Language Contact and Grammatical Change


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Atmabrittanta


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The History of Basque


Book Description

Basque is the sole survivor of the very ancient languages of Western Europe. This book, written by an internationally renowned specialist in Basque, provides a comprehensive survey of all that is known about the prehistory of the language, including pronunciation, the grammar and the vocabulary. It also provides a long critical evaluation of the search for its relatives, as well as a thumbnail sketch of the language, a summary of its typological features, an external history and an extensive bibliography.







Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective


Book Description

The book contains 30 descriptive chapters dealing with a specific language contact situation. The chapters follow a uniform organisation format, being the narrative version of a standard comprehensive questionnaire previously distributed to all authors. The questionnaire targets systematically the possibility of contact influence / grammatical borrowing in a full range of categories. The uniform structure facilitates a comparison among the chapters and the languages covered. The introduction describes the setup of the questionnaire and the methodology of the approach, along with a survey of the difficulties of sampling in contact linguistics. Two evaluative chapters, each authored by one of the co-editors, draws general conclusions from the volume as a whole (one in relation to borrowed grammatical categories and meaningful hierarchies, the other in relation to the distribution of Matter and Pattern replication).




Thoughts on grammaticalization


Book Description

"Thoughts on grammaticalization" was first published in a working-paper version in 1982 and became very influential immediately, even though it was properly published only in 1995. Despite its modest title, the book can be read as an advanced introduction to grammaticalization, though its conception is very original. The present edition contains a number of corrections of the 1995 edition. After a short review of the history of research, the work introduces and delimits the concepts related to grammaticalization. It then provides extensive exemplification of grammaticalization phenomena in diverse languages, ordered by grammatical domains such as the verbal, pronominal and nominal sphere and clause level relations. The final chapter presents a theory of grammaticalization which is based on the autonomy of the linguistic sign with respect to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. This is the basis of the structural parameters that constitute grammaticalization. They are operationalized to the point of rendering degrees of grammaticalization measurable.




Auxiliation


Book Description

Probing the nature of grammaticalisation on the basis of an in-depth study of the process of auxiliation, this book brings together the explanatory potential of recent grammaticalisation theory and insights from the latest psychological studies.




Parameters of Slavic Morphosyntax


Book Description

Focusing on issues of case theory and comparative grammar, this study treats selected problems in the syntax of the Slavic languages from the perspective of Government-Binding theory. Steven Franks seeks to develop parametric solutions to related constructions among the various Slavic languages. A model of case based loosely on Jakobson's feature system is adapted to a variety of comparative problems in Slavic, including across-the-board constructions, quantification, secondary predication, null subject phenomena, and voice. Solutions considered make use of recent approaches to phrase structure, including the VP-internal subject hypothesis and the DP hypothesis. The book will serve admirably as an introduction to GB theory for Slavic linguists as well as to the range of problems posed by Slavic for general syntacticians.




Demonstratives


Book Description

All languages have demonstratives, but their form, meaning and use vary tremendously across the languages of the world. This book presents the first large-scale analysis of demonstratives from a cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective. It is based on a representative sample of 85 languages. The first part of the book analyzes demonstratives from a synchronic point of view, examining their morphological structures, semantic features, syntactic functions, and pragmatic uses in spoken and written discourse. The second part concentrates on diachronic issues, in particular on the development of demonstratives into grammatical markers. Across languages demonstratives provide a frequent historical source for definite articles, relative and third person pronouns, nonverbal copulas, sentence connectives, directional preverbs, focus markers, expletives, and many other grammatical markers. The book describes the different mechanisms by which demonstratives grammaticalize and argues that the evolution of grammatical markers from demonstratives is crucially distinct from other cases of grammaticalization.




Aspects of Language Contact


Book Description

This edited volume brings together fourteen original contributions to the on-going debate about what is possible in contact-induced language change. The authors present a number of new vistas on language contact which represent new developments in the field. In the first part of the volume, the focus is on methodology and theory. Thomas Stolz defines the study of Romancisation processes as a very promising laboratory for language-contact oriented research and theoretical work based thereon. The reader is informed about the large scale projects on loanword typology in the contribution by Martin Haspelmath and on contact-induced grammatical change conducted by Jeanette Sakel and Yaron Matras. Christel Stolz reviews processes of gender-assignment to loan nouns in German and German-based varieties. The typology of loan verbs is the topic of the contribution by Søren Wichmann and Jan Wohlgemuth. In the articles by Wolfgang Wildgen and Klaus Zimmermann, two radically new approaches to the theory of language contact are put forward: a dynamic model and a constructivism-based theory, respectively. The second part of the volume is dedicated to more empirically oriented studies which look into language-contact constellations with a Romance donor language and a non-European recipient language. Spanish-Amerindian (Guaraní, Otomí, Quichua) contacts are investigated in the comparative study by Dik Bakker, Jorge Gómez-Rendón and Ewald Hekking. Peter Bakker and Robert A. Papen discuss the influence exerted by French on the indigenous languages ofCanada. The extent of the Portuguese impact on the Amazonian language Kulina is studied by Stefan Dienst. John Holm looks at the validity of the hypothesis that bound morphology normally falls victim to Creolization processes and draws his evidence mainly from Portuguese-based Creoles. For Austronesia, borrowings and calques from French still are an understudied phenomenon. Claire Moyse-Faurie’s contribution to this topic is thus a pioneer’s work. Similarly, Françoise Rose and Odile Renault-Lescure provide us with fresh data on language contact in French Guiana. The final article of this collection by Mauro Tosco demonstrates that the Italianization of languages of the former Italian colonies in East Africa is only weak. This volume provides the reader with new insights on all levels of language-contact related studies. The volume addresses especially a readership that has a strong interest in language contact in general and its repercussions on the phonology, grammar and lexicon of the recipient languages. Experts of Romance language contact, and specialists of Amerindian languages, Afro-Asiatic languages, Austronesian languages and Pidgins and Creoles will find the volume highly valuable.