What is Language?
The design feature that describes how any particular language is learned through social interaction.
What is cultural transmission?
The hypothesis that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were nomadic warrior horsemen originating from the Eurasian grasslands who spread the Proto-Indo-European language by conquest.
What is the steppe theory?
This city's dialect of Langues d'Oil developed into Modern Standard French.
What is Paris?
A neologism forming by blending two or more existing words together.
What is a blend?
The localized area in the temporal lobe associated with language comprehension.
What is Wernicke's area?
Under the principles of ethical research, this must be obtained from human participants before collecting data from them.
What is informed consent?
The common ancestor of the Romance languages.
What is Vulgar Latin?
What is an idiolect?
A definition for a part of speech that is based on words' semantic properties – that is, their meanings.
What is a semantic definition of part of speech?
The lobe of the brain most associated with syntax.
What is the frontal lobe?
What is linguistics?
The language originally spoken in a small area surrounding the city of Rome and spread widely with the expansion of the Roman state.
What is Latin?
This language family is the largest in the world by total number of speakers.
What is the Indo-European language family?
The two types of affix.
What are prefix and suffix?
This part of the brain is responsible for regulating the signals flowing between the body and the brain.
What is the brain stem?
The design feature that describes how there is no inherent connection between the sounds of *words and their meanings.
*most
What is arbitrariness?
A writing system in which each unique symbol corresponds to about word or meaning.
What is a logographic system?
This region of England was controlled by the Vikings during the 9th and 10th centuries.
What is the Danelaw?
A neologism formed by adding two or more words together without blending.
What is a compound?
The hemisphere in which language is lateralized in 90% of right-handers and 50% of left-handers.
What is the left hemisphere?
The design feature that describes how any specific thing we say has a specific meaning.
What is semanticity?
This language influenced the Langues d'Oc in the south of France, being in part responsible for their divergence from the Langues d'Oil of the north.
What is the Celtic Gaulish language?
The year that William the Conqueror invaded England.
What is 1066?
A neologism formed from the name of a person or place.
What is an eponym?
The localized area in the frontal lobe linked to speech production.
What is Broca's area?
What is interchangeability?
The language that William Shakespeare spoke and wrote his works in.
What is (Early) Modern English?
The earliest evidence that we have of the Chinese writing system is found on these.
What are oracle bones?
A morpheme that can stand on its own as a word.
What is a free morpheme?
The purposeful study of a language, such as a second or third language.
What is language learning?
The design feature that describes how humans can use language to talk about things at a different time and place.
What is displacement?
"Standard Chinese" refers to this specific variety.
What is the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese?
This event resulted in the end of any Muslim rule in Iberia, and its end marked the beginning of Modern Spanish.
What is the Reconquista?
Morphemes which perform grammatical jobs.
What are function morphemes?
The natural development of linguistic abilities over the first few years of life; "just picking up" a language.
The design feature that describes how humans can intentionally say false, misleading or meaningless things.
What is prevarication?
The proper name for the Chinese writing system.
What is Hanzi, or the Han characters.
The Romans invited this Germanic tribe to live in Iberia if they would help keep out other invaders – but the Roman Empire fell anyway.
Who were the Visigoths?
The ability of a morpheme to readily form new words.
What is productivity?
Features of one language affecting learning or usage of another.
What is language transfer?
The design feature, apparently unique to human language among animal systems of communication, that describes how brand new utterances can be made and understood.
What is productivity?
Authors like Laozi, Sun Tzu, and Confucius wrote during this period in the history of the Chinese language.
What is Classical Chinese?
This concept describes the ability of speakers of two or more language varieties to understand each other (or not.)
What is mutual intelligibility?
Neologisms formed by taking off a morpheme (which can either be real or merely perceived) from an existing word.
What are backformations?
The idea that there is a period of growth, generally held to last from early childhood until puberty, in which full native competence is possible when acquiring a language, and outside of which language must be learnt and not acquired.
What is the critical period hypothesis?
The category of words that are, in at least one sense, exceptions to the design feature of arbitrariness.
What are onomatopoeia?
The region where Proto-Sino-Tibetan was probably spoken.
What is the Yellow River Basin?
This language heavily influenced Old English as a result of the Danelaw.
What is Old Norse?
The "dictionary" in your mind.
What is the lexicon?
The bundle of nerves that connect the two hemispheres of the cerebrum.
What is the corpus callosum?