1.
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
2.
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
3.
Dictionary
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It is a lexicographical product which shows inter-relationships among the data. A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries, Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a complete range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are called terms instead of words. In practice, the two approaches are used for both types, there are other types of dictionaries that do not fit neatly into the above distinction, for instance bilingual dictionaries, dictionaries of synonyms, and rhyming dictionaries. The word dictionary is usually understood to refer to a general purpose monolingual dictionary, there is also a contrast between prescriptive or descriptive dictionaries, the former reflect what is seen as correct use of the language while the latter reflect recorded actual use. Stylistic indications in many modern dictionaries are also considered by some to be less than objectively descriptive, the birth of the new discipline was not without controversy, the practical dictionary-makers being sometimes accused by others of astonishing lack of method and critical-self reflection. The oldest known dictionaries were Akkadian Empire cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla, the early 2nd millennium BCE Urra=hubullu glossary is the canonical Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlists. Philitas of Cos wrote a pioneering vocabulary Disorderly Words which explained the meanings of rare Homeric and other words, words from local dialects. Apollonius the Sophist wrote the oldest surviving Homeric lexicon, the first Sanskrit dictionary, the Amarakośa, was written by Amara Sinha c. 4th century CE. Written in verse, it listed around 10,000 words, according to the Nihon Shoki, the first Japanese dictionary was the long-lost 682 CE Niina glossary of Chinese characters. The oldest existing Japanese dictionary, the c.835 CE Tenrei Banshō Meigi, was also a glossary of written Chinese, a 9th-century CE Irish dictionary, Sanas Cormaic, contained etymologies and explanations of over 1,400 Irish words. In India around 1320, Amir Khusro compiled the Khaliq-e-bari which mainly dealt with Hindavi, in medieval Europe, glossaries with equivalents for Latin words in vernacular or simpler Latin were in use. The Catholicon by Johannes Balbus, a large grammatical work with a lexicon, was widely adopted. It served as the basis for several bilingual dictionaries and was one of the earliest books to be printed, in 1502 Ambrogio Calepinos Dictionarium was published, originally a monolingual Latin dictionary, which over the course of the 16th century was enlarged to become a multilingual glossary. The first monolingual dictionary written in Europe was the Spanish, written by Sebastián Covarrubias Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, published in 1611 in Madrid, in 1612 the first edition of the Vocabolario dellAccademia della Crusca, for Italian, was published. It served as the model for works in French and English. In 1690 in Rotterdam was published, posthumously, the Dictionnaire Universel by Antoine Furetière for French, in 1694 appeared the first edition of the Dictionnaire de lAcadémie française. Between 1712 and 1721 was published the Vocabulario portughez e latino written by Raphael Bluteau, the Totius Latinitatis lexicon by Egidio Forcellini was firstly published in 1777, it has formed the basis of all similar works that have since been published
4.
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
5.
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
6.
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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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
8.
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
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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
10.
Compound (linguistics)
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In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of formation that creates compound lexemes. That is, in terms, compounding occurs when two or more words are joined to make one longer word. The meaning of the compound may be similar to or different from the meanings of its components in isolation, with very few exceptions, English compound words are stressed on their first component stem. The process occurs readily in other Germanic languages for different reasons, words can be concatenated both to mean the same as the sum of two words or where an adjective and noun are compounded. The addition of affix morphemes to words should not be confused with nominal composition, compound formation rules vary widely across language types. In a synthetic language, the relationship between the elements of a compound may be marked with a case or other morpheme. This latter pattern is common throughout the Semitic languages, though in some it is combined with a genitive case. Agglutinative languages tend to very long words with derivational morphemes. Compounds may or may not require the use of derivational morphemes also, the longest compounds in the world may be found in the Finnic and Germanic languages. German examples include Farbfernsehgerät, Funkfernbedienung, and the jocular word Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze, in Finnish, although there is theoretically no limit to the length of compound words, words consisting of more than three components are rare. Even those with less than three components can look mysterious to non-Finnish such as hätäuloskäytävä, compounds can be rather long when translating technical documents from English to some other language, since the lengths of the words are theoretically unlimited, especially in chemical terminology. For example, the English compound doghouse, where house is the head, endocentric compounds tend to be of the same part of speech as their head, as in the case of doghouse. For example, the English compound white-collar is neither a kind of collar nor a white thing, in an exocentric compound, the word class is determined lexically, disregarding the class of the constituents. For example, a must-have is not a verb but a noun, the meaning of this type of compound can be glossed as whose B is A, where B is the second element of the compound and A the first. A bahuvrihi compound is one whose nature is expressed by neither of the words, copulative compounds are compounds with two semantic heads. Appositional compounds are lexemes that have two attributes that classify the compound, most natural languages have compound nouns. The positioning of the words according to the language
