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Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars
Abstract
Foreigners often say that the English language is "easy". A language like Spanish is challenging in its variety of verb endings and gender for nouns, whereas English is more straightforward. But linguists generally deny claims that certain languages are 'easier' than others, since it is assumed that all languages are complex to the same degree. For example, they will point to English's use of the word "do" - Do you know French? This usage is counter-intuitive and difficult for non-native speakers. This book agrees that all languages are complex, but questions whether or not they are all equally complex. The topic of complexity has become an area of great debate in recent years, particularly in creole studies, historical linguistics, and language contact. This book describes when languages came into contact (when French-speakers ruled the English for a few centuries, or the Vikings invaded England), a large number of speakers are forced to learn a new language quickly and thus came up with a simplified version, a pidgin. When this ultimately turns into a "real" language, a creole, the result is still simpler and less complex than a "non-interrupted" language that has been around for a long time. This book makes the case that this kind of simplification happens by degrees, and criticizes linguists who are reluctant to say that, for example, English is simpler than Spanish for socio-historical reasons. It analyzes how various languages that seem simple but are not creoles, actually are simpler than they would be if they had not been broken down by large numbers of adult learners. In addition to English, the book looks at Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Malay, and some Arabic varieties.
... In section 1.1, we already mentioned the idea that pidgins and creoles are in general less complex than languages with a long history and uninterrupted transmission. More generally, in recent work (e.g., Trudgill 1997Trudgill , 2009Trudgill , 2011Trudgill , 2017Kusters 2003Kusters , 2008McWhorter 2007McWhorter , 2008Lupyan & Dale 2010;Bentz & Winter 2013;Bentz et al. 2015;Bentz 2016), claims have been advanced that the overall degree of complexity as well as certain particular types of grammatical complexity correlate with such socioecological conditions of language use as high vs. low degree of contact, number of adult learners, size and geographic expansion of the speaker population, and some others (see also Tinits 2014 for a behavioural experiment with a miniature artificial language). Significantly, most of such studies have focused on simplification caused by language contact (see Dorian 1978;McWhorter 2001; among many others), emphasizing that morphological complexity requires long-term periods of socioecological stability to develop (Dahl 2004). ...
... Complexities in certain domains of morphology represent a challenge for the adult learner and tend to be eroded with the increase of the number of adult learners at a given point in the history of a speech community. This adaptive response of language structures to social factors has been claimed to be also crucial to understand how gender systems change through time and how they are distributed worldwide (Trudgill 1999;Nichols 2003;McWhorter 2007). For a number of language families around the world (e.g., Indo-European and Niger-Congo) grammatical gender can be reconstructed as a feature of the protolanguage, and as one of the most long-lived. ...
... Third, and last, the data suggest that gender marking, which has often been described as a redundant and seemingly afunctional phenomenon in grammar (Trudgill 1999;McWhorter 2007), may in fact have important ties to the way in which speakers and speech communities construe their linguistic identity in opposition to that of their neighbours. This appears to be even more evident when, as in the case of Makanza Lingala, gender distinctions and gender agreement patterns that have got lost as a result of natural language evolution are reintegrated through policies of language planning and standardization. ...
The volume deals with the multifaceted nature of morphological complexity understood as a composite rather than unitary phenomenon as it shows an amazing degree of crosslinguistic variation. It features an Introduction by the editors that critically discusses some of the foundational assumptions informing contemporary views on morphological complexity, eleven chapters authored by an excellent set of contributors, and a concluding chapter by Östen Dahl that reviews various approaches to morphological complexity addressed in the preceding contributions and focuses on the minimum description length approach. The central eleven chapters approach morphological complexity from different perspectives, including the language-particular, the crosslinguistic, and the acquisitional one, and offer insights into issues such as the quantification of morphological complexity, its syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic aspects, diachronic developments including the emergence and acquisition of complexity, and the relations between morphological complexity and socioecological parameters of language. The empirical evidence includes data from both better-known languages such as Russian, and lesser-known and underdescribed languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas, as well as experimental data drawn from iterated artificial language learning.
... For this reason, both Meisel et al. (2013) and Westergaard (2021) have raised credible objections on the purported link between monolingual acquisition and diachronic language change, maintaining instead that language contact through second (L2) acquisition or bilingualism in the parental generation brings about changes in the E-language that is the input to the I-language of their children. Their position bodes well with the consensus in sociolinguistics (Bentz & Winter, 2014;McWhorter, 2007;Meisel et al., 2013;Trudgill, 2001): that adult L2 learners are the main agents of language change because L2 acquisition generally results in non-native attainment after puberty (Johnson & Newport, 1989;Hartshorne et al., 2018). ...
... Birdsong (2018, p. 10) even writes: "Among international adoptees and heritage speakers, dominance shifts involve attrition of the L1, a representational and functional loss which likewise reflects neural plasticity." Therefore, under certain circumstances, heritage speakers are driving the changes of their heritage language (not the majority language) which, when diffused or spread to other generations and speakers with different proficiency in the heritage language, creates a new variety of the language, in the same manner proposed for the diachronic evolution of standard languages with many non-native speakers (McWhorter, 2007). ...
It has been suggested that the parents of heritage speakers (2nd generation immigrants), who are the main source of input to them, may exhibit first-language (L1) attrition in their language, thereby directly transmitting different structural properties or “errors” to the heritage speakers. Given the state of current knowledge of inconsistent input in L1 acquisition, age of acquisition effects in bilingualism, and how long it takes children to master different properties of their native language, it is highly unlikely that immigrant parents are directly transmitting patterns of language attrition to their heritage language children. The argument advanced in this article is that if the patterns evident in heritage speakers and first-generation immigrants are related, reverse transmission may be at play instead, when the heritage speakers might be influencing the language of the parents rather than the other way around. Theoretical and empirical evidence for this proposal may explain the emergence of the variety of Spanish spoken in the United States.
... It is tempting, but highly speculative at present, to link these differences to the sociolinguistic history of the different languages. There is abundant literature suggesting a link between high levels of contact or historical L2 adult language acquisition and morphological simplification (Bentz & Winter, 2013;Kusters, 2003;Lupyan & Dale, 2010a;McWhorter, 2007;Trudgill, 2011). Spanish is the most widely spoken Romance language and has historically expanded dramatically from its small home in North-Western Castille to close to 500 million people nowadays, spread across 22 countries covering close to 10% of the global land area. ...
This paper presents VeLeSpa, a verbal lexicon of Peninsular Spanish, which contains the full paradigms (all 63 cells) in phonological form of 6553 verbs, along with their corresponding frequencies. In this paper, the process and decisions involved in the building of the resource are presented. In addition, based on the most frequent 3000 + verbs, a quantitative analysis is conducted of morphological predictability in Spanish verbal inflection. The results and their drivers are discussed, as well as observed differences with other Romance languages and Latin.
... The fact remains, however, that, in the absence of these controls, morphological complexity could be systematically overestimated in some languages, particularly in underresearched and unstandardised languages. This has very notable implications for cross-linguistic research on morphological-paradigmatic complexity (Ackerman & Malouf, 2013;Stump & Finkel, 2013;Beniamine, 2018), as well as for the general validity of results and claims regarding the greater morphological complexity of low-contact languages with small speech communities (Kusters, 2003;McWhorter, 2007;Lupyan & Dale, 2010;Trudgill, 2011). Although, as the remainder of this section shows, very high levels of complexity do hold for Central Pame, it should be carefully explored whether the extraordinary complexity reported for some other underresearched inflectional systems could be to some extent an artefact of variation. ...
This paper reports on the compilation and quantitative analysis of VeLePa, an inflected lexicon containing paradigms of 216 Central Pame verbs and a total of 12528 elicited words, in phonological form, supplied with cell and lexeme frequency information. The language (Otomanguean) is of interest due to both its extraordinary morphological complexity, as well as due to the organization of the inflection into a four-fold concurrent classification system where prefixes, stems, tone-stress, and suffixes all display inflection classes and irregularities which are only partially predictable from each other. A quantitative analysis of morphological predictability as per the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem is conducted for every layer, and for the whole word, as well as of the uncertainties language users face to learn or predict the morphosyntactic values or lexical meaning of a verb form from its morphology.
... These effects have been observed in studies of individual grammars (Dussias et al. 2020) and in varieties used by groups of speakers, such as peer groups (Saad et al. 2019). Potentially, transfer effects may affect the language of the entire speech community (McWhorter 2007;Moro 2019;Ross 2013) or even larger language areas (Hickey 2017), such as the Macro Sudan Belt in West Africa (Güldemann 2008). Because of crosslinguistic transfer, languages in contact converge in terms of particular structural features, becoming more like each other. ...
