General Facts about Linguistics
~7250
What is the approximate number of languages in the world?
Labial, labiodental, interdental, alveolar, alveopalatal, palatal, velar, glottal.
What are places of articulation?
The smallest unit of language that bears meaning.
What is a morpheme?
The process in which a word from one language is adapted for use in another.
What is borrowing?
The general term for why, for example, Contemporary English is different from Old English.
What is Language Change?
The phonetic context in which a sound occurs.
What is environment?
A morpheme that must be attached to another element is one of these.
What is a bound morpheme?
In any given language, this process is how you express who is doing what to whom.
What is the ordering or words/word order?
This is the annual publication listing statistics about all of the recognized languages of the world.
What is the ethnologue?
This is the field that studies how speech is produced by the vocal tract
What is Articulatory Phonetics?
Complex words usually consist of a ______ morpheme and one or more _________.
What is stem/root and affixes?
The name of expressions that can (but do not need to) cooccur with other elements for the sentence to be grammatical.
what are adjuncts?
The design property of language where forms are built from a finite set of units.
What is Discreteness?
This is a term for the particular form of a language spoken by an individual.
What is an idolect?
The set of constraints on how sequences of segments pattern.
What is Phonotactics?
The form to which an affix is added.
What is a stem?
These are abstract classes of words.
What are lexical categories?
From a morphological perspective, the word Thanksgiving is this type of word.
What is a compound?
According to the Ethnologue, approximately this many languages have become extinct since 1950.
What is 384?
This is a set of phonemes in a language that all have a given feature or set of features.
What is a natural class?
This is a process that assigns an already existing word to a new syntactic category. Example:
Butter (N) → Butter (V)
What is Conversion (or Zero Derivation)?
This is term for when there are sentences of a language that a grammar cannot produce.
What is Undergenerates?
The term for sounds that are made by pushing air out of the vocal tract from the lungs. Most of the speech sounds we looked at can be described by this term.
What is Pulmonic Egressive?