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The global language system is the "ingenious pattern of connections between language groups". [1] Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan developed this theory in 2001 in his book Words of the World: The Global Language System and according to him, "the multilingual connections between language groups do not occur haphazardly, but, on the contrary, they constitute a surprisingly strong and efficient ...
This phenomenon refers to how we classify the grammatical category of phrases, where the grammatical category of the phrase is dependent on the grammatical category of one of the words within the phrase, called the head. For example, in the phrase "buy the books", the verb "buy" is the head, and we call the entire phrase a verb-phrase.
In areas where many languages are in close contact, this may lead to the formation of language areas in which unrelated languages share a number of linguistic features. A number of such language areas have been documented, among them, the Balkan language area, the Mesoamerican language area, and the Ethiopian language area.
Among Whorf's best-known examples of linguistic relativity are instances where a non-European language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in ...
Grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a linguistic process in which words change from representing objects or actions to serving grammatical functions. Grammaticalization can involve content words , such as nouns and verbs , developing into new function words that express grammatical relationships among other ...
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky.The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be.
Grammatical category, a grammatical feature such as tense, gender, etc. The definition of linguistic categories is a major concern of linguistic theory , and thus, the definition and naming of categories varies across different theoretical frameworks and grammatical traditions for different languages.
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...