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140-797: In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant default or minimum-effort form is known as unmarked ; the other, secondary one is marked . In other words, markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms. In linguistics, markedness can apply to, among others, phonological , grammatical , and semantic oppositions, defining them in terms of marked and unmarked oppositions, such as honest (unmarked) vs. dishonest (marked). Marking may be purely semantic, or may be realized as extra morphology. The term derives from

280-414: A branch of linguistics. Before the 20th century, linguists analysed language on a diachronic plane, which was historical in focus. This meant that they would compare linguistic features and try to analyse language from the point of view of how it had changed between then and later. However, with the rise of Saussurean linguistics in the 20th century, the focus shifted to a more synchronic approach, where

420-411: A category is taken as marked if every language that has the marked category also has the unmarked one but not vice versa. Markedness has been extended and reshaped over the past century and reflects a range of loosely connected theoretical approaches. From emerging in the analysis of binary oppositions, it has become a global semiotic principle, a means of encoding naturalness and language universals, and

560-560: A comparison of different time periods in the past and present) or in a synchronic manner (by observing developments between different variations that exist within the current linguistic stage of a language). At first, historical linguistics was the cornerstone of comparative linguistics , which involves a study of the relationship between different languages. At that time, scholars of historical linguistics were only concerned with creating different categories of language families , and reconstructing prehistoric proto-languages by using both

700-502: A complete retention of the underlying syntactic structure of their L1. Notably, they exhibited the V2, verb second, word order present in most Germanic languages, except English. This rule requires the tense-marked verb of a main clause to occur in the second position of the sentence, even if that means it comes before the subject (e.g. there is an adverb at the beginning of the sentence). These speakers' ability to form sentences with V2 word order

840-491: A different impact on possible fossilization and/or deterioration of the linguistic system. Frequency of use has been shown to be an important factor in language attrition. Decline in use of a given language leads to gradual loss of that language. In the face of much evidence to the contrary, one study is often cited to suggest that frequency of use does not correlate strongly with language attrition. Their methodology, however, can be called into question, especially concerning

980-552: A foreign language. The study involved 26 out of 30 initial participants who were native Dutch (L1) speakers who had little to no prior knowledge of Italian (L3), and proficiency in English (L2) as their second language. The experiment involved all participants learning 70 non-cognate Italian words over two days, with no EEG taken. On the third day, an EEG was recorded for the entire session while participants attempted to retrieve half of their learned Italian words in English, and then took

1120-433: A language and the methods used to teach it can also affect attrition. A positive attitude towards the potentially attriting language or its speech community and motivation to retain the language are other factors which may reduce attrition. These factors are too difficult to confirm by research. These factors are similar to those that affect second-language acquisition and the two processes are sometimes compared. However,

1260-631: A language where their knowledge of it is less extensive than a native speaker's; therefore testing for attrition is difficult. L1 attrition is the partial or complete loss of one's first, often native, language. This can often result from immigration to an L2-dominant region, daily activities in L2-dominant environments, or motivational factors. L2 attrition is the loss of one's second language, which can result from cross-interference from L1 or even from an additional third learned language ("L3"). Unlike L1 learning and attrition, L2 learning and attrition

1400-434: A linguistic medium of communication in itself. Palaeography is therefore the discipline that studies the evolution of written scripts (as signs and symbols) in language. The formal study of language also led to the growth of fields like psycholinguistics , which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics , which studies language processing in the brain; biolinguistics , which studies

1540-444: A male or female, while lioness is marked because it can refer only to females. The default nature allows unmarked lexical forms to be identified even when the opposites are not morphologically related. In the pairs old / young , big / little , happy / sad , clean / dirty , the first term of each pair is taken as unmarked because it occurs generally in questions. For example, English speakers typically ask how old someone is; use of

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1680-478: A part of the culture they are trying to assimilate into. This type of attrition is not to be confused with contact-induced change since that would mean speech production changes due to an increased use of another language and not due to the less frequent use of the L1. Lambert and Moore attempted to define numerous hypotheses regarding the nature of language loss, crossed with various aspects of language. They envisioned

1820-416: A particular feature or usage is "good" or "bad". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular species is "better" or "worse" than another. Prescription , on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favoring a particular dialect or " acrolect ". This may have

1960-425: A picture of an item in front of the participant and ask them to name it, or by measuring lexical diversity in the speaker's spontaneous speech (speech that is unprompted and improvised). In both cases, attriters performed worse than non-attriters. One hypothesis suggests that when a speaker tries to access a lexical item from their L1 they are also competing with the translation equivalents of their L2 and that there

2100-696: A recall test twice on all 70 learned Italian words. Incorrectness, partial correctness, and total correctness was used as a scoring guideline for these tests. This experiment tested attrition of the participants' L3 compared to their L2. When analyzing the EEGs of the participants, the experimenters observed an enhanced early anterior negative deflection (N2), a peak on the EEG often observed during language switching, for items that took longer to recall in Italian. These are interpreted to represent interfering responses, possibly

2240-553: A result of interference between English and Italian. Another peak, the late positive component (LPC), which is often interpreted as an indicator of interference, was reduced for interfered items compared to non-interfered items. Lastly, theta bands on an EEG, which have previously been associated with semantic interference and active retrieval efforts, showed up more prominently when participants were asked to recognize words that they had retrieved both in English and Italian. While these must be further studied, these results give clues to what

2380-474: A second language. Attriters are outperformed by native speakers of the second language in proficiency. A 2009 study tested the Swedish proficiency of Swedish speakers who had attrited knowledge of Spanish. These participants did show almost but not quite native-like proficiency when compared to native Swedish speakers, and they did not show an advantage when compared with bilingual Swedish-Spanish speakers. On

2520-419: A second-language speaker who is attempting to acquire the language. Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken data and signed data are more fundamental than written data . This is because Nonetheless, linguists agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics , written language

