and the distinction between the two fields has even been questioned. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, the study of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of his 1939 article Sociolinguistics in India published in Man in India. Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by such as William Labov in the US. For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of attitudes that a particular vernacular would not be considered appropriate language use in a business or professional setting. Sociolinguists might also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, the study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the given to the use of different varieties of language in different social situations. William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics and he is especially noted for introducing the quantitative study of language variation and change, making the sociology of language into a scientific discipline. Also, sociolinguistics can study a gradual transition of individual values of a word in the context its semantics which occur in some ethnic, altyntsev studied the semantics of the word love among the Ashkenazi Jews from Udmurtia and Tatarstan. Sociolinguistic interviews are a part of collecting data for sociolinguistic studies. There is an interviewer, who is conducting the study, and a subject, or informant, who is the interviewee. In order to get a grasp on a linguistic form and how it is used in the dialect of the subject. There are five different styles, ranging from formal to casual, the most formal style would be elicited by having the subject read a list of minimal pairs. Minimal pairs are pairs of words differ in only one phoneme. Having the subject read a word list will elicit a formal register, the reading passage style is next down on the formal register, and the interview style is when an interviewer can finally get into eliciting a more casual speech from the subject. Of course, the most sought after type of speech is the casual style and this type of speech is difficult if not impossible to elicit because of the Observers Paradox. The closest one might come to CS in an interview is when the subject is interrupted by a friend or family member
9.
Syntax
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In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, specifically word order. The term syntax is used to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages, in mathematics, syntax refers to the rules governing the behavior of mathematical systems, such as formal languages used in logic. The word syntax comes from Ancient Greek, σύνταξις coordination, which consists of σύν syn, together, and τάξις táxis, a basic feature of a languages syntax is the sequence in which the subject, verb, and object usually appear in sentences. Over 85% of languages usually place the subject first, either in the sequence SVO or the sequence SOV, the other possible sequences are VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV, the last three of which are rare. In the West, the school of thought came to be known as traditional grammar began with the work of Dionysius Thrax. For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a known as grammaire générale. This system took as its premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and therefore there is a single. It became apparent that there was no such thing as the most natural way to express a thought, the Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic. Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in terms of Subject – Copula – Predicate, initially, this view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such as Franz Bopp. The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th century, there are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. One school of thought, founded in the works of Derek Bickerton, sees syntax as a branch of biology, other linguists take a more Platonistic view, since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract formal system. Yet others consider syntax a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages, the hypothesis of generative grammar is that language is a structure of the human mind. The goal of grammar is to make a complete model of this inner language. This model could be used to all human language and to predict the grammaticality of any given utterance. This approach to language was pioneered by Noam Chomsky, most generative theories assume that syntax is based upon the constituent structure of sentences. Generative grammars are among the theories that focus primarily on the form of a sentence and this complex category is notated as instead of V. NP\S is read as a category that searches to the left for an NP and outputs a sentence. The category of verb is defined as an element that requires two NPs to form a sentence
10.
Dependency grammar
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Dependency grammar is a class of modern syntactic theories that are all based on the dependency relation and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesnière. Dependency is the notion that linguistic units, e. g. words, are connected to other by directed links. The verb is taken to be the center of clause structure. All other syntactic units are directly or indirectly connected to the verb in terms of the directed links. DGs are distinct from phrase structure grammars since DGs lack phrasal nodes although they acknowledge phrases, structure is determined by the relation between a word and its dependents. Ibn Maḍāʾ, a 12th-century linguist from Córdoba, Andalusia, may have been the first grammarian to use the term dependency in the sense that we use it today. Dependency is also present in the works of Sámuel Brassai, a Hungarian linguist, and of Heimann Hariton Tiktin. Modern dependency grammars, however, begin primarily with the work of Lucien Tesnière, Tesnière was a Frenchman, a polyglot, and a professor of linguistics at the universities in Strasbourg and Montpellier. His major work Éléments de syntaxe structurale was published posthumously in 1959 – he died in 1954, DG has generated a lot of interest in Germany in both theoretical syntax and language pedagogy. Dependency-based systems are increasingly being used to parse natural language and generate tree banks, interest in dependency grammar is growing at present, international conferences on dependency linguistics being a relatively recent development. Dependency is a correspondence, for every element in the sentence. The result of this correspondence is that dependency grammars are word grammars. All that exist are the elements and the dependencies that connect the elements into a structure and this situation should be compared with the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars. Constituency is a correspondence, which means that, for every element in a sentence. The result of difference is that dependency structures are minimal compared to their constituency structure counterparts. These two trees illustrate just two ways to render the dependency and constituency relations. This dependency tree is a tree, i. e. it reflects actual word order. Many dependency trees abstract away from linear order and focus just on hierarchical order and this constituency tree follows the conventions of bare phrase structure, whereby the words themselves are employed as the node labels
11.
