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The intense language contact between Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia has led to cross-linguistic influence at all linguistic levels, but its effect on the prosody of these languages has received little attention to date. Based on semi-spontaneous and read speech data from 31 Catalan–Spanish bilinguals, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the intonation of Spanish and Catalan as spoken in Girona, with a focus on the speakers’ bilingualism. These contact varieties share numerous intonational properties, with differences mainly in the frequency of specific tunes in certain contexts. However, they also exhibit significant variation, often linked to extralinguistic factors such as the bilinguals’ language dominance. Overall, the intonation of these contact varieties results from substratum transfer and wholesale convergence between the prosodic systems of Spanish and Catalan. The book is particularly relevant to scholars researching prosody, language contact, variation, and multilingualism.
A collection of papers on Contrastive Pragmatics, involving research on interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives with a focus on second language acquisition contexts.
It is well-known that contact between speakers of different languages or varieties leads to dynamics in many respects. From a grammatical perspective, especially contact between closely related languages/varieties fosters contact-induced innovations. The evaluation of such innovations reveals speakers’ attitudes and is in turn an important aspect of the sociolinguistic dynamics linked to language contact. In this volume, we assemble studies on such settings where typologically congruent languages are in contact, i.e. language contact within the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Languages involved include Afrikaans, Danish, English, Frisian, (Low and High) German, and Yi...
Languages do not exist beyond their speakers, but the history of individual languages has often been told as if they had a life of their own, emerging from other languages, growing and sometimes dying. When applied to Spanish, this story line commonly begins in spoken Latin, with the language taking shape in medieval Spain before spreading beyond Europe in the colonial period.This book proposes a new take on this narrative. Instead of seeing Spanish as a linguistic entity with linear development, what would its history look like if we think of it as a centuries-long constellation of contact events? A History of Spanish as a Contact Language revisits the evolution of Spanish from the perspective of the ecology of language, centring speakers as the only historical agents of language transmission and change. Taking the speakers’ vantage point opens up exciting possibilities to rethink what Spanish is, how it has changed, and who has played a role in this process.
This volume presents discourse production in multilingual contexts as a specific type of language contact situation. Translation may be seen as the prototypical type of multilingual discourse production, other types would include parallel text production in different languages (e.g. for websites) or the production of versions more loosely connected with the source text. When divergent communicative norms and conventions come into contact in any of these types of text production, one may find that such conventions transcend established language boundaries, potentially leading to the emergence of new genres. This volume represents the first collection of papers that focus on the specific properties of language contact through multilingual discourse production. It brings together approaches by historical linguists, language contact researchers and translation scholars, thus presenting the topic in its full variety and providing valuable suggestions for further research in this emerging field of study.
This volume deals with different aspects of the creation and use of multilingual corpora. The term 'multilingual corpus' is understood in a comprehensive sense, meaning any systematic collection of empirical language data enabling linguists to carry out analyses of multilingual individuals, multilingual societies or multilingual communication. The individual contributions are thus concerned with a variety of spoken and written corpora ranging from learner and attrition corpora, language contact corpora and interpreting corpora to comparable and parallel corpora. The overarching aim of the volume is first to take stock of the variety of existing multilingual corpora, documenting possible corpus designs and uses, second to discuss methodological and technological challenges in the creation and analysis of multilingual corpora, and third to provide examples of linguistic analyses that were carried out on the basis of multilingual corpora.
Migration has become a structural part of the globalized society in which we live and, as such, it is essential to determine the causes and effects it produces in the involved social groups. Sociolinguistics has a very important role to play in this respect, insofar as its object of study focuses precisely on the analysis of the interrelationships between the linguistic and the social dimensions. This volume presents a series of proposals that involve theoretical approaches, models, and applications related to the process of sociolinguistic integration in contact situations arising from migration. The volume includes studies of general interest which present models and theoretical foundation...
This book provides a forum for methodological discussions emanating from researchers engaged in studying how individuals acquire an additional language. Whereas publications in the field of second language acquisition generally report on empirical studies with relatively little space dedicated to questions of method, the current book gave authors the opportunity to more fully develop a discussion piece around a methodological issue in connection with the interpretation of language-learning data. The result is a set of seven thought-provoking contributions from researchers with diverse interests. Three main topics are addressed in these chapters: the role of native-speaker norms in second-language analyses, the impact of epistemological stance on experimental design and/or data interpretation, and the challenges of transcription and annotation of language-learning data, with a focus on data ambiguity. Authors expand on these crucial issues, reflect on best practices, and provide in many instances concrete examples of the impact they have on data interpretation.
This volume offers several empirical, methodological, and theoretical approaches to the study of observable variation within individuals on various linguistic levels. With a focus on German varieties, the chapters provide answers on the following questions (inter alia): Which linguistic and extra-linguistic factors explain intra-individual variation? Is there observable intra-individual variation that cannot be explained by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors? Can group-level results be generalised to individual language usage and vice versa? Is intra-individual variation indicative of actual patterns of language change? How can intra-individual variation be examined in historical data? ...
This volume explores the rich and complex pattern of morphosyntactic variation in the Bantu languages, providing a comprehensive overview of the wealth of empirical and conceptual work in the field. The chapters discuss data from some 80 Bantu languages as well as drawing on a wider comparative set of more than 200 languages from across Central, Eastern and Southern Africa: some studies focus on one specific language in a comparative context; some investigate fine-grained variation among a close-knit group of languages; and others present large-scale comparative studies spanning the whole of the Bantu-speaking area. The contributors address a range of topics from a micro-variation perspective, primarily in the areas of nominal and verbal morphology and syntax and information structure. The volume highlights key aspects of contemporary research in Bantu morphosyntax and outlines distinct and novel approaches to prominent questions; it combines the most recent thinking on morphosyntactic variation in Bantu with different theoretical and methodological approaches and novel empirical data from a wide range of languages.