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Definition(s) of phoneme

What different definitions of phoneme do you know? Please note that I'm not asking for an explanation of what phoneme is but rather for professional definitions. I'm interested in how the issue is tackled in different phonological theories. Edit: It…
kamil-s
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We have constructed languages, but are there constructed accents?

I know people have created languages like Esperanto or Ido to make languages that have desired characteristics. Obviously then people have spent a lot of time creating these languages from the ground up, but has anyone modified an existing language…
Nerdatope
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How do linguists deal with losing normal intuition?

Sometimes when I see an example sentence in a linguistics textbook which is supposed to be incorrect or unparseable, I get annoyed because the sentence seems just fine to me. Garden paths aren't the same to me anymore, either, because after studying…
Nate Glenn
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Is it possible to determine genetic relations without external historical data?

Spanish and Portuguese, for example, are very similar languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin over the past two thousand years or so. We know a great deal about their histories, the occupation of the Iberian peninsula by the Roman Empire etc. But I…
Paula Donegan
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Uniformitarianism in diachronic typology

Croft 2003 argues that "the typological universals discovered in contemporary languages should also apply to ancient and reconstructed languages" (the so called uniformitarian hypothesis, p. 233). How so? I don't quite follow his logic. How do new…
Alex B.
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What defines a unique writing style?

I'm an amateur writer that happens to be a professional programmer. I say this because I've recently jumped back into a personal research project in which the goal is to automate the de-anonymization of passages or, more simply, figure out the true…
drusepth
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What is this phenomenon called, and is it the only occurrence?

Usually it's fairly easy to know the spelling of words in Italian, given the very close relation between that and pronunciation. But that's not always true. The word musulmano in Italian (which means Muslim), has one S, but it's pronounced like it…
Alenanno
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Is the prefix "proto-" reserved only for unattested languages ?

I'm not sure if there's a consensus in linguistic nomenclature about using the aforementioned prefix in naming the reconstructed languages. As we all probably know, in linguistics, there's a custom of naming every unattested, hypothetical,…
czypsu
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Is "sentence" a useful and/or clearly-defined term in linguistics

Further to comments against Do complex sentences always need a conjunction? as recently asked on ELU (and Complex sentence without a subordinating conjunction? here on Linguistics), I'd like to know whether "sentence" is a useful and/or…
FumbleFingers
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How to work on annotating AND sentence-aligning parallel texts?

There are plenty of software programs facilitating interlinear transcription (e.g. Toolbox, Fieldworks Language Explorer). There's also a number of tools that allow you to work on aligning parallel texts (mostly bitexts, but also some allowing…
user444
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Why there are no grammatical cases in the French language?

As far as I know, the French language is considered as a Romance language, which is derived, in its turn, from the Latin language. The last one has a rich grammatical cases system. I am interested to know, how, during what processes, and why the…
Mike
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Do distantly related languages have a lower incidence of false friends?

Are false friends less common between distantly related languages compared to closely related languages? If so, is it merely because there's fewer words that sound similar, or is it also that when they do sound similar, they're more likely to have…
Golden Cuy
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Which branch of linguistics studies handwriting?

In all 3 of the non-Latin-script languages I have learned to relative degrees of fluency, handwritten and printed forms differed significantly. Of course, this should not come as a surprise. Often, learning handwritten forms required a significant…
magnetar
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Has Ray Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture paradigm received a formal review or criticism(s) from Chomsky and/or others?

Ray Jackendoff, a theoretical linguist and cognitive scientist at Tufts University, has been developing his theory of the linguistic Parallel Architecture since departing from the narrow syntactic research first undertaken during his formative years…
mncz
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Is urbanization correlated with language innovation?

In Brazil, the Portuguese dialects spoken in rural areas preserve, despite their own innovations, several features of the language that were common in the 16th century. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the so called “caipira dialect”.…
Otavio Macedo
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