This paper explores variation in the patterns of reflexivity marking in the Mano language and possible influence from the Kpelle language by using an experimental design with a picture questionnaire. While Kpelle does not have a morphological distinction between reflexive and basic pronouns, the Mano variety spoken by Mano-dominant individuals does possess such a distinction in 3sg. In contrast, the Mano variety spoken by Kpelle-dominant individuals shows a pattern borrowing from Kpelle into Mano, whereby the basic pronoun is used for both coreferential and disjoint readings. In a bilingual village, however, despite daily usage of both languages, almost all speakers from our sample manifest a uniform pattern that aligns closely with the monolingual Mano pattern of reflexivity marking. Therefore, the intensity of contact alone does not predict the amount of influence of Kpelle on Mano. Contrary to predictions by Labov (2010. Principles of linguistic change. Volume 3, Cognitive and cultural factors. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell: 5), we conclude that the languages spoken in a multilingual speech community do not necessarily converge and that a balanced multilingual community may provide enough input to acquire monolingual-like competence, at least according to the specific parameter under investigation. In the long run, however, convergence between Mano and Kpelle could indeed be taking place, with Mano losing its reflexivity contrasts, having already lost the contrast in 3pl.
... Gender systems are treated as grammatically complex features primarily due to the obligatory grammatical marking associated with these systems (McWhorter et al. 2007). However, in some languages, the presence of gender systems will add to grammatical complexity when it is defined through other criteria, such as inflectional morphology, irregularity, or disruptions in meaning-form correspondences (Miestamo 2008;Lupyan and Dale 2010;Trudgill 2011). ...
Humans categorize the experience they encounter in various ways, which is mirrored, for instance, in grammatical gender systems of languages. In such systems, nouns are grouped based on whether they refer to masculine/feminine beings, (non-)humans, (in)animate entities, or objects with specific shapes. Languages differ greatly in how many gender assignment rules are incorporated in gender systems and how many word classes carry gender marking (gender agreement patterns). It has been suggested that these two dimensions are positively associated as numerous assignment rules are better sustained by numerous agreement patterns. We test this claim by analyzing the correlated evolution (Continuous method in BayesTraits) and making the causal inferences about the relationships (phylogenetic path analysis) between these 2 dimensions in 482 languages from the global Grambank database. By applying these methods to linguistic data matched to phylogenetic trees (a world tree and individual families), we evaluate whether various types of gender assignment rules (semantic, phonological, and unpredictable) are causally linked to more gender agreement patterns on the global level and in individual language families. Our results on the world language tree suggest that semantic rules are weakly positively correlated with gender agreement and that the development of agreement patterns is facilitated by different rules in individual families. For example, in Indo-European languages, more agreement patterns are caused by the presence of phonological and unpredictable rules, while in Bantu languages, the driving force of agreement patterns is the variety of semantic rules. Our study shows that the relationships between agreement and rules are family-specific and yields support to the idea that more distinct rules and/or rule types might be more robust in languages with more pervasive gender agreement.
... Specifically, in the case of Arabic, MSA is usually written, while CA is most commonly oral; this has been the case for many centuries throughout the Arab world. This correlation creates an interdependency between the effects of modality and register on the grammatical structures of Arabic (Holes, 2004;McWhorter, 2007;Ibrahim, 2009). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that this correlation between register and modality is rapidly declining, since, in the past decade, many write colloquial Arabic in digital media. ...
Numerous scholars have demonstrated the existence of pervasive directionality in verbal metaphors, for example when comparing the two terms ‘conscience’ and ‘compass’, the preferred direction would be ‘Conscience is a compass’, while saying ‘A compass in conscience’ would be anomalous Most of the theories in this field claim that the directionality of metaphors stems from the conceptual level (Lakoff and Johnson, in Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, 1980; in philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. HarperCollins, 1999), while recently, a few researchers have pointed to the critical influence of different grammatical structures on directionality (Shen & Porat, in Handbook of categorization in cognitive science, chapter 47. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-101107-2.00047-6, 2017; Gil and Shen, Frontiers in Psychology: Language Sciences, 10, 2275). Such findings showing the significant impact of linguistic factors on metaphor directionality lead to the hypothesis that different linguistic modalities can affect metaphor directionality. In this study, we examined for the first time the effect of the linguistic medium on directionality, mainly focusing on modality (written vs. oral). The language chosen for the study was Arabic, which, because of its diglossic state, has one of the biggest differences between the two modalities in the daily life of its speakers. Two Arabic-speaking groups were asked to produce asymmetric similes using 32 metaphoric pairs: one group performed the task in written form using Modern Standard Arabic, and the other in oral form using Colloquial Palestinian Arabic, and then computing the percentage of the similes emitted in the preferred direction (directionality). The results showed a significant difference in directionality percentages between the two mediums favoring the written MSA, in accordance with our hypothesis. The findings are discussed with regard to metaphor directionality theory, as well as the effect of the linguistic medium.
... Specifically, in the case of Arabic, MSA is usually written, while CA is most commonly oral; this has been the case for many centuries throughout the Arab world. This correlation creates an interdependency between the effects of modality and register on the grammatical structures of Arabic (Holes, 2004;McWhorter, 2007;Ibrahim, 2009). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that this correlation between register and modality is rapidly declining, since, in the past decade, many write colloquial Arabic in digital media. ...
Numerous scholars have demonstrated the existence of pervasive directionality in verbal metaphors, for example when comparing the two terms ‘conscience’ and ‘compass’, the preferred direction would be ‘Conscience is a compass’, while saying ‘A compass in conscience’ would be anomalous Most of the theories in this field claim that the directionality of metaphors stems from the conceptual level (Lakoff and Johnson, in Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, 1980; in philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. HarperCollins, 1999), while recently, a few researchers have pointed to the critical influence of different grammatical structures on directionality (Shen & Porat, in Handbook of categorization in cognitive science, chapter 47. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-101107-2.00047-6, 2017; Gil and Shen, Frontiers in Psychology: Language Sciences, 10, 2275). Such findings showing the significant impact of linguistic factors on metaphor directionality lead to the hypothesis that different linguistic modalities can affect metaphor directionality. In this study, we examined for the first time the effect of the linguistic medium on directionality, mainly focusing on modality (written vs. oral). The language chosen for the study was Arabic, which, because of its diglossic state, has one of the biggest differences between the two modalities in the daily life of its speakers. Two Arabic-speaking groups were asked to produce asymmetric similes using 32 metaphoric pairs: one group performed the task in written form using Modern Standard Arabic, and the other in oral form using Colloquial Palestinian Arabic, and then computing the percentage of the similes emitted in the preferred direction (directionality). The results showed a significant difference in directionality percentages between the two mediums favoring the written MSA, in accordance with our hypothesis. The findings are discussed with regard to metaphor directionality theory, as well as the effect of the linguistic medium.
... Second, the previous studies involve widely different linguistic phenomena that are assumed to be comparable only through the lens of the umbrella term "grammatical complexity." Grammatical complexity has many facets: the number of markers, irregularity, obligatoriness, compositionality, redundancy, and reliance on phonologically fused rather than independent forms (5,6,24,25). The multifaceted nature of complexity means that a language is seen as more complex as it increases the number of grammatical cases and determiners, irregular verb forms, noncompositional constructions, agreement patterns, and/or phonologically fused markers expressing different functions. ...
Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of nonnative speakers (societies of strangers) tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their grammatical markers. Here, we test these claims using a global dataset of grammatical structures, Grambank. We model the impact of the number of native speakers, the proportion of nonnative speakers, the number of linguistic neighbors, and the status of a language on grammatical complexity while controlling for spatial and phylogenetic autocorrelation. We deconstruct "grammatical complexity" into two separate dimensions: how much morphology a language has ("fusion") and the amount of information obligatorily encoded in the grammar ("informativity"). We find several instances of weak positive associations but no inverse correlations between grammatical complexity and sociodemographic factors. Our findings cast doubt on the widespread claim that grammatical complexity is shaped by the sociolinguistic environment.
... Filppula et al. 2002Filppula et al. , 2008Emonds & Faarlund 2014, respectively). McWhorter (2007) argues that languages with a lot of adult language learning remain in one stage. His examples include English, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Colloquial Arabic, and Malay. ...
