Language Families and Classification
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Questions and Answers

Which of the following languages is classified as a West Germanic language?

  • Swedish
  • Romanian
  • Icelandic
  • Dutch (correct)

    • What is the term used for comparing elements in different languages based on their formal structure, meaning, and functional use?

  • Formal Correspondence
  • Tertium Comparationis (correct)
  • Pragmatic Equivalence
  • Semantic Equivalence

    • Which of the following languages is NOT classified as an Indo-European language?

  • Greek
  • Lithuanian
  • Romanian
  • Finnish (correct)

    • Which of the following language families is the largest, including the most languages?

    <p>Indo-European (D)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following languages is considered an isolate?

    <p>Basque (A)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following is an example of an interfix?

    <p>editor-in-chief (C)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What is the difference between a bound morpheme and a clitic?

    <p>A bound morpheme is always attached to a word, while a clitic can be attached to a phrase or clause. (A)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which process describes the change from 'permit' (verb) to 'permit' (noun)?

    <p>Conversion (D)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What type of compounding is represented by the word 'mish-mash'?

    <p>Reduplication (B)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following is an example of ablaut?

    <p>He drove home (C)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What is the process of shortening a polysyllabic word called?

    <p>Clipping (C)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following is an example of a stump compound?

    <p>Pan Am (D)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What is the process of creating a new word by removing an 'affix' from an existing word called?

    <p>Back-formation (A)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    In Polish, the sentence "To Piotrowi Michał dał klucze" (Michał gave the keys to Piotr) exemplifies what grammatical phenomenon?

    <p>Topicalization (A)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following best describes the grammatical relationship between the clauses in the sentence "John plays the guitar because Mary sings"?

    <p>Subordination (B)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What is the difference between "government" and "agreement" in terms of grammatical dependencies?

    <p>Agreement involves matching of features, while government does not. (A)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following sentences exemplifies the accusative case alignment?

    <p>She has fired him. (B)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following examples demonstrates the use of topicalization in English?

    <p>The answer I'll give you in a minute. (B)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What is the primary difference between coordinated and subordinated clauses?

    <p>Coordinated clauses are independent, while subordinated clauses are dependent. (D)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following sentence types is characterized by the use of subordinating conjunctions?

    <p>Subordinated clauses (D)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following examples demonstrates the use of the ergative case alignment?

    <p>The tree broke the window. (A)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following is NOT an example of irregular plural formation in English?

    <p>Houses (D)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which aspect of English grammar does NOT influence gender assignment?

    <p>Declension (D)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    In Polish, the plural form of a noun is determined by its:

    <p>Gender and declension (C)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following is a core component of a sentence, according to the text?

    <p>Object (C)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What does the term 'predicate' encompass in a sentence?

    <p>The verb and its complements (A)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What is the default word order in both English and Polish?

    <p>Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) (C)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    In Polish, which word order can occur with intransitive verbs?

    <p>AVS(C) (Adverbial-Verb-Subject-Complement) (C)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of back-formation?

    <p>It is a process of adding suffixes to existing words (B)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following examples illustrates the concept of a proverb?

    <p>&quot;The cat is out of the bag.&quot; (D)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What type of semantic relationship exists between the words "dog" and "canine"?

    <p>Hyponymy (A)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    The words "address" and "direct" are considered synonyms. What type of difference might they have?

    <p>Connotation (A)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following is NOT an example of a polysemous word?

    <p>Rose (a type of flower and a colour) (C)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What is the term for words that are spelled the same but have different meanings?

    <p>Homographs (B)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What type of semantic relationship exists between the words "car" and "wheel"?

    <p>Meronymy (B)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following is an example of a false friend?

    <p>Actually (English) - Aktualnie (Polish) (C)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of these is an example of an idiom?

    <p>It's raining cats and dogs. (B)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    What type of semantic change is described in the example of the word "mischievous", where it has shifted meaning from "disastrous" to "playfully annoying"?

    <p>Amelioration (C)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following is an example of a semantic extension through metaphor?

    <p>The team added fuel to the fire by scoring another goal. (A)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following is a common example of a loanword in English?

    <p>Skaner (D)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which type of semantic change is illustrated by the example of "starve" which has shifted meaning from "to die" to "to die of hunger"?

    <p>Restriction (B)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of these is a direct, word-for-word translation from a different language?

    <p>Drapacz chmur (C)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    A bilingual person is someone who:

    <p>Uses two languages depending on the situation. (B)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following is an example of a semantic loan?

