LIN 2300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Language Contact, Linguistic Universal, Italic Languages

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LIN 2300
• Professor: Gustavo Freire

Document Summary

Universal; things that are shared amongst all languages: for example; vowels and consonants as well a subject, object, and verbs. Tendencies; most languages posses these, but not necessarily universally included: absolute universals, universal tendencies, implicational universals. Adults may learn the new language as a second language: children may be fully bilingual. Results in borrowing of words, sounds, syntactic constructions. Language learning: the child must construct their language based on the input received, towards regularization learning an irregular form requires more input, random differences may spread, especially through a small population. Language use; natural process: rapid or casual speech procedures assimilation, vowel reduction, deletion. For example; word order change in chinese. Child language: what"s natural for kids was natural for our ancestors as well, for example; scant was previously known as skamt : m became n when preceding t (assimilation) (linguistic) conservatism: tendency to believe that old languages is better than new.