2660-766: A series of graduate workshops and panels at international conferences, such as the International Symposium on Bilingualism (2007, 2009), the annual conferences of the European Second Language Association, and the AILA World Congress (2008). The outcomes of some of these meetings were later published in edited volumes. The term first language attrition (FLA) refers to the gradual decline in native language proficiency. As speakers use their L2 frequently and become proficient (or even dominant) in it, some aspects of

2800-432: A structural change to underlying linguistic knowledge (that is, to an emerging representational deficit of any kind). This assumption is in line with a range of investigations of L1 attrition which argue that this process may affect interface phenomena (e.g. the distribution of overt and null subjects in pro-drop languages) but will not touch the narrow syntax. Phonological attrition is a form of language loss that affects

2940-604: A subfield of linguistics with a 1980 conference at the University of Pennsylvania called "Loss of Language Skills". The aim of the conference was to discuss areas of second language attrition and to discuss ideas for possible future research. The conference revealed that attrition is a wide topic, with numerous factors and taking many forms. Decades later, the field of first language attrition gained new momentum with two conferences held in Amsterdam in 2002 and 2005, as well as

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3080-624: A terminology for studying defaults and preferences in language acquisition. What connects various approaches is a concern for the evaluation of linguistic structure, though the details of how markedness is determined and what its implications and diagnostics are varies widely. Other approaches to universal markedness relations focus on functional economic and iconic motivations, tying recurring symmetries to properties of communication channels and communication events. Croft (1990), for example, notes that asymmetries among linguistic elements may be explainable in terms economy of form, in terms of iconism between

3220-418: A test may confound testing what was not acquired with what was lost. Lambert, in personal communication with Köpke and Schmid, described the results as 'not substantial enough to help much in the development of the new field of language skill attrition'. The use of translation tests to study language loss is inappropriate for a number of reasons: it is questionable what such tests measure; too much variation ;

3360-429: A test to be given to American State Department employees that would include four linguistic categories ( syntax , morphology , lexicon , and phonology ) and three skill areas ( reading , listening , and speaking ). A translation component would feature on a sub-section of each skill area tested. The test was to include linguistic features that are the most difficult, according to teachers, for students to master. Such

3500-503: A theoretical or explanatory framework. Both order of acquisition and order of attrition need to be put into the larger context of linguistic theory in order to gain explanatory adequacy. Keijzer (2007) conducted a study on the attrition of Dutch in Anglophone Canada. She finds some evidence that later-learned rules, such as diminutive and plural formation, indeed erode before earlier learned grammatical rules. However, there

3640-420: A theory of 'core grammar': We will assume that [Universal Grammar] is not an 'undifferentiated' system, but rather incorporates something analogous to a 'theory of markedness' Specifically, there is a theory of core grammar with highly restricted options, limited expressive power, and a few parameters. Systems that fall within core grammar constitute 'the unmarked case'; we may think of them as optimal in terms of

3780-419: A view towards uncovering the biological underpinnings of language. In Generative Grammar , these underpinning are understood as including innate domain-specific grammatical knowledge. Thus, one of the central concerns of the approach is to discover what aspects of linguistic knowledge are innate and which are not. Cognitive linguistics , in contrast, rejects the notion of innate grammar, and studies how

3920-645: A wide number of languages. However, critics have argued that frequency is problematic because categories that are cross-linguistically infrequent may have a high distribution in a particular language. More recently the insights related to frequency have been formalized as chance-corrected conditional probabilities, with Informedness (Δp') and Markedness (Δp) corresponding to the different directions of prediction in human association research (binary associations or distinctions) and more generally (including features with more than two distinctions). Universals have also been connected to implicational laws . This entails that

4060-424: A word. Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form. Any particular pairing of meaning and form is a Saussurean linguistic sign . For instance, the meaning "cat" is represented worldwide with a wide variety of different sound patterns (in oral languages), movements of the hands and face (in sign languages ), and written symbols (in written languages). Linguistic patterns have proven their importance for

4200-462: Is a researcher within the field, or to someone who uses the tools of the discipline to describe and analyse specific languages. An early formal study of language was in India with Pāṇini , the 6th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology . Pāṇini's systematic classification of the sounds of Sanskrit into consonants and vowels, and word classes, such as nouns and verbs,

4340-430: Is a system of rules which governs the production and use of utterances in a given language. These rules apply to sound as well as meaning, and include componential subsets of rules, such as those pertaining to phonology (the organization of phonetic sound systems), morphology (the formation and composition of words), and syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences). Modern frameworks that deal with

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4480-426: Is also considerable interaction between the first and second language and so a straightforward 'regression pattern' cannot be observed. Also, parallels in noun and verb phrase morphology could be present because of the nature of the tests or because of avoidance by the participants. In a follow-up 2010 article, Keijzer suggests that the regression hypothesis may be more applicable to morphology than to syntax. Citing

4620-447: Is an optimal time period for humans to acquire language, and after this time language acquisition is more difficult (though not impossible). Language attrition also seems to have a time period; before around age 12, a first language is most susceptible to attrition if there is reduced exposure to that language. Research shows that the complete attrition of a language would occur before the critical period ends. All available evidence on

4760-441: Is concerned with understanding the universal and fundamental nature of language and developing a general theoretical framework for describing it. Applied linguistics seeks to utilize the scientific findings of the study of language for practical purposes, such as developing methods of improving language education and literacy. Linguistic features may be studied through a variety of perspectives: synchronically (by describing

4900-440: Is conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the structural and linguistic knowledge (grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors. Phonetics and phonology are branches of linguistics concerned with sounds (or

5040-399: Is detrimental as the language is not learned in a meaningful way that reinforces cognitive understanding. Conversational-style homework and classroom settings, along with focuses on receptive skills, could make one's fluency less susceptible to attrition. Another potential method of prevention is to alter the duration of instruction for a new language. According to Bardovi-Harlig and Stringer,

