Linguistics

The Affective Filter hypothesis was developed by Stephen Krashen in 1982, and it is part of a total of five different hypotheses regarding the acquisition of foreign and second languages. The...

Blum-Kulka's argument against Brown and Levinson's claim is based on empirical research and not on any sort of philosophical argument. Blum-Kulka conducted research with speakers of both Hebrew...

One way in which men and women differ in their speech patterns is in the use of terminal questions. A terminal question is a grammatical statement that sounds like a question because of the...

I can't draw the actual tree here, but I can help you identify the parts of speech in the above sentences which may help you then create the tree in the appropriate manner. The words of the actual...

In some cases, studying a language as a system can make the new language easier to learn. For example, when I learned Japanese, we studied the new language as a system first. Since we were having...

Of course, the change from Old English to Middle English did not occur all at once. So there is no one date on which Old English died and Middle English began. The best we can say is that Middle...

To my understanding, mathematical linguistics may include logical proofs as a part of its coverage, but the two are distinct entities and do not necessarily overlap academically or...

How you approach this assignment depends on what your instructor has required. You could write an argumentative paper concerning one particular scholarly area or an informative paper reviewing...

The immediate practical benefits of being bilingual are clear. Bilingualism increases the number of people with whom you can communicate easily and directly. If the second language in question is a...

Language is defined as a symbolic or semiotic system used for communication. Its essential characteristic is that it is a system of signs, which consist of a signifier that stands in either a...

The Germanic languages were extremely influential in shaping the English language as we know it today. The original inhabitants of the islands we now know as the British Isles (England, Scotland,...

In general, trends in scholarship (in social sciences) tend to be affected by changes in overall attitudes in society. This is true with respect to views on the idea of "women's English." In the...

In The age factor in second language acquisition: a critical look at the Critical Period Hypothesis, Singleton and Lengyel (1995) make an argument against the "Critical Period" Hypothesis proposed...

There are a number of different theories concerning language acquisition. Many still leave some important questions unanswered. Most theories agree on several key principles though. For young...

Language systems embody cultural awareness instead of simply describing static externalities. The bigger the cultural differences between the Source Language and the Target language (SL and TL),...

The key to understanding the main ideas of this article is knowing its purpose. The article is written by two researchers at the Intelligent Systems Program of the University of Pittsburgh. This...

Excellent answer. One other important element: the level of education is embedded in language choices, "correctness" of grammar, sophistication of vocabulary, etc.

I am a little torn, but I believe conventionalism. I think that over time, people agree on language by using it. Consider the new words that are added to our language, and how some nouns become...

There are many different tests which one can use in order to determine if a sequence of words is a syntactic constituent. The five below are some of the easiest to understand and provide examples...

It is true that, in order to achieve a good success rate in the EFL/ESL classroom teachers should select a model variety of English to ensure that the type of EL that is being taught reunites the...

English classes (I am assuming you are referring to a typical English literature/grammar class and not an English Language class (meaning that the English language is taught))tend to include the...

When we're dealing with sentence structure—or "phrase structure," as you call it—we can give you some general rules. Yet keep in mind, we are working with words. Unlike numbers, words aren't so...

When analyzing the social context of language teaching and learning, the first thing to consider is what Holliday (2001) refers to as the "macro social context". This outer wall that surrounds the...

Every language has dialects within itself. There is a usually at least one standard or formal dialect of the language that is used in schools, government, and media. Then there are informal...

The word whose meaning has changed most strikingly in recent times is the word "gay." When my parents were growing up in the 1950s, this word still meant "happy" or "carefree." Songs in popular...

The basic tenet of Chomsky's theory of second language acquisition is that humans are, so to speak, pre-wired genetically and psychologically with what he refers to as a "linguistic corpus", that...

Passive and active voices are ways of making statements, in which the agent can either be the subject of the sentence or the object of a preposition. In English, therefore, we can say:1 The dog bit...

The word "semiotics" comes from the Greek "semeion", which means "sign". In his posthumously published book, A Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, states that Language is a...

In terms of Ferdinand de Saussure, he originated the two-part model of "sign". He posited that each sign in linguistics has a twin aspect. Saussuere's definition of a sign consisted of the form the...

Chomsky's notion of Universal Grammar presupposed that (1) there are universal syntactic features that can only be accounted for by an innate faculty and (2) language acquisition depended an such...

Code-switching is a tendency to revert to our indigenous language (L1) when speaking a target or second language (L2). Research has shown that children of bilingual homes with double exposure to...

The phrase "yada yada" is attested in English beginning in the 1960s and carries the sense of "and so on", with a derogatory sense of continuing meaningless empty chatter. In other words, you might...

Great question, and one which has many answers, but let’s take “teething” as an example. It begins with a voiceless stop, the “t” that does not involve the vocal cords in its production. Next, we...

The connotation of the term "rearing" is typically a parent-child situation, and it implies that care is provided for the child by the parent (including protection, provision, and education)....

These terms, from Frederick de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, are used to differentiate between the tool and its use. Langue (French for “language) is a system of speech—its syntax,...

To teach someone how to read is to provide that person with strategies to decode and make sense out of the symbols printed on the page so that they become recognizable and meaningful words. Most...

Ever since British exploration and colonization in the Renaissance English has had global influence on other languages. The first obvious effect was the creation of pidgins and creoles. Pidgins are...

The -ing form in the English language apparently came from a blending of the suffix - ende and the suffix - inge from middle English. The new ending then lost it's final e and ended up being what...

This is a very difficult question and one that is sometimes hotly debated among both non-linguists and linguists. While I don't expect to end the debate, I can shed a little light on the question...

Chomsky notes similarities in "structure and comprehension" between languages, even languages that do not derive from a similar historical source. He suggests that children learn language too...

Linguists can “rate” and taxonomize “signifiers” by their recognizability. Thus, open class words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) that have less specialized application are “general” while...

The issue of "English usage" is controversial to the extent that there is conflict between the ideas of prescriptive linguistics and descriptive linguistics. Many linguists only do descriptive...

For some reason I read this question differently. I thought that you originally wanted to ask: Why take OUT "will" in the sentence "Many people will go to the station every morning" as complement...

In linguistics, the function of a sentence, or the sentence's function, is to announce the speaker's purpose for articulating the collection of words (being in sentence form, a fragment, a phrase,...

The answer to this depends on what scholars you believe. It may be that your teacher or your text takes a position on this that you are expected to repeat. I would advise you to try to make...

Language clarity is an important aspect of writing for authors to consider. We often find works more appealing that are easy for us to read and relate to. For example, many students find the...

Syntax (from the Greek – “to arrange together”) is a general word for the arrangement of objects or ideas or processes with some end result in mind. In linguistics, it carries two meanings: the...

The term "English usage" simply refers to the ways in which people speak English. It refers to things like the grammatical rules that they follow (and those that they do not follow) and to the...

Let's focus on the role of linguistics as part of the variables that naturally occur in sociolinguistics. As the word implies, the study focuses on how a specific cultural, ethnic, religious, or...

Linguistic evidence is used as a type of forensic science in legal proceedings. Linguistic analysis is routinely performed on a broad array of evidence such as suicide notes, ransom notes, 911...