Generative grammar
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Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. Noam Chomsky first used the term in relation to the linguistics of grammar that he developed in the late 1950s. Linguists who follow the approach have been called generativists. The generative school has focused on the study of syntax, but has also addressed other aspects of a languages structure, early versions of Chomskys theory were called transformational grammar, which is still used as a general term that includes his subsequent theories. There are a number of versions of generative grammar currently practiced within linguistics, a contrasting approach is that of constraint-based grammars. Where a generative grammar attempts to list all the rules that result in all well-formed sentences, in stochastic grammar, grammatical correctness is taken as a probabilistic variable, rather than a discrete property. There are a number of different approaches to generative grammar, common to all is the effort to come up with a set of rules or principles that formally defines each and every one of the members of the set of well-formed expressions of a natural language. Chomsky, in an acceptance speech delivered in India in 2001. Generative grammar has been under development since the late 1950s, and has many changes in the types of rules. In tracing the development of ideas within generative grammar, it is useful to refer to various stages in the development of the theory. The so-called standard theory corresponds to the model of generative grammar laid out by Chomsky in 1965. A core aspect of standard theory is the distinction between two different representations of a sentence, called deep structure and surface structure, the two representations are linked to each other by transformational grammar. The so-called extended standard theory was formulated in the late 1960s, features are, syntactic constraints generalized phrase structures The so-called revised extended standard theory was formulated between 1973 and 1976. It contains restrictions upon X-bar theory, move α An alternative model of syntax based on the idea that notions like subject, direct object, and indirect object play a primary role in grammar. Chomskys Lectures on Government and Binding and Barriers, generative grammars can be described and compared, with the aid of the Chomsky hierarchy in the 1950s. This sets out a series of types of formal grammars with increasing expressive power, at a higher level of complexity are the context-free grammars. The derivation of a sentence by such a grammar can be depicted as a derivation tree, linguists working within generative grammar often view such trees as a primary object of study. According to this view, a sentence is not merely a string of words, such a tree diagram is also called a phrase marker
12.
Internet linguistics
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Internet linguistics is a domain of linguistics advocated by the English linguist David Crystal. It studies new language styles and forms that have arisen under the influence of the Internet and other New Media, studying the emerging language on the Internet can help improve conceptual organization, translation and web usability. This study is intended to both linguists and web users. The study of Internet linguistics can be effectively done through four main perspectives, sociolinguistics, education, stylistics, the Internet continues to play a significant role in both encouraging as well as diverting attention away from the usage of languages. David Crystal has identified four main perspectives for further investigation – the sociolinguistic perspective, the perspective, the stylistic perspective. The four perspectives are effectively interlinked and affect one another and this perspective deals with how society views the impact of Internet development on languages. The advent of the Internet has revolutionized communication in many ways, it changed the way people communicate, significant avenues include but are not limited to SMS text messaging, e-mails, chatgroups, virtual worlds and the Web. The evolution of these new mediums of communications has raised concern with regards to the way language is being used. At a personal level, CMC such as SMS Text Messaging, some examples include the iPhone and the BlackBerry. In schools, it is not uncommon for educators and students to be given personalized school e-mail accounts for communication and interaction purposes, classroom discussions are increasingly being brought onto the Internet in the form of discussion forums. These forms of social networking and media are slated to rise as educators from all over the world continue to seek new ways to better engage students. ”This will affect the way language is used as students. At a professional level, it is a sight for companies to have their computers and laptops hooked up onto the Internet. This greatly facilitates internal and external communication, mobile communications such as smart phones are increasingly making their way into the corporate world. In general, these new CMCs that are possible by the Internet have altered the way people use language – there is heightened informality. However, as David Crystal puts it, these should be seen positively as it reflects the power of the creativity of a language, the sociolinguistics of the Internet may also be examined through five interconnected themes. Multilingualism – It looks at the prevalence and status of languages on the Internet. Language change – From a sociolinguistic perspective, language change is influenced by the constraints of technology. It explores the changes over time, with emphasis on Internet lingo
13.