5180-455: Is either a problem with activating the L1 due to infrequent use or with the inhibition of the competing L2. Grammatical attrition can be defined as "the disintegration of the structure of a first language (L1) in contact situations with a second language (L2)". In a study of bilingual Swedes raised outside of Sweden who, in their late twenties, returned to their home country for schooling, the participants demonstrated both language attrition and

5320-469: Is generally hard to find for events long ago, due to the occurrence of chance word resemblances and variations between language groups. A limit of around 10,000 years is often assumed for the functional purpose of conducting research. It is also hard to date various proto-languages. Even though several methods are available, these languages can be dated only approximately. In modern historical linguistics, we examine how languages change over time, focusing on

5460-424: Is marked as opposed to a positive one: happy / unhappy , honest / dishonest , fair / unfair , clean / unclean , and so forth. Similarly, unaffixed masculine or singular forms are taken to be unmarked in contrast to affixed feminine or plural forms: lion / lioness , host / hostess , automobile / automobiles , child / children . An unmarked form is also a default form. For example, the unmarked lion can refer to

5600-500: Is natural in language. Willi Mayerthaler, another linguist, for example, defines unmarked categories as those "in agreement with the typical attributes of the speaker". Since a main component of markedness is the information content and information value of an element, some studies have taken markedness as an encoding of that which is unusual or informative, and this is reflected in formal probabilistic definitions of markedness and informedness that, for dichotomous problems, correspond to

5740-456: Is not a linear phenomenon and can begin in multiple ways: vocabulary loss, weakened syntax, simpler phonetic rules, etc. In Hansen and Reetz-Kurashige (1999), Hansen cites her own research on L2-Hindi and Urdu attrition in young children. As young pre-school children in India and Pakistan, the subjects of her study were often judged to be native speakers of Hindi or Urdu; their mother was far less proficient. On return visits to their home country,

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5880-754: Is occurring synaptically in the brain during language interference, and how that impacts attrition of a foreign language. The above factors all affect the likelihood of language attrition in individuals, but an additional factor is the method of language learning and how that affects the possibility of language attrition. Therefore, strategies in the classroom and any other learning environment become an important part of preventing language attrition. Many researchers believe that language production skills, specifically writing and speaking, are significantly more susceptible to attrition than receptive skills, like listening and reading. Under this belief, one method of prevention would be to focus on literacy and receptive learning in

6020-447: Is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. In addition, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry. The study of writing systems themselves, graphemics, is, in any case, considered

6160-590: Is often simply split into two distinct forms: the instrumental and the integrative. Instrumental motivation, in the case of attrition, is the desire to maintain a language in order to complete a specific goal, i.e. maintaining a language to maintain a job. Integrative motivation, however, is motivation that comes from a desire to fit in or maintain one's cultural ties. These inferences can be drawn, as strategies for knowledge maintenance will, by definition, precisely oppose actions that lead to forgetting. There are differences in attrition related to motivation depending on

6300-452: Is selected based on specific contexts but also, at a micro level, shapes language as text (spoken or written) down to the phonological and lexico-grammatical levels. Grammar and discourse are linked as parts of a system. A particular discourse becomes a language variety when it is used in this way for a particular purpose, and is referred to as a register . There may be certain lexical additions (new words) that are brought into play because of

6440-428: Is the study of how language changes over history, particularly with regard to a specific language or a group of languages. Western trends in historical linguistics date back to roughly the late 18th century, when the discipline grew out of philology , the study of ancient texts and oral traditions. Historical linguistics emerged as one of the first few sub-disciplines in the field, and was most widely practised during

6580-508: The Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī . Today, modern-day theories on grammar employ many of the principles that were laid down then. Before the 20th century, the term philology , first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the study of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus. Since Ferdinand de Saussure 's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis , however, this focus has shifted and

6720-432: The agent or patient . Functional linguistics , or functional grammar, is a branch of structural linguistics. In the humanistic reference, the terms structuralism and functionalism are related to their meaning in other human sciences . The difference between formal and functional structuralism lies in the way that the two approaches explain why languages have the properties they have. Functional explanation entails

6860-626: The comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction . Internal reconstruction is the method by which an element that contains a certain meaning is re-used in different contexts or environments where there is a variation in either sound or analogy. The reason for this had been to describe well-known Indo-European languages , many of which had detailed documentation and long written histories. Scholars of historical linguistics also studied Uralic languages , another European language family for which very little written material existed back then. After that, there also followed significant work on

7000-412: The knowledge engineering field especially with the ever-increasing amount of available data. Linguists focusing on structure attempt to understand the rules regarding language use that native speakers know (not always consciously). All linguistic structures can be broken down into component parts that are combined according to (sub)conscious rules, over multiple levels of analysis. For instance, consider

7140-504: The mind of the individual or the speech community. Construction grammar is a framework which applies the meme concept to the study of syntax. The generative versus evolutionary approach are sometimes called formalism and functionalism , respectively. This reference is however different from the use of the terms in human sciences . Modern linguistics is primarily descriptive . Linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether

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7280-455: The "medical discourse", and so on. The lexicon is a catalogue of words and terms that are stored in a speaker's mind. The lexicon consists of words and bound morphemes , which are parts of words that can not stand alone, like affixes . In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions and other collocations are also considered to be part of the lexicon. Dictionaries represent attempts at listing, in alphabetical order,

7420-410: The "n" sound in "tenth" is made differently from the "n" sound in "ten" spoken alone. Although most speakers of English are consciously aware of the rules governing internal structure of the word pieces of "tenth", they are less often aware of the rule governing its sound structure. Linguists focused on structure find and analyze rules such as these, which govern how native speakers use language. Grammar

7560-543: The 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics . Bloomfield attributes "the first great scientific linguistic work of the world" to Jacob Grimm , who wrote Deutsche Grammatik . It was soon followed by other authors writing similar comparative studies on other language groups of Europe. The study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt , of whom Bloomfield asserts: This study received its foundation at

7700-575: The East, but the grammarians of the classical languages did not use the same methods or reach the same conclusions as their contemporaries in the Indic world. Early interest in language in the West was a part of philosophy, not of grammatical description. The first insights into semantic theory were made by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue , where he argues that words denote concepts that are eternal and exist in

7840-494: The Human Race ). Language loss Several factors affect language attrition. Frequent exposure and use of a particular language is often assumed adequate to maintain the native language system intact. However, research has often failed to confirm this prediction. A person's age can predict the likelihood of attrition; children are demonstrably more likely to lose their first language than adults. The process of learning

7980-595: The Korean adoptees, those who were adopted the earliest essentially lost their Korean and those adopted later still retained some of it, although it was primarily their comprehension of Korean that was spared. A 2007 study looked at Korean adoptees in France and found that they performed on par with native French speakers in French proficiency and Korean. Attrition of a first language does not guarantee an advantage in learning

8120-447: The L1 and actual attrition of the L1. Since all bilinguals experience some degree of cross linguistic influence , where the L2 interferes with the retrieval of the speaker's L1, it is difficult to determine if delays and/or mistakes in the L1 are due to attrition or caused by CLI. Also, simultaneous bilinguals may not have a language that is indistinguishable from that of a native speaker or

8260-444: The L1 can deteriorate or become subject to L2 influence. Research on L2 attrition is lacking, as most research focused on L1 attrition. Only during the 1970s and early 1980s did research on L2 attrition and memory start to appear. However, there are many overlaps between L1 attrition and L2 attrition. To study the process of language attrition, researchers initially looked at neighboring areas of linguistics to identify which parts of

8400-433: The L1 system attrite first; lacking years of direct experimental data, linguists studied language contact , creolization , L2 acquisition , and aphasia , and applied their findings to language acquisition. Language loss caused by aging, brain injuries, or neurological disorders is not considered part of language attrition. One issue that is faced when researching attrition is distinguishing between normal L2 influence on

8540-454: The L2 environment have an additive requirement for the maintenance of the L1 and the development of the L2 (Opitz, 2013). There have been cases in which adults have undergone first language attrition. A 2011 study tested adult monolingual English speakers, adult monolingual Russian speakers and adult bilingual English-Russian speakers on naming various liquid containers (cup, glass, mug, etc.) in both English and Russian. The results showed that

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8680-411: The L2, especially in terms of phonological production, and for those who have immersed themselves and built a connection to the culture of the country for the L2. A sociolinguistic approach to this phenomenon is that the acquisition of a native-like L2 accent and the subsequent loss of one's native accent is influenced by the societal norms of the country and the speakers' attempt to adapt in order to feel

8820-493: The Russian Verb", Jakobson extended the concept to grammatical meanings in which the marked element "announces the existence of [some meaning] A" while the unmarked element "does not announce the existence of A, i.e., does not state whether A is present or not". Forty years later, Jakobson described language by saying that "every single constituent of a linguistic system is built on an opposition of two logical contradictories:

8960-627: The United States, both children appeared to lose all their L2 while the mother noticed no decline in her own L2 abilities. Twenty years later, those same young children as adults comprehend not a word from recordings of their own animated conversations in Hindi-Urdu; the mother still understands much of them. Yamamoto (2001) found a link between age and bilinguality. In fact, a number of factors are at play in bilingual families. In her study, bicultural families that maintained only one language,

9100-451: The age effect for L1 attrition, therefore, indicates that the development of susceptibility displays a curved, not a linear, function. This suggests that in native language learning there is indeed a critical period effect, and that full development of native language capacities necessitates exposure to L1 input for the entire duration of this CP. The regression hypothesis, first formulated by Roman Jakobson in 1941 and originally formulated on

9240-512: The ages of 8 through 13. Before this time period, a first language can attrite under certain circumstances, the most prominent being a sudden decline in exposure to the first language. Various case studies show that children who emigrate before puberty and have little to no exposure to their first language end up losing the first language. In 2009, a study compared two groups of Swedish-speaking groups: native Swedish speakers and Korean international adoptees who were at risk of losing their Korean. Of

9380-671: The aim of establishing a linguistic standard , which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism ). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors , who attempt to eradicate words and structures that they consider to be destructive to society. Prescription, however, may be practised appropriately in language instruction , like in ELT , where certain fundamental grammatical rules and lexical items need to be introduced to

9520-497: The bilinguals had attrited Russian vocabulary because they did not label these liquid containers the same way as the monolingual Russian speakers. When grouped according to Age of Acquisition (AoA) of English, the bilinguals showed an effect of AoA (or perhaps the length of exposure to the L2) in that bilinguals with earlier AoA (mean AoA 3.4 years) exhibited much stronger attrition than bilinguals with later AoA (mean AoA 22.8 years). That is,

9660-404: The biology and evolution of language; and language acquisition , which investigates how children and adults acquire the knowledge of one or more languages. The fundamental principle of humanistic linguistics, especially rational and logical grammar , is that language is an invention created by people. A semiotic tradition of linguistic research considers language a sign system which arises from

9800-501: The brain, making that language more stable and less susceptible to attrition. Under this hypothesis, language attrition is believed to first affect lexical words and then grammar rules, rather than grammar rules eroding first like in the regression hypothesis. It also requires a higher activation threshold to recall a word rather than recognize it, which does not indicate fluency. Children are more susceptible to (first) language attrition than adults. Research shows an age effect around

9940-828: The chance-correct unidirectional components of the Matthews correlation coefficient known as Δp and Δp'. Conceptual familiarity with cultural norms provided by familiar categories creates a ground against which marked categories provide a figure, opening the way for markedness to be applied to cultural and social categorization. As early as the 1930s Jakobson had already suggested applying markedness to all oppositions, explicitly mentioning such pairs as life/death, liberty/bondage, sin/virtue, and holiday/working day. Linda Waugh extended this to oppositions like male/female, white/black, sighted/blind, hearing/deaf, heterosexual/homosexual, right/left, fertility/barrenness, clothed/nude, and spoken language/written language. Battistella expanded this with

