现代语言学笔记详解

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CHAPTER ONE

1. 语言学的主要分支是什么。每个分支的研究对象是什么？

Linguistics mainly involves the following branches:

General linguistics, which is the study of language as a whole and which deals with the basic concepts, theories, descriptions, models and methods applicable in any linguistic study

Phonetics, which studies the sounds that are used in linguistic communication

Phonology, which studies how sounds are put together and used in communication

Mor­phology, which studies the way in which morphemes are arranged to form words

Syntax, which studies how morphemes and words are combined to form sentences

Semantics, which is the study of meaning in lan­guage.

Pragmatics, which is the study of meaning not in isolation, but in context of use

Sociolinguistics, which is the study of language with reference to society

Psycholinguistics, which is the study of language with reference to the workings of mind.

Applied linguistics, which is concerned about the application of linguistic findings in linguistic studies; In a nar­row sense, applied linguistics refers to the application of linguistic principles and theories to language teaching and learning, especially the teaching of foreign and second languages.

Other related branches are anthropological linguistics, neurological linguistics, mathematical linguistics, and computational linguistics.

2. 现代语言学与传统语法有什么区别？

Traditional gram­mar is prescriptive; it is based on "high "(religious, literary) written lan­guage . It sets models for language users to follow. But Modern linguistics is descriptive; its investigations are based on authentic, and mainly spoken language data. It is supposed to be scientific and objective and the task of linguists is supposed to describe the language people actually use, whether it is "correct" or not.

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4. 人类语言的甄别性特征是什么？ 1) Arbitrariness It means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. For instance, there is no nec­essary relationship between the word dog and the animal it refers to. The fact that different sounds are used to refer to the same object in different languages and that the same sound may be used to refer to different objects is another good example. Although language is arbitrary by nature, it is not entirely arbitrary. Some words, such as the words created in the imitation of sounds by sounds are motivated in a certain degree. The arbitrary nature of language makes it possible for language to have an unlimited source of expressions. 2) Productivity Language is productive or creative in that it makes possible the con­struction and interpretation of an infinitely large number of sentences, including those that they have never said or heard before. 3) Duality It means that language is a system, which consists of two sets of structure, or two levels, one of sounds at the lower level and the other of meanings at the higher level. At the lower or the basic level, there is the structure of individual and meaningless sounds, which can be grouped into meaningful units at the higher level. This duality of structure or dou­ble articulation of language enables its users to talk about anything within their knowledge. 4) Displacement It means that language can be used to talk about what happened in the past, what is happening now, or what will happen in the future. Language can also be used to talk about our real word experiences or the experiences in our imaginary world. In other words, language can be used to refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker. 5) Cultural transmission While we are born with the ability to acquire language, the details of any language are not genetically transmitted, but instead have to be taught and learned anew.

5. Chomsky的语言能力和语言使用各指什么？ American linguist N. Chomsky in the late 1950’s proposed the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language. This internalized set of rules enables the language user to produce and understand an infinitely large number of sentences and recognize sentences that are ungrammatical and ambiguous. According to Chomsky, performance is the actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication. Although the speaker’s knowledge of his mother tongue is perfect, his performances may have mistakes because of social and psychological factors such as stress, embarrassment, etc.. Chomsky believes that what linguists should study is the competence, which is systematic, not the performance, which is too haphazard. 6. Saussure 是如何区分语言和言语的？ The distinction between langue, and parole was made by the famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure early this century. Langue and parole are French words. Langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community, and parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use. Langue is the set of conventions and rules which language users all have to follow while parole is the concrete use of the conventions and the application of the rules. Langue is abstract; It is not the language people actually use, but parole is concrete; it refers to the naturally occurring language events. Langue is relatively stable, it does not change frequently; while parole varies from person to person, and from situation to situation.

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CHAPTER TWO

7. 语言交际的两大媒介是什么？哪一个是基本的交际媒介？为什么？

Modern linguistics regards the spoken form of language as primary, but not the written form, because the spoken form is prior to the writ­ten form and most writing systems are derived from the spoken form of lan­guage.

