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The term ''abstraction'' has a number of uses in the field of linguistics. It can denote a process (also called object abstraction) in the development of language, whereby terms become used for concepts further removed from the objects to which they were originally attached. It can also denote a process applied by linguists themselves, whereby phenomena are considered without the details that are not relevant to the desired level of analysis. ==Object abstraction== Object abstraction, or simply ''abstraction'', is a concept wherein terms for objects become used for more abstract concepts, which in some languages develop into further abstractions such as verbs and grammatical words (grammaticalisation). Abstraction is common in human language, though it manifests in different ways for different languages. In language acquisition, children typically learn object words first, and then develop from that vocabulary an understanding of the alternate uses of such words. For example, the word "book" refers objectively to a physical object constructed with bound pages, but in abstraction refers to a particular literary creation —regardless of how many physical copies of the "book" there are, it is one "book."〔Example taken from Chomsky, BBC interview titled: "Silent Children, New Language"〕 The word "book" then developed more abstract uses, such as in keeping a record (bookkeeping), or to keep a record of betting (booking), or as a verb for entering persons into a record ("to book"). Words may then be further abstracted and even have embedded puns, such as in 'to make history of oneself' ("he booked"). An early example of this kind of study came from John Horne Tooke, who in his conversational ''The Diversions of Purley'' (1786), proposed that the abstract word through came to English through both sound change and derivation from the Gothic: :"For as the French peculiar preposition CHEZ is no other than the Italian substantive CASA or CA, so is the English preposition THOROUGH no other than the Gothic substantive ''dauro'', or the Teutonic substantive ''thuruh'': and like them, means door, gate, passage. I am persuaded that Door and Through have one and the same Gothic origin dauro, mean one and the same thing, and are in fact one and the same word."〔quoted in John McWhorter, ''Understanding Linguistics,'' lecture series.〕 Tooke was incorrect about "through," but his insights about the way words migrated via geography, language, sound change, and meaning were innovative, and fundamentally correct. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Abstraction (linguistics)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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