Origin of language
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The origin of language in the human species has been the topic of scholarly discussions for several centuries. In spite of this, there is no consensus on the origin or age of human language. The topic is difficult to study because of the lack of direct evidence, many argue that the origins of language probably relate closely to the origins of modern human behavior, but there is little agreement about the implications and directionality of this connection. This shortage of evidence has led many scholars to regard the entire topic as unsuitable for serious study. Today, there are numerous hypotheses about how, why, when, despite this, there is scarcely more agreement today than a hundred years ago, when Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection provoked a rash of armchair speculation on the topic. Some theories see language mostly as an innate faculty—largely genetically encoded, other theories regard language as a mainly cultural system—learned through social interaction. Berwick, suggests it is compatible with modern biology. What we do not see is any kind of gradualism in new technologies or innovations like fire, shelters. Berwick and Chomsky therefore suggest language emerged approximately between 200,000 years ago and 60,000 years ago and that leaves us with about 130,000 years, or approximately 5, 000–6,000 generations of time for evolutionary change. This is not overnight in one generation as some have inferred—but neither is it on the scale of geological eons, a majority of linguistic scholars as of 2015 hold continuity-based theories, but they vary in how they envision language development. Others in this intellectual camp—notably Ib Ulbæk—hold that language evolved not from primate communication but from primate cognition, where vocal precursors are concerned, many continuity theorists envisage language evolving from early human capacities for song. Ritual/speech coevolution theory exemplifies this approach, scholars in this intellectual camp point to the fact that even chimpanzees and bonobos have latent symbolic capacities that they rarely—if ever—use in the wild. Because the emergence of language lies so far back in human prehistory, another approach inspects early human fossils, looking for traces of physical adaptation to language use. In some cases, when the DNA of extinct humans can be recovered, a further study by Q. D. Atkinson suggests that successive population bottlenecks occurred as our African ancestors migrated to other areas, leading to a decrease in genetic and phenotypic diversity. Atkinson argues that these bottlenecks also affected culture and language, suggesting that the further away a particular language is from Africa, the fewer phonemes it contains. By way of evidence, Atkinson claims that todays African languages tend to have large numbers of phonemes. Relying heavily on Atkinsons work, a subsequent study has explored the rate at which phonemes develop naturally, the results suggest that language first evolved around 350, 000–150,000 years ago, which is around the time when modern Homo sapiens evolved. In 1861, historical linguist Max Müller published a list of speculative theories concerning the origins of spoken language, the bow-wow or cuckoo theory, which Müller attributed to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, saw early words as imitations of the cries of beasts and birds
14.