8. 语音学的三个分支是什么。它们研究的对象各是什么？

Articulatory phonetics: It studies the human speech organs and the way in which thee speech sounds are produced.

Acoustic phonetics: It studies the physical properties of the speech sounds; it deals with the sound waves through the use of such machines as a spectrograph.

Auditory phonetics is the study of the perception of sounds by the human ear.

9. 什么叫浊音化？它是如何形成的？

Voicing is the result of the vibration of the vocal cords. When the vocal cords are drawn wide apart, letting air go through without causing vibration, the sounds produced in such a way are voiceless. When vocal cords are held together tautly so that the air stream vibrates them, the sounds produced in this way are voiced.

10. 宽式标音和严式标音有什么区别？

The broad transcription is the transcription of sounds by using one letter to represent one sound. The narrow transcription is the transcription with diacritics to show detailed articulatory features of sounds.

11. 英语的辅音是如何分类的？

1) by place of articulation :

a. bilabial such as [p],,[m],[w]

b. labiodental such as [f],[v]

c. dental such as [θ],[T ]

d. alveolar such as [t],[d],,[z],[n],[l],[r]

e. palatal such as [∫], [V ],[ t∫ ], [dV ], [j]

f. velar such as [k], [g], [ N ]

g. glottal such as [h]

2) by manner of articulation.

a. Stops such as [p],,[t],[d],[k],[g]

b. Fricatives such as [f],[v],,[z],[ θ],[ T ], [∫ ], [ V], [h]

c. Afficates such as [t∫], [dV ]

d. Liquids such as [l], [r]

e. Nasals such as [n],[m],[N]

f. Glides such as [w], [j]

12. 英语的元音是如何分类的？

1) Vowels may be distinguished as front vowels such as [i:] [e] [A] [a], central vowels such as [\:], [[],[Q]and back vowels such as[u:] [J] [ C:] and [B:] in terms of the position of the tongue in the mouth.

2) According to how wide our mouth is opened, we classify the vowels into four groups: close vowels such as [i:],[ i],[u:],[J], semi-close vowels such as[e], [з: ] , semi-open vowels such as [ [ ], [ C: ] , and open vowels such as [æ], [a], [Λ] and [ɑ:].

3) According to the shape of the lips, vowels are divided into rounded vowels and unrounded vowels.

4) The English vowels can also be classified into long vowels and short vowels according to the length of the sound. The long vowels include [i:] [\:] [ C: ] [u:] [ɑ:]，while the rest are short vowels.

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13. 语音学和音系学有什么区别？

They differ in their approach and focus. Phonetics is of a general nature; it is interested in all the speech sounds used in all human languages: how they are produced, how they differ from each other, what phonetic features they possess, how they can be classified. Phonology, on the other hand, is interested in the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.

14. 音素、音位和音位变体有什么区别？

Phones are the speech sounds we use when speaking a language. A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. It does not necessarily distinguish meaning.; some do, some don’t. A phoneme is a basic unit in phonology; it is a unit that is of distinctive value. It is an abstract unit. It is not a sound, but a collection of distinctive phonetic features. In actual speech, a phoneme is realized phonetically as a certain phone. The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the allophones of that phoneme.

15. 什么是超音位特征？它是如何影响语义的？

1) The location of stress in English distinguishes meaning, such as `import and im`port. The similar alternation of stress also occurs between a compund noun a a phrase consisting of the same elements. A phonological feature of the English compounds, is that the stress of the word always falls on the first element and the second element receives secondary stress, for example: `blackbird is a particular kind of bird, which is not necessarily black, but a black `bird is a bird that is black.

2) The more important words such as nouns, verbs adjectives , adverbs,etc are pronounced with greater force and made more prominent. But to give special emphasis to a certain notion, a word in sentence that is usually unstressed can be stressed to achieve different effect. Take the sentence “He is driving my car.” for example. To emphasize the fact that the car he is driving is not his, or yours, but mine, the speaker can stress the possessive pronoun my, which under normal circumstances is not stressed.

3) English has four basic types of intonation, known as the four tones: When spoken in different tones, the same sequence of words may have different meanings. Generally speaking, the falling tone indicates that what is said is a straight-forward, matter-of-fact statement, the rising tone often makes a question of what is said, and the fall-rise tone often indicates that there is an implied message in what is said.

