Glossary

A semantic change in which the meaning of a word becomes more specific over time.

A sound which is produced as air travels through the nasal passage. ex: [m] [n]

A language which an individual learns as a child.

A group of sounds which all share one or more phonetic features. ex: [m] [p] [b] are all bilabials.

A natural language is any language that develops in human beings' brains during the first few years of life, and without any explicit planning or premeditation. This is as opposed to constructed (or formal) language that is used to program computers or study logic and mathematics.

NLP is a field of computational linguistics and computer sciences concerned with the interaction between computers and human languages with the primary goals of programming a computer to analyze, understand and generate human language.

The interface or overlap of kinship, work, territory-based activities(teams), social groups, physical proximity in various social environments.

This is in contrast to constant opposition.

A phonological rule which eliminates phonemic contrast in a specific phonological environment. ex: all vowels in non-stressed syllables in English become schwa.

Natural Language Toolkit is a large set of freeware linguistics analysis tools used for symbolic and statistical natural language processing (NLP). It is written and is available to edit in the Python programming language.

A node is the end of any branch on a syntactic tree or the point where two (or more) branches are joined. ex. VP, V, NP, N, PP, etc.

A grammatical case marking the subject of finite clauses.

A sound in which airflow is blocked in the vocal tract during production. ex: all stops

Any node on a syntactic tree with branching below or above it.

A part of speech (lexical or syntactic category) which refers to a person, place, thing or idea.

The element of a syllable which carries pitch, tone, and vocalic material. ex: [o] in the word coat.