    <p>Strona (A)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Which of the following terms refers to the influence of one language on another, primarily affecting the vocabulary?

    <p>Lexical borrowing (D)</p> Signup and view all the answers

    Flashcards

    Word Order

    The arrangement of words in a sentence; Polish is more flexible than English, which uses SVO.

    Topicalization

    Movement of a constituent to the beginning of a sentence for emphasis.

    Coordinated Clauses

    Clauses of equal importance connected by conjunctions; both clauses can stand alone.

    Subordinated Clauses

    Clauses that depend on the main clause, making them less significant, introduced by conjunctions.

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    Agreement

    Dependence with matching features, such as subject-verb agreement.

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    Government

    Dependence without matching features, focusing on structure more than agreement.

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    Case Alignment

    How case marking is applied to verb arguments; includes accusative, ergative, and neutral types.

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    Accusative Alignment

    Transitive subjects and intransitive subjects in nominative case, direct objects in accusative case.

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    Bound markers

    Elements attached to words that modify meaning, e.g., -s, -ll.

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    Ablaut

    A vowel change within the stem that indicates meaning change, such as in 'drive' to 'drove'.

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    Affixation

    Attaching affixes to a root word to modify its meaning, includes prefixes and suffixes.

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    Infixes

    Affixes placed within a word, not just at the ends, e.g., fanfuckingtastic.

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    Suppletion

    Distinct forms appearing in an inflectional paradigm, e.g., be : am : was.

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    Compounding

    Combining two or more roots to form a new word, like 'blackbird'.

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    Reduplication

    Repeating part of a word for emphasis, like in 'mish-mash'.

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    Acronyms

    Words formed from the initial letters of other words, such as NATO.

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    Back-formation

    A process where a word is formed by removing affixes, like 'edit' from 'editor'.

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    Allomorphs

    Different forms of a morpheme, like [z], [s], or [əz] for plural in English.

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    Irregular plural examples

    Words that don’t follow regular pluralization, like 'children' and 'mice'.

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    Gender in English

    Based on natural gender, seen in pronouns like 'he' or 'she'.

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    Grammatical gender

    A system in some languages assigning gender to nouns and correlating with adjectives.

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    Subject-Verb-Object (SVO)

    The standard sentence structure in English and Polish: subject first, then verb, then object.

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    Verb vs. Predicate

    A verb is an action, while a predicate includes the verb and its complements.

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    Word order in Polish

    Polish allows variations like (A)VS(C), unlike strict SVO in English.

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    Slavic Languages

    A branch of Indo-European languages spoken in Eastern Europe, comprising East, West, and South groups.

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    Germanic Languages

    A branch of Indo-European languages including English, German, and the Scandinavian languages.

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    Language Typology

    The classification of languages based on their structural features and common characteristics.

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    Tertium Comparationis

    The shared features used to compare different languages, such as structure and meaning.

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    Formal Correspondence

    A type of translational correspondence focusing on similar structural elements across languages.

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    Polysemous words

    Words with multiple meanings influenced by collocations.

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    Idioms

    Expressions whose meanings aren't clear from individual words.

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    Denotation

    The literal meaning of a word without context.

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    Connotation

    Emotional or associative meaning tied to a word.

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    Polysemy vs. Homonymy

    Polysemy: related meanings; Homonymy: unrelated meanings that sound the same.

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    Synonyms

    Different words that share similar meanings.

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    Hyponymy

    A specific term included in a more general category.

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    Meronymy

    A word representing a part of a whole.

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    Semantic Change

    The evolution of word meanings over time, including broadening, narrowing, and shifts.

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    Extension

    Broadening of a word's meaning, like 'broadcast' originally meaning 'sow seeds'.

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    Restriction

    Narrowing of a word's meaning, as seen in 'starve' which originally meant 'to die'.

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    Deterioration/Pejoration

    Negative semantic shift, e.g., 'notorious' changing from 'widely known' to 'widely and unfavourably known'.

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    Amelioration

    Positive shift in word meaning, like 'mischievous' evolving from 'disastrous' to 'playfully annoying'.

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    Lexical Borrowing

    Adoption of words from one language into another, typically under intense contact.

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    Loanwords

    Words borrowed from another language without translation, like 'scanner' in English.

