LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Grammatical Tense, Grammatical Number, Grammaticalization
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Words that are used more in a language last longer. Do kinship terms that are used often get replaced across time. Do kinship terms act like a group. Terms like mother", son", sister" are used more often and change slower than ones like aunt". Most distant terms are also less common: difference in expressiveness. Many languages do not have grammatical tense. No grammatical distinction between present & past tense. John walk" = john is walking" or john was walking". Many languages do not have grammatical number. Form of the noun doesn"t indicate singular v. s. plural. I bought book"; = i bough tone or more books". On the other hand, many other languages have grammatical distinctions that. Inclusive: the speaker and the addressee (and possibly others) Exclusive: the speaker and others, but not the addressee. Three-way number: singular v. s. dual v. s. plural. Grammatical morphemes indicating the source and kind of evidence that the speaker has for statement.
