Blog Archives
Cranberry Morpheme
A morpheme that has an unclear or nonexistent meaning and only appears in complex words with a free root, e.g., the “cran” in cranberry has a proposed etymological source, but it is no longer meaningful in the language. (morphology)
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Creole
A pidgin that has become grammaticalized by children who now speak it as their native language, or as one of their native languages (in the case of multilingualism). (sociolinguistics)
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Creolist Hypothesis
The hypothesis that varieties of English spoken by Black Americans are descended from the English-based creoles spoken by slaves (and turn from the English-based pidgins spoken by West Africans, which married English lexemes to some degree with African grammars). (sociolinguistics)
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Crowdsourcing
Creating a translation over the Internet using many translators.
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D
See “Determiner.” (syntax)
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Dative Case
A case morpheme that marks the indirect object of a verb. (morphology, syntax)
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Dative Shift
A syntactic process whereby an indirect object, e.g., a recipient or a benefactive, occurs in the direct object instead of being grammatically marked as an oblique argument. (syntax)
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Declensions
Inflectional patterns common to sets of adjectives or nouns. (morphology)
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Defective Verb Root
A consonantal root in Arabic where the third consonant is a glide. (morphology)
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Definite
The referent of a noun phrase is thought to be known to the hearer. (semantics)
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