16. 什么叫音位对立？什么叫互补分布？什么是最小对立对？

If two phonetically similar sounds can occur in the same environments and they distinguish meaning, they are in phonemic contrast. If two phonetically similar sounds are two allophones of the same phoneme and they occur in different environments, they are said to be in complementary distribution.

17. 复合词有什么特点？

Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words with or without a hyphen in between. Syntactically, the part of speech of a compound is determined by the last element. Semantically, the meaning of a compound is idiomatic, not calcu­lable from the meanings of all its components. Phonetically, the word stress of a compound usually falls on the first element.

2005-12-27 16:00:37

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CHAPTER THREE

18. 词素可以划分成哪些类别？

Free morphemes: They are the independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves, for example, “book-” in the word “bookish”.

Bound morphemes: They are those that cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word such as “-ish” in “bookish”. Bound morphemes can be subdivided into roots and affixes. A root is seen as part of a word; it can never stand by itself although it has a clear and definite meaning, such as “gene-” in the word “generate”. Affixes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional morphemes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories such as “-s” in the word “books” to indicate plurality of nouns. Derivational affixes are added to an existing form to create a word such as “mis-” in the word “misinform”. Derivational affixes can also be divided into prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes occur at the beginning of a word such as “dis- ” in the word “dislike”, while suffixes occur at the end of a word such as “-less” in the word “friendless”.

2005-12-27 16:01:44

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CHAPTER FOUR

19. 什么是X-标杆理论?

X-bar theory is a general and highly abstract schema that collapses all phrasal structure rules into a single format: X″→ (Spec) X (Compl). In this format, Spec stands for specifier while Compl stands for complement. This theory is capable of reducing the redundancies of individual phrasal structure rules and may well capture certain basic properties shared by all phrasal categories, i.e. NP, VP, AP, PP, across the languages of the world.

20. 英语的句子中的三种基本类型是什么？

Traditionally, three major types of sentences are distinguished. They are simple sentence, coordinate or compound sentence and complex sentence. (1) A simple sentence consists of a single clause which contains a subject and a predicate and stands alone as its own sentence. For example, ① John reads extensively. ② Mary decided to take a linguistic class the next semester. Each of the two sentences contains a single clause and can stand structurally independent. (2) A coordinate sentence contains two clauses joined by a linking word called coordinating conjunction, such as “and”, “but”, “or”. The two clauses in a coordinate sentence are structurally equal parts of the sentence; neither is subordinate to the other. For example, ③ John is reading a linguistic book, and Mary is preparing for her history exam. ④ John likes linguistics, but Mary is interested in history. (3) A complex sentence contains two or more clauses, one of which is incorporated into the other. The two clauses in a complex sentence have unequal status, one subordinating the other. The incorporated, or subordinate, clause is normally called an embedded clause, and the clause into which it is embedded is called a matrix sentence. For example, ⑤ Mary told Jane [that John liked linguistics]. ⑥ [That John likes linguistics] puzzles everyone. ⑦ Mary showed interest in linguistics [after John gave her a lecture]. In the above three examples, the clauses in the square brackets are embedded clauses. They are subordinate to the clauses outside the brackets which are called matrix clauses.

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21. 画出 “Flying planes can be dangerous.” 的树型图。”

This sentence is ambiguous because it has two readings:

a. Planes which are flying can be dangerous.

b. To fly planes can be dangerous.

The tree diagrams are as follows:

a.

S

<![endif]>
NP VP

<![endif]>
Flying planes can be dangerous.

b.

S

<![endif]>
S’ VP

NP VP

(Someone) fly planes can be dangerous.

2005-12-27 16:02:23

CHAPTER FIVE

22. 语义研究的主要流派有哪些？

1) The naming theory: It was proposed by the ancient Greek scholar Plato. According to this theory, the linguistic forms or symbols used in a language are taken to be la­bels of the objects they stand for. So words are just names or labels for things.

