Traces of Contact in the Lexicon


Book Description

What can the languages spoken today tell us about the history of their speakers? This question is crucial in insular Southeast Asia and New Guinea, where thousands of languages are spoken, but written historical records and archaeological evidence is yet lacking in most regions. While the region has a long history of contact through trade, marriage exchanges, and cultural-political dominance, detailed linguistic studies of the effects of such contacts remain limited. This volume investigates how loanwords can prove past contact events, taking into consideration ten different regions located in the Philippines, Eastern Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and New Guinea. Each chapter studies borrowing across the borders of language families, and discusses implications for the social history of the speech communities.




Language Contact in the Territory of the Former Soviet Union


Book Description

The former Soviet Union (USSR) provides the ideal territory for studying language contact between one and the same dominant language (Russian) and a wide range of genealogically and typologically diverse languages with varying histories of language contact. This is the first book that bundles different case studies and systematically investigates the impact of Russian at all linguistic levels, from the lexicon to the domains of grammar to discourse, and with varying types of outcomes such as relatively rapid language shift, structural changes in a relatively stable contact situation, pidginization and super variability at the post-pidgin stage. The volume appeals to linguists studying language contact and contact-induced language change from a broad range of perspectives, who want to gain insight into how one of the largest languages in the world influences other smaller languages, but also experts of mostly minority languages in the sphere of the former Soviet Union.




The Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism


Book Description

**Honored as a 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title** Comprising state-of-the-art research, this substantially expanded and revised Handbook discusses the latest global and interdisciplinary issues across bilingualism and multilingualism. Includes the addition of ten new authors to the contributor team, and coverage of seven new topics ranging from global media to heritage language learning Provides extensively revised coverage of bilingual and multilingual communities, polyglot aphasia, creolization, indigenization, linguistic ecology and endangered languages, multilingualism, and forensic linguistics Brings together a global team of internationally-renowned researchers from different disciplines Covers a wide variety of topics, ranging from neuro- and psycho-linguistic research to studies of media and psychological counseling Assesses the latest issues in worldwide linguistics, including the phenomena and the conceptualization of 'hyperglobalization', and emphasizes geographical centers of global conflict and commerce




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.




Language Contact and the Lexicon in the History of Cypriot Greek


Book Description

Cypriot is unique among the Modern Greek dialects in possessing such a variegated vocabulary - testimony, indeed, to the chequered history of the island. This book presents a thorough investigation of the foreign component of the Cypriot lexis. It traces, firstly, the relevant socio-cultural factors that gave rise to it. It presents, secondly, a detailed account of how words from sources as diverse as Romance, Arabic, Turkish and English became fully nativised and indistinguishable from the native stock. A fresh case study of language contact and lexical borrowing, it addresses such issues as the extent of lexical borrowing, the types of vocabulary borrowed, the relationship between the social integration and the structural adaptation of loans, and the degree and predictability of the phonological, morphological and even semantic modification affecting foreign words.




The Bilingual Lexicon


Book Description

In the study of bilingualism, the lexical level of language is of prime importance because, in practical terms, vocabulary acquisition is an essential prerequisite for the development of skill in language use; from a theoretical point of view, the mental lexicon, as a bridge between form and meaning, plays a crucial role in any model of language processing. A central issue in this volume is at which level of the bilingual speaker's lexicon languages share representations and how language-specific representations may be linked. The contributors favor a dynamic, developmental perspective on bilingualism, which takes account of the change of the mental lexicon over time and pays considerable attention to the acquisition phase. Several papers deal with the level of proficiency and its consequences for bilingual lexical processing, as well as the effects of practice. This discussion raises numerous questions about the notion of (lexical) proficiency and how this can be established by objective standards, an area of study that invites collaboration between researchers working from a theoretical and from a practical background.




Exploring the Second Language Mental Lexicon


Book Description

This volume does not offer a complex perspective of the L2 lexicon, but rather represents a sustained attempt to answer some very basic questions clustered around the relationship between the L2 mental lexicon and the L1 mental lexicon. It provides a review of L1 and L2 lexical research issues such as similarities and differences between the conditions of L1 and L2 acquisition, the respective roles of forming and meaning in L1 and L2 processing, and the degree of separation/integration between L1 and L2 lexical operations.




The Multilingual Lexicon


Book Description

This volume is a response both to the increasing interest in multilingual phenomena and lexical issues in language learning. It is of interest to scholars and graduate students interested in bi- and multilingualism, second and multiple language acquisition, language processing and language learning, mental lexicon, applied linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics and language teaching. Recent research on third language acquisition and trilingualism has made clear that most multilingual studies actually deal with vocabulary learning or the lexicon. So far books on the mental lexicon have mainly been concerned with two languages in contact. This book is unique because it explores the multilingual lexicon by providing insights from research studies conducted in psycholinguistics, applied linguistics and neurolinguistics. It goes beyond the use of two languages and thus concentrates on a new and developing area in linguistic research. The different perspectives included in this volume provide a link to the mainstream work on the lexicon and vocabulary acquisition and will stimulate further debate in these areas and in the study of multilingualism.




The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition


Book Description

What is language and how can we investigate its acquisition by children or adults? What perspectives exist from which to view acquisition? What internal constraints and external factors shape acquisition? What are the properties of interlanguage systems? This comprehensive 31-chapter handbook is an authoritative survey of second language acquisition (SLA). Its multi-perspective synopsis on recent developments in SLA research provides significant contributions by established experts and widely recognized younger talent. It covers cutting edge and emerging areas of enquiry not treated elsewhere in a single handbook, including third language acquisition, electronic communication, incomplete first language acquisition, alphabetic literacy and SLA, affect and the brain, discourse and identity. Written to be accessible to newcomers as well as experienced scholars of SLA, the Handbook is organised into six thematic sections, each with an editor-written introduction.




A Grammar of Neo-Aramaic


Book Description

Being direct descendants of the Aramaic spoken by the Jews in antiquity, the still spoken Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects of Kurdistan deserve special and vivid interest. Geoffrey Khan’s A Grammar of Neo-Aramaic is a unique record of one of these dialects, now on the verge of extinction. This volume, the result of extensive fieldwork, contains a description of the dialect spoken by the Jews from the region of Arbel (Iraqi Kurdistan), together with a transcription of recorded texts and a glossary. The grammar consists of sections on phonology, morphology and syntax, preceded by an introductory chapter examining the position of this dialect in relation to the other known Neo-Aramaic dialects. The transcribed texts record folktales and accounts of customs, traditions and experiences of the Jews of Kurdistan.