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Subjectification (linguistics)
In historical (or diachronic) linguistics, subjectification (also known as subjectivization or subjectivisation) is a language change process in which a linguistic expression acquires meanings that convey the speaker's attitude or viewpoint. An English example is the word ''while'', which, in Middle English, had only the sense of 'at the same time that'. It later acquired the meaning of 'although', indicating a concession on the part of the speaker ("While it could use a tune-up, it's a good bike."). This is a pragmatic-semantic process, which means that inherent as well as contextual meanings of the given expression are considered. Subjectification is realized in lexical and grammatical change. It is also of interest to cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. Subjectivity in language From a synchronic perspective, subjectivity can be expressed in language in many ways. First of all, the subject is implied in discourse through any speech act. Subjectivity can also be expressed in m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics) # to develop general theories about how and why language changes # to describe the history of speech communities # to study the history of words, i.e. etymology Historical linguistics is founded on the Uniformitarian Principle, which is defined by linguist Donald Ringe as: History and development Western modern historical linguistics dates from the late-18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity. At first, historical linguistics served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics, primarily as a tool ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evidentiality
In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particular grammatical element (affix, clitic, or particle) that indicates evidentiality. Languages with only a single evidential have had terms such as mediative, médiatif, médiaphorique, and indirective used instead of ''evidential''. Introduction All languages have some means of specifying the source of information. European languages (such as Germanic and Romance languages) often indicate evidential-type information through modal verbs ( es, deber de, nl, zouden, da, skulle, german: sollen) or other lexical words ( adverbials, en, reportedly) or phrases (English: ''it seems to me''). Some languages have a distinct grammatical category of evidentiality that is required to be expressed at all times. The elements in European languages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammaticalization
In historical linguistics, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) become grammatical markers (such as affixes or prepositions). Thus it creates new function words from content words, rather than deriving them from existing bound, inflectional constructions. For example, the Old English verb 'to want', 'to wish' has become the Modern English auxiliary verb ''will'', which expresses intention or simply futurity. Some concepts are often grammaticalized, while others, such as evidentiality, are not so much. For an understanding of this process, a distinction needs to be made between lexical items or content words, which carry specific lexical meaning, and grammatical items or function words, which serve mainly to express grammatical relationships between the different words in an utterance. Grammaticalization has been defined as "the change whereby ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cline Of Instantiation
The cline of instantiation is a concept in systemic functional linguistics theory. Alongside stratification and metafunction, it is one of the global semiotic dimensions that define the organization of language in context. According to Michael Halliday, instantiation is "the relation between an instance and the system that lies behind it". It is "based on memory and is a feature of all systemic behaviour". The cline of instantiation has two poles. At one end is "instance"; at the other is the "system", the whole potential to which the instance relates. In the study of language and other phenomena, including other semiotic phenomena, what can be observed is an instance of an underlying potential. Halliday borrows the distinction between "weather" and "climate" to explain the relation. The weather can be observed day by day; over time, a picture of a climate is built up. Weather and climate are not distinct phenomena but different perspectives on the same phenomenon. The notion ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semasiology
Semasiology (from el, σημασία, ', "signification") is a discipline of linguistics concerned with the question "what does the word ''X'' mean?". It studies the meaning of words regardless how they are pronounced. It is the opposite of onomasiology, a branch of lexicology that starts with a concept or object and asks for its name, i.e., "how do you express X?" whereas semasiology starts with a word and asks for its meanings. The exact meaning of semasiology is somewhat obscure. It is often used as a synonym of semantics (the study of the meaning of words, phrases, and longer forms of expression). However, semasiology is also sometimes considered part of lexical semantics, a narrow subfield of lexicology (the study of words) and semantics. The term was first used in German by Christian Karl Reisig in 1825 in his work, 'Lectures on Latin Linguistics''(german: links=no, Vorlesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaft), and was used in English by 1847. Semantics replaced it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ronald Langacker
Ronald Wayne Langacker (born December 27, 1942) is an American linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known as one of the founders of the cognitive linguistics movement and the creator of cognitive grammar. He has also made significant contributions to the comparative study of Uto-Aztecan languages, publishing several articles on historical Uto-Aztecan linguistics, as well as editing collections of grammar sketches of under-described Uto-Aztecan languages. Life Born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Langacker received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1966. From 1966 until 2003, he was professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. From 1997 until 1999 he also served as president of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association. Career Langacker develops the central ideas of cognitive grammar in his seminal, two-volume ''Foundations of Cognitive Grammar'', which became a maj ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elizabeth Traugott
Elizabeth Closs Traugott (born April 9, 1939 in the UK) is an American linguist and Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English, Stanford University. She is best known for her work on grammaticalization, subjectification, and constructionalization. Education and Career Traugott earned her BA in English Language at Oxford University in 1960 and her PhD in English Language at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. Elizabeth Traugott's initial appointment was in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley (1964-1970). After year-long teaching appointments at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and University of York, UK, she was appointed Associate Professor of Linguistics and English at Stanford University in 1970, and Professor from 1977 until her retirement in 2003. She served as Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University from 1980-1985 and as Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies from 1985-1991. Elizabeth Trau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deixis
In linguistics, deixis (, ) is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words ''tomorrow'', ''there'', and ''they''. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to be fully understood—for example, English pronouns—are deictic. Deixis is closely related to anaphora. Although this article deals primarily with deixis in spoken language, the concept is sometimes applied to written language, gestures, and communication media as well. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is treated as a particular subclass of the more general semiotic phenomenon of indexicality, a sign "pointing to" some aspect of its context of occurrence. Although this article draws examples primarily from English, deixis is believed to be a feature (to some degree) of all natural languages.Lyons, John (1977) "Deixis, space ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language Change
Language change is variation over time in a language's features. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify three main types of change: systematic change in the pronunciation of phonemes, or sound change; borrowing, in which features of a language or dialect are altered as a result of influence from another language or dialect; and analogical change, in which the shape or grammatical behavior of a word is altered to more closely resemble that of another word. All living languages are continually undergoing change. Some commentators use derogatory labels such as "corruption" to suggest that language change constitutes a degradation in the quality of a language, especially when the change originates from human error or is a prescriptively discouraged usage. Modern linguistics rejects this concept, since from a scientific point of view su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Valency (linguistics)
In linguistics, valency or valence is the number and type of arguments controlled by a predicate, content verbs being typical predicates. Valency is related, though not identical, to subcategorization and transitivity, which count only object arguments – valency counts all arguments, including the subject. The linguistic meaning of valency derives from the definition of valency in chemistry. The valency metaphor appeared first in linguistics in Charles Sanders Peirce's essay "The Logic of Relatives" in 1897, and it then surfaced in the works of a number of linguists decades later in the late 1940s and 1950s. Lucien Tesnière is credited most with having established the valency concept in linguistics. A major authority on the valency of the English verbs is Allerton (1982), who made the important distinction between semantic and syntactic valency. Types There are several types of valency: #impersonal (= avalent) ''it rains'' #intransitive (monovalent/monadic) '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Person
In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically the distinction is between the speaker (first person), the addressee ( second person), and others ( third person). A language's set of ''personal'' pronouns are defined by grammatical person, but other pronouns would not. ''First person'' includes the speaker (English: ''I'', ''we'', ''me'', and ''us''), ''second person'' is the person or people spoken to (English: ''you''), and ''third person'' includes all that are not listed above (English: ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they'', ''him'', ''her'', ''them''). It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships. Related classifications Number In Indo-European languages, first-, second-, and third-person pronouns are typically also marked for singular and plural forms, and sometimes dual form as well ( grammatical number). Inclusive/exclusive distinction Some oth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