2) The conceptualist view: It holds that there is no direct link between a lin­guistic form and what it refers to. In the interpretation of meaning, they are linked through the mediation of concepts in the mind.

3) Contextualism: It is based on the presumption that one can derive meaning from or reduce meaning to observable contexts. Two kinds of context are recognized:the situational context and the linguistic context .For example, the meaning of the word "seal" in the sentence "The seal could not be found" can only be determined ac­cording to the context in which the sentence occurs:

The seal could not be found. The zoo keeper became worried.

(seal meaning an aquatic mammal)

The seal could not be found. The king became worried.

(seal meaning the king's stamp)

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) Behaviorism

The contextualist view was further strengthened by Bloomfield . He drew on behaviorist psychology when he tried to define the meaning of linguistic forms. Behaviorists attempted to de­fine the meaning of a language form as " the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in the hearer". (Bloomfield,

This behaviorist theory is somewhat close to contextualism. It is linked with psychological interest.

23. 所指与意义有什么关系？

Sense and reference are two terms in the study of meaning. (1) Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. It is the collection of all the features of the linguistic form; it is abstract and de-contextualized. It is the aspect of meaning that dictionary compilers are interested in. Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real, physical world; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience. (2) Obviously, linguistic forms having the same sense may have different references in different situations. On the other hand, there are less frequent occasions when linguistic forms with the same reference might differ in sense, e.g. “morning star” and “evening star”.

24. 同义词可以分为哪些类别？

Dialectal synonyms : Dialectal synonyms are words which have more or less the same mean­ing and are used in different regional dialects such as petroleum in British English and gasoline in American English. Dialectal synonyms can also be found within British, or American English itself. For example, "girl" is called "lass" or "lassie" in Scottish dialect.

Stylistic synonyms: Stylistic synonyms are words which have the same meaning but differ in style, or degree of formality. Some of the stylistic synonyms tend to be more formal , others tend to be casual , and still oth­ers are neutral in style. For exampleld man, daddy, dad, father, male parent.

Synonyms that differ in their emotive or evaluative meaning :They are words that have the same meaning but express different emotions of the user. The emotions of the user indicate the attitude or bias of the user toward what he is talking about, such as thrifty and miser.

Collocational synonyms : Some synonyms differ in their collocation. That is, they go together with different words, for example: accuse. . . of, charge. . . with, rebuke. .-for.

Semantically different synonyms: They refer to the synonyms that differ slight­ly in what they mean. For example, "amaze" and "astound" are very close in meaning to the word "surprise," but they have very subtle differences in meaning. While amaze suggests confusion and bewilderment, " astound" imples difficulty in believing. "

25. 在语义上，反义关系可以分为哪几个类别？各有什么特征？

1) gradable antonys: Some antonyms are gradable because there are often intermediate forms between the two members of a pair such as old/young, hot/cold.

2) Complementary antonyms: a pair of complementary antonyms is characterized by the feature that the denial of one member of the pair implies the assertion of the other.

3) Relational opposites: pairs of words that exhibit the reversal of a relationship between the two items.

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26. 什么是述谓结构？它有那些类型？

The predica­tion is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence. This applies to all forms of sentence, including statements, imperative and interrogative forms. A predication consists of argument(s) and predicate. An ar­gument is a logical participant in a predication. It is generally identical with the nominal element (s) in a sentence. A predicate is something that is said about an argument or it states the logical relation linking the arguments in a sentence.

According to the number of arguments contained in a predi­cation, the predications may be classified into two-place predication (con­taining two arguments), one-place argument (containing one argument), and no-place predication ( containing no argument). For example:

His car is next to my car. (Two-place predication)

He is singing. (One-place predication)

It is raining. (No-place predication)

27. 句子的意义是构成句子的每个单词意义的总和吗？

The meaning of a sentence is not the sum total of the meanings of all its components. It cannot be worked out by adding up all the meanings of its constituent words. For example;

The dog bit the man.

The man bit the dog.

The two sentences consist of exactly the same words, but they arc widely different in their meanings.