... As historical linguists we must denounce the validity of this explanation as to the origins of popular Brazilian and note that there is ample evidence that morphological complexity decreases in languages when (a) they are spoken by large numbers of speakers (Nettle 2012;Lupyan and Dale 2010), (b) they have been subject to language contact and dialect mixing (Trudgill 2001(Trudgill , 2010(Trudgill , 2011 and (c) they have been learned as a second language by adults (Bentz et al. 2015;Bentz and Winter 2013;Trudgill 2001;McWhorter 2007). The Portuguese of Brazil fulfils all of these conditions since in South-America the numbers of native speakers expanded exponentially, and, ...
This paper examines the deeply ingrained nature of linguistic prejudice towards popular varieties of Brazilian Portuguese and analyses it with reference to the work of the French philosopher and sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s theory captures the fact that language variety (like race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.) is a human variable, and variables are sensitive to being associated with some type of social meaning, entirely independent of the inherent characteristics and qualities of the variable. From this viewpoint, non-standard forms of a language are given a devalued price, and one’s linguistic competence, the ability to adopt different ways of speaking, functions as linguistic capital in the market of the nation/state. In this sense, linguistic prejudice can be understood as ‘symbolic violence’, whereby society is structured not only to devalue non-standard speech but also to convince its citizens, including the speakers of non-standard forms, that certain ways of speaking have less worth and are somehow inferior to the speech of others. Linguistic prejudice is also analysed from a hermeneutic point of view, from which the belief that the standard form of the language is the superior form constitutes society’s horizon of intelligibility. We also analyse the most common educational measure to deal with language variation in a non-discriminatory way: the theory of differences and the proposal of bidialectalism. We argue that these measures are of limited effect since they are based on naïve conclusions of sociolinguistic studies which propose that linguistic prejudice can be combatted via a ‘principle of error correction’ (Lewis, Language and Society, 47(3), 325–346, 2018) whereby the focus is on changing beliefs of individuals. We argue that it is more important to analyse the political, historical and social factors which sustain and reinforce such beliefs and the material structures which endorse and promote them. We conclude by proposing a number of solutions to combat linguistic prejudice in Brazil, related to accepting and celebrating the linguistic diversity within Brazilian Portuguese whilst at the same time maintaining a written standard and the unity of the Brazilian language and the Brazilian people.KeywordsLinguistic prejudice and discriminationBourdieuSymbolic power of languagePrinciple of error correctionPopular Brazilian Portuguese
... This unequal relationship affects language as well, where the language of the weaker group is displaced or replaced by that of the dominant one. This phenomenon is described linguistically, where the substrate denotes the vestiges of a language of low prestige relative to the superstrate, i.e. the typically high prestige idiom that displaces it [1,2]. However, even when the substrate language goes extinct, some of its vocabulary may pass into the dominant language that replaced it, serving as a reminder of the prior linguistic situation of that particular population or area. ...
The common toad (Bufo bufo) has been the subject of many folk tales and superstitions in Western Europe, and as a result, it is characterised by numerous common names (zoonyms). However, the zoonyms of the toad and its associated traditions have remained unexplored in the Balkans, one of Europe’s linguistic hotspots. In the present study, it was attempted to fill this knowledge gap by focusing on Greece, where more than 7.700 individuals were interviewed both in the field and through online platforms, in order to document toad zoonyms from all varieties and dialects of Greek, as well as local non-Greek languages such as Arvanitika, South Slavic dialects, and Vlach. It was found that the academically unattested zoonyms of the toad provide an unmatched and previously unexplored linguistic and ethnographic tool, as they reflect the linguistic, demographic, and historical processes that shaped modern Greece. This is particularly pertinent in the 21st century, when a majority of the country’s dialects and languages are in danger of imminent extinction–and some have already gone silent. Overall, the present study shows the significance of recording zoonyms of indigenous and threatened languages as excellent linguistic and ethnographic tools that safeguard our planet’s ethnolinguistic diversity and enhance our understanding on how pre-industrial communities interacted with their local fauna. Furthermore, in contrast to all other European countries, which only possess one or only a few zoonyms for the toad, the Greek world boasts an unmatched 37 zoonyms, which attest to its role as a linguistic hotspot.
... Secondand perhaps more importantlythe previous studies involve widely different linguistic phenomena that are assumed to be comparable only through the lens of the umbrella term "grammatical complexity". Grammatical complexity has many facets: the number of markers, irregularity, obligatoriness, compositionality, redundancy, and reliance on phonologically fused rather than independent forms (5,6,24,25). The multifaceted nature of complexity means that a language is seen as more complex as it increases the number of grammatical cases and determiners, irregular verb forms, non-compositional constructions, agreement patterns, and/or phonologically fused markers expressing different functions. ...
Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The Linguistic Niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of non-native speakers (societies of strangers) will tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their range of grammatical markers. Here, we test such claims using a new global dataset of grammatical structures - Grambank. We model the impact of the number of native speakers, the proportion of non-native speakers, the number of linguistic neighbors, and the status of a language on grammatical complexity while controlling for spatial and phylogenetic autocorrelation. We deconstruct "grammatical complexity" into two separate dimensions: (i) how much morphology a language has ("fusion"), and (ii) the amount of information obligatorily encoded in the grammar ("informativity"). We find several instances of weak positive associations but no inverse correlations between grammatical complexity and sociodemographic factors. Our findings cast doubt on the widespread assumption that grammatical complexity is shaped by the sociolinguistic environment.
... Regarding the economy criterion, Сашко's mixed languages exhibit more manners of expression of a given categorial distinction than their sources -there are more forms or structures available to express a given domain, concept, or function. Indeed, all mixed languages developed by Сашко are characterized by synonymy, redundancy, allomorphy, free variations, and the nearly pedantic maintenance of broadly understood exceptions -phenomena that typically increase complexity in languages (McWhorter 2007(McWhorter , 2008Hammarström 2008: 29). ...
This study examines the idiolect of Сашко – a hyper-multilingual global nomad whose language repertoire draws on forty languages, ten of which he speaks with native or native-like proficiency. By analyzing grammatical and lexical features typifying Сашко’s translanguaging practices (code-switches, code-borrowings, and code-mixes), as documented in the corpus of reflexive notes that span the last twenty-five years, the author designs Сашко’s translanguaged grammar. Instead of being a passive additive pluralization of separated, autonomous, and static monolects, Сашко’s grammar emerges as a deeply orchestrated, unitary, and dynamic strategy. From Сашко’s perspective, this grammar constitutes a tool to express his rebellious and defiant identity; a tool that – while aiming to combat Western mono-culturalisms, compartmented multilingualisms, and nationalisms – ultimately leads to Сашко’s linguistic and cultural homelessness. This paper – the last in a series of three articles – is dedicated to Сашко’s mixed languages and translanguaged grammar typifying Сашко-lect in its integrity.
... Em linhas gerais, a complexidade estrutural pode ser expressa pela complementariedade entre as áreas da gramática, pela operação com mais regras, pela utilização de mais recursos na manifestação de um fenômeno linguístico, pelo número de irregularidades na estrutura, ou ainda, pelo tipo de complexidade apresentada: mais formas variáveis, menos formas variáveis (MCWHORTER, 2007;KUSTERS, 2008;PARKVALL, 2008;GOOD, 2012). De acordo com Nunes (2021, p. 216), a complexidade está alinhada à ideia de variação e à liberdade que as estruturas linguísticas apresentam 12 . ...
Este estudo analisa a categoria dos ideofones no kreyòl (crioulo haitiano), itens lexicais que representam uma ideia em um som. O trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar as propriedades estruturais dos ideofones haitianos relacionadas aos âmbitos morfofonológico, sintático e semântico. O embasamento teórico segue Samarin (1965), Childs (1994a, 1994b), Dingemanse (2011), Costa (2017), entre outros autores. Quanto aos preceitos metodológicos, a investigação parte da recolha de dados em fontes já existentes, sobretudo, Prou (2000) e Champion et al. (2015). Um corpus de 81 dados de ideofones foi reanalisado e reclassificado a partir de três critérios para uma palavra ser considerada um ideofone no kreyòl: (1) apresentar conteúdo/traço onomatopaico, (2) sofrer reduplicação (morfo)fonológica e (3) não possuir somente conteúdo nominal. Logo, o corpus passou a contar com 66 dados, que foram tratados nos softwares Excel e Dekereke. Dentre as hipóteses levantadas, assumimos que os ideofones haitianos representam um marcador de complexidade gramatical, posto que as suas características gerais indicam a utilização de diferentes recursos para expressar um mesmo fenômeno. Além disso, destacamos que a morfofonologia é a área de análise mais produtiva dos ideofones haitianos. Em linhas gerais, as principais características estruturais dos ideofones do kreyòl são: (1) para a sintaxe – tendem a ocorrer em sentenças declarativas, manifestam-se em posição sintática medial e/ou final; (2) para a morfofonologia – apresentam formatos morfofonológicos variados (A, A.A, A.B.B, A.B.C etc); sofrem reduplicação total e parcial, e reduplicação morfológica e fonológica; obedecem aos inventários vocálico e consonantal existentes no kreyòl, bem como seguem a estrutura silábica canônica (CV, CVC, CCV etc.); e (3) para a semântica – podem ser enquadrados em diferentes macrocategorias semânticas, sendo as mais expressivas: ações, sons e movimentos.
