Cognate

9 Key excerpts on "Cognate"

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  Cognate Vocabulary in Language Acquisition and Use

  Attitudes, Awareness, Activation

  • Agnieszka Otwinowska(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  et al. , 2009: 157). It is assumed that typologically close languages, and also those unrelated typologically (e.g. English and Polish), share a considerable number of words which are very similar or even identical. This chapter deals with such crosslinguistically similar lexis, in particular with Cognates, internationalisms, and false friends. It also discusses how formal lexical crosslinguistic similarity can be measured. Finally, it presents a database of English-Polish Cognates that is used in further research in Part 4 of the book.

  Degrees of Crosslinguistic Lexical Similarity What is understood by Cognate words

  In historical and contact linguistics, Cognates will be understood as words that have a common etymological origin. The very word ‘Cognate’ derives from the Latin cognatus – blood relative. From this perspective, crosslinguistic lexical similarity involves ‘words of similar structure and of similar or in many instances identical meanings in the various languages of the Indo-European group (…) recognised as Cognate, that is, of common origin’ (Pyles & Algeo, 1982: 79, original emphasis).

  In linguistic studies, Cognates are often defined as ‘words in different languages which have descended from a common parent word’ (Schmitt, 1997: 209), or words that have similar meaning, spelling and form, and have been inherited from the same ancestor language (Whitley, 2002). Cognates defined in accordance with etymological criteria include those words which have descended from earlier derivatives of the Indo-European language family. Numerous instances of such Cognates, similar in form and meaning will be present in typologically close languages (e.g. verbs können in German, kunne in Danish and can in English). But in the case of languages typologically distant, the common etymological Proto-Indo-European origin is often hard to detect on the basis of the word form (e.g. młyn in Polish, mill in English, Mühle in German, and moulin in French). Although etymologically such words are Cognates, most language users will not find them strikingly similar.

  When we compare the definitions of Cognates used by historical linguists on the one hand, and linguists dealing with language processing and acquisition on the other, there seems to be a lot of discrepancy in how Cognates are defined. Contrary to historical linguists preoccupied with genealogy, in psycholinguistic studies the term ‘Cognate’ may be defined only in accordance with formal criteria. For instance, it may be reserved for orthographically identical words that share form and meaning in two languages (e.g. bed in Dutch and in English) (Lemhöfer & Dijkstra, 2004; Lemhöfer et al. , 2008). Such definition is useful for typologically close languages abundant in similar words, but in the case of Polish and English, Cognates understood in such a way are restricted to a small subset of words (e.g. radio , zebra ) and some recent unassimilated borrowings. In psycholinguistic studies, Cognates may also be defined as phonologically and/or orthographically similar translation equivalents (e.g. De Groot & Comijs, 1995; Van Hell & Djikstra, 2002), or as translation equivalents with high orthographic overlap with no regards to phonology (Schepens et al.

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  Language in Use

  Cognitive and Discourse Perspectives on Language and Language Learning

  • Andrea E. Tyler, Mari Takada, Yiyoung Kim, Diana Marinova, Andrea E. Tyler, Mari Takada, Yiyoung Kim, Diana Marinova(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Georgetown University Press

    (Publisher)

  For example, Whitley points out that some forms are so similar that they can be confused; students tend to overextend Cognate meanings and create words that do not exist. They might say, for example, protectic AN INVESTIGATION OF THE USE OF CognateS BY UNIVERSITY SECOND-LANGUAGE LEARNERS 125 instead of protective because -ic is a derivative suffix with which they are familiar (Nation 2001). In this chapter, we are concerned with the possibility that adult L2 learners might lack the lexical and morphological ability to benefit from their knowledge of Cognates and that their inability to use Cognates effectively might undermine their writing. As a measure of Cognate knowledge, we consider the use of Cognates in es-says. As a measure of morphological ability, we consider the use of derivational suf-fixes in sentences as morphological units that distinguish nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Before turning to our study, we first define terms and discuss the litera-ture on difficulties involved in learning academic words. Definitions of Terms Researchers have defined the term Cognate in different ways. Moss (1992) uses the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology to define the term: “Akin, descended from a common ancestor (from the Latin co gnatus ).” Whitley (2002) explains that lin-guists often use this narrow definition. He suggests that many linguists regard words as Cognates only “if they have been inherited from the same ancestor language” (Whitley 2002, 305). Whitley goes on to argue that linguists would not find such words true Cognates if their resemblance were coincidental or if one or both of the words were borrowed from a third language. Meara, Lightbown, and Halter (1994) define Cognate more broadly, as a word with a similar form and meaning in the learner’s L1 and L2. (See Carroll 1992 and Nagy et al. 1993 for similar definitions.) Following these researchers, we define Cognate as an English word with similar form and meaning in Spanish.

