Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact : Essays in Honour of Ans Van Kemenade, Ed. by Bettelou Los, Pieter de Haan

Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact : Essays in Honour of Ans Van Kemenade, Ed. by Bettelou Los, Pieter de Haan PDF Author: George Walkden
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Languages : en
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Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact

Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact PDF Author: Bettelou Los
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027264848
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
The case studies in this volume offer new insights into word order change. As is now becoming increasingly clear, word order variation rarely attracts social values in the way that phonological variants do. Instead, speakers tend to attach discourse or information-structural functions to any word order variation they encounter in their input, either in the process of first language acquisition or in situations of language or dialect contact. In second language acquisition, fine-tuning information-structural constraints appears to be the last hurdle that has to be overcome by advanced learners. The papers in this volume focus on word order phenomena in the history of English, as well as in related languages like Norwegian and Dutch-based creoles, and in Romance.

Individuality in Language Change

Individuality in Language Change PDF Author: Lynn Anthonissen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110725843
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Linguists have typically studied language change at the aggregate level of speech communities, yet key mechanisms of change such as analogy and automation operate within the minds of individual language users. Drawing on lifespan data from 50 authors and the intriguing case of the special passives in the history of English, this study addresses three fundamental issues relating to individuality in language change: (i) how variation and change at the individual level interact with change at the community level; (ii) how much innovation and change is possible across the adult lifespan; (iii) and to what extent related linguistic patterns are associated in individual cognition. As one of the first large-scale empirical studies to systematically link individual- and community-based perspectives in language change, this volume breaks new ground in our understanding of language as a complex adaptive system.

Language Change at the Interfaces

Language Change at the Interfaces PDF Author: Nicholas Catasso
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027257876
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse – with a special focus on Germanic and Romance – and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide new insights into the diachronic development of long-burning issues such as negation, word order, quantifiers, null subjects, aspectuality, the structure of the left periphery, and extraposition. The first part of the volume explores interface phenomena at the intrasentential level, in which only clause-internal factors seem to play a significant role in determining diachronic change. The second part examines developments at the intersentential level involving a rearrangement of categories between at least two clausal domains. The book will be of interest for scholars and students interested in generative accounts of language change phenomena at the interfaces, as well as for theoretical linguists in general.

Parameter Hierarchies and Universal Grammar

Parameter Hierarchies and Universal Grammar PDF Author: Ian Roberts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192526790
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 800

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Book Description
This book develops a minimalist approach to cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation. Ian Roberts argues that the essential insight of the principles-and-parameters approach to variation can be maintained - albeit in a somewhat different guise - in the context of the minimalist programme for linguistic theory. The central idea is to organize the parameters of Universal Grammar (UG) into hierarchies that define the ways in which properties of individually variant categories and features may act in concert. A further leading idea, which is consistent with the overall goal of the minimalist programme to reduce the content of UG, is that the parameter hierarchies are not directly determined by UG, and are instead emergent properties stemming from the interaction of the three factors in language design. Cross-linguistic variation in word order, null subjects, incorporation, verb-movement, case/alignment, wh-movement, and negation are all analysed in the light of this approach. This book represents a significant new contribution to the formal study of cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation on both the empirical and theoretical levels, and will appeal to researchers and students in all areas of theoretical linguistics and comparative syntax.

Language Change, Variation, and Universals

Language Change, Variation, and Universals PDF Author: Peter W. Culicover
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198865392
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
This volume explores how human languages become what they are, why they differ from one another in certain ways but not in others, and why they change in the ways that they do. Given that language is a universal creation of the human mind, the puzzle is why there are different languages at all: why do we not all speak the same language? Moreover, while there is considerable variation, in some ways grammars do show consistent patterns: why are languages similar in those respects, and why are those particular patterns preferred? Peter Culicover proposes that the solution to these puzzles is a constructional one. Grammars consist of constructions that carry out the function of expressing universal conceptual structure. While there are in principle many different ways of accomplishing this task, languages are under press to reduce constructional complexity. The result is that there is constructional change in the direction of less complexity, and grammatical patterns emerge that more efficiently reflect conceptual universals. The volume is divided into three parts: the first establishes the theoretical foundations; the second explores variation in argument structure, grammatical functions, and A-bar constructions, drawing on data from a variety of languages including English and Plains Cree; and the third examines constructional change, focusing primarily on Germanic. The study ends with observations and speculations on parameter theory, analogy, the origins of typological patterns, and Greenbergian 'universals'.

Linguistic Communities and Migratory Processes

Linguistic Communities and Migratory Processes PDF Author: Karen P. Corrigan
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110611570
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
This inter-disciplinary book is the first in an Irish context to address issues connected with the ‘super-diversifying’ of language and society engendered by recent and historical migrations. It analyses novel data from interviews with allochthonous and autochthonous groups of monolingual and plurilingual youngsters living in Northern Ireland. A key aim is to test models within second language acquisition and language variation and change research. Another goal is to examine the extent to which distinctive migratory trends generated changes in the language ecologies of communities on the island of Ireland as well as globally in regions where the Irish settled intensively from the 1700s. The book also compares contemporary migratory experiences with historical records to further our understanding of the dynamics of identification through language across time. The first-ever book devoted to all aspects of the sociolinguistics of globalization and migration in Northern Ireland will be welcomed by scholars interested in the consequences for ethnolinguistic vitality of large-scale population movements. It could not be more timely given the fact that 2.5 million sought asylum in Europe alone during 2016, greatly enhancing its diversity.

Diachronic Treebanks for Historical Linguistics

Diachronic Treebanks for Historical Linguistics PDF Author: Hanne Martine Eckhoff
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260451
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Over the last few decades, the widespread diffusion of digital technology has increased availability of primary textual sources, radically changing the everyday life of scholars in the humanities, who are now able to access, query and process a wealth of empirical evidence in ways not possible before. Also for ancient languages, corpora enhanced with increasingly complex layers of metalinguistic information, such as part-of-speech tagging and syntactic annotation (called 'treebanks') are now available. In particular, diachronic treebanks, which provide data for a language across several historical stages of a given language, allow for a new approach to diachronic studies of syntactic phenomena where scholars previously had to content themselves with empirical work on a much smaller scale. This volume brings together a set of papers that report research on various diachronic matters supported by evidence from diachronic treebanks. The contents of the papers cover a wide range of languages, including English, French, Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Latin and Ancient Greek. Originally published as special issue of Diachronica 35:3 (2018).

Rethinking Verb Second

Rethinking Verb Second PDF Author: Rebecca Woods
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198844301
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 979

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Book Description
This volume provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property, which has been a central topic in formal syntax for decades. While Verb Second has traditionally been considered a feature primarily of the Germanic languages, this book shows that it is much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought, and explores the multiple empirical, theoretical, and experimental puzzles that remain in developing an account of the phenomenon. Uniquely, formal theoretical work appears alongside studies of psycholinguistics, language production, and language acquisition. The range of languages investigated is also broader than in previous work: while novel issues are explored through the lens of the more familiar Germanic data, chapters also cover Verb Second effects in languages such as Armenian, Dinka, Tohono O'odham, and in the Celtic, Romance, and Slavonic families. The analyses have wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of the language faculty, and will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of syntax, historical linguistics, and language acquisition.

A Mind for Language

A Mind for Language PDF Author: Harry van der Hulst
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108471579
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 595

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Book Description
Illustrated with real-life examples throughout, this book provides a complete introduction to one of the most fundamental question about what it means to be human: how does human language arise in the mind? Theory is explained in an easy-to-understand way, making it accessible for students without a background in linguistics.