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Some English examples result from nouns being verbed in the patterns of "add <noun> to" and "remove <noun> from"; e.g. dust, seed, stone. Denotations and connotations can drift or branch over centuries.
Language change is the process of alteration in the features of a single language, or of languages in general, over time. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics : historical linguistics , sociolinguistics , and evolutionary linguistics .
Cohyponymic transfer: Horizontal shift in a taxonomy, e.g., the confusion of mouse and rat in some dialects. Antiphrasis: Change based on a contrastive aspect of the concepts, e.g., perfect lady in the sense of "prostitute". Auto-antonymy: Change of a word's sense and concept to the complementary opposite, e.g., bad in the slang sense of "good".
Jan-Petter Blom and John J. Gumperz coined the linguistic term 'metaphorical code-switching' in the late sixties and early seventies. They wanted to "clarify the social and linguistic factors involved in the communication process ... by showing that speaker's selection among semantically, grammatically, and phonologically permissible alternates occurring in conversation sequences recorded in ...
Cyclic drift is the mechanism of long-term evolution that changes the functional characteristics of a language over time, such as the reversible drifts from SOV word order to SVO and from synthetic inflection to analytic observable as typological parameters in the syntax of language families and of areal groupings of languages open to investigation over long periods of time.
Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is the prescriptive practice of recognising one form of a language as purer or of intrinsically higher quality than others. The perceived or actual decline may take the form of change of vocabulary, syncretism of grammatical elements, or loanwords, and in this case, the form of a language reform.
It can also be used when something is being quoted in its original language, the speaker wants to address a specific individual, directly address or bring attention to a particular context within the conversation.Situational code-switching relies on adapting to the speakers within a conversation in order to accentuate, explain or change the ...
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. [1] Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym, with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite.