ENGL 4301: 501

Fall 1998

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1: "Paper Chase"

Back to the Syllabus

 

The following list contains 50 terms of interest in historical linguistics. Your job is to give a brief definition for each term. Your definition should indicate how the word is used in linguistics, or as related to the history of English. Due in class on Monday 14 September.

There are many sources in libraries that can help you with this assignment. Books on the history of the English language are shelved at PE 1075 and thereabouts. Books on general historical linguistics reside at around P 140. There are many websites devoted to historical linguistics, some of them accessible from our course site and some not listed there.

 

  1. Substrate
  2. Monophthongization
  3. Cognate
  4. Grimm's Law
  5. Phoneme
  6. Suprasegmental
  7. Phrase
  8. Clause
  9. Creole
  10. Pidgin
  11. Indo-European
  12. Indo-Aryan
  13. Pronoun
  14. Preposition
  15. vowel shift
  16. Great Vowel Shift
  17. Johnson's Dictionary
  18. Chancery English
  19. Metathesis
  20. Idiolect
  21. Euphemism
  22. Received Pronunciation
  23. Caxton
  24. Reflexive Pronoun
  25. Exeter Book
  26. Voice (of verbs)
  27. Mood (of verbs)
  28. Celtic languages
  29. Vernacular
  30. Natural language
  31. Authorized Version (of the Bible)
  32. Declension
  33. Conjugation
  34. Paleography
  35. Caedmon's Hymn
  36. Sanskrit
  37. Morphology
  38. Diachronic
  39. Synchronic
  40. Proto-language
  41. Strong verb
  42. Sign/Symbol distinction
  43. Dialect/Language distinction
  44. Auxiliary verb
  45. Isogloss
  46. Toponymy
  47. Digraph
  48. Front-mutation (in plurals)
  49. Metaphor
  50. Metonymy