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A unique combination of features defines a phoneme. Examples of phonemic or distinctive features are: [+/- voice], [+/- ATR] (binary features) and [ CORONAL] (a unary feature; also a place feature). Surface representations can be expressed as the result of rules acting on the features of the underlying representation. These rules are formulated ...
Hockett's Design Features are a set of features that characterize human language and set it apart from animal communication. They were defined by linguist Charles F. Hockett in the 1960s. He called these characteristics the design features of language.
Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be "decay" or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable. [119]
An archaic language stage is chronologically old, compared to a more recent language stage, while the terms conservative and innovative typically compare contemporary forms, varieties or features. A conservative linguistic form, such as a word or sound feature, is one that remains closer to an older form from which it evolved, relative to ...
In some cases, particularly with noun and adjective phrases, it is not always clear which dependents are to be classed as complements, and which as adjuncts.Although in principle the head-directionality parameter concerns the order of heads and complements only, considerations of head-initiality and head-finality sometimes take account of the position of the head in the phrase as a whole ...
In linguistics, language classification is the grouping of related languages into the same category. There are two main kinds of language classification: genealogical and typological classification. There are two main kinds of language classification: genealogical and typological classification.
Theory of language is a topic in philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. [1] It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; [2] [3] "Why do languages have the properties they do?"; [4] or "What is the origin of language?". In addition to these fundamental questions, the theory of language also seeks to understand ...
A classifier is a word (or in some analyses, a bound morpheme) which accompanies a noun in certain grammatical contexts, and generally reflects some kind of conceptual classification of nouns, based principally on features of their referents. Thus a language might have one classifier for nouns representing persons, another for nouns ...