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Information Structure and Language Change
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 401

Information Structure and Language Change

The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are availa...

The Life Cycle of Language
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 497

The Life Cycle of Language

This volume brings together an international group of linguists from a diverse range of research backgrounds to explore the cycles of change in the world's languages. Historical linguistics does not solely focus on reconstructing a language's linguistic past and exploring the mechanisms underlying previous language changes; it also addresses broader questions concerning the development and ongoing evolution of language. The chapters in this book draw on data both from languages from the distant past, such as Hittite, Proto-Turkic, and Proto-Bantu, and from present-day languages including Akan, Cantonese, Kuuk Thaayorre, Selis-Ql'ispé, Nivaclé, and Spanish. The contributions showcase current research in historical linguistics and exemplify the dynamism and inherently interdisciplinary nature of the field.

Language and Ideology
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 290

Language and Ideology

Together with its sister volume on Theoretical Cognitive Approaches, this volume explores the contribution which cognitive linguistics can make to the identification and analysis of overt and hidden ideologies. This volume shows that descriptive tools which cognitive linguistics developed for the analysis of language-in-use are highly efficient for the analysis of ideologies as well. Amongst them are the concept of grounding and the speaker's deictic centre, iconographic reference, frames, cultural cognitive models as a subgroup of Idealized Cognitive Models, conceptual metaphors, root metaphors, frames as groups of metaphors, mental spaces, and conceptual blending.The first section 'Politic...

Whose German?
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 196

Whose German?

The author addresses a number of issues in German and general phonology, using a specific problem in German phonology (the ach/ich alternation) as a springboard. These issues include especially the naturalness, or lack thereof, of the prescriptive standard in German, and the importance of colloquial pronunciations, as well as historical and dialect evidence, for phonological analyses of the “standard” language. Other important topics include the phonetic and phonological status of German /r/, the phonetic and phonological representation of palatals, the status of loanwords in phonological description, and, especially as regards the latter, the usefulness of Optimality Theory in capturing phonological facts.The book addresses itself to scholars from the fields of German and Germanic linguistics, as well as those concerned more generally with theoretical phonology (whether Lexical or Optimal). It may even appeal to the orthoëpists and lexicographers of modern German.

Actualization
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 274

Actualization

This collection of papers consolidates the observation that linguistic change typically is actualized step by step: any structural innovation being introduced, accepted, and generalized, over time, in one grammatical environment after another, in a progression that can be understood by reference to the markedness values and the ranking of the conditioning features. The Introduction to the volume and a chapter by Henning Andersen clarify the theoretical bases for this observation, which is exemplified and discussed in separate chapters by Kristin Bakken, Alexander Bergs and Dieter Stein, Vit Bubenik, Ulrich Busse, Marianne Mithun, Lene Schosler, and John Charles Smith in the light of data from the histories of Norwegian, English, Hindi, Northern Iroquoian, and Romance. A final chapter by Michael Shapiro adds a philosophical perspective. The papers were first presented in a workshop on "Actualization Patterns in Linguistic Change" at the XIV International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Vancouver, B.C. in 1999.

Classic and Contemporary
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 365

Classic and Contemporary

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

Grammaticalization
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 214

Grammaticalization

In this monograph, various aspects of the morphosyntactic evolution of the Romance languages are shown to interact in a theory of grammaticalization. The study argues for the incorporation and subordination of inflectional morphology within a grammaticalization continuum, constituting but a portion of the latter. Parameters of natural morphology are seen as principles of grammaticalization, but the reverse is also true, rendering grammaticalization and natural morphology indistinguishable. In the context of this theoretical framework, Chapter 2 deals with Latin, French, and Italian verbal inflection, focusing on universal and system-dependent parameters of natural morphology. In Chapter 3, a...

Conversational Narrative
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 262

Conversational Narrative

This book investigates the forms and functions of storytelling in everyday conversation. It develops a rhetoric of everyday storytelling through an integrated approach to both the internal structure and the contextual integration of narrative passages. It aims at a more complete picture of oral narrative through analysis of a wider range of natural data, including personal anecdotes told for humor, put-down stories told for self-aggrandizement, family stories retold to ratify membership and so on, as well as marginal stories and narrative-like passages to delineate the boundaries of conversational storytelling and to test the analytical techniques proposed.Using transcriptions of stories from everyday talk, Norrick explores disfluencies, formulaicity and repetition as teller strategies and listener cues alongside global phenomena such as retelling and narrative macrostructures. He also extends his analysis to narrative jokes from conversation and to narrative passages in drama, namely Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet" and Beckett's "Endgame."

Morphological Analysis in Comparison
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 278

Morphological Analysis in Comparison

This volume consists of selected and revised papers from the Seventh International Morphology Meeting, held in 1996 in Vienna. It presents advances in morphological theorizing, such as the foundations of sign-based morphology, the morphology-syntax interface, the boundaries between compounding and derivation, derivation and inflection, and the emergence of morphology from premorphological precursors in early first-language acquisition. The contributions deal with morphological analyses in various fields of the ever-widening domain of morphology and its relevance to the lexicon. The comparative aspect is reflected in the above-mentioned areas, and through the variety of languages investigated: Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages of Europe, and Asian, African and American languages. This breadth allows valuable insights into current problems of morphological research in America, Western and Eastern Europe.

Towards a Critical Sociolinguistics
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 363

Towards a Critical Sociolinguistics

This collection of twelve essays, some of which have been written specifically for this volume by well-known European and North-American sociolinguists, reflects an increasing recognition within the field that sociological and theoretical innocence can no longer be underwritten by it, and offers a multi-pronged and multi-methodological way to move towards a critical, reflexive, and theoretically responsible socio-linguistics. It explores, with courage and sensitivity, some very important areas in the enormous space between Bloomfieldian 'idiolect' and Chomskyan 'UG' in order to situate the human linguistic enterprise, and offers valuable insights into human linguisticality and sociality. These explorations expose the limits of correlationism, determinism, and positivistic reificationism, and offer new ways of doing sociolinguistics.Intended for both practicing and future sociolinguists, it is an ideal text-book for the times, particularly for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.