28. 语义变化的主要类型有哪些？

Semantic change refers to the change of meaning of a word. The major types of semantic change are as follows: (1) Semantic broadening refers to the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general or inclusive than its historically earlier denotation. For example, the word “holiday” was originally used to mean a day of religious significance because it was a “holy day”. Today everyone enjoys a holiday, whether he or she is religious or not. (2) Semantic narrowing is the reverse process in which the meaning of a word becomes less general or inclusive than its historically earlier meaning. For example, the word “liquor” in contemporary English is an alcoholic drink, but it was once synonymous with “liquid”, be it alcoholic or not. (3) Semantic shift refers to the process in which a word loses its former meaning and acquires a new, sometimes related meaning, e.g. the word “silly”. Quite surprisingly, a “silly” person was a happy person in Old English, and a naive person in Middle English, but a foolish person in Modern English.

2005-12-27 16:02:48

CHAPTER SIX

29. 语用学和传统语义学有什么区别？

Pragmatics is the study of meaning in the context of use, while traditional semantics treats meaning as something intrinsic, abstract and de-contextualized.

30. 句子和话语有什么区别？

A sentence is a grammatical unit. Its meaning is often studied as the abstract, intrinsic property of the sentence itself in terms of a predication. Utterance is what people actually utter in the course of communication. It should be considered in the situation in which it is actually uttered or used. Most utterances take the form of sentences, i.e. most utterances are complete sentences in terms of syntax; however, some utterances are not, and some cannot even be restored to complete sentences.

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31. 句子的语义与话语语义有什么区别？

The meaning of a sentence is abstract and de-contextualized, while the meaning of an utterance is concrete and context-dependent. Utterance meaning is based on sentence meaning; it is the realization of the abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication, or simply in a context.

32. 言内行为、言外行为和言后行为有什么区别，举例说明。

A locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. It is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonol­ogy. An illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker's intention; it is the act performed in saying something. A perlocutionary act is the act per­formed by or resulting from saying something; it is the consequence of, or the change brought about by the utterance; it is the act performed by saying something. For example:

You have left the door wide open.

The locutionary act performed by the speaker is that he has uttered all the words " you,' " have," " door," " left," " open," etc. and expressed what the word literally mean. The illocutionary act performed by the speaker is that by making such an utterance, he has expressed his intention of asking the hearer to close the door. The perlocutionary act refers to the effect of the utterance. If the hearer understands that the speaker intends him to close the door and closes the door, the speaker has successfully brought about the change in the real world he has intended to; then the perlocutiohary act is successfully per­formed .

33. Searle是如何对言外行为进行分类的？它们各自的言外之的是什么？

1) Representatives: stating or describing, saying what the speaker believes to be true.

2) Directives: trying to get the hearer to do something.

3) Commissives: committing the speaker himself to some future course of action.

4) Expressives: expressing feelings or attitude towards an existing state.

5) Declarations: bringing about immediate changes by saying something.

34. 合作原则的四个准则是什么？违反合作原则的四个准则是如何产生会话含义的？

1)The maxim of quantity

(1) Make your contribution as informative as required (for the current purpose of the exchange) .

(2) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

2) The maxim of quality

(1) Do not say what you believe to be false.

(2) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

3)The maxim of relation

Be relevant.

.

4)The maxim of manner

(1) Avoid obscurity of expression.

(2) Avoid ambiguity.

(3) Be brief ( avoid unnecessary prolixity) .

(4) Be orderly.

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A: Do you know where Mr. Smith lives?

B: Somewhere in the southern suburbs of the city.

This is said when both A and B know that B does know Mr. Smith' s address. Thus B does not give enough information that is required, and he has flouted the maxim of quantity. Therefore, such conversational implica­ture as "I do not wish to tell you where Mr. Smith lives" is produced.

A: Would you like to come to our party tonight?

B: I'm afraid I' m not feeling so well today.

This is said when both A and B know that B is not having any health problem that will prevent him from going to a party. Thus B is saying some­thing that he himself knows to be false and he is violating the maxim of qual­ity. The conversational implicature " I do not want to go to your party tonight" is then produced.

A: The hostess is an awful bore. Don't you think?

B: The roses in the garden are beautiful, aren't they?