Origin of speech
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The origin of speech in Homo sapiens is a widely debated and controversial topic. The problems relate to humans unprecedented use of the tongue, lips, other animals vocalise, but do not use the tongue to modulate sounds. The topic is a separate one because language is not necessarily spoken, Speech is in this sense optional, although it is the default modality for language. Uncontroversially, monkeys, apes and humans, like other animals, have evolved specialised mechanisms for producing sound for purposes of social communication. On the other hand, no monkey or ape uses its tongue for such purposes, the term modality means the chosen representational format for encoding and transmitting information. A striking feature of language is that it is modality-independent, should an impaired child be prevented from hearing or producing sound, its innate capacity to master a language may equally find expression in signing. Sign languages of the deaf are independently invented and have all the properties of spoken language except for the modality of transmission. From this it appears that the centres of the human brain must have evolved to function optimally irrespective of the selected modality. Animal communication systems routinely combine visible with audible properties and effects, no vocally impaired whale, dolphin or songbird, for example, could express its song repertoire equally in visual display. Indeed, in the case of communication, message and modality are not capable of being disentangled. Whatever message is being conveyed stems from intrinsic properties of the signal, modality independence should not be confused with the ordinary phenomenon of multimodality. Monkeys and apes rely on a repertoire of species-specific gesture-calls — emotionally expressive vocalisations inseparable from the visual displays which accompany them, humans also have species-specific gesture-calls — laughs, cries, sobs and so forth — together with involuntary gestures accompanying speech. Many animal displays are polymodal in that appears designed to exploit multiple channels simultaneously. The human linguistic property of modality independence is conceptually distinct from this and it allows the speaker to encode the informational content of a message in a single channel, while switching between channels as necessary. Modern city-dwellers switch effortlessly between the word and writing in its various forms — handwriting, typing, e-mail. Whichever modality is chosen, it can transmit the full message content without external assistance of any kind. When talking on the telephone, for example, any accompanying facial or manual gestures, when typing or manually signing, conversely, theres no need to add sounds. Then, when released from the taboo, these same individuals resume narrating stories by the fireside or in the dark, speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures
15.
Linguistic prescription
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Linguistic prescription is the practice of elevating one variety or manner of language use over another. It may imply that some forms are incorrect, improper, or illogical, or lack communicative effect, sometimes informed by linguistic purism, these normative practices may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, grammar, semantics, pronunciation, and syntax. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use, Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach what a particular society perceives as a correct form, or advise on effective communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to change, if radical. Prescriptive approaches to language are often contrasted with linguistics, which observes. The basis of research is text analysis and field study. Description, however, may include researchers observations of their own language usage, the chief aim of linguistic prescription can be to specify standard language forms in a way that is easily taught and learned. Prescription may apply to most aspects of language, including spelling, grammar, semantics, pronunciation, syntax, while such a lingua franca may evolve by itself, the desire to formulate and define it is widespread in most parts of the world. Writers or communicators often adhere to prescriptive rules to make their communication clearer, similarly, stability of a language over time helps one to understand writings from the past. In addition, it is useful to have a standard so as to be able to decide whether or not a speaker or writer is using an educated form of the language. Linguistic prescription may also be used to impose a political ideology, during the second half of the 20th century, politically motivated efforts driven by various advocacy groups had considerable influence on language use under the broad banner of political correctness. These successfully imposed special rules for anti-sexist, anti-racist or generically anti-discriminatory language, george Orwell criticized the use of euphemisms and convoluted phrasing as a means of hiding insincerity in Politics and the English Language. His fictional Newspeak is a parody of ideologically motivated linguistic prescriptivism, prescription presupposes authorities whose judgment may be followed by other speakers and writers. The Duden grammar has a status for German. Although lexicographers often see their work as purely descriptive, dictionaries are widely regarded as prescriptive authorities, books such as Lynne Trusss Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which argues for stricter adherence to prescriptive punctuation rules, also seek to exert an influence. Linguistic prescription is regulated formally in some places, the Académie française in Paris is a French national body whose recommendations are widely respected, though not legally enforceable there. In Germany and the Netherlands, recent spelling reforms were devised by teams of linguists commissioned by the government, some met with significant dissent, for example the German orthography reform of 1996. Other kinds of authorities exist in specific settings, such as establishing a house style specifying preferred spellings or grammatical forms
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Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population
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Structural