... Space limitations do not allow for a detailed discussion of how Brazilian Portuguese became so different; suffice to say that it was the result of an almost total disregard for education from colonial to modern times combined with prolonged and extensive (a) contact with other languages, (b) acquisition as a second language by adult speakers (mainly indigenous peoples, African slaves, and foreign immigrants), (c) regular exponential increases in the number of native speakers, and (d) dialect mixing and koinéisation due to population migrations. The linguistics literature is clear in predicting the outcome of such social circumstances: rapid and, at times, transformative linguistic change, particularly towards the simplification of the inflectional morphology (Bentz, Verkerk, Kiela, Hill, & Buttery, 2015;Bentz & Winter, 2013;Lupyan & Dale, 2010;McWhorter, 2007;Nettle, 2012;Nichols & Bentz, 2017;Trudgill, 1986Trudgill, , 2001Trudgill, , 2010Trudgill, , 2011) and complexification of the phonology as a marker of local identity. ...
In this article I offer an extended socio-historical overview of the Portuguese language in Brazil from independence to modern times in order to establish why there is such a gulf between the written official standard and actual linguistic usage. I reflect on how language is often regarded as a problem within educational contexts and how the response of academics in both linguistics and education studies has largely been focused on combating linguistic prejudice against non-standard varieties of Portuguese. I identify this as a recognition-oriented strategy aimed at changing attitudes towards non-standard forms of the language and its speakers and I question the effectiveness of such strategies. I argue that there are more fundamental structural problems with language and education in Brazil. These are identified as (a) the linguistic distance between the speech of the great majority of Brazilians and the official standard norm and (b) the uncertainty whether the education system is designed to teach this standard norm or, paradoxically, to assess the extent to which it is acquired. I conclude with an analysis of modern education policy documents where I find no strong emphasis for ensuring that students achieve active, advanced proficiency in the standard norm. I argue that recognition-orientated strategies need to be accompanied by strategies that advocate for structural changes in (a) the standard language to make it more readily resemble the actual speech of Brazilians and (b) how this standard is used as a means of instruction and assessment. Para a versão em português clique no botão de download à direita.
... Linguists often compare the complexity of languages. Most commonly, this involves comparing individual grammatical systems based on the number of types of which they are composed (McWhorter 2007) or on the length of their linguistic descriptions (Dahl 2004). 1 For example, we can say the vowel inventory of English is more complex than Mandarin because it has more vowels (Maddieson 2013a), and the tonal system of Mandarin is more complex than English because it has more tones (Maddieson 2013b). Similarly, we can say languages that lack inflection like Hausa and Vietnamese have relatively simple morphologies (Bickel and Nichols 2013). ...
In this paper, I introduce a situational approach to the study of linguistic complexity. As opposed to most research on linguistic complexity, which has focused on the grammatical complexity of languages, I consider this topic from a situational perspective. I make two proposals. First, I claim that languages can vary in their situational diversity. Languages that have been adapted for a wider range of communicative contexts are more situationally complex than languages that have been adapted for a narrower range of communicative contexts. To support this claim, I consider examples of situational diversity from across a range of different languages and varieties of languages, drawing on empirical research from linguistics and anthropology. Second, I claim that situational diversity can help explain variation in grammatical complexity. I propose that increasing situational diversity in a language over time should lead to decreasing grammatical complexity. Furthermore, I argue that this trade-off between situational and grammatical complexity could explain how overall linguistic complexity could be maintained across languages and over time.
Passive sentences in Spanish come in different varieties and present complexity at the syntactic, semantic and morphological level. This study reviews research showing that child and adult heritage speakers of Spanish develop basic knowledge of these complex sentences early on, even when these are not very frequent in spoken input, but they may be less efficient than baseline speakers interpreting different word orders, gender agreement, the semantics of the by-phrase, and the aspectual interpretation of the copulas ser and estar. Accuracy with the production and comprehension of passives is related to proficiency in the heritage language, and literacy experience enhances the acquisition of all the complexities of verbal passives in Spanish.
The expansion of world Englishes into Tajikistan's language ecology has steadily progressed since Tajikistan's independence, with English now widely taught in the education system and used in international and national organisations as a language of wider communication alongside Tajik and Russian, adding to the sociolinguistic complexity of Tajikistan's multilingual, even plurilingual language ecology. This entry documents the rising status of English from Soviet times until today, examining its place in education and society, and critically assessing knowledge about English in Tajikistan. Accordingly, the entry reviews research published in Tajik, Russian and English on the English in Tajikistan, examining the language's place in employment, in education as a foreign language subject, in English‐medium instruction and potentially in multilingual or plurilingual education. In this entry, a critical overview is provided of sociolinguistic and applied linguistic research on English, looking at domestic and international publication on English in Tajikistan, published by domestic, regional and international researchers.
Human population history, as traced by our genome, has shaped the distribution of languages around the world. While case studies suggest that population history can also affect specific structures of languages, such as patterns in their sound systems and grammars, results are conflicting, and it remains unknown whether such effects hold globally. Here we show that, adjusting for geography, phylogeny, and environment, genetic diversity is inversely correlated with diversity in linguistic structures. Low genetic diversity (i.e. excess homozygosity) results from relative isolation, and this promotes diversification in language. High genetic diversity results from contact and migration, and this promotes homogenization in language. These effects are particularly pronounced in Asia and, under some conditions, also in a few other areas, suggesting sociocultural factors contributing to differences in how strongly isolation favors linguistic diversity and how strongly contact promotes linguistic homogenization. Our results suggest that present-day hotspots of linguistic diversity, which are characterized by relative isolation, may provide a privileged window on the dynamics of linguistic evolution as they are less affected by the vast demographic expansions, migrations, and extinctions that characterize the Neolithic age.
The paper aims to clarify the concept of complexity from a typological perspective. This study involves a survey of various definitions of linguistic complexity. Different types of complexity are distinguished (e.g. absolute complexity and relative complexity or complexity for the user) and are related to different linguistic approaches. Furthermore, we provide an analysis of complexity from a typological perspective, discussing the limitations that interlinguistic analysis poses to the concept of complexity. To assess the viability of the Typological complexity, languages from the two opposite parameters of minimal and maximal morphological complexity are considered.
The contribution, in conclusion, demonstrates that we can consider typological complexity only at the local level and we can relate complexity to the synthesis index. The greater the number of morphemes on a word shown by a language, the greater is its degree of complexity. It is not, however, possible to adopt other types of complexity (e.g., complexity for the user) with a typological approach.
In the multicultural and multilingual situation of Malaysia, Malays, Chinese, Tamils and a number of smaller groups live together, partly in their own cultural environment, but also in close interaction. This creates a multilingual environment which leads to multiple linguistic interferences at the level of spoken varieties, called “bahasa rojak” (‘language mix’) by the speakers. This mixing of linguistic resources follows cultural concepts and ascriptions specific to one of the three main languages. While the spoken vernaculars are lexically influenced by the standard languages, the standard varieties gain localized colloquial, semi-creolized registers: Malaysian English, Malaysian Chinese, Bahasa Pasar. In order to assess the regularities of this multilingual competence, speakers of Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese were interviewed in Kuala Lumpur and Penang in various languages, observing borrowing and code-switching as well as syntactic patterns. An elicitation task was performed in order to compare loanword use and structural analogies across all languages. This study aims to shed light on possible cultural differences and the motivations for lexical and grammatical convergences. The particularly complex situation may simplify with the youngest generation (<20) who do no longer actively use the South Sinitic family languages and may not attempt to learn other Sinitic vernaculars, but will continue to use the localized Malaysian varieties of English and Chinese as well as the spoken form of Malay while also getting educated in the respective standard varieties which are also omnipresent in mass media and the internet.
Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings explores an innovative proposal: that linguistic similarities identified in different forms of contact-influenced varieties of language use (including translation, native and non-native varieties of English, and language use of bilinguals more generally) can be accounted for in a coherent framework grounded in the notion of ‘constrained communication’. These varieties have hitherto been studied in independent scholarly traditions, especially translation studies and world Englishes, leaving the potential underlying unity underexplored, both conceptually and empirically. The chapters collected in this volume aim to develop such a unified perspective by drawing on corpus data across a range of languages and language varieties, with a focus on written language, a neglected data source in research on multilingual contact settings. The findings point to shared general characteristics across individual contact settings, which result from (probabilistically conditioned) manifestations of the same deeper regularities – constraints – present in diverse language-contact settings.
Nel contributo gli autori presentano una revisione ragionata della letteratura italiana o sull’italiano in termini di parametri morfosintattici e lessicali che correlano con una maggiore semplicità linguistica. L’analisi si concentra in particolare sulla varietà dell’italiano istituzionale, cioè la lingua usata dalla pubblica amministrazione. Sarà considerata sia la letteratura linguistica sia quella prodotta nell’ambito dei progetti di semplificazione linguistica realizzati a vario titolo dalla pubblica amministrazione. La revisione dei testi ha come obiettivo la costruzione di una lista dei parametri condivisi e la valutazione, ove possibile, del diverso impatto di ciascuno di essi sulla leggibilità di un testo. La nozione di complessità presa in considerazione in questo contributo è la cosiddetta complessità relativa al ricevente: un parametro considerato più complesso di un altro se la sua presenza in un testo affatica o pregiudica del tutto la comprensione da parte del ricevente-lettore. Gli indici di complessità analizzati sono distinti in base ai livelli di analisi: indice di complessità morfologica; indice di complessità sintattica; indice di complessità lessicale. Gli autori cercano, inoltre, di fornire una ‘schedatura’ (senza pretesa di esaustività) di software che a vario modo utilizzano la nozione di semplificazione dei testi. Vengono presi in esame il software READ-IT, che si rivela utile nella misurazione della leggibilità dei testi giuridici, e il software Corrige, basato sulla formula GULPEASE. Parameters for simplifying institutional Italian: literature review In this contribution, the authors present a reasoned review of the literature on or about Italian in terms of morphosyntactic and lexical parameters that correlate with greater linguistic simplicity. The analysis focuses in particular on the variety of institutional Italian, i.e. the language used by the public administration. Both the linguistic literature and that produced within the framework of the linguistic simplification projects carried out in various capacities by the public administration will be considered. The review of the texts aims at constructing a list of shared parameters and assessing, where possible, the different impact of each of them on the readability of a text. The notion of complexity taken into consideration in this contribution is the so-called receiver-related complexity: a parameter is considered more complex than another if its presence in a text fatigues or completely impairs comprehension by the receiver-reader. The complexity indices analysed are distinguished according to levels of analysis: morphological complexity index; syntactic complexity index; lexical complexity index. The authors also attempt to provide a ‘listing? (without claiming to be exhaustive) of software that uses the notion of text simplification in various ways. They examine the READ-IT software, which proves useful in measuring the readability of legal texts, and the Corrige software, based on the GULPEASE formula.
Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.
The present article studies the structure of the resultative stream (a part of the verbal system that hosts grams diachronically evolving along and synchronically modelled by means of the resultative path: resultative > perfect > perfective/past and resultative > stative > present) in the Fanakalo pidgin as compared to the lexifier Nguni languages (Zulu/Xhosa). The evidence indicates that the organization of the resultative stream in Fanakalo is different from that found in Nguni, attesting to both simplification and complexification, as well as the acceleration of the movement along the resultative path and the cline of structural grammaticalization. This corroborates the views concerning the increase in complexity of stabilized and expanded pidgins and the observation suggesting the acceleration of grammaticalization processes in a situation of contact.
Some grammatical phenomena are more resistant to diachronic change than others. The syntactic core is particularly resilient, raising the question why this is the case and what causes the least vulnerable properties to change. Since fundamental alterations of grammars do not occur across the lifespan of adults, first language acquisition is commonly considered to be the main locus of syntactic change. Under the assumption that language contact leads to cross-linguistic interaction, early bilinguals have been claimed to be the main agents of change. I revisit this debate, focusing on head directionality and V2. Summaries of studies of various acquisition types lead to the conclusion that reanalysis in core syntax does not happen in the course of neither monolingual nor bilingual L1 acquisition. Contrary to hypotheses entertained in diachronic linguistics, neither language contact nor structural ambiguity/complexity has this effect. For core properties to change in L1, the triggering information must be contained in the input. Insufficient exposure, as in heritage language acquisition, can cause morphosyntactic change, though not in the syntactic core. Only second language acquisition exhibits such effects. L2 learners are thus the most likely agents of fundamental syntactic change. I conclude that explanations of the resilience of syntactic phenomena cannot rely exclusively on structural aspects. It results from an interaction of syntactic and developmental factors, defined by grammatical constraint, acquisition principles, and processing demands.
Pakistani English, Received Pronunciation, Semivowels. Being a global lingua franca, English is widely used as a medium of communication, particularly among the educated class in Pakistan. It serves not only as one of the country's official languages but also as a medium of instruction in the higher education sector. Over the years, it has evolved so much that it stands as a distinctive variety of English identified as Pakistani English (PE). Though numerous studies have briefly focused on the phonological deviation of consonants in PE, an in-depth research is needed to analyse each consonant thoroughly. In this regard, this paper aims to explore how PE speakers pronounce the selected English consonants, semivowels [w] and [j], and liquids [l] and [r]. For this purpose, a sample of 20 participants (10 males and 10 Females) enrolled in Masters in English linguistics and literature was selected from a public sector university in Islamabad. Each participant was provided with a list of preselected words for each phoneme and was asked to pronounce them individually. Firstly, we recorded the sessions, then transcribed the data phonemically, and finally, we analysed the data in comparison with the Received Pronunciation (RP) obtained from the PhoTransEdit Online application. The results were illustrated in the stacked bar graph. The findings show that PE deviates from RP in all the respective English semivowels and liquids because these phonemes were not present in their first language, Urdu. Consequently, PE speakers substitute the English phonemes with the nearest available Urdu equivalent. The study is significant because it highlights the salient features of PE in terms of its deviation from RP.
Human evolution is defined by a multifaceted interplay of biological and cultural factors, which comprise the focus of a diverse spectrum of scientific fields. This edited volume aims to establish interdisciplinary links through a series of nine studies that critically discuss the current methods, hypotheses frameworks, and future perspectives for reconstructing habitual behavior in past humans. The authors are specialists in the fields of biological anthropology, primatology, experimental archaeology, and linguistics.
This study investigates diachronic changes in constructional networks illustrated with examples from the Manchuric branch of Tungusic, an endangered language family spoken in Northeast Asia. Earlier studies have noted pronounced differences between this branch and the rest of the family, such as a reduction in morphological complexity and partial restructuring of the morphosyntactic system. Based on the framework of Diachronic Construction Grammar, this study investigates aspects of nominal morphology, including flagging and indexing. These are especially promising for a better understanding of the evolution of Manchuric and have not often been discussed in terms of Construction Grammar.