This is said when both A and B know that it is entirely possible for B to make a comment on the hostess. Thus B is saying something irrelevant to what A has just said, and he has flouted the maxim of relation. The conver­sational implicature "I don't wish to talk about the hostess in such a rude manner" is produced.

A: Shall we get something for the kids?

B: Yes. But I veto I - C - E - C - R - E - A - M.

This is said when both A and B know that B has no difficulty in pro­nouncing the word "ice-cream." Thus B has flouted the maxim of manner. The conversational implicature "I don’t want the kids to know we are talking about ice-cream" is then produced.

2005-12-27 16:03:17

Jacky

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CHAPTER SEVEN

35. 英语语言的发展可分为哪几个主要阶段？各个阶段的转变是以什么历史事件为标志的？

English has undergone dramatic changes throughout the three major periods, i.e. Old English (roughly from 449 to 1100), Middle English (roughly from 1100 to 1500), and Modern English (roughly from 1500 to the present). (2) Historical Events: The Old English period began with the invasion of the British Isles by English-speaking Anglo-Saxons from Europe, and ended with the arrival of Norman French invaders historically known as the Norman Conquest. The Middle English period is distinguished from the Old English period by the Norman Conquest, and from the Modern English period as the result of the cultural influence of the European renaissance movement.

36. 语言变化的本质有什么特征？

All living languages change with time and language change is inevitable. As a general rule, language change is universal, continuous and, to a considerable de­gree, regular and systematic. Language change is extensive, taking place in virtually all aspects of the grammar.

Although language change is universal, inevitable, and in some cases, vigorous, it is never an overnight occurrence, but a gradual and constant process, often indiscernible to speakers of the same generation.

37. 语言变化的主要原因是什么？

(1) Sound assimilation is the physiological effect of one sound on another. It may cause loss of vowels or consonants, vowel nasalization and morphological and lexical changes. (2) Rule simplification and regularization are a type of spontaneous morphological rule change involving exceptional plural forms of nouns. For example, many English speakers tend to ignore the exceptional plural rules, just producing plural nouns such as “hoofs” instead of “hooves”. () Internal borrowing caused by the need to lessen the burden on memory. For example, by analogy to the pairs “reap/reaped” and “seem/seemed”, English speakers are heard saying “He sweeped the floor.” (4) Elaboration is motivated by the need to reduce ambiguity and increase communicative clarity or expressiveness. For example, Modern English has a stricter word order than Old English did. (5) Sociological triggers refer to those radical socio-political changes that lead to vigorous language changes. A typical example in the history of English is the Norman Conquest, a military event that marked the dawning of the Middle English period. (6) The continual process of cultural transmission across generations is another cause of language change. For example, while old people tend to call a refrigerator “icebox”, the younger generation is more often heard speaking of a “fridge” as they have the desire to sound different from the older generation. (7) Children’s approximation toward the adult grammar constitutes another basic cause for language change. Children tend to acquire the simplified and regularized expressions, thus giving rise to language change in the long run.

38. 为什么古英语的词序比现代英语灵活？

Old English has an elaborate case marking system to show if a constituent is the subject, object, and so on, of a sentence, while Modern English has a much weaker system for case marking and therefore has to rely heavily on more rigid word order to indicate grammatical relations.

39. 历史语言学重新构建语言历史的目和方法各是什么？

Historical linguists aim at establishing, through the method of comparative reconstruction, the genetic relationship between and among various languages based on the evidence of systematic form-meaning resemblance in cognate items, and thereby to re­construct the protolanguage of a language family.

40. 什么是Grimm法则？

Jacob Grimm, A German scholar, found a series of consonant shifts that occurred in the history of the Germanic languages including English, Dutch, German, Swedish and Danish. The following are the three sets of consonant shifts that Grimm discovered: a. Voiced stops become voiceless. b → p d → t g → k b. Voiceless stops become fricatives. p → f t → θ k → x c. Voiced aspirates become deaspirated. bh → b dh →d gh →g Because these sound changes were so strikingly regular and law-like, they became known as Grimm’s Law. According to this law, the Germanic languages were subject to a rule that changed all voiceless stops into fricatives after they split off from other Indo-European languages.