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Structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as biological organisms, abstract structures include data structures in computer science and musical form. Types of structure include a hierarchy, a network featuring many-to-many links, buildings, aircraft, skeletons, anthills, beaver dams and salt domes are all examples of load-bearing structures. The results of construction are divided into buildings and non-building structures, the effects of loads on physical structures are determined through structural analysis, which is one of the tasks of structural engineering. The structural elements can be classified as one-dimensional, two-dimensional, or three-dimensional, the latter was the main option available to early structures such as Chichen Itza. Two-dimensional elements with a third dimension have little of either. The structure elements are combined in structural systems, the majority of everyday load-bearing structures are section-active structures like frames, which are primarily composed of one-dimensional structures. In biology, structures exist at all levels of organization, ranging hierarchically from the atomic and molecular to the cellular, tissue, organ, organismic, population, usually, a higher-level structure is composed of multiple copies of a lower-level structure. Structural biology is concerned with the structure of macromolecules, particularly proteins. The function of molecules is determined by their shape as well as their composition. Protein structure has a four-level hierarchy, the primary structure is the sequence of amino acids that make it up. It has a backbone made up of a repeated sequence of a nitrogen. The secondary structure consists of repeated patterns determined by hydrogen bonding, the two basic types are the α-helix and the β-pleated sheet. The tertiary structure is a back and forth bending of the chain. Chemical structure refers to both molecular geometry and electronic structure, the structure can be represented by a variety of diagrams called structural formulas. Lewis structures use a dot notation to represent the valence electrons for an atom, bonds between atoms can be represented by lines with one line for each pair of electrons that is shared. In a simplified version of such a diagram, called a skeletal formula, only carbon-carbon bonds, atoms in a crystal have a structure that involves repetition of a basic unit called a unit cell. The atoms can be modeled as points on a lattice, and one can explore the effect of symmetry operations that include rotations about a point, reflections about a symmetry planes, and translations
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Clause (linguistics)
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In grammar, a clause is the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. A typical clause consists of a subject and a predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase, a simple sentence usually consists of a single finite clause with a finite verb that is independent. More complex sentences may contain multiple clauses, main clauses are those that can stand alone as a sentence. Subordinate clauses are those that would be awkward or incomplete if they were alone, a primary division for the discussion of clauses is the distinction between main clauses and subordinate clauses. A main clause can stand alone, i. e. it can constitute a complete sentence by itself. A subordinate clause, in contrast, is reliant on the appearance of a clause, it depends on the main clause and is therefore a dependent clause. A second major distinction concerns the difference between finite and non-finite clauses, a finite clause contains a structurally central finite verb, whereas the structurally central word of a non-finite clause is often a non-finite verb. Traditional grammar focuses on finite clauses, the awareness of non-finite clauses having arisen much later in connection with the study of syntax. The discussion here focuses on finite clauses, although some aspects of non-finite clauses are considered further below. Clauses can be classified according to a trait that is a prominent characteristic of their syntactic form. The position of the verb is one major trait used for classification. These two criteria overlap to an extent, which means that no single aspect of syntactic form is always decisive in determining how the clause functions. Standard SV-clauses are the norm in English and they are usually declarative, they express information in a neutral manner, e. g. The pig has not yet been fed, - Declarative clause, standard SV order Ive been hungry for two hours. - Declarative clause, standard SV order. that Ive been hungry for two hours and they can be viewed as basic, other clause types being derived from them. Standard SV-clauses can also be interrogative or exclamative, however, given the appropriate intonation contour and/or the appearance of a question word, the pig has not yet been fed. - Rising intonation on fed makes the clause a yes/no-question, the pig has not yet been fed. - Spoken forcefully, this clause is exclamative, youve been hungry for how long
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Phrase
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In everyday speech, a phrase may be any group of words, often carrying a special idiomatic meaning, in this sense it is roughly synonymous with expression. In linguistic analysis, a phrase is a group of words that functions as a constituent in the syntax of a sentence, a phrase typically appears within a clause, but it is possible also for a phrase to be a clause or to contain a clause within it. There is a difference between the use of the term phrase and its technical use in linguistics. In common usage, a phrase is usually a group of words with some special meaning or other significance, such as all rights reserved, economical with the truth, kick the bucket. It may be a euphemism, a saying or proverb, a fixed expression, in grammatical analysis, particularly in theories of syntax, a phrase is any group of words, or sometimes a single word, which plays a particular role within the grammatical structure of a sentence. It does not have to have any meaning or significance, or even exist anywhere outside of the sentence being analyzed. This means that expressions that may be called phrases in everyday language are not phrases in the technical sense. In grammatical analysis, most phrases contain a key word that identifies the type and linguistic features of the phrase, this is known as the head-word, or the head. The syntactic category of the head is used to name the category of the phrase, for example, the remaining words in a phrase are called the dependents of the head. Most theories of syntax view most phrases as having a head, a phrase lacking a head is