Sociolinguistic Typology

Sociolinguistic Typology PDF Author: Peter Trudgill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199604347
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book considers how far social factors explain why human societies produce different kinds of language at different times and places and why some languages and dialects get simpler while others get more complex. It does so in the context of a wide range of languages and societies.

Sociolinguistic Typology

Sociolinguistic Typology PDF Author: Peter Trudgill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199604347
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book considers how far social factors explain why human societies produce different kinds of language at different times and places and why some languages and dialects get simpler while others get more complex. It does so in the context of a wide range of languages and societies.

Biscriptality

Biscriptality PDF Author: Daniel Bunčić
Publisher: Universitatsverlag Winter
ISBN: 9783825366254
Category : Language and languages
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Serbs write their language in Cyrillic or Latin letters in seemingly random distribution. Hindi-Urdu is written in Nagari by Hindus and in the Arabic script by Muslims. In medieval Scandinavia the Latin alphabet, ink and parchment were used for texts 'for eternity', whereas ephemeral messages were carved into wood in runes. The Occitan language has two competing orthographies. German texts were set either in blackletter or in roman type between 1749 and 1941. In Ancient Egypt the distribution of hieroglyphs, hieratic and demotic was much more complex than commonly assumed. Chinese is written with traditional and simplified characters in different countries. This collective monograph, which includes contributions from eleven specialists in different philological areas, for the first time develops a coherent typological model on the basis of sociolinguistic and graphematic criteria to describe and classify these and many other linguistic situations in which two or more writing systems are used simultaneously for one and the same language.

Perspectives on Variation

Perspectives on Variation PDF Author: Nicole Delbecque
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 311090957X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The significant advances witnessed over the last years in the broad field of linguistic variation testify to a growing convergence between sociolinguistic approaches and the somewhat older historical and comparative research traditions. Particularly within cognitive and functional linguistics, the evolution towards a maximally dynamic approach to language goes hand in hand with a renewed interest in corpus research and quantitative methods of analysis. Many researchers feel that only in this way one can do justice to the complex interaction of forces and factors involved in linguistic variability, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributions to the present volume illustrate the ongoing evolution of the field. By bringing together a series of analyses that rely on extensive corpuses to shed light on sociolinguistic, historical, and comparative forms of variation, the volume highlights the interaction between these subfields. Most of the contributions go back to talks presented at the meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea held in Leuven in 2001. The volume starts with a global typological view on the sociolinguistic landscape of Europe offered by Peter Auer. It is followed by a methodological proposal for measuring phonetic similarity between dialects designed by Paul Heggarty, April McMahon, and Robert McMahon. Various papers deal with specific phenomena of socially and conceptually driven variation within a single language. For Dutch, José Tummers, Dirk Speelman, and Dirk Geeraerts analyze inflectional variation in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, Reinhild Vandekerckhove focuses on interdialectal convergence between West-Flemish urban dialects, and Arjan van Leuvensteijn studies competing forms of address in the 17th century Dutch standard variety. The cultural and conceptual dimension is also present in the diachronic lexicosemantic explorations presented by Heli Tissari, Clara Molina, and Caroline Gevaert for English expressions referring to the experiential domains of love, sorrow and anger, respectively: the history of words is systematically linked up with the images they convey and the evolving conceptualizations they reveal. The papers by Heide Wegener and by Marcin Kilarski and Grzegorz Krynicki constitute a plea against arbitrariness of alternations at the level of nominal morphology: dealing with marked plural forms in German, and with gender assignment to English loanwords in the Scandinavian languages, respectively, their distributional accounts bring into the picture a variety of motivating factors. The four cross-linguistic studies that close the volume focus on the differing ways in which even closely related languages exploit parallel morphosyntactic patterns. They share the same methodological concern for combining rigorous parametrization and quantification with conceptual and discourse-functional explanations. While Griet Beheydt and Katleen Van den Steen confront the use of formally defined competing constructions in two Germanic and two Romance languages, respectively, Torsten Leuschner as well as Gisela Harras and Kirsten Proost analyze how a particular speaker's attitude is expressed differently in various Germanic languages.

The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology

The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology PDF Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316790665
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1661

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Book Description
Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.

Variation in Indonesian Sign Language

Variation in Indonesian Sign Language PDF Author: Nick Palfreyman
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501504827
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This pioneering work on Indonesian Sign Language (BISINDO) explores the linguistic and social factors that lie behind variation in the grammatical domains of negation and completion. Using a corpus of spontaneous data from signers in the cities of Solo and Makassar, Palfreyman applies an innovative blend of methods from sign language typology and Variationist Sociolinguistics, with findings that have important implications for our understanding of grammaticalisation in sign languages. The book will be of interest to linguists and sociolinguists, including those without prior experience of sign language research, and to all who are curious about the history of Indonesia’s urban sign community. Nick Palfreyman is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies (iSLanDS), University of Central Lancashire.

Millennia of Language Change

Millennia of Language Change PDF Author: Peter Trudgill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108477399
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
This collection brings together Peter Trudgill's essays on the sociolinguistic aspects of historical linguistics for the first time.

Sociolinguistic and Typological Perspectives on Language Variation

Sociolinguistic and Typological Perspectives on Language Variation PDF Author: Silvia Ballarè
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110781166
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Linguistic variation, loosely defined as the wholesale processes whereby patterns of language structures exhibit divergent distributions within and across languages, has traditionally been the object of research of at least two branches of linguistics: variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic typology. In spite of their similar research agendas, the two approaches have only rarely converged in the description and interpretation of variation. While a number of studies attempting to address at least aspects of this relationship have appeared in recent years, a principled discussion on how the two disciplines may interact has not yet been carried out in a programmatic way. This volume aims to fill this gap and offers a cross-disciplinary venue for discussing the bridging between sociolinguistic and typological research from various angles, with the ultimate goal of laying out the methodological and conceptual foundations of an integrated research agenda for the study of linguistic variation.

How We Talk about Language

How We Talk about Language PDF Author: Betsy Rymes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108488315
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
With examples of conversation, this book is a lively account of social and intellectual import of everyday talk about language.

Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable

Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable PDF Author: Geoffrey Sampson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191567663
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This book presents a challenge to the widely-held assumption that human languages are both similar and constant in their degree of complexity. For a hundred years or more the universal equality of languages has been a tenet of faith among most anthropologists and linguists. It has been frequently advanced as a corrective to the idea that some languages are at a later stage of evolution than others. It also appears to be an inevitable outcome of one of the central axioms of generative linguistic theory: that the mental architecture of language is fixed and is thus identical in all languages and that whereas genes evolve languages do not. Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable reopens the debate. Geoffrey Sampson's introductory chapter re-examines and clarifies the notion and theoretical importance of complexity in language, linguistics, cognitive science, and evolution. Eighteen distinguished scholars from all over the world then look at evidence gleaned from their own research in order to reconsider whether languages do or do not exhibit the same degrees and kinds of complexity. They examine data from a wide range of times and places. They consider the links between linguistic structure and social complexity and relate their findings to the causes and processes of language change. Their arguments are frequently controversial and provocative; their conclusions add up to an important challenge to conventional ideas about the nature of language. The authors write readably and accessibly with no recourse to unnecessary jargon. This fascinating book will appeal to all those interested in the interrelations between human nature, culture, and language.

The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics

The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics PDF Author: Robert Bayley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190233745
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 913

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Book Description
This major new survey of sociolinguistics identifies gaps in our existing knowledge base and provides directions for future research.