The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity PDF full book. Access full book title The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity by Östen Dahl. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Östen Dahl
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027295255
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book studies linguistic complexity and the processes by which it arises and is maintained, focusing not so much on what one can say in a language as how it is said. Complexity is not seen as synonymous with “difficulty” but as an objective property of a system – a measure of the amount of information needed to describe or reconstruct it. Grammatical complexity is the result of historical processes often subsumed under the rubric of grammaticalization and involves what can be called mature linguistic phenomena, that is, features that take time to develop. The nature and characteristics of such processes are discussed in detail, as well as the external and internal factors that favor or disfavor stability and change in language.
Author: Östen Dahl
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027295255
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book studies linguistic complexity and the processes by which it arises and is maintained, focusing not so much on what one can say in a language as how it is said. Complexity is not seen as synonymous with “difficulty” but as an objective property of a system – a measure of the amount of information needed to describe or reconstruct it. Grammatical complexity is the result of historical processes often subsumed under the rubric of grammaticalization and involves what can be called mature linguistic phenomena, that is, features that take time to develop. The nature and characteristics of such processes are discussed in detail, as well as the external and internal factors that favor or disfavor stability and change in language.
Author: Nikolaos Lavidas
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527559688
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 128
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume synthesizes recent approaches to the study of historical English and long-established philological scholarship. Using this synthesis, it casts doubt upon the old antagonisms between modern linguistics and traditional approaches, and makes the historical study of English accessible to scholars and students of both backgrounds. This book brings together 10 studies on various characteristics of the historical development of English, and mainly Old and Middle English, first presented in workshops at the “Old and Middle English” and “Language Variation and Change in Ancient and Medieval Europe” summer schools, organized in Naxos, Greece. It includes studies derived from the first four workshops: “New Approaches to the History of Early English(es)” I, II and III and “Language Change in Indo-European” I. The first part of the volume emphasizes the synchronic description of syntactic, morphological and semantic features of Old English, while the second section emphasizes explanations of the development of various features of English, starting with Old English.
Author: Thomas Hoffmann
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027289069
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 460
Get Book Here
Book Description
World Englishes is a vibrant research field that has attracted scholars from many different linguistic subdisciplines. Emphasizing the common ground of all research on World Englishes, the 22 articles in this collected volume, selected from more than a hundred papers presented at the 2007 conference of the International Association for World Englishes in Regensburg, cover a broad range of topics which together reflect the state of the art of research in this field. The volume focuses on regions as diverse as Africa, the Caribbean, the Antipodes and Asia, but also promotes a globally comparative perspective by analyzing selected characteristics of the English language across a wide range of varieties. Methodologically, a number of different approaches are applied, including corpus linguistic studies, socio-phonetics as well as historical discourse analysis. Due to its wide scope, the book is of interest not only to World Englishes scholars but also to sociolinguists as well as applied, contact or corpus linguists.
Author: Christiaan Wouter Kusters
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Shannon Bischoff
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110285320
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Get Book Here
Book Description
Functionalism, as characterized by Allen, (2007:254) "holds that linguistic structures can only be understood and explained with reference to the semantic and communicative functions of language, whose primary function is to be a vehicle for social interaction among human beings." Since the 1970s, inspired by the work of Jespersen, Bolinger, Dik, Halliday, and Chafe, functionalism has been attached to a variety of movements and models making major contributions to linguistic theory and to various subfields within linguistics, such as syntax, discourse, language acquisition, cognitive linguistics, typology, and documentary linguistics. Further, functional approaches have had a major impact outside linguistics in fields such as psychology and education, both in terms of theory and application. The main goal of functionalist approaches is to clarify the dynamic relationship between form and function (Thompson 2003:53). Functionalist perspectives have gained more ground over the past decades with more linguists resorting to functional explanations to account for linguistic structure. The authors in this volume present the current state of functional approaches to linguistic inquiry expanding our knowledge of language and linguistics.
Author: Daniel Siddiqi
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 902726712X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 563
Get Book Here
Book Description
The field of morphology is particularly heterogeneous. Investigators differ on key points at every level of theory. These divisions are not minor issues about technical implementation, but rather are foundational issues that mold the underlying anatomy of any theory. The field has developed very rapidly both theoretically and methodologically, giving rise to many competing theories and varied hypotheses. Many drastically different and often contradictory models and foundational hypotheses have been proposed. Theories diverge with respect to everything from foundational architectural assumptions to the specific combinatorial mechanisms used to derive complex words. Today these distinct models of word-formation largely exist in parallel, mostly without proponents confronting or discussing these differences in any major forum. After forty years of fast-paced growth in the field, morphologists are in need of a moment to take a breath and survey the drastically different points of view within the field. This volume provides such a moment.