Our research is dedicated to investigating the semantic attributes of idiomatic expressions in English. We consider phraseology to be a fundamental characteristic of language units, evident at different levels, encompassing individual words to fixed combinations. This observation underscores that a substantial portion of units in the English vocabulary possesses this distinctive trait. A lexical idiom can present itself as a standalone word or represent a lexical-semantic variant with complete or partial semantic integrity. Keywords idioms, figure of speech, foreign borrowings, polysemantic phraseme A functional command of a foreign language necessitates not only the active acquisition of vocabulary and grammatical structures but also the utilization of phraseological units-vivid, figurative idiomatic expressions. Consequently, students' comprehension of the fundamental theoretical and practical aspects of phraseology holds considerable significance. Proficiency in phraseological content, encompassing a substantial portion of the expressive language repertoire, functions as a wellspring for cultivating stable communication skills. This, in turn, infuses the speech of foreign language learners with vitality, emotion, and expressiveness. Mastery of phraseology establishes favorable conditions for a more comprehensive understanding of literary texts and newspaper journalism. According to a particular definition, the term "idiom" is categorized as one of the types of phraseological units. Idiomatic phrases are distinctive expressions within languages, possessing integral and unified meanings in their usage. They typically resist precise translation into other languages, often necessitating substitutions with similar stylistic nuances during the translation process. Practical proficiency in a foreign language involves not only actively acquiring vocabulary and grammatical structures but also employing phraseological units-vivid, figurative idiomatic expressions. In this context, students' understanding of
Background. The multi-ethnic situation in Malaysia translates into a multilingualism with ethnic vernaculars and high convergence between the varieties, including spoken English, Malay, Chinese, and South-Sinitic idioms (disregarding many other languages here). Loanwords, syntactic structures and shared function words lead to communicative practices termed bahasa ro-jak ('language mix'). Material and method. In order to assess ethnolectal differences in the use of shared languages, the Malay function word kena is analyzed in the speech of ethnic Malays and Chinese, both in Bazaar Malay / Colloquial Malay / Baba Malay and in English. Analysis. Kena serves two functions, (a) as a modal verb 'must', (b) as a passive marker. It is used by Malays and Chinese in Bazaar Malay, but with some usage differences based on slightly different semantic interpretations of the word. For Chinese speakers, an alternative passive with the verb 'give' or 'kasi' is transferred onto English and Malay, respectively, obviously from a South Sinitic construction , but Malay speakers don't use this structure. Conclusions. It seems that spoken Malay and English are influenced by the longstanding presence of South Sinitic varieties. The two ethnic groups show small ethnolectal differences when speaking Malay or English. Due to the influence of education, younger speakers seem to reverse the achieved convergence to some degree in favor of the standard forms of the languages involved.
Linguists have long been interested in systems of nominal classification due to their diverse functions as well as cognitive and cultural correlates. Among others, ongoing research has focused on semantic, functional and morphosyntactic properties of complex systems such as co-occurring gender and numeral classifiers. Such approaches have typically focused on the languages of north-western South America and Papua New Guinea. This volume proposes to fill in a gap in existing research by focusing on Asia, based on case studies from languages belonging to a wide range of families, i.e., Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Hmong-Mien, Indo-European, Mongolic, Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai as well as the language isolate Nivkh. Gender and classifiers in these languages are approached within several different perspectives, i.e., functional, typological and diachronic, thus revealing complex patterns in their lexical and pragmatic functions as well as origin, development and loss. Describing and analysing such properties is a unique and innovative contribution of the volume.
Linguists have long been interested in systems of nominal classification due to their diverse functions as well as cognitive and cultural correlates. Among others, ongoing research has focused on semantic, functional and morphosyntactic properties of complex systems such as co-occurring gender and numeral classifiers. Such approaches have typically focused on the languages of north-western South America and Papua New Guinea. This volume proposes to fill in a gap in existing research by focusing on Asia, based on case studies from languages belonging to a wide range of families, i.e., Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Hmong-Mien, Indo-European, Mongolic, Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai as well as the language isolate Nivkh. Gender and classifiers in these languages are approached within several different perspectives, i.e., functional, typological and diachronic, thus revealing complex patterns in their lexical and pragmatic functions as well as origin, development and loss. Describing and analysing such properties is a unique and innovative contribution of the volume.
Due to the widespread use of English around the world, the native‐speaker construct has diminished and the traditional English as a second language/English as a foreign language (ESL/EFL) dichotomy is no longer the dominant view. English is the current global lingua franca and, unlike former lingua francas, is no longer connected to a single country or empire. The predominance of English is driven by education, including science and technology, leading to its use as both a subject and medium of instruction particularly in higher education and the global economy, and its perceived importance in employment and the media. English itself is changing, as observed in the simplification of its grammar, affecting the teaching and learning of the language. The future of English is to be determined more by those who learn it and use it as an additional language than by L1 speakers.
This paper presents VeLeSpa, a verbal lexicon of Peninsular Spanish, which contains the full paradigms (all 63 cells) in phonological form of 6553 verbs, along with their corresponding frequencies. In this paper, the process and decisions involved in the building of the resource are presented. In addition, based on the most frequent 3000 + verbs, a quantitative analysis is conducted of morphological predictability in Spanish verbal inflection. The results and their drivers are discussed, as well as observed differences with other Romance languages and Latin.
20230304 Invitation to contribute to an edition project at ALAL (Asian Languages and Linguistic) Literacy and vernaculars in Southeast Asia [Multilingualism and standard languages in Southeast Asia] Dear Colleagues, SouthEast Asia is a huge linguistic area known for multilingualism and linguistic diversity; however, with the formation of modern, independent states, like in most other areas of the world, national standard languages (and varying language policies) have been introduced which diminish the use of smaller nonstandard languages. Furthermore, global languages such as English, Malay and Chinese are not only used as non-standard linguae francae, but are increasingly transmitted in L2 education as indispensable tools for every modern society. This change from 'natural' language learning out of practical necessity to 'organised' L2 education in global and national languages naturally removes functional domains from the smaller languages which are substantially weakened or given up. It seems that the existing literature on the matter either describes national policies of learning standard languages or the situation of minority languages. This special issue would like to collect information on 'how exactly' the linguistic situation of (urban) multilingual speakers represents itself today, and which directions the development seems to take (language maintenance or shift). This endeavour does not distinguish between autochthonous minorities and (relatively) more recent allochthonous groups which arise due to increased migration movements since the 20th century , or 'dialects' which are 'integrated' into a new standard language (and possibly given up)-leading to "superdiversity", the "roofing over" by standard languages, and then, to a decrease of linguistic diversity. Such language planning also interferes with well-established convergences between contact languages which are now separated again through independent standards (e.g., Malay/Indonesian vs. Spoken Malay vernaculars; Singaporean English vs. Standard English). Such developments are closely connected to the cultural changes in the last decades, with mass media, mixed marriages, wider communicative needs, especially the importance of literacy and globalised communication-areas where smaller languages cannot thrive.
Arabic linguistics encompasses a range of language forms and functions from formal to informal, classical to contemporary, written to spoken, all of which have vastly different research traditions. Recently however, the increasing prominence of new methodologies such as corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics have allowed Arabic linguistics to be studied from multiple perspectives, revealing key discoveries about the nature of Arabic-in-use and deeper knowledge of traditional fields of study. With contributions from internationally renowned experts on the language, this handbook provides a state-of-the-art overview of both traditional and modern topics in Arabic linguistics. Chapters are divided into six thematic areas: applied Arabic linguistics, variation and sociolinguistics, theoretical studies, computational and corpus linguistics, new media studies and Arabic linguistics in literature and translation. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the exciting and rapidly moving field of Arabic linguistics.
A heritage language is the term given to a language spoken at home by bilingual children of immigrant parents. Written by a leading figure in the field, this pioneering, in-depth study brings together three heritage languages – Hindu, Spanish and Romanian - spoken in the United States. It demonstrates how heritage speakers drive morphosyntactic change when certain environmental characteristics are met, and considers the relationship between social and cognitive factors and timing in language acquisition, bilingualism, and language change. It also discusses the implications of the findings for the language education of heritage speakers in the USA and considers how the heritage language can be maintained in the English-speaking school system. Advancing our understanding of heritage language development and change, this book is essential reading for students and researchers of linguistics and multilingualism, immigration, education studies and language policy, as well as educators and policy makers.
Nouns and verbs are known to differ in the types of grammatical information they encode. What is less well known is the relationship between verbal and nominal coding within and across languages. The equi-complexity hypothesis holds that all languages are equally complex overall, which entails trade-offs between coding in different domains. From a diachronic point of view, this hypothesis implies that the loss and gain of coding in different domains can be expected to balance each other out. In this study, we test to what extent such inverse coevolution can be observed in a sample of 244 languages, using data from a comprehensive cross-linguistic database (Grambank) and applying computational phylogenetic modelling to control for genealogical relatedness. We find evidence for coevolutionary relationships between specific features within nominal and verbal domains on a global scale, but not for overall degrees of grammatical coding between languages. Instead, these amounts of nominal and verbal coding are positively correlated in Sino-Tibetan languages and inversely correlated in Indo-European languages. Our findings indicate that accretion and loss of grammatical information in nominal words and verbs are lineage-specific.