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  Bilingual Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

  • Roberto R. Heredia, Anna B. Cieślicka(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  However, psycholinguists typically define Cognates as a broader category of words that share form and meaning across languages such as film in Polish and film in English or appel and apple across Dutch and English (Comesaña et al., 2015; Costa, Santesteban, & Caño, 2005; Dijkstra, Grainger, & van Heuven, 1999; Dijkstra et al., 2010; Li & Gollan, 2018a). Generally, the rationale behind the use of words whose language affiliation is ambiguous across languages during testing is the following: if words sharing form and/or meaning across languages are processed dif- ferently from language-specific words in a given experimental task, the difference can be interpreted as evidence that all these languages were activated during that task. Past research in bilingualism has shown that words that are similar across languages in terms of form only (e.g., 71 interlingual homographs) are typically processed slower and with less accuracy than language-specific targets (see also van Assche, Brysbaert, and Duyck, Chapter 3, this volume). In contrast, the processing of items sharing both form and meaning across languages (i.e., Cognates) is facili- tated (faster and more accurate) relative to controls (nonCognates). In the present chapter, psycholinguistic studies that investigated patterns of the Cognate facilitation effect will be reviewed. However, before the review is offered, it is important to discuss how Cognates and nonCognates are selected for the purposes of psycholinguis- tic research. Since cross-language similarity is the defining feature of Cognates, researchers have used a number of ways to assess the similarity of lexical items. For example, Kroll and Stewart (1994) asked English native speakers with no knowledge of German or Dutch to provide translations to a list of Dutch words categorized into semantic clusters. Items correctly translated by at least 50 percent of the participants were treated as Cognates.

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  Languages and linguistics

  An introduction

  • Joe E. Pierce(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  When the words have descended from the same word, they are called CognateS. Cognates familiar to most college students are hand and man in English and German as well as table in English and French. If one has been reading carefully in the earlier chapters, he will immediately note that English is a Germanic language and French is a Romance language. How then does English share Cognates with both a Germanic and a non-Germanic language? This represents a problem to which we shall return later, but first it is necessary to explain the proc-esses involved in the differentiation of linguistic communities into dialects, languages, families, stocks, etc. In the discussion of variations within languages, which was given earlier, it was indicated that some dialects differ only by slight phonological and lexical substitutions and some are hardly intelligible to each other. Further, there is an almost infinite number of degrees of difference between these two extremes. This forces us to repeat something that was said earlier, and that is that languages change almost constantly. Sounds are ranges, even for one person, and the center of gravity for these ranges shift through time. In the case where nearly everyone in a given area talks almost 93 daily with most of the other members of the speech community, a large number of erratic sounds have a tendency to cancel each other out. That is, the speakers each influence each other, so that the phonemic norm can shift only when the great mass of speakers all gradually come to accept a new center of gravity for the particular range of sound. This type of shift in phonemic quality is completely sub-conscious, hence it operates as if it were (but really is not, of course) independent of the speakers, because since it is a phenomenon of which they are unaware, they do not consciously control it.