Author: Carmen Silva-Corvalán
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107729211
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 435
Get Book Here
Book Description
How do children develop bilingual competence? Do bilingual children develop language in the same way as monolinguals? Set in the context of findings on language development, this book examines the acquisition of English and Spanish by two brothers in the first six years of their lives. Based on in-depth and meticulous analyses of naturalistic data, it explores how the systems of both languages affect each other as the children develop, and how different levels of exposure to each language influence the nature of acquisition. The author demonstrates that the children's grammars and lexicons follow a developmental path similar to that of monolinguals, but that cross-linguistic interactions affecting lexical, semantic and discourse-pragmatic aspects arise in Spanish when exposure to it diminishes around the age of four. The first of its kind, this original study is a must-read for students and researchers in bilingualism, child development, language acquisition and language contact.
Author: Elly van Gelderen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 902726743X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 439
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book presents new data and additional questions regarding the linguistic cycle. The topics discussed are the pronoun, negative, negative existential, analytic-synthetic, distributive, determiner, degree, and future/modal cycles. The papers raise questions about the length of time that cycles take, the interactions between different cycles, the typical stages and their stability, and the areal factors influencing cycles. The languages and language families that are considered in depth are Central Pomo, Cherokee, Chinese, English, French, Gbe, German, Hmong-Mien, Maipurean, Mayan, Mohawk, Mon-Khmer, Niger-Congo, Nupod, Quechuan, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai , Tuscarora, Ute, and Yoruboid. One paper covers several of the world’s language families. Cyclical change connects linguists working in various frameworks because it is exciting to find a reason behind this fascinating phenomenon.
Author: John McWhorter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190294930
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Get Book Here
Book Description
Foreigners often say that English language is "easy." A language like Spanish is challenging in its variety of verb endings (the verb speak is conjugated hablo, hablas, hablamos), and gender for nouns, whereas English is more straight forward (I speak, you speak, we speak). But linguists generally swat down claims that certain languages are "easier" than others, since it is assumed all languages are complex to the same degree. For example, they will point to English's use of the word "do" -- Do you know French? This usage is counter-intuitive and difficult for non-native speakers. Linguist John McWhorter agrees that all languages are complex, but questions whether or not they are all equally complex. The topic of complexity has become a hot issue in recent years, particularly in creole studies, historical linguistics, and language contact. As McWhorter describes, when languages came into contact over the years (when French speakers ruled the English for a few centuries, or the vikings invaded England), a large number of speakers are forced to learn a new language quickly, and this came up with a simplified version, a pidgin. When this ultimately turns into a "real" language, a creole, the result is still simpler and less complex than a "non-interrupted" language that has been around for a long time. McWhorter makes the case that this kind of simplification happens in degrees, and criticizes linguists who are reluctant to say that, for example, English is simply simpler than Spanish for socio-historical reasons. He analyzes how various languages that seem simple but are not creoles, actually are simpler than they would be if they had not been broken down by large numbers of adult learners. In addition to English, he looks at Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Malay, and some Arabic varieties. His work will interest not just experts in creole studies and historical linguistics, but the wider community interested in language complexity.
Author: Michael Fortescue
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191506206
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1398
Get Book Here
Book Description
This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. These languages and the problems they raise for linguistic analyses have long featured prominently in language descriptions, and yet the essence of polysynthesis remains under discussion, right down to whether it delineates a distinct, coherent type, rather than an assortment of frequently co-occurring traits. Chapters in the first part of the handbook relate polysynthesis to other issues central to linguistics, such as complexity, the definition of the word, the nature of the lexicon, idiomaticity, and to typological features such as argument structure and head marking. Part two contains areal studies of those geographical regions of the world where polysynthesis is particularly common, such as the Arctic and Sub-Arctic and northern Australia. The third part examines diachronic topics such as language contact and language obsolence, while part four looks at acquisition issues in different polysynthetic languages. Finally, part five contains detailed grammatical descriptions of over twenty languages which have been characterized as polysynthetic, with special attention given to the presence or absence of potentially criterial features.