known as exocentric, and phrases with heads are endocentric. When a noun is used in a sentence without an explicit determiner, for full discussion, see Determiner phrase. See the Generative approaches section of the article for details. Many theories of syntax and grammar illustrate sentence structure using phrase trees, trees show the words, phrases, and, at times, clauses that make up sentences. Any word combination that corresponds to a complete subtree can be seen as a phrase, there are two established and competing principles for constructing trees, they produce constituency and dependency trees and both are illustrated here using an example sentence. The node labels in the two trees mark the syntactic category of the different constituents, or word elements, of the sentence, in the constituency tree each phrase is marked by a phrasal node, and there are eight phrases identified by phrase structure analysis in the example sentence. On the other hand, the tree identifies a phrase by any node that exerts dependency upon, or dominates. And, using dependency analysis, there are six phrases in the sentence, the trees and phrase-counts demonstrate that different theories of syntax differ in the word combinations they qualify as a phrase. Here the constituency tree identifies three phrases that the tree does not, namely, house at the end of the street, end of the street
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Word
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In linguistics, a word is the smallest element that can be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content. This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning, a word may consist of a single morpheme, or several, whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word. A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes, words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. The term word may refer to a word or to a written word. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, the difficulty of deciphering a word depends on the language. Dictionaries categorize a languages lexicon into lemmas and these can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a word in the opinion of the writers of that language. The most appropriate means of measuring the length of a word is by counting its syllables or morphemes, when a word has multiple definitions or multiple senses, it may result in confusion in a debate or discussion. Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of Minimal Free Forms in 1926, words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves. However, some words are not minimal free forms as they make no sense by themselves. Some semanticists have put forward a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, according to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations. In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words are construed as bundles of features that are united into a structure with form. For example, the word koalas has semantic features, category features, number features, phonological features, the task of defining what constitutes a word involves determining where one word ends and another word begins—in other words, identifying word boundaries. There are several ways to determine where the boundaries of spoken language should be placed, Potential pause, A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries, however, this method is not foolproof, the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words, or fail to separate two or more closely linked words. Indivisibility, A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud, thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become My family and I have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have infixes, which are put inside a word, similarly, some have separable affixes, in the German sentence Ich komme gut zu Hause an, the verb ankommen is separated. Phonetic boundaries, Some languages have rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be
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First language
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A first language is a language that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. If there are multiple L1, the designation first language is used for the L1 spoken the best or the one that is the basis for sociolinguistic identity. In some countries, the native language or mother tongue refers to the language of ones ethnic group rather than ones first language. Children brought up speaking more than one language can have more than one native language, by contrast, a second language is any language that one speaks other than ones first language. Native speakers are considered to be an authority on their language because of their natural acquisition process regarding the language. That is achieved by interaction with the language and speakers of the language. Native speakers will not necessarily be knowledgeable about every rule of the language. Sometimes, the mother tongue or mother language is used for the language that a person learned as a child at home. Children growing up in homes can, according to this definition, have more than one mother tongue or native language. It is quite possible that the first language learned is no longer a dominant language. According to Ivan Illich, the mother tongue was first used by Catholic monks to designate a particular language they used, instead of Latin. That is, the mother the Church introduced this term. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, on 17 November 1999, UNESCO designated 21 February as International Mother Language Day. The first language of a child is part of the personal, social and cultural identity, another impact of the first language is that it brings about the reflection and learning of successful social patterns of acting and speaking. It is basically responsible for differentiating the linguistic competence of acting and that has implications on the education of non-native speakers. The topic of native speaker also gives way to discussion about what exactly bilingualism is, one definition is that a person is bilingual by being equally proficient in both languages. A person who grows up speaking English and begins learning Spanish for four years is not necessarily bilingual unless he speaks the two languages with equal fluency, one can have two or more native languages, thus being a native bilingual or indeed multilingual. The order in which languages are learned is not necessarily the order of proficiency
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