Category: General Language

Yes, my fellow respondents have rightly raised the definitional issues that would give one pause about agglutinativity. I’m going to be less scrupulous. The difference between fusional, isolating and agglutinative languages is a significant typological difference—although of course, as with anything typological, there are shades of grey that it ignores, and square pegs that it […]

You need programming chops, though nothing too flash and algorithmic. You need to be across regexes. You need to pick up some linguistics, but honestly, not as much as you might think. You certainly don’t need formal syntax or phonology. You will need to know what morphology is, especially if you’ll be working on languages […]

I’m not quite the right person to ask about this; serious interest in the origins of language resumed after I studied linguistics. But think about it. Why do words have multiple meanings? We differentiate polysemy and homophony: multiple related meanings, and multiple unrelated meanings. Why is there polysemy? Because words get applied to different contexts, […]

See e.g. http://personal.bgsu.edu/~dcalle… : Principle II: The Linear Nature of the Signifier The linearity principle is Saussure’s statement that, because linguistic signifiers are sounds (spoken words), they are intrinsically sequential (“linear”). They cannot be perceived simultaneously, the way visual signs are: they must be perceived one after the other, as a sequence in time. That […]

I believe it is (add Russian, bigtime), but I’ve just gone through half a dozen historical linguistics textbooks, and it’s not discussed separately in any of them. I was even struggling to find a good term describing this phenomenon: lexicalised diminutives I guess is the best. The problem is that semantic change is massively variegated, […]

Not that controversial, but I think there’s a lot to be said for diachronic explanations of language, and the synchronic/diachronic distinction is somewhat artificial. Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is functional grammar? will explain that a little bit: functional accounts are kind of diachronic to begin with (what function does this linguistic component serve in […]

Vote #1 Trevor Sullivan: Trevor Sullivan’s answer to What is functional grammar? It’s the correct answer, but not defensive enough for my liking. 🙂 So treat this answer as a restatement of his. There are several ways of explaining why language is the way it is. Originally, the split was between diachronic and synchronic explanations. […]

I should know a good answer to this, as part of my apprenticeship (being a research assistant) was tracking referents in Acehnese discourse for Mark Durie. The obvious answers I think have already been given. Gender in all its manifold forms, extending to noun classes. Deixis. Politeness strategies and social deixis. Reflexives, including long-distance reflexives […]

René Alix has basically covered it in his answer (Vote #1 René Alix’s answer to Why can’t we perceive onomatopoeia in other languages as easily as in our native language?) But there’s something that’s only implicit in René’s answer, that I’ll make explicit: No actual dogs really sound like that. And so you get the […]

Vote #1 Michael Minnich: Michael Minnich’s answer to Linguistically speaking, why is the relationship between the signifier and signified mostly arbitrary? It brings up several pertinent reasons. My answer’s simpler: restricting ourselves to lexicon, non-arbitrary signifier–signified relations in a spoken language are going to be limited to referents that make a sound. Most verbs and […]