Dynamics of Language Changes
Dynamics of Language Changes

Author: Keith Allan

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-08-31

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 9811564302

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This book explores the dynamics of language changes from sociolinguistic and historical linguistic perspectives. With in-depth case studies from all around the world, it uses diverse approaches across sociolinguistics and historical linguistics to answer questions such as: How and why do language changes begin?; how do language changes spread?; and how can they ultimately be explained? Each chapter explores a different component of language change, including typology, syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, lexicology, discourse strategies, diachronic change, synchronic change, how the deafblind modify sign language, and the accommodation of language to song. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of language change over time, simultaneously advancing current research and suggesting new directions in sociolinguistic and historical linguistic approaches.

Dynamics of Contact-Induced Language Change
Dynamics of Contact-Induced Language Change

Author: Claudine Chamoreau

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-04-26

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 3110271435

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Open publication The volume deals with previously undescribed morphosyntactic variations and changes appearing in settings involving language contact. Contact-induced changes are defined as dynamic and multiple, involving internal change as well as historical and sociolinguistic factors. A variety of explanations are identified and their relationships are analyzed. Only a multifaceted methodology enables this fine-grained approach to contact-induced change. A range of methodologies are proposed, but the chapters generally have their roots in a typological perspective. The contributors recognize the precautionary principle: for example, they emphasize the difficulty of studying languages that have not been described adequately and for which diachronic data are not extensive or reliable. Three main perspectives on contact-induced language change are presented. The first explores the role of multilingual speakers in contact-induced language change, especially their spontaneous innovations in discourse. The second explores the differences between ordinary contact-induced change and change in endangered languages. The third discusses various aspects of the relationship between contact-induced change and internal change.

Dynamics of Language Contact
Dynamics of Language Contact

Author: Michael G. Clyne

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-03-20

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780521786485

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Discusses disparate findings to examine the dynamics of contact between languages in an immigrant context.

Language Standardization and Language Change
Language Standardization and Language Change

Author: Ana Deumert

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9789027218575

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Language Standardization and Language Change describes the formation of an early standard norm at the Cape around 1900. The processes of variant reduction and sociolinguistic focusing which accompanied the early standardization history of Afrikaans (or 'Cape Dutch' as it was then called) are analysed within the broad methodological framework of corpus linguistics and variation analysis. Multivariate statistical techniques (cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling and PCA) are used to model the emergence of linguistic uniformity in the Cape Dutch speech community. The book also examines language contact and creolization in the early settlement, the role of Afrikaner nationalism in shaping language attitudes and linguistic practices, and the influence of English. As a case study in historical sociolinguistics the book calls into question the traditional view of the emergence of an Afrikaans standard norm, and advocates a strongly sociolinguistic, speaker-orientated approach to language history in general, and standardization studies in particular.

The future of dialects
The future of dialects

Author: Marie-Hélène Côté

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2016-02-05

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 3946234186

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Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.

Motivational Dynamics in Language Learning
Motivational Dynamics in Language Learning

Author: Zoltán Dörnyei

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2014-10-01

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1783092564

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This landmark volume offers a collection of conceptual papers and data-based research studies that investigate the dynamics of language learning motivation from a complex dynamic systems perspective. The chapters seek to answer the question of how we can understand motivation if we perceive it as a continuously changing and evolving entity rather than a fixed learner trait.

The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation
The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation

Author: Terttu Nevalainen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2008-12-03

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9027290385

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Variability is characteristic of any living language. This volume approaches the ‘life cycle’ of linguistic variability in English using data sources that range from electronic corpora to the internet. In the spirit of the 1968 Weinreich, Labov and Herzog classic, the fifteen contributions divide into three sections, each highlighting different stages in the dynamics of English across time and space. They show, first, how increase in variability can be initiated by processes that give rise to new patterns of discourse, which can ultimately crystallize into new grammatical elements. The next phase is the spread of linguistic features and patterns of discourse, both new and well established, through the social and regional varieties of English. The final phase in this ebb and flow of linguistic variability consists of processes promoting some variable features over others across registers and regional and social varieties, thus resulting in reduced variation and increased linguistic homogeneity.

Linguistic Attractors
Linguistic Attractors

Author: David L. Cooper

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9027223548

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The interdisciplinary linguistic attractor model portrays language processing as linked sequences of fractal sets, and examines the changing dynamics of such sets for individuals as well as the speech community they comprise. Its motivation stems from human anatomic constraints and several artificial neural network approaches. It uses general computation theory to: (1) demonstrate the capacity of Cantor-like fractal sets to perform as Turing Machines; (2) better distinguish between models that simply match outputs (emulation) and models that match both outputs and internal dynamics (simulation); and (3) relate language processing to essential computation steps executed in parallel. Measure and information theory highlight the key variables driving linguistic dynamics, while catastrophe and game theory help predict the possible topologies of language change.It introduces techniques to isolate and measure attractors, and to interpret their stability and relative content within a system. Important results include the capability to distinguish the sequence of related sound changes, and to make point-to-point comparisons of different texts using common metrics. Other techniques allow quantifiable ambiguity landscapes illustrating the forces that propel different languages in different directions.

The Dynamics of Language
The Dynamics of Language

Author: Lutz Marten

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-01-27

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 1849508739

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For the whole of the last half-century, most theoretical syntacticians have assumed that knowledge of language is different from the tasks of speaking and understanding. There have been some dissenters, but, by and large, this view still holds sway. This book takes a different view: it continues the task set in hand by Kempson et al (2001) of arguing that the common-sense intuition is correct that knowledge of language consists in being able to use it in speaking and understanding. The Dynamics of Language argues that interpretation is built up across as sequence of words relative to some context and that this is all that is needed to explain the structural properties of language. The dynamics of how interpretation is built up is the syntax of a language system. The authors' first task is to convey to a general linguistic audience with a minimum of formal apparatus, the substance of that formal system. Secondly, as linguists, they set themselves the task of applying the formal system to as broad an array of linguistic puzzles as possible, the languages analysed ranging from English to Japanese and Swahili. It argues that knowledge in language consists of being able to use it in speaking and understanding. It analyses a variety of languages, from English to Japanese and Swahili. It appeals to a wide audience in the disciplines of language, linguistics, anthropology, education, psychology, cognitive science, law, media studies, and medicine.

Usage-Based Dynamics in Second Language Development
Usage-Based Dynamics in Second Language Development

Author: Wander Lowie

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1788925262

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This book honours the contribution of Marjolijn Verspoor to the development and implementation of dynamic usage-based (DUB) approaches in second language (L2) research and pedagogy. With chapters written by renowned experts in the field, the book addresses the dynamics of language, language learning and language teaching from a usage-based perspective. The book contains both theory and empirical work: the initial theoretical chapters present cutting-edge thinking in relation to both the scope of DUB theory and its applications, providing conceptual perspectives from cognitive grammar and linguistics, thinking-for-speaking (TFS), and Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) approaches, united by their shared underpinnings of language as a dynamic system of conventionalized routines. The second half of the volume showcases state-of-the-art methodologies to study dynamic trajectories of language learning, empirical investigations into the above-mentioned theoretical concepts, and innovative classroom implementations of DUB language pedagogy.