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Spoonerism: a switch of two sounds in two different words (cf. sananmuunnos) Same-sounding words or phrases, fully or approximately homophonous (sometimes also referred to as "oronyms") Techniques that involve the letters. Acronym: abbreviations formed by combining the initial components in a phrase or names; Anadrome: a word or phrase that ...
Such an affix usually applies to words of one lexical category (part of speech) and changes them into words of another such category. For example, one effect of the English derivational suffix -ly is to change an adjective into an adverb (slow → slowly). Here are examples of English derivational patterns and their suffixes:
Words' meanings may also change in terms of the breadth of their semantic domain. Narrowing a word limits its alternative meanings, whereas broadening associates new meanings with it. For example, "hound" (Old English hund) once referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it denotes only a particular type of dog. On the other hand, the word ...
Similar to other languages, words in Pingelapese can take different forms to add to or even change its meaning. Verbal suffixes are morphemes added at the end of a word to change its form. Prefixes are those that are added at the front. For example, the Pingelapese suffix –kin means 'with' or 'at.' It is added at the end of a verb.
A heteronym (also known as a heterophone) is a word that has a different pronunciation and meaning from another word but the same spelling. These are homographs that are not homophones . Thus, lead ( /ˈlɛd/ the metal) and lead ( /ˈliːd/ a leash) are heteronyms, but mean ( /ˈmin/ average) and mean ( /ˈmin/ intend) are not, since they are ...
Assimilation is a sound change in which some phonemes (typically consonants or vowels) change to become more similar to other nearby sounds. A common type of phonological process across languages, assimilation can occur either within a word or between words. It occurs in normal speech but becomes more common in more rapid speech.
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound.
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation (e.g., more than one way of pronouncing the same phoneme or the same word), lexicon (e.g., multiple words with the same meaning), grammar (e.g., different syntactic constructions expressing the same grammatical function), and ...