Author : Scott F. Kiesling
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 16,6 MB
Release : 2011-04-29
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 074863763X
The study of variation and change is at the heart of the sociolinguistics. Providing a wide survey of the field, this textbook is organised around three constraints on variation: linguistic structure, social structure and identity, and social and linguistic perception. By considering both structure and meaning, Scott F. Kiesling examines the most important issues surrounding variation theory, including canonical studies and terms as well as challenges to them.
Author : Mirjam Fried
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 14,77 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9027207836
The ten volumes of the "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, interactional, or discursive angles, this sixth volume focuses on the dynamic aspects of language and reviews the relevant developments in variationist and diachronic scholarship. The areas explored in the volume concern several general themes: specific methodological approaches, from comparative reconstruction to evolutionary pragmatics; issues in intra-lingual variation in terms of standard and non-standard varieties; cross-linguistic variation, including its cross-cultural dimension; and the study of diachronic relations across linguistic patterns, including changes in all areas of pragmatic patterns and categories. The contributions document two prominent and interrelated trends that shape contemporary variationist and diachronic research. One, it has moved from situating change within context-independent systems toward incorporating patterns of language use and the speaker s role in language change. And two, it has reoriented its focus away from cataloguing instances of variation and toward seeking theoretically informed accounts that aim at "explaining" variation and change. On the whole, the volume argues for accepting and developing actively a systematic connection between research in diachrony, synchronic variation, and typology, while also incorporating the socio-cognitive perspective in linguistic analysis as a particularly promising source of useful methodology and explanatory models."
Author : Tanya Karoli Christensen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 49,54 MB
Release : 2022-01-20
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1108492843
New perspectives on how and why syntax varies between and within speakers, focusing on explaining theoretical backgrounds and methods.
Author : Isabelle Léglise
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 35,60 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9027234922
This volume is at the cross-roads between two research traditions dealing with language change: contact linguistics and language variation and change. It starts out from the notion that linguistic variation is still a little researched area in most contact-induced language change studies. Intending to fill this gap, it offers a rich panorama of case studies and approaches dealing with linguistic variation in contact settings. It concentrates both on monolingual data, tracing variation and contact beneath surface homogeneity, and on bilingual data such as code-switching and other forms of variation, to trace their underlying regularities. It investigates the relationship between variation and change in language contact settings. The book will be relevant for students and researchers in contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, language variation and change, sociology of language, descriptive linguistics and linguistic typology.
Author : Elly Van Gelderen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 35,77 MB
Release : 2021-12-16
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1108924468
In this pioneering study, a world-renowned generative syntactician explores the impact of phenomena known as 'third factors' on syntactic change. Generative syntax has in recent times incorporated third factors – factors not specific to the language faculty – into its framework, including minimal search, labelling, determinacy and economy. Van Gelderen's study applies these principles to language change, arguing that change is a cyclical process, and that third factor principles must combine with linguistic information to fully account for the cyclical development of 'optimal' language structures. Third Factor Principles also account for language variation around that-trace phenomena, CP-deletion, and the presence of expletives and Verb-second. By linking insights from recent theoretical advances in generative syntax to phenomena from language variation and change, this book provides a unique perspective, making it essential reading for academic researchers and students in syntactic theory and historical linguistics.
Author : François Grosjean
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 355 pages
File Size : 18,68 MB
Release : 2021-06-03
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1108838642
A book on those who know and use two or more languages: Who are they? How do they do it?
Author : Manfred Krug
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 539 pages
File Size : 19,50 MB
Release : 2013-10-24
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1107469848
Methodological know-how has become one of the key qualifications in contemporary linguistics, which has a strong empirical focus. Containing 23 chapters, each devoted to a different research method, this volume brings together the expertise and insight of a range of established practitioners. The chapters are arranged in three parts, devoted to three different stages of empirical research: data collection, analysis and evaluation. In addition to detailed step-by-step introductions and illustrative case studies focusing on variation and change in English, each chapter addresses the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology and concludes with suggestions for further reading. This systematic, state-of-the-art survey is ideal for both novice researchers and professionals interested in extending their methodological repertoires. The book also has a companion website which provides readers with further information, links, resources, demonstrations, exercises and case studies related to each chapter.
Author : Robin Dodsworth
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 39,34 MB
Release : 2019-08-21
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1317281713
This monograph takes up recent advances in social network methods in sociology, together with data on economic segregation, in order to build a quantitative analysis of the class and network effects implicated in vowel change in a Southern American city. Studies of sociolinguistic variation in urban spaces have uncovered durable patterns of linguistic difference, such as the maintenance of blue collar/white collar distinctions in the case of stable linguistic variables. But the underlying interactional origins of these patterns, and the interactional reasons for their durability, are not well understood, due in part to the near-absence of large-scale network investigation. This book undertakes a sociolinguistic network analysis of data from the Raleigh corpus, a set of conversational interviews collected form natives of Raleigh, North Carolina, from 2008-2017. Acoustic analysis of the corpus shows the rapid, ongoing retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift and increasing participation in national vowel changes. The social distribution of these trends is explored via standard social factors such as occupation as well as innovative network variables, including a measure of nestedness in the community network. The book aims to pursue new network-based questions about sociolinguistic variation that can be applied to other corpora, making this key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics as well as those interested in further understanding how existing quantitative network methods from sociological research might be applied to sociolinguistic data.
Author : Catherine Delesse
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 37,98 MB
Release : 2018-06-11
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1527512231
This collection of eleven essays traces the complex paths of change taken by the English language in its long history, from its Indo-European origins to the present day. Just like any other language, English is a complex system made up of several interconnected sub-systems – lexical, syntactical, phonological, morphological – and all of those sub-systems are subject to change, resulting in constant shifts and readjustments. Additionally, more than some other languages, English has a history marked by strong upheavals, particularly with the influence of Scandinavian and Romance languages in the Middle Ages. The contributions here consider all aspects of that complex history, with four of them taking a particular interest in the issues brought about by language contact with French and Latin.
Author : Ralph Penny
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 16,83 MB
Release : 2004-05-20
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 9780521604505
This book applies recent theoretical insights to trace the development of Castilian and Latin American Spanish from the Middle Ages onwards, through processes of repeated dialect mixing both within the Iberian Peninsula and in the New World. The author contends that it was this frequent mixing which caused Castilian to evolve more rapidly than other varieties of Hispano-Romance, and which rendered Spanish particularly subject to levelling of its linguistic irregularities and to simplification of its structures. These two processes continued as the language extended into and across the Americas. These processes are viewed in the context of the Hispano-Romance dialect continuum, which includes Galician, Portuguese and Catalan, as well as New World varieties. The book emphasises the subtlety and seamlessness of language variation, both geographical and social, and the impossibility of defining strict boundaries between varieties. Its conclusions will be relevant both to Hispanists and to historical sociolinguists more generally.