10080-485: The classroom, rather than teach students primarily to speak and write. This protects against attrition as it solidifies receptive skills. Another method is to encourage homework and practice that is not mechanical, but instead engaging and opportunistic, using high frequency items the most. Basic repetition and learning low frequency patterns and items are more susceptible to attrition, as students are unable to practice as opportunities arise and use high frequency items. This

10220-443: The context of attrition, however, there is strong evidence that this optionality is not indicative of any underlying representational deficits: the same individuals do not appear to encounter recurring problems with the same kinds of grammatical phenomena in different speech situations or on different tasks. This suggests that problems of L1 attriters are due to momentary conflicts between the two linguistic systems and not indicative of

10360-478: The contextual specific meanings of features) has further developed the semantic analysis of grammatical items in terms of marked and unmarked features. Other semiotically-oriented work has investigated the isomorphism of form and meaning with less emphasis on invariance, including the efforts of Henning Andersen, Michael Shapiro, and Edwin Battistella. Shapiro and Andrews have especially made connections between

10500-635: The core, and internal to the periphery. The second has to do with the way parameters are set in the absence of evidence. As for the third, there are, no doubt, significant regularities even in departures from the core principles (for example, in irregular verb morphology in English), and it may be that peripheral constructions are related to the core in systematic ways, say by relaxing certain conditions of core grammar. Some generative researchers have applied markedness to second-language acquisition theory, treating it as an inherent learning hierarchy which reflects

10640-559: The corpora of other languages, such as the Austronesian languages and the Native American language families . In historical work, the uniformitarian principle is generally the underlying working hypothesis, occasionally also clearly expressed. The principle was expressed early by William Dwight Whitney , who considered it imperative, a "must", of historical linguistics to "look to find the same principle operative also in

10780-417: The demonstration of how cultures align markedness values to create cohesive symbol systems, illustrating with examples based on Rodney Needham 's work. Other work has applied markedness to stylistics, music, and myth. Markedness depends on context . What is more marked in some general contexts may be less marked in other local contexts. Thus, "ant" is less marked than "ants" on the morphological level, but on

10920-462: The development of modern standard varieties of languages, and over the development of a language from its standardized form to its varieties. For instance, some scholars also tried to establish super-families , linking, for example, Indo-European, Uralic, and other language families to Nostratic . While these attempts are still not widely accepted as credible methods, they provide necessary information to establish relatedness in language change. This

11060-423: The difference between attriters and bilinguals is complex; activating two languages at once may cause interference. Yoshitomi attempted to define a model of language attrition that was related to neurological and psychological aspects of language learning and unlearning. She discussed four possible hypotheses and five key aspects related to acquisition and attrition. The hypotheses are: According to Yoshitomi,

11200-426: The equivalent aspects of sign languages). Phonetics is largely concerned with the physical aspects of sounds such as their articulation , acoustics, production, and perception. Phonology is concerned with the linguistic abstractions and categorizations of sounds, and it tells us what sounds are in a language, how they do and can combine into words, and explains why certain phonetic features are important to identifying

11340-434: The evaluation metric. An actual language is determined by fixing the parameters of core grammar and then adding rules or conditions, using much richer resources, ... These added properties of grammars we may think of as the syntactic analogue of irregular verbs. A few years later, Chomsky describes it thus: The distinction between core and periphery leaves us with three notions of markedness: core versus periphery, internal to

11480-430: The expertise of the community of people within a certain domain of specialization. Thus, registers and discourses distinguish themselves not only through specialized vocabulary but also, in some cases, through distinct stylistic choices. People in the medical fraternity, for example, may use some medical terminology in their communication that is specialized to the field of medicine. This is often referred to as being part of

11620-450: The field of philology , of which some branches are more qualitative and holistic in approach. Today, philology and linguistics are variably described as related fields, subdisciplines, or separate fields of language study but, by and large, linguistics can be seen as an umbrella term. Linguistics is also related to the philosophy of language , stylistics , rhetoric , semiotics , lexicography , and translation . Historical linguistics

11760-441: The five key aspects related to attrition are neuroplasticity , consolidation, permastore /savings, decreased accessibility, and receptive versus productive abilities. Given that exposure to an L2 at a younger age typically leads to stronger attrition of the L1 than L2 exposure at later ages, there may be a relationship between language attrition and the critical period hypothesis . The critical period for language claims that there

11900-644: The hands of the Prussian statesman and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), especially in the first volume of his work on Kavi, the literary language of Java, entitled Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts ( On the Variety of the Structure of Human Language and its Influence upon the Mental Development of

12040-433: The history of a language. The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is morphophonology . Semantics and pragmatics are branches of linguistics concerned with meaning. These subfields have traditionally been divided according to aspects of meaning: "semantics" refers to grammatical and lexical meanings, while "pragmatics" is concerned with meaning in context. Within linguistics,

12180-414: The human mind creates linguistic constructions from event schemas , and the impact of cognitive constraints and biases on human language. In cognitive linguistics, language is approached via the senses . A closely related approach is evolutionary linguistics which includes the study of linguistic units as cultural replicators . It is possible to study how language replicates and adapts to

12320-431: The idea of hierarchy." Trubetzkoy and Jakobson analyzed phonological oppositions such as nasal versus non-nasal as defined as the presence versus the absence of nasality; the presence of the feature, nasality , was marked; its absence, non-nasality, was unmarked. For Jakobson and Trubetzkoy, binary phonological features formed part of a universal feature alphabet applicable to all languages. In his 1932 article "Structure of

12460-461: The idea that language is a tool for communication, or that communication is the primary function of language. Linguistic forms are consequently explained by an appeal to their functional value, or usefulness. Other structuralist approaches take the perspective that form follows from the inner mechanisms of the bilateral and multilayered language system. Approaches such as cognitive linguistics and generative grammar study linguistic cognition with

12600-474: The impact of AoA. However, converging evidence suggests an age effect on FLA which is much stronger and more clearly delineated than the effects that have been found in SLA research. Two studies that consider prepuberty and postpuberty migrants (Ammerlaan, 1996, AoA 0–29 yrs; Pelc, 2001, AoA 8–32 years) find that AoA is one of the most important predictors of ultimate proficiency, and a number of studies that investigate

12740-668: The impact of age among postpuberty migrants fail to find any effect at all (Köpke, 1999, AoA 14–36 yrs; Schmid, 2002, AoA 12–29 yrs; Schmid, 2007, AoA 17–51 yrs). A range of studies conducted by Montrul on Spanish heritage speakers in the US as well as Spanish-English bilinguals with varying levels of AoA also suggests that the L1 system of early bilinguals may be similar to that of L2 speakers, while later learners pattern with monolinguals in their L1 (e.g. Montrul, 2008; Montrul, 2009). These findings therefore indicate strongly that early (prepuberty) and late (postpuberty) exposure to an L2 environment have

12880-423: The individual. In order for one to maintain a low threshold, regular vocabulary and grammar usage is needed. Otherwise, an L2 that has fallen into disuse will now have a higher threshold for each language item, requiring a higher number of neural impulses to activate that item's representation in one's brain. Items that are used regularly have a lower required number of neural impulses to trigger its representation in

13020-447: The individuals with earlier AoA were the more different from monolingual Russian speakers in their labeling and categorization of drinking vessels, than the people with later AoA. However, even the late AoA bilinguals exhibited some degree of attrition in that they labeled the drinking vessels differently from native monolingual Russian-speaking adults. There are few principled and systematic investigations of FLA specifically investigating

13160-498: The interaction of meaning and form. The organization of linguistic levels is considered computational. Linguistics is essentially seen as relating to social and cultural studies because different languages are shaped in social interaction by the speech community . Frameworks representing the humanistic view of language include structural linguistics , among others. Structural analysis means dissecting each linguistic level: phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and discourse, to

13300-412: The late 19th century. Despite a shift in focus in the 20th century towards formalism and generative grammar , which studies the universal properties of language, historical research today still remains a significant field of linguistic inquiry. Subfields of the discipline include language change and grammaticalization . Historical linguistics studies language change either diachronically (through

13440-429: The lexicon of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included. Lexicography , closely linked with the domain of semantics, is the science of mapping the words into an encyclopedia or a dictionary. The creation and addition of new words (into the lexicon) is called coining or neologization , and the new words are called neologisms . It is often believed that a speaker's capacity for language lies in

13580-607: The marked term ( how young are you? ) would presuppose youth. While the idea of linguistic asymmetry predated the actual coining of the terms marked and unmarked , the modern concept of markedness originated in the Prague School structuralism of Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy as a means of characterizing binary oppositions. Both sound and meaning were analyzed into systems of binary distinctive features. Edwin Battistella wrote: "Binarism suggests symmetry and equivalence in linguistic analysis ; markedness adds

13720-408: The marking of a grammatical role with a suffix or another element, and has been extended to situations where there is no morphological distinction. In social sciences more broadly, markedness is, among other things, used to distinguish two meanings of the same term, where one is common usage (unmarked sense) and the other is specialized to a certain cultural context (marked sense). In psychology ,

13860-401: The minority language, in the household, were able to raise bilingual, bicultural children without fail. Families that adopted the one parent – one language policy were able to raise bilingual children at first but when the children joined the dominant language school system, there was a 50% chance that children would lose their minority language abilities. In families that had more than one child,

14000-426: The nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning. There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals. Morphology is the study of words , including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes , which are

14140-681: The number of marked features. However, the use of phonological markedness as part of the evaluation metric was never able to fully account for the fact that some features are more likely than others or for the fact that phonological systems must have a certain minimal complexity and symmetry. In generative syntax , markedness as feature-evaluation did not receive the same attention that it did in phonology. Chomsky came to view unmarked properties as an innate preference structure based first in constraints and later in parameters of universal grammar . In their 1977 article "Filters and Control", Chomsky and Howard Lasnik extended this to view markedness as part of

14280-448: The older child was most likely to retain two languages, if it was at all possible. Younger siblings in families with more than two other brothers and sisters had little chance of maintaining or ever becoming bilingual. The first linguistic system to be affected by first language attrition is the lexicon. The lexical-semantic relationship usually starts to deteriorate first and most quickly, driven by Cross Linguistic Interference (CLI) from

14420-412: The other hand, L1 attrition may also occur if the overall effort to maintain the first language is insufficient while exposed to a dominant L2 environment. Another recent investigation, focusing on the development of language in late bilinguals (i.e. adults past puberty), has claimed that maintenance of the mother tongue in an L1 environment requires little to no maintenance for individuals, whereas those in

14560-421: The other hand, focuses on an analysis that is based on the paradigms or concepts that are embedded in a given text. In this case, words of the same type or class may be replaced in the text with each other to achieve the same conceptual understanding. The earliest activities in the description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini who wrote a formal description of

14700-479: The overall impact of these factors is far less than that for second language acquisition. Language attrition results in a decrease of language proficiency. The current consensus is that it manifests itself first and most noticeably in speakers' vocabulary (in their lexical access and their mental lexicon), while grammatical and especially phonological representations appear more stable among speakers who emigrated after puberty. The study of language attrition became

14840-407: The phonology of only Slavic languages, goes back to the beginnings of psychology and psychoanalysis. It states that which was learned first will be retained last, both in 'normal' processes of forgetting and in pathological conditions such as aphasia or dementia. As a template for language attrition, the regression hypothesis has long seemed an attractive paradigm. However, regression is not in itself

14980-444: The plural is reformed to be a regular form of the singular: However, a number of words instead reform the singular by extending the form of the plural: The common feature of the nouns that regularize the singular to match the plural is that they occur more often in pairs or groups than singly; they are said to be semantically (but not morphologically) locally unmarked in the plural. Joseph Greenberg 's 1966 book Language Universals

15120-714: The presence of an attribute ('markedness') in contraposition to its absence ('unmarkedness')." In his 1941 Child Language, Aphasia, and Universals of Language , Jakobson suggested that phonological markedness played a role in language acquisition and loss . Drawing on existing studies of acquisition and aphasia , Jakobson suggested a mirror-image relationship determined by a universal feature hierarchy of marked and unmarked oppositions. Today many still see Jakobson's theory of phonological acquisition as identifying useful tendencies. The work of Cornelius van Schooneveld, Edna Andrews , Rodney Sangster, Yishai Tobin and others on 'semantic invariance' (different general meanings reflected in

15260-478: The principles of grammar include structural and functional linguistics , and generative linguistics . Sub-fields that focus on a grammatical study of language include the following: Discourse is language as social practice (Baynham, 1995) and is a multilayered concept. As a social practice, discourse embodies different ideologies through written and spoken texts. Discourse analysis can examine or expose these ideologies. Discourse not only influences genre, which

15400-416: The quantity of words stored in the lexicon. However, this is often considered a myth by linguists. The capacity for the use of language is considered by many linguists to lie primarily in the domain of grammar, and to be linked with competence , rather than with the growth of vocabulary. Even a very small lexicon is theoretically capable of producing an infinite number of sentences. Stylistics also involves

15540-424: The relationships between dialects within a specific period. This includes studying morphological, syntactical, and phonetic shifts. Connections between dialects in the past and present are also explored. Syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences . Central concerns of syntax include word order , grammatical relations , constituency , agreement ,

15680-401: The scientific study of language, though linguistic science is sometimes used. Linguistics is a multi-disciplinary field of research that combines tools from natural sciences, social sciences, formal sciences , and the humanities. Many linguists, such as David Crystal, conceptualize the field as being primarily scientific. The term linguist applies to someone who studies language or

15820-652: The semantic (and frequency) levels it may be more marked since ants are more often encountered many at once than one at a time. Often a more general markedness relation may be reversed in a particular context. Thus, voicelessness of consonants is typically unmarked. But between vowels or in the neighborhood of voiced consonants, voicing may be the expected or unmarked value. Reversal is reflected in certain West Frisian words' plural and singular forms: In West Frisian, nouns with irregular singular-plural stem variations are undergoing regularization. Usually this means that

15960-524: The semiotic of C. S. Peirce and markedness, treating it "as species of interpretant" in Peirce's sign–object–interpretant triad. Functional linguists such as Talmy Givón have suggested that markedness is related to cognitive complexity—"in terms of attention, mental effort or processing time". Linguistic 'naturalists' view markedness relations in terms of the ways in which extralinguistic principles of perceptibility and psychological efficiency determine what

16100-422: The sequence in which constructions are acquired, the difficulty of acquiring certain constructions, and the transferability of rules across languages. More recently, optimality theory approaches emerging in the 1990s have incorporated markedness in the ranking of constraints. Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language . The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing

16240-447: The small sample size and the reliance on self reported data. The researchers themselves state that their findings may be inaccurate. The overall evidence suggests that frequency of use is a strong indicator of language attrition. Motivation could be defined as the willingness and desire to learn a second language, or, in the case of attrition, the incentive to maintain a language. Motivation can be split into four categories, but it

16380-694: The smallest units in a language with some independent meaning . Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves, but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of a larger word. For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching . Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech , and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number , tense , and aspect . Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over

16520-404: The smallest units. These are collected into inventories (e.g. phoneme, morpheme, lexical classes, phrase types) to study their interconnectedness within a hierarchy of structures and layers. Functional analysis adds to structural analysis the assignment of semantic and other functional roles that each unit may have. For example, a noun phrase may function as the subject or object of the sentence; or

16660-421: The social science concept of markedness is quantified as a measure of how much one variable is marked as a predictor or possible cause of another, and is also known as Δp (deltaP) in simple two-choice cases. See confusion matrix for more details. In terms of lexical opposites, a marked form is a non-basic one, often one with inflectional or derivational endings. Thus, a morphologically negative word form

16800-490: The speaker's L2, and it is believed to be exacerbated by continued exposure to, and frequent use of, the L2. Evidence for such interlanguage effects can be seen in a study by Pavlenko (2003, 2004) which shows that there was some semantic extension from the L2, which was English, into the L1 Russian speakers' lexicons. In order to test for lexical attrition, researchers used tests such as picture naming tasks, where they place

16940-411: The speaker's ability to produce their native language with their native accent. A study of five native speakers of American English who moved to Brazil and learned Portuguese as their L2 demonstrates the possibility that one could lose one's L1 accent in place of an accent that is directly influenced by the L2. It is thought that phonological loss can occur to those who are closer to native-like fluency in

17080-488: The structure of a language at a specific point in time) or diachronically (through the historical development of a language over a period of time), in monolinguals or in multilinguals , among children or among adults, in terms of how it is being learnt or how it was acquired, as abstract objects or as cognitive structures, through written texts or through oral elicitation, and finally through mechanical data collection or through practical fieldwork. Linguistics emerged from

17220-412: The structure of language and conceptualization of the world. Markedness entered generative linguistic theory through Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle 's The Sound Pattern of English . For Chomsky and Halle, phonological features went beyond a universal phonetic vocabulary to encompass an 'evaluation metric', a means of selecting the most highly valued adequate grammar. In The Sound Pattern of English ,

17360-696: The structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages ), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language), and pragmatics (how the context of use contributes to meaning). Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics (the study of the biological variables and evolution of language) and psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) bridge many of these divisions. Linguistics encompasses many branches and subfields that span both theoretical and practical applications. Theoretical linguistics (including traditional descriptive linguistics)