In this paper, we will examine the problematic concept of the native speaker, which is central to much linguistic theory, to studies of language acquisition, and to language teaching and assessment. It is a notion which can have ramifications when it comes to the recruitment of language teachers in schools and in university language centres. Often, in private language schools or in the case of language assistants in university language centres and in state schools, whether applicants can describe themselves as native speakers may even determine the fact that they are considered as qualified for a position. In recent years in many areas of linguistic research, the relevance of the native speaker has been increasingly questioned. In the case of international lingua francas, such as English, it has been argued that the contribution of non-native speakers is not to be underestimated (Kachru 1985, Seidlhofer 2005, 2011). Problems regarding the status of native speaker arise within the specific context of language teaching because the concept itself is often conflated with other issues such as language competence and the questionable advocacy of the so-called direct method. In this paper, we will look at the fundamental differences between native and non-native speakers and the place of each on assessment scales such as the CEFR (Council of Europe 2001). We will examine the arguments that have been made against treating the native speaker as the only legitimate point of reference for language teaching and assessment (Cook 1999, Rinvolucri 2001, Graddol 2007). We will also comment on the role of the native speaker in language teaching.
This study describes the diachronic development of modality in South African English (henceforth SAfE) from the early 19th century up to its contemporary state (1820s to 1990s) in the registers of letters, news, fiction/narrative and non-fiction, on the basis of the theoretical framework of sociohistorical linguistics and the empirical approach of corpus linguistics. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are conducted for modal and quasi-modal verbs, by means of the newly compiled historical corpus of SAfE and ICE-SA (with the addition of Afrikaans corpora for comparison). The study explores general frequency changes, register-internal changes and macro- and microsemantic changes, with the focus of the main semantic analysis more strongly on the obligation and necessity cluster1. A set of parameters is compiled for analysing the strength of obligation in the modals must and should, and the quasi-modal HAVE to, and is applied in the microsemantic analyses. The findings are compared with the trends for modality in other native Englishes, such as
American, British and Australian English (cf. e.g. Mair & Leech, 2006; Collins, 2009a; Leech, 2011), in an attempt to present a complete and comprehensive description of SAfE modality, as opposed to the traditional approach of focusing on peculiar features.
It is reported that the trends of modality in SAfE correspond to those of other native varieties in some cases, but do not correspond in others. The modals of SAfE for example have declined more and the quasi-modals have increased less over the 20th century than in other native varieties of English. One particular case in which SAfE is reported to be unique among other varieties, is the quantitative and qualitative trends for must, which has some implications for the manifestation of the democratisation process. Must in SAfE has not declined significantly over the 20th century (as it has in other native varieties) and has become less face threatening, since uses with a median (weaker) degree of force are just as frequent as those with a higher degree of force by the 1990s (unlike in other native varieties, where must has become restricted to high-degree obligative contexts). Based on sociohistorical, as well as linguistic evidence (on both quantitative and qualitative levels), language contact with Afrikaans is posited as the main influence for the increased use of must in contexts that are not face threatening. Extrapolating from the semantic findings, some new insights are offered regarding the phase in which SAfE finds itself within Schneider’s (2003) model of the evolution of New Englishes, and some support is offered for
Bekker’s (2012:143) argument that “SAfE is ...the youngest of the colonial varieties of English”, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. Ultimately, this thesis offers a piece in the larger puzzle that is SAfE, both in terms of linguistic (textual) and sociohistorical (contextual) aspects.
All living beings try to save effort, and humans are no exception. This groundbreaking book shows how we save time and energy during communication by unconsciously making efficient choices in grammar, lexicon and phonology. It presents a new theory of 'communicative efficiency', the idea that language is designed to be as efficient as possible, as a system of communication. The new framework accounts for the diverse manifestations of communicative efficiency across a typologically broad range of languages, using various corpus-based and statistical approaches to explain speakers' bias towards efficiency. The author's unique interdisciplinary expertise allows her to provide rich evidence from a broad range of language sciences. She integrates diverse insights from over a hundred years of research into this comprehensible new theory, which she presents step-by-step in clear and accessible language. It is essential reading for language scientists, cognitive scientists and anyone interested in language use and communication.
A heritage language is a sociopolitically minority and/or minoritized language acquired as the first or one of the first languages in a bilingual or multilingual context. Heritage languages are typically acquired under conditions of reduced exposure and are often used less than the majority language during late childhood and adolescence. Heritage languages show structural differences and changes at all levels of linguistic analysis from baseline grammars that arise from the complex interaction between the nature and quantity of input and the age of bilinguals. Although many situations give rise to heritage languages, this article focuses on immigrants and their children and reviews foundational studies of the linguistic properties of heritage languages; studies of age effects that have shed light on critical differences between first, second, and heritage language acquisition; and recent studies of heritage language relearning and reactivation. The implications of the study of heritage languages for bilingualism and society and for the language and cognitive sciences are discussed.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 9 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
It is hardly surprising that contact-based influence on Arabic, with over 300 million native speakers spoken from Uzbekistan to Morocco to northeast Nigeria, has been important. This article walks through eight different historical and cultural stages of contact, beginning with the under-reported story of pre- and early Islamic Aramaic–Arabic contact. Emerging from the shadow of Aramaic to become the dominant language of the Middle East and southern Mediterranean, Arabic left behind interesting minorities in Andalusia (Spain), Malta, and Cyprus, each marked by special sources of influence from Romance languages and Greek, and in the case of Uzbekistan Arabic, pushed to the point of mixed language status by co-territorial Dari and Uzbek. In the Sudanic region, native varieties have undergone profound influence from co-territorial African languages – Kanuri influence is illustrated here – but only in specific domains of grammar. Elsewhere in Africa, contact has been so intense and so compressed that entirely new pidgin-creole varieties (Nubi/Juba Arabic) have emerged. Arabic-internal contact – inter-dialectal and Standard Arabic – constitutes a continuing dynamic within Arabic societies. Arabic represents an open challenge to general theories of contact – Dixon, van Coetsam, Labov – as important to the study of Arabic as to the study of linguistics.
Language contact - the linguistic and social outcomes of two or more languages coming into contact with each other - has been pervasive in human history. However, where histories of language contact are comparable, experiences of migrant populations have been only similar, not identical. Given this, how does language contact work? With contributions from an international team of scholars, this Handbook - the first in a two-volume set - delves into this question from multiple perspectives and provides state-of-the-art research on population movement and language contact and change. It begins with an overview of how language contact as a research area has evolved since the late 19th century. The chapters then cover various processes and theoretical issues associated with population movement and language contact worldwide. It is essential reading for anybody interested in the dynamics of social interactions in diverse contact settings and how the changing ecologies influence the linguistic outcomes.
Heritage speakers are native speakers of a minority language they learn at home, but due to socio-political pressure from the majority language spoken in their community, their heritage language does not fully develop. In the last decade, the acquisition of heritage languages has become a central focus of study within linguistics and applied linguistics. This work centres on the grammatical development of the heritage language and the language learning trajectory of heritage speakers, synthesizing recent experimental research. The Acquisition of Heritage Languages offers a global perspective, with a wealth of examples from heritage languages around the world. Written in an accessible style, this authoritative and up-to-date text is essential reading for professionals, students, and researchers of all levels working in the fields of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, education, language policies and language teaching.
The question whether all languages are similarly complex is at the centre of some of the most heated debates within linguistics. These debates focus on such issues as the universality of syntactic recursion, the exceptional simplicity of creole languages, complexity trade-offs between structural levels, as well as sociolinguistic correlates of complexity profiles. Discussions concerning complexity have implications that go far beyond linguistics in the narrow sense, including e.g. the role of nature vs. nurture in human cognition and culture, or the distinction between message and noise in information theory. In consequence, debates on linguistic complexity shape our perception of human nature and variation among human populations.
In this Research Topic, we investigate the motivations driving the research on linguistic complexity. Thus, Menzerath’s law about complexity trade-offs was inspired by bottom-up empirical observations. By contrast, the claim about the universality of syntactic recursion was primarily informed by theoretical considerations. Due to its normative dimension, the notion of complexity has also served as a vehicle for advancing ideological agendas, such as characterizing speakers as more or less advanced based on perceived properties of their languages. By bringing these perspectives together, we contribute to a critical assessment of how linguistic research is motivated by both epistemic and non-epistemic goals.
In this study, I argue that the experiential aspect marker in Sinitic languages should be reclassified as an evidential marker based on its semantic characteristics. The analysis shows that the relevant marker in each Sinitic language is used to express the speaker os commitment to the truth of the proposition, specifically, certainty about prior occurrence of an event in its core use. Furthermore, this is founded on either direct observation or knowledge, if not an inference from an observable result state which is made by the speaker.1 On the basis of data from eight Chinese languages, I first discuss why the experiential aspect is, in essence, an evidential marker; next, I outline the two main paths of grammaticalization in Sinitic languages; and finally, I address core and non-core semantic features as a reflection of morphosyntactic and semantic variation within Sinitic languages. I use the framework of prototype theory to analyse the evidential in terms of a radial category (Jurafsky 1997). This is the first study to analyse this grammatical category in Sinitic languages as a whole.