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  Information-theoretic causal inference of lexical flow

  • Johannes Dellert(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Language Science Press

    (Publisher)

  2.4 Classical methods for the word to have an etymology, and most etymological dictionaries do not include such information, o fen due to a lack o f historical data. In classical historical linguistics, words which are derived from the same word in a common proto-language are called Cognates , whereas borrowed words and their descendants are not counted as belonging to the same cognacy class. While the clean separation of inherited words and loanwords is crucial to the classi-cal method, computational methods have tended to put less emphasis on this distinction. Tis leads to a somewhat unfortunate di ference in terminology be-tween classical and computational historical linguistics, as the la ter cus tomarily subsumes both inheritance and borrowing under the cognacy relation. As an al-ternative term to cover this more liberal notion of cognacy, correlate has some currency, but I opt not to use it here because of the otherwise confusing frequent occurrence of the concept of correlates in the statistical sense in the text. Instead, I will use true cognacy for the stricter classical sense whenever the distinction is relevant, and otherwise stick to the more liberal usage established in computa-tional historical linguistics. Expanding on the basic distinction of inherited items and loans in the lexicon of a language lexicon, descriptions of loanwords are usually more fne-grained. Very ofen, loanwords o f roughly the same age from the same donor languages can be grouped into strata or layers. For instance, there is a rather thin stratum of Celtic loans in English, which includes words such as basket , beak , and nook . Tis Celtic stratum can be further subdivided into an Ancient Bri tonic layer ( to which the mentioned words belong), and later borrowings from languages such as Welsh ( bard , crag ) and Irish ( galore , slogan ).

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  Encyclopedia of Bilingual Education

  • Josue M. Gonzalez, Josué M. González(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Even though false Cognates can cause communica-tion problems for language learners, they can be an important resource to draw on for building a wider vocabulary in the new language. Cognates are words derived from the same root or, literally, words that are born together (from the Latin co, meaning with or together, and gnatus, meaning born ). English lan-guage learners must draw on all available resources, including Cognates, because they face a formidable task in acquiring English vocabulary. Michael Graves cites studies showing that native-English-speaking third graders have a reading vocabu-lary of about 10,000 words. The average 12th-grade student’s reading vocabulary is nearly 40,000 words. This means that children acquire about 3,000 words each year. Much of this vocabulary is acquired through reading. As they read, students infer word meanings from context. Estimates of the number of words students learn from context vary. However, middle-grade students learn somewhere between 800 and 8,000 words annu-ally simply from reading. School texts contain more words than does oral language that form part of the aca-demic vocabulary students need to succeed academi-cally. Students who read more acquire more of these words. It is a clear case of the rich getting richer. Many English language learners start third grade with far fewer than 10,000 words. Because they have more limited vocabularies, they do not read nearly as much in English as do their native English-speaking classmates. Since reading is a major source of vocab-ulary acquisition, English learners do not acquire as many words from reading as their native English-speaking peers. As a result, rather than catching up, they may actually fall further behind each year. However, when teachers read to English learners and provide time and encouragement for bilingual students to read, vocabulary growth is accelerated.

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  Journal of Language Relationship

  Volume 11

  • Vladimir Dybo, Kirill Babaev, Anna Dybo, Alexei Kassian, Sergei Kullanda, Ilya Yakubovich, Vladimir Dybo, Kirill Babaev, Anna Dybo, Alexei Kassian, Sergei Kullanda, Ilya Yakubovich(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  Language-specific similarity is hereby understood as similarity between words which is reflected in regular sound correspondences. Lass (1997: 130) calls this kind of similarity genotypic as opposed to phenotypic similarity , which is based on surface re-semblances of phonetic segments. However, the most crucial aspect of this kind of similarity is that it is language-specific . It is never defined in general terms but always with respect to the language systems which are being compared. Correspondence relations can therefore only be established for individual languages, they can never be taken as general statements. As an example, consider the two words English mouth [maʊð] and German Mund [mʊnt] “mouth”. From a language-specific perspective, these two words are maximally similar, since all correspondences, which are reflected in the alignment of the words, occur regularly, even the null-correspondence German [n] ≈ English [–] (Starostin 2010: 95). From a language-independent perspective , however, there are phonetically much more similar candidates to compare in both languages, such as, e.g., English mount [maʊnt], or German Maus [maus] “mouse”. In contrast to language-independent phenotypic similarities, language-specific similarities can never be pro-posed by relying on one word pair alone. This is the reason why the comparative method so heavily relies on the sample size: The smaller a sample is, the greater the possibility that it does not contain enough Cognate words that make it possible to detect these specific similarities. 2.2. Language-Independent Approaches to Cognate Detection. Most of the current automatic approaches to Cognate detection employ a language-inde-pendent notion of similarity. The method by Turchin et al. (2010), for example, builds on Dol-gopolsky’s (1964) idea of sound classes .

