Continuity and Change in Grammar

Continuity and Change in Grammar PDF Author: Anne Breitbarth
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255423
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to explain the "causes" of language change. Any such explanation, however, must also address the actuation problem: why is it that changes occurring in a given language at a certain time cannot be reliably predicted to recur in other languages, under apparently similar conditions? The sixteen contributions to the present volume each aim to elucidate various aspects of this problem, including: What processes can be identified as the drivers of change? How central are syntax-external (phonological, lexical or contact-based) factors in triggering syntactic change? And how can all of these factors be reconciled with the actuation problem? Exploring data from a wide range of languages from both a formal and a functional perspective, this book promises to be of interest to advanced students and researchers in historical linguistics, syntax and their intersection."

Continuity and Change in Grammar

Continuity and Change in Grammar PDF Author: Anne Breitbarth
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255423
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the principal challenges of historical linguistics is to explain the "causes" of language change. Any such explanation, however, must also address the actuation problem: why is it that changes occurring in a given language at a certain time cannot be reliably predicted to recur in other languages, under apparently similar conditions? The sixteen contributions to the present volume each aim to elucidate various aspects of this problem, including: What processes can be identified as the drivers of change? How central are syntax-external (phonological, lexical or contact-based) factors in triggering syntactic change? And how can all of these factors be reconciled with the actuation problem? Exploring data from a wide range of languages from both a formal and a functional perspective, this book promises to be of interest to advanced students and researchers in historical linguistics, syntax and their intersection."

Change and Continuity in the English Language

Change and Continuity in the English Language PDF Author: Martti Juhani Rudanko
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761810391
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
While earlier treatments of English verb syntax from a diachronic perspective exist, this book breaks entirely fresh ground with its focus on the detailed study of English predicate complementation over the past three centuries. It draws data from an unprecedented combination of authoritative sources, including computer corpora and H. Poutsma's unpublished dictionary, and offers novel systematizations of predicates and discussions of alternation. By giving ample evidence of both change and continuity in the language over the past three hundred years, the book opens up a new research field in the study of the English language.

Theoretical Issues in Language Acquisition

Theoretical Issues in Language Acquisition PDF Author: Juergen Weissenborn
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1134746695
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
In recent linguistic theory, there has been an explosion of detailed studies of language variation. This volume applies such recent analyses to the study of child language, developing new approaches to change and variation in child grammars and revealing both early knowledge in several areas of grammar and a period of extended development in others. Topics dealt with include question formation, "subjectless" sentences, object gaps, rules for missing subject interpretation, passive sentences, rules for pronoun interpretation and argument structure. Leading developmental linguists and psycholinguists show how linguistic theory can help define and inform a theory of the dynamics of language development and its biological basis, meeting the growing need for such studies in programs in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science.

Grammatical Relations in Change

Grammatical Relations in Change PDF Author: Jan Terje Faarlund
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027230584
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
The eleven selected contributions making up this volume deal with grammatical relations, their coding and behavioral properties, and the change that these properties have undergone in different languages. The focus of this collection is on the changing properties of subjects and objects, although the scope of the volume goes beyond the central problems pertaining to case marking and word order. The diachrony of syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomena are approached from different theoretical perspectives, generative grammar, valency grammar, and functionalism. The languages dealt with include Old English, Mainland Scandinavian, Icelandic, German and other Germanic languages, Latin, French and other Romance languages, Northeast Caucasian, Eskimo, and Popolocan. This book provides an opportunity to compare different theoretical approaches to similar phenomena in different languages and language families.

Language Structure, Variation and Change

Language Structure, Variation and Change PDF Author: Ian E. Mackenzie
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030105679
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers an original account of the dynamics of syntactic change and the evolving structure of Old Spanish that combines rigorous manuscript-based investigation, quantitative analysis and a syntactic approach grounded in Minimalist thinking. Its analysis of both successful and failed changes demonstrates the degree of unpredictability caused by the interaction of competing factors and will shed fresh light on the assumed unidirectionality of linguistic change. Importantly, it reveals that Old Spanish and modern Spanish are more similar to one another than is usually supposed and demonstrates that many of the differences between the two varieties are quantitative rather than qualitative. This theoretically sophisticated examination of historical corpora will provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Old and modern Spanish, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax.

Topic Continuity in Discourse

Topic Continuity in Discourse PDF Author: T. Givón
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027280258
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Get Book Here

Book Description
The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered, traditionally, from two distinct drawbacks. First, it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second, quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major departure from past practices, without rejecting both their intuitive appeal and the many good results yielded by them. First, “topic” and “topicality” are re-analyzed as a scalar property, rather than as an either/or discrete prime. Second, the graded property of “topicality” is firmly connected with sensible cognitive notions culled from gestalt psychology, such as “predictability” or “continuity”. Third, we develop and utilize precise measures and quantified methods by which the property of “topicality” of clausal arguments can be studied in connected discourse, and thus be properly hinged in its rightful context, that of topic identification, maintenance and recoverability in discourse. Fourth, we show that many grammatical phenomena which used to be studied by linguists in isolation, all partake in one functional domain of grammar, that of topic identification. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of this new approach to the study of “topic” and “topicality” by applying the same text-based quantifying method to a number of typologically-diverse languages, in studying actual texts. Languages studied here are: Written and spoken English, spoken Spanish, Biblical Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa, Japanese, Chamorro and Ute.

Language Loyalty, Continuity and Change

Language Loyalty, Continuity and Change PDF Author: Rakhmiel Peltz
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 1853599026
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
This short volume provides a comprehensive and synoptic view of Joshua A. Fishman's contributions to international sociolinguistics. The two integrative essays provide readers with the essential understandings of Fishmanian sociolinguistics and his contributions to Yiddish scholarship. An up-to-date comprehensive bibliography prepared by Gella Schweid Fishman, as well as Fishman's own concluding sentiments, complement the integrative essays.

Continuities and Changes in Maya Archaeology

Continuities and Changes in Maya Archaeology PDF Author: Charles Golden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135946078
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents the current state of Maya archaeology by focusing on the history of the field for the last 100 years, present day research, and forward looking prescription for the direction of the field.

Bilingualism in the Community

Bilingualism in the Community PDF Author: Rena Torres Cacoullos
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415822
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Analysis of bilinguals' use of two languages reveals highly adept code-switching: alternating between languages while keeping intact the separate grammars.

Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change

Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change PDF Author: Sam Featherston
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110402122
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
The newly-emerging field of theoretically informed but simultaneously empirically based syntax is dynamic but little-represented in the literature. This volume addresses this need. While there has previously been something of a gulf between theoretical linguists in the generative tradition and those linguists who work with quantitative data types, this gap is narrowing. In the light of the empirical revolution in the study of syntax, even people whose primary concern is grammatical theory take note of processing effects and attribute certain effects to them. Correspondingly, workers focusing on the surface evidence can relate more to the concepts of the theoreticians, because the two layers of explanation have been brought into contact. And these workers too must account for the data gathered by the theoreticians. An additional innovation is the generative analysis of historical data – this is now seen as psycholinguistic theory-relevant data like any other. These papers are thus a snapshot of some of the work currently being done in evidence-based grammar, using both experimental and historical data.