Chechen exhibits three major strategies for the combination of clauses: coordination, chaining, and subordination. The major formal characteristics of these three traditional categories of clause linking are discussed with reference to their basic syntax and semantics as well as to more particular syntactic characteristics, including constituent order and behaviour with respect to negation and
wh
-questions. In addition, these clause combining strategies of Chechen are classified with respect to Foley and Van Valin’s (1984) typology of clause linkage. A particularly useful result of this classification is that it permits a straightforward characterization of the use of the preverbal conjunctive enclitic
’a
as a marker of cosubordination.
In the Hakka dialect, there are more than 40 nouns with gendered suffixes. These gendered nouns are widespread in the daily language including the names of animals, body parts and inanimate objects. Gendered nouns are also found in other neighboring dialects, but to a much lesser extent and they share little homology with these nouns. The occurrence of these nouns is a very interesting phenomenon and their significance is discussed.
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What can be said about articles in Maltese, summarized in Part 1, is confronted with cross-linguistic generalizations about this category, and it is seen, in Part 3, that much of what was said about articles in Maltese reflects, or is derivative of, general truths about Language.
Palenquero is a Spanish-lexicon creole, spoken in El Palenque, Colombia. Descendants of 17th-century runaway slaves, the Palenqueros lived in relative cultural and geographic isolation until the early 1990s. This significantly contributed to the preservation of the local creole. The Palenquero community has been bilingual (Spanish/creole) for at least two centuries. Starting around 1970, the younger generations began to shun the creole. Today only about half of the Palenqueros still speak the local vernacular. Almost the entire Palenquero lexicon is derived from Spanish. The two languages are, however, hardly intelligible to Spanish-speaking outsiders. Differences in grammar are the main reason for this unintelligibility.
The aim of this article is to describe and account for the major word order differences among the Germanic languages.1 The main thesis of the article is that the different placements of the finite verb and related phenomena in these languages can be ascribed to a small set of grammatical differences, mainly involving different distributions of the properties assigned to COMP and INFL. Specifically, I will argue that S is a headed category, and that the choice of head of S is a parameter, the value of which singles out English from the other Germanic languages.
The term Cantonese conventionally designates the urban Yue varieties spoken in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau. Our data come from Cantonese as spoken in Hong Kong, which differs in some respects from that of Guangzhou, and more extensively from other Yue dialects of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, with which it may even be mutually unintelligible. In particular, the influence of spoken Mandarin, still moderate in Hong Kong, is stronger in the mainland: the first tone, for example, is generally pronounced with a high level contour in Hong Kong but high falling in Guangzhou.
This volume contains revised and extended versions of a selection of the papers presented at “The Amsterdam Workshop on Language Contact and Creolization.” These studies apply the concept of relexification to creoles as well as other contact languages; highlight the relevance of strategies of second language learning for theories of pidgin/creole genesis; critically discuss the notions levelling (koine formation) and convergence; the relation between types of contact situations and processes of crosslinguistic influence; as well as the linguistic consequences of the social structure of the plantation system. In addition to discussing English-, French-, and Dutch-related creoles, the papers cover a wide range of contact languages spoken throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe. The breadth and coverage makes this an indispensable title for research in the field of contact linguistics.
Almost all known varieties of vernacular Arabic are characterized by a functional and formal split of the old dual morpheme -ayn. It serves as a dual marker when appended to some nouns, as a plural marker with others; the two functions entail morphophonemic, sometimes also phonetic and syntactic, differences. Some of the features studied can be traced back to the ninth century; others are later developments.
The theoretical observation that certain types of pronominal differentiation are functionally related to certain types of transformational rules leads to a loose concept of a 'functional component' (independent of formal relationships), within which these two aspects of grammar play complementary roles. This complementarity is matched by an empirically observed inverse relationship in the functional values of the two from one language to another. By looking at the functional component as a whole (i.e. at a system rather than at individual elements), we arrive at an interesting new kind of universal.
This paper examines high tone sandhi in Saramaccan, an Atlantic creole spoken in the Surinamese interior, as described by Voorhoeve (1961) and Rountree (1972a). In particular, a comparison is drawn with a similar tonal phenomenon in the Anlo dialect of Ewe (Ghana: Western Gbe) as reported by Clements (1978). Tone sandhi domains in both languages are argued to be delineated by the left edges of maximal projection edges in the syntax. Cross-linguistic work on edge-based mapping relations between syntax and phonology (e.g., Clements, 1978; Selkirk, 1986; Chen, 1987; Odden, 1987) has shown that the shape as well as the use of syntactically-derived prosodic domains varies widely. Similarities as well as differences between Anlo Ewe and Saramaccan tone sandhi environments are examined in light of the sub-stratist and universalist hypotheses of creole genesis, leading to the conclusion that a less polemic view, such as that suggested by Mufwene (1986), provides the best account.
Richly inflected languages often have morphologies in which one or two key relational morphemes serve as the glue which binds other, more substantive morphemes together. When an important relational morpheme suffers phonetic erosion, it may be replaced rather abruptly by a successor morpheme which obtains a foothold in the relevant paradigm and then spreads rapidly, replacing the old morpheme throughout the system. We will refer to this as the 'lost-wax' (cire perdue) method of formal renewal, on the analogy of an ancient method for casting bronze artefacts. The point is illustrated by a close case study of two morphemes, Inverse and Potential, connected with the pronominal agreement system of a set of closely related Australian languages. The mechanics are somewhat different in the two cases, but both can be described as variations on the lost-wax method.
This paper compares Saramaccan and its main substrate language Fongbe, demonstrating that while Saramaccan is hardly a “simple language, Fongbe vastly surpasses it in overspecification and complexity as I characterize these metrics here and in previous papers. The argument makes use of new Saramaccan data collected from informants by the author. It is also shown that the facts are similar in a comparison of Fongbe to another creole for which it served as a major substrate, Haitian Creole. The analysis demonstrates that structural reduction is a significant component in the creolization process, rather than mere inflectional reduction and its syntactic correlates, or relexification of substrate grammars.
Two synchronic tense-marking auxiliaries in Panare are derived etymologically from demonstrative pronouns. The original pronouns differed in spatial deixis, one marking proximate ('this'), the other distal ('that'). They came to be required between predicate noun and subject in predicate nominal clauses, and thus evolved into copulas. As copulas, the deixis of the pronouns shifted to time, with proximal becoming present or immediate future and distal becoming past (but also sometimes interprétable as distant future). These copulas then evolved further to become tense auxiliaries for a new generation of main clause verbs.
1.0. The corpus on which this description of Sathewkok Hakka grammar is based consists of approximately 30.000 “words” of recorded and transcribed texts, mainly short conversations on a number of topics, stories of the folk-tale type, plus a collection of isolated sentences elicited from the informant in the course of the field work. The lexicon, admittedly incomplete as yet, comprises well over 2.000 morphemes, of which about half have been sufficiently analyzed distributionaliy for summary statements to be feasible. The rest needs further research; most of these belong to the “restricted” type of morphemes.
This article is concerned with the basic syntactic and semantic structure of Riau Indonesian, a hitherto undescribed dialect differing in many respects from standard Indonesian and Malay. Riau Indonesian appears to exhibit an abundance of zero-markings of various kinds, in which a wide variety of syntactic constructions and semantic categories lack overt morphosyntactic expression. Two alternative descriptions are provided: an “easy” description, couched in traditional grammatical terminology and a Eurocentric perspective, and a “simple” description, positing a single open syntactic category, and unconstrained rules of semantic interpretation. The latter, simple description, is argued to be superior.
Although in classical Arabic all short vowels, as a rule, are preserved, a is more persistent than i/u: in prose, pausal -in/-un are elided, yet -an shifts to -ā. In many modern Arabic dialects too (dubbed by J. Cantineau diffeérentiel) a tends to be sustained in phonetic environments in which i/u are elided. This is, it seems, the reason that in the Bedouin dialects of northern Arabia and the Syrian-Iraqi desert it is the historical tanwīn -an, rather than -in/-un, that is preserved, especially when preceding an indefinite attribute; even phonetic -in has, it seems, to be derived from original -an. The same applies to medieval Judeo-Arabic 'n (spelt as a separate word) in this position.