List of Terms

List of terms

Here are the concepts that you should be familiar with if you want to be successful on the final test!

Seminar 3 Sound change

Absolute regularity, assimilation, chain shifts, conditioned change, dissimilation , drag chain, epenthesis, final devoicing, Great English Vowel Shift, Grimm's Law, loss, metathesis, morphophonemic alternations, paradigm, prothesis, push chain, regularity hypothesis, sound change, sporadic change, Verner's Law, weakening

Seminar 4

mergers (conditioned vs unconditioned), chain shifts

=> make sure you are familiar with some (at least 2) more recent sound changes (e.g. mergers in US, yod-dropping, change of stress, Northern Cities shift, Southern shift)

Seminar 5 Morphological change

analogy, four-part / proportional analogy, leveling, morphophonemic alternations, one meaning - one form, productivity, backformation, blending, contamination, reanalysis, folk etymology, ellipsis, clitics, regular analogy, (relatively) systematic analogy, sporadic analogy

Seminar 6 Syntactic change

Negation patterns, clitics, word order in English

Seminar 7 Grammaticalization

Grammaticalization, difference analogy – grammaticalization, some (3) principles of analogy (Heine/Hopper) + illustrating examples

Seminar 8 Semantic change

Arbitrariness, euphemism, homonymy (also: avoidance of excessive homonymy), extension/broadening, narrowing, hyperbole, litotes, amelioration, metaphor, metonymy, one meaning - one form, overlap in meaning, pejoration, polysemy, reinterpretation, synecdoche, synonymy, taboo, taboo-induced deformation, taboo-induced replacement

Seminar 9 Borrowing

Adaptation, adoption, adstratum, borrowing (basic vocabulary, collocations, morphology, sounds) calques, donor language, linguistic nationalism, loan shifts, loans, nativization, need as motivation for borrowing, prestige as motivation for borrowing, substitution of most similar native sound, substratum, superstratum

Seminar 10 Pidgins and Creoles

baby talk, creole, creolization, decreolization, depidginization, foreigner talk, pidgin(+features), reduction & simplification,

Seminar 11 Language death /Causes of Change

-forms and causes of language death

-early theories (climatic/geographical determinism, racial/anatomical determinism, etiquette, social convention and cultural traits/ indolence/ ease and simplification/Foreign influence/ desire to be distinct/ external historical events); internal vs. external causes, avoidance of pernicious homophony (lexical replacement/loss, prevention, deflection), loss

Seminar 12 Linguistic Variation

-real vs. apparent time studies, overt vs. covert prestige, roles of different social classes in change, actuation/innovation vs. spread, social networks (weak and strong), innovators, early adopters