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  Key Concepts in Second Language Acquisition

  • Shawn Loewen, Hayo Reinders(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  However, they are truly embarrassed when they say ‘estoy embarazada’ and find out that it means ‘I am pregnant’ rather than ‘I am embarrassed’. Another way in which Cognates can facilitate L 2 learning is by freeing up cogni-tive resources, so that learners can concentrate on learning other things. Below is a list of Cognate and non-Cognate words for Italian, English and German. C Cognates 27 Cognates Italian English German Piramide Pyramid Die Pyramide Stadio Stadium Das Stadion Bomba Bomb Die Bombe Pistola Pistol Die Pistole Giraffa Giraffe Die Giraffe Scorpione Scorpion Der Skorpion Trattore Tractor Der Traktor Triangolo Triangle Die Triangel Violino Violin Die Violine Delfino Dolphin Der Delphin Non-Cognates Italian English German Pozzo Well Der Brunnen Spada Sword Das Schwert Freccia Arrow Der Pfeil Pavone Peacock Der Pfau Struzzo Ostrich Der Strauß Zattera Raft Das Floß Sommergibile Submarine Das Unterseeboot Tamburo Drum Die Trommel Gambero Crayfish Der Krebs Squalo Shark Der Hai (Tonzar et al., 2009: 644–5) Tonzar, C., Lotto, L. and Job, R. (2009) ‘L2 vocabulary acquisition in children’, Language Learning 59, 623–46. Cognition The ability for thinking and processing information. Cognition is a general term to refer to the mental activities and processes that humans engage in. See also cognitive theories. Cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) This is the ability that learners need in order to comprehend academic language which is often more complex and more abstract than everyday language. As such it contrasts with basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) , and it takes longer to develop. Therefore, even if learners can function well in an L2 environ-ment, it does not ensure that they will have the language skills necessary for more cognitively demanding functions.

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  Inductive Semantics and Syntax

  Foundations of Empirical Linguistics

  • Leo Zawadowski(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  It is said that such languages exhibit concordancies, common features, similarities, coincidences, analogies, that they 'agree' in some features; these relations are supposed to hold in their lexicon, vo-cabulary, grammatical structure, grammatical elements, or simply grammar. 2 Both the terms and what is said about the related facts are usually vague and confused, and sometimes contradictory. Meillet makes a significant remark : Comme tout savant, le linguiste a sans cesse des vérifications de détail, qui le dispensent de penser aux prin-cipes de la méthode. 3 That is one of the attitudes that have prevented the creation of a really well established scientific linguistics. It is not just that principles of method were not stated but that the elementary requirements of any science were not met. Con-sequently we have to establish those relations between facts of languages which prove their genetic relation, and the kind of genetic relation in question. Comparative genetic linguistics successfully used not only methods for establishing THAT certain languages have common origin, but also for establishing certain facts ABOUI the common predecessor language. This is a different problem, though related to the preceding one. 2. CORRESPONDENCES IN LEXICON AND COMMON ORIGIN OF MORPHEMES 2.1. Statements of family relationship are invariably based on observations of some relations between words. It is required that they exhibit 'concordances' that concern the sounds, the sense, or, if it is possible, the grammatical use of the words in question, 4 so that they are susceptibles d'être ramenés à une identité antérieure. 6 • E.g. LHG, passim. Cf. Introd., 13. • LHG, 21. • ibid., 30. • ibid., 31. 258 RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LANGUAGES A naive argument is sometimes mentioned: the farther we go back into the past, the greater the 'resemblances' between some languages ; this is considered as an additional argument for their common origin.

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