17500-445: The structure of the word "tenth" on two different levels of analysis. On the level of internal word structure (known as morphology), the word "tenth" is made up of one linguistic form indicating a number and another form indicating ordinality. The rule governing the combination of these forms ensures that the ordinality marker "th" follows the number "ten." On the level of sound structure (known as phonology), structural analysis shows that

17640-579: The studies on the regression hypothesis that have been done, Yukawa says that the results have been contradictory. It is possible that attrition is a case-by-case situation depending on a number of variables (age, proficiency, and literacy , the similarities between the L1 and L2, and whether the L1 or the L2 is attriting). The threshold hypothesis , created by Jim Cummins in 1979 and expanded on since then, claims that there are language fluency thresholds that one must reach in both one's L1 and L2 in order for bilingualism to function properly and be beneficial to

17780-471: The study of language in canonical works of literature, popular fiction, news, advertisements, and other forms of communication in popular culture as well. It is usually seen as a variation in communication that changes from speaker to speaker and community to community. In short, Stylistics is the interpretation of text. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida , for instance, further distinguished between speech and writing, by proposing that written language be studied as

17920-531: The study of written, signed, or spoken discourse through varying speech communities, genres, and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media. It involves the study and interpretation of texts for aspects of their linguistic and tonal style. Stylistic analysis entails the analysis of description of particular dialects and registers used by speech communities. Stylistic features include rhetoric , diction, stress, satire, irony , dialogue, and other forms of phonetic variations. Stylistic analysis can also include

18060-436: The study was geared towards analysis and comparison between different language variations, which existed at the same given point of time. At another level, the syntagmatic plane of linguistic analysis entails the comparison between the way words are sequenced, within the syntax of a sentence. For example, the article "the" is followed by a noun, because of the syntagmatic relation between the words. The paradigmatic plane, on

18200-586: The subfield of formal semantics studies the denotations of sentences and how they are composed from the meanings of their constituent expressions. Formal semantics draws heavily on philosophy of language and uses formal tools from logic and computer science . On the other hand, cognitive semantics explains linguistic meaning via aspects of general cognition, drawing on ideas from cognitive science such as prototype theory . Pragmatics focuses on phenomena such as speech acts , implicature , and talk in interaction . Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that

18340-626: The suffix /-a/, which is used to express an indefinite plural, and overextend this morpheme to also represent the indefinite singular. There is little evidence to support the view that there is a complete restructuring of the language systems. That is, even under language attrition the syntax is largely unaffected and any variability observed is thought to be due to interference from another language, rather than attrition. L1 attriters, like L2 learners, may use language differently from native speakers. In particular, they can have variability on certain rules which native speakers apply deterministically. In

18480-419: The term philology is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history, and literary tradition", especially in the United States (where philology has never been very popularly considered as the "science of language"). Although the term linguist in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641, the term linguistics is first attested in 1847. It is now the usual term in English for

18620-504: The type at hand. Instrumental motivation is often less potent than integrative motivation, but, given sufficient incentives, it can be equally as powerful. A 1972 study by Gardner and Lambert emphasized the importance of integrative motivation in particular in regards to factors relating to language acquisition, and, by extension, language attrition. A study published in 2021 examines what language attrition looks like neurologically by studying EEGs (electroencephalograms) of students learning

18760-462: The value of a grammar was the inverse of the number of features required in that grammar. However, Chomsky and Halle realized that their initial approach to phonological features made implausible rules and segment inventories as highly valued as natural ones. The unmarked value of a feature was cost-free with respect to the evaluation metric, while the marked feature values were counted by the metric. Segment inventories could also be evaluated according to

18900-420: The very outset of that [language] history." The above approach of comparativism in linguistics is now, however, only a small part of the much broader discipline called historical linguistics. The comparative study of specific Indo-European languages is considered a highly specialized field today, while comparative research is carried out over the subsequent internal developments in a language: in particular, over

19040-563: The word in its original meaning as " téchnē grammatikḗ " ( Τέχνη Γραμματική ), the "art of writing", which is also the title of one of the most important works of the Alexandrine school by Dionysius Thrax . Throughout the Middle Ages , the study of language was subsumed under the topic of philology, the study of ancient languages and texts, practised by such educators as Roger Ascham , Wolfgang Ratke , and John Amos Comenius . In

19180-596: The world of ideas. This work is the first to use the word etymology to describe the history of a word's meaning. Around 280 BC, one of Alexander the Great 's successors founded a university (see Musaeum ) in Alexandria , where a school of philologists studied the ancient texts in Greek, and taught Greek to speakers of other languages. While this school was the first to use the word "grammar" in its modern sense, Plato had used

19320-468: Was an influential application of markedness to typological linguistics and a break from the tradition of Jakobson and Trubetzkoy. Greenberg took frequency to be the primary determining factor of markedness in grammar and suggested that unmarked categories could be determined by "the frequency of association of things in the real world". Greenberg also applied frequency cross-linguistically, suggesting that unmarked categories would be those that are unmarked in

19460-553: Was compared against L2 learners who often overproduce the rigid SVO word order rather than applying the V2 rule. Although the study did not show evidence for attrition of syntax of the person's L1, there was evidence for attrition in the expatriates' morphology, especially in terms of agreement. They found that the bilinguals would choose to use the unmarked morphemes in place of the marked one when having to differentiate between gender and plurality; also they tend to overgeneralize where certain morphemes can be used. For example, they may use

19600-516: Was the first known instance of its kind. In the Middle East, Sibawayh , a Persian, made a detailed description of Arabic in AD 760 in his monumental work, Al-kitab fii an-naħw ( الكتاب في النحو , The Book on Grammar ), the first known author to distinguish between sounds and phonemes (sounds as units of a linguistic system) . Western interest in the study of languages began somewhat later than in

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