Agreement in Language Contact

Agreement in Language Contact PDF Author: Florian Dolberg
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262411
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Get Book Here

Book Description
Gender in English changed dramatically from the elaborate system found in Old English to the very simple he/she/it-alternation in use from (late) Middle English onwards. While either system is well described and understood, the change from one to the other is anything but: more than 120 years of research into the matter provided no prevailing opinion – let alone a consensus – regarding how it proceeded or why it occurred. The present study is the first to address this issue in the context of language contact with Old Norse, assessing this contact influence in relation to both language-formal and semantico-cognitive factors. This empirical, functional account uses rigorous, innovative methodology, interdisciplinary evidence, and well-established models of synchronic variation in diachronic application to draw a fine-grained picture of the variation, change, and loss of gender from Old to Middle English and its underlying mainsprings. The resulting plausible and parsimonious explanations will prove relevant to students and scholars of historical linguistics, morpho-syntax, language variation and change, or language contact, to name but a few.

Agreement in Language Contact

Agreement in Language Contact PDF Author: Florian Dolberg
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262411
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Get Book Here

Book Description
Gender in English changed dramatically from the elaborate system found in Old English to the very simple he/she/it-alternation in use from (late) Middle English onwards. While either system is well described and understood, the change from one to the other is anything but: more than 120 years of research into the matter provided no prevailing opinion – let alone a consensus – regarding how it proceeded or why it occurred. The present study is the first to address this issue in the context of language contact with Old Norse, assessing this contact influence in relation to both language-formal and semantico-cognitive factors. This empirical, functional account uses rigorous, innovative methodology, interdisciplinary evidence, and well-established models of synchronic variation in diachronic application to draw a fine-grained picture of the variation, change, and loss of gender from Old to Middle English and its underlying mainsprings. The resulting plausible and parsimonious explanations will prove relevant to students and scholars of historical linguistics, morpho-syntax, language variation and change, or language contact, to name but a few.

Sign Language

Sign Language PDF Author: Jim G. Kyle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521357173
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
The discovery of the importance of sign language in the deaf community is very recent indeed. This book provides a study of the communication and culture of deaf people, and particularly of the deaf community in Britain. The authors' principal aim is to inform educators, psychologists, linguists and professionals working with deaf people about the rich language the deaf have developed for themselves - a language of movement and space, of the hands and of the eyes, of abstract communication as well as iconic story telling. The first chapters of the book discuss the history of sign language use, its social aspects and the issues surrounding the language acquisition of deaf children (BSL) follows, and the authors also consider how the signs come into existence, change over time and alter their meanings, and how BSL compares and contrasts with spoken languages and other signed languages. Subsequent chapters examine sign language learning from a psychological perspective and other cognitive issues. The book concludes with a consideration of the applications of sign language research, particularly in the contentious field of education. There is still much to be discovered about sign language and the deaf community, but the authors have succeeded in providing an extensive framework on which other researchers can build, from which professionals can develop a coherent practice for their work with deaf people, and from which hearing parents of deaf children can draw the confidence to understand their children's world.

The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact

The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact PDF Author: Anthony P. Grant
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190876905
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 788

Get Book Here

Book Description
Every language has been influenced in some way by other languages. In many cases, this influence is reflected in words which have been absorbed from other languages as the names for newer items or ideas, such as perestroika, manga, or intifada (from Russian, Japanese, and Arabic respectively). In other cases, the influence of other languages goes deeper, and includes the addition of new sounds, grammatical forms, and idioms to the pre-existing language. For example, English's structure has been shaped in such a way by the effects of Norse, French, Latin, and Celtic--though English is not alone in its openness to these influences. Any features can potentially be transferred from one language to another if the sociolinguistic and structural circumstances allow for it. Further, new languages--pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages--can come into being as the result of language contact. In thirty-three chapters, The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact examines the various forms of contact-induced linguistic change and the levels of language which have provided instances of these influences. In addition, it provides accounts of how language contact has affected some twenty languages, spoken and signed, from all parts of the world. Chapters are written by experts and native-speakers from years of research and fieldwork. Ultimately, this Handbook provides an authoritative account of the possibilities and products of contact-induced linguistic change.

Language Contact and Contact Languages

Language Contact and Contact Languages PDF Author: Peter Siemund
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027219273
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
This new volume on language contact and contact languages presents cutting-edge research by distinguished scholars in the field as well as by highly talented newcomers. It has two principal aims: to analyze language contact from different perspectives – notably those of language typology, diachronic linguistics, language acquisition and translation studies; and to describe, explain, and elaborate on universal constraints on language contact. The individual chapters offer systematic comparisons of a wealth of contact situations and the book as a whole makes a valuable contribution to deepening our understanding of contact-induced language change. With its broad approach, this work will be welcomed by scholars of many different persuasions.

