Glossary

The Family Tree Theory was formulated by August Schleicher and states that all languages change in systematic and similar ways due to the fact that they are inter-related.

A finite verb is inflected to show tense, aspect, or mood and shows agreement in person and number with its subject. English has few examples. ex: Lawrence sleeps on the couch. The verb 'sleeps' is inflected for present tense, third person, and singular (as opposed to the non-finite form 'to sleep'.

The process by which children acquire their native language.

A fissure is a deep grove or depression in various areas of the brain separates regions, or lobes.

A flap is a consonant produced when one articulator makes a brief, single contact with another articulator, often involving the movement of one across the other. Distinctions between 'taps' and 'flaps' are generally no longer made.

Forensic linguistics is the study of linguistic data (visual, aural, or spoken) with the goal of gathering information to help agencies deal with criminal activity.

The term 'form' refers to a structure or representation of any linguistic element, i.e., a phoneme, a morpheme, a phrase, a sentence, etc.

 Fossilization is a stage in second language acquisition in which a learner is not able to advance past a certain point in perceiving or producing a structure or pronunciation.  

Free morphemes can stand alone as a unit of meaning. ex: 'man', 'climb', 'love'

Free variation refers to the alternation of phonological forms of a word by one speaker that can be interchanged based on social contexts, without altering meaning. ex: [jɛ] 'yeah' [jɛs] 'yes' [ɹut] 'route' [ɹawt] 'route'

This term refers to a manner of articulation whereby the airstream passes through a narrow constriction between articulators creating friction. Several fricatives in English include: /f, v, s, z/

A front vowel is produced when the tip/blade of the tongue is positioned towards the front of the oral cavity. ex: /i, e/

A function morpheme gives grammatical information about a word without changing its lexical category. ex: In English the past tense marker '_ed' in 'walked' the plural marker '_s' in 'books' the present progressive marker '_ing' in 'flying'.

Function words are used to show a grammatical relationship between words rather than providing lexical meaning. ex: prepositions, conjunctions

This is a syntactic category headed by a functional head such as articles, quantifiers, and auxiliaries. ex: CP, IP, TP, etc.

The Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Robert Bley-Vroman,1990) states that L1 and L2 are acquired in fundamentally different ways, using different areas of the brain.

Fusion, also referred to as coalescence is a phonological process in which the features of two linguistic segments merge to create a new sound. ex: French vowels became nasalized when preceding nasal consonants. When the final nasal consonants were lost, nasal vowels became distinct phonemes.