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    Study Notes

    Language Families

    • Comparing and classifying languages involves various methods: comparative (multiple languages), typological (large samples), and contrastive (usually two languages).
    • Language classifications can be genetic (historical development) or typological (structural properties).
    • The comparative method uses shared cognates (basic vocabulary) to reconstruct proto-forms and determine relationships. This assumes regular language change.
    • Language families are groups of languages descended from a common ancestor. Indo-European is an example, derived from Proto-Indo-European.
    • Groupings within families include branches (subgroups evolved from a more recent common ancestor), isolates (languages with uncertain classification), and dialects (language varieties).
    • Distinguishing between languages and dialects involves factors like formal differences, mutual intelligibility, standardization, history, and social perceptions.
    • Political events can also impact the classification of languages (e.g., Serbo-Croatian divided into Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian).

    Language Typology and Universals

    • Language typology studies universally shared features of languages (e.g., phonology, word order, morphology, semantics).
    • Categories of comparison include formal correspondence (e.g., phonemes, morphemes, word order) and semantic equivalence (meaning).
    • Pragmatic/functional equivalence considers stylistic and register differences across languages.
    • Language universals are properties attributed to most languages.
    • Universal patterns exist in linguistic structures and patterns.

    Morphological Typology

    • Morphology studies word structure.
    • Languages are categorized based on their complexity (number of morphemes) and ease of combining morphemes into words.
    • Synthetic languages use affixes to express grammatical meanings (fusion).
    • Analytic languages express grammatical meanings via independent words and rigid word order.
    • Agglutinative languages have easily separable affixes.
    • Fusional languages have less easily separable affixes.
    • Polysynthetic languages have complex grammatical structure.

    Sounds Systems

    • Consonant description involves considering manner and place of articulation, voicing, and other relevant features.
    • Polish and English consonants have differences, especially regarding fricatives and affricates.
    • Vowel contrasts focus on characteristics like tongue position (front, central, back, high, mid, low), lip rounding, and length.
    • Vowel phonemes in Polish differ by the presence of nasal vowels.
    • Assimilation is influenced by neighboring sounds.

    Language Universals and Similarities

    • Languages share similarities due to cognitive patterns (e.g., word order: SOV, SVO, VSO) and pragmatic/functional patterns.
    • Different languages share similar structural properties and patterns of semantic content.

    Language Contact

    • Language contact occurs with multiple language use in a specific region.
    • Bilingualism reflects languages interacting in a population.
    • Borrowing from one language into another impacts lexicons, syntax, and morphology.
    • Borrowing can be by loanwords or calques based on the source language.
    • Loanword adoption involves changes aligning with the target language's phonology or morphology, including the effects on syntax and grammatical concordance rules

    Syntax and Morphology

    • Word order varies cross-linguistically, impacting grammatical relationships.
    • The SVO structure (Subject-Verb-Object) is common, but different orderings are valid.
    • Sentence types vary with independent/coordinated and clause/subordinate clause structures.
    • Agreement, such as grammatical gender, is dependent on matching of features.
    • Government refers to features that impact the structure of sentences.
    • Coordination is based on clauses and phrases,
    • Subordination relies on subordinate clauses.

    Gender and Speech Acts

    • In many languages, grammatical gender exists based on the agreement of words in the sentence.
    • Grammatical gender can be based on natural gender (biological sex), social gender, or semantic gender.
    • Language contains elements like speech acts, with performatives and constatives.
    • Illocutionary acts reflect speaker intent, while perlocutionary acts focus on listener outcomes.
    • Social relationships and power influence language use (e.g. terms of address), including formal vs. informal contexts.

    Semantic Relationships

    • Synonymy refers to words with similar meanings which can vary in connotation.
    • Antonymy describes words with opposite meanings.
    • Hyponymy refers to a word's meaning included within a larger category.
    • Meronymy describes a word representing part of a larger concept.
    • Polysemy describes a word having multiple meanings linked through a common core idea.
    • Homophones or homographs/homonyms are words with identical sound or spelling but differing meanings.

    Pragmatics and Speech Acts

    • Pragmatics is the study of language use in context to understand how people use linguistic means in communication.
    • Speech acts are actions performed using language (representatives, directives, expressives, declarations.).
    • Politeness theory explains how people use language to maintain social harmony.
    • Cultural norms and social relationships influence the meaning and functions of words, phrases and sentences.

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    Explore the methods used for comparing and classifying languages, including genetic and typological classifications. This quiz delves into the comparative method, language families, branches, and the distinctions between languages and dialects. Test your understanding of language relationships and their historical developments.

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