Hungarian Language Contact Outside Hungary

Hungarian Language Contact Outside Hungary PDF Author: Anna Fenyvesi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027294461
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Communist times, it was impossible to do sociolinguistic work on Hungarian in contact with other languages. In the short period of time since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Hungarian sociolinguists have certainly done their very best to catch up. This volume brings together the fruits of their work, some of which was hitherto only available in Hungarian. The reader will find a wealth of information on many bilingual communities involving Hungarian as a minority language. The communities covered in the book are located in countries neighboring Hungary (Austria, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Ukraine) as well as overseas (in Australia and the United States). Several of the chapters discuss material derived from the Sociolinguistics of Hungarian Outside Hungary project. Throughout the book, the emphasis is on how the language use of Hungarian minority speakers has been influenced by the majority or contact language, both on a sociolinguistic macro-level as well as on the micro-level. In the search for explanations, particular attention is given to typological aspects of language change under the conditions of language contact.

English as a Contact Language

English as a Contact Language PDF Author: Daniel Schreier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139619268
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Get Book Here

Book Description
Recent developments in contact linguistics suggest considerable overlap of branches such as historical linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, pidgin/creole linguistics, language acquisition, etc. This book highlights the complexity of contact-induced language change throughout the history of English by bringing together cutting-edge research from these fields. Special focus is on recent debates surrounding substratal influence in earlier forms of English (particularly Celtic influence in Old English), on language shift processes (the formation of Irish and overseas varieties) but also on dialects in contact, the contact origins of Standard English, the notion of new epicentres in World English, the role of children and adults in language change as well as transfer and language learning. With contributions from leading experts, the book offers fresh and exciting perspectives for research and is at the same time an up-to-date overview of the state of the art in the respective fields.

A grammar of Sanzhi Dargwa

A grammar of Sanzhi Dargwa PDF Author: Diana Forker
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101965
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 628

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sanzhi Dargwa belongs to the Dargwa (Dargi) languages (ISO dar; Glottocode sanz1248) which form a subgroup of the East Caucasian (Nakh-Dagestanian) language family. Sanzhi Dargwa is spoken by approximately 250 speakers and is severely endangered. This book is the first comprehensive descriptive grammar of Sanzhi, written from a typological perspective. It treats all major levels of grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax) and also information structure. Sanzhi Dargwa is structurally similar to other East Caucasian languages, in particular Dargwa languages. It has a relatively large consonant inventory including pharyngeal and ejective consonants. Sanzhi morphology is concatenative and mainly suffixing. The language exhibits a mixture of dependent-marking in the form of a rich case inventory and head-marking in the form of verbal agreement. Nouns are divided into three genders. Verbal inflection conflates tense/aspect/mood/evidentiality in a rich array of synthetic and analytic verb forms as well as participles, converbs, a masdar (verbal noun), and infinitive and some other forms used in analytic tenses and subordinate clauses. Salient traits of the grammar are two independently operating agreement systems: gender/number agreement and person agreement. Within the nominal domain, modifiers agree with the head nominal in gender/number. Agreement within the clausal domain is mainly controlled by the argument in the absolutive case. Person agreement operates only at the clausal level and according to the person hierarchy 1, 2 > 3. Sanzhi has ergative alignment in the form of gender/number agreement and ergative case marking. The most frequent word order at the clause level is SOV, though all other logically possible word orders are also attested. In subordinate clauses, word order is almost exclusively head-final.

Sociolinguistic Typology

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

Get Book Here

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.

Pseudo-Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions

Pseudo-Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions PDF Author: Giuliana Giusti
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027257930
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
Verbal Pseudo-Coordination (as in English ‘go and get’) has been described for a number of individual languages, but this is the first edited volume to emphasize this topic from a comparative perspective, and in connection to Multiple Agreement Constructions more generally. The chapters include detailed analyses of Romance, Germanic, Slavic and other languages. These contributions show important cross-linguistic similarities in these constructions, as well as their diversity, providing insights into areas such as the morphology-syntax and syntax-semantics interfaces, dialectal variation and language contact. This volume establishes Pseudo-Coordination as a descriptively important and theoretically challenging cross-linguistic phenomenon among Multiple Agreement Constructions and will be of interest to specialists in individual languages as well as typologists and theoreticians, serving as a foundation to promote continued research.

Contact, Structure, and Change

Contact, Structure, and Change PDF Author: Anna M. Babel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781607856078
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contact, Structure, and Change addresses the classic problem of how and why languages change over time through the lens of two uniquely productive and challenging perspectives: the study of language contact and the study of Indigenous American languages. Each chapter in the volume draws from a distinct theoretical positioning, ranging from documentation and description, to theoretical syntax, to creole languages and sociolinguistics. This volume acts as a Festschrift honoring Sarah G. Thomason, a long-time professor at the University of Michigan, whose career spans the disciplines of historical linguistics, contact linguistics, and Native American studies. This conversation among distinguished scholars who have been influenced by Thomason extends and in some cases refracts the questions her work addresses through a collection of studies that speak to the enduring puzzles of language change.