Perspectives on Language Structure and Language Change
Perspectives on Language Structure and Language Change

Author: Lars Heltoft

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2019-06-15

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 9027262632

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This volume centers on three important theoretical concepts for the study of language change and the ways in which language structure emerges and turns into new structure: reanalysis, actualization, and indexicality. Reanalysis is a part of ongoing everyday language use, a process through which language is reproduced and changed. Actualization refers to the processes through which a reanalyzed structure spreads throughout single communities and society. Indexicality covers the way in which parts of a linguistic system can point to other parts of the system, both syntagmatically and paradigmatically. The inclusion of indexicality leads to fine-grained analysis in morphology, word order, and constructional syntax.

Language Structure, Variation and Change
Language Structure, Variation and Change

Author: Ian E. Mackenzie

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-03-09

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 3030105679

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This book offers an original account of the dynamics of syntactic change and the evolving structure of Old Spanish that combines rigorous manuscript-based investigation, quantitative analysis and a syntactic approach grounded in Minimalist thinking. Its analysis of both successful and failed changes demonstrates the degree of unpredictability caused by the interaction of competing factors and will shed fresh light on the assumed unidirectionality of linguistic change. Importantly, it reveals that Old Spanish and modern Spanish are more similar to one another than is usually supposed and demonstrates that many of the differences between the two varieties are quantitative rather than qualitative. This theoretically sophisticated examination of historical corpora will provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Old and modern Spanish, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax.

Patterns of Language
Patterns of Language

Author: Robbins Burling

Publisher: Brill Academic Pub

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 9780121449209

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Presents a comprehensive introduction to linguistics, This book includes chapters on variation and change in lexicon, phonology, and syntax. It also covers topics such as pidgins and creoles, first and second language acquisition, development of language in the human species, growth of writing, printing in information technology and others.

Linguistic Structure and Change
Linguistic Structure and Change

Author: Thomas Berg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780198236726

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Thomas Berg challenges context-free theories of linguistics; he is concerned with the way the term 'explanation' is typically used in the discipline. He argues that real explanations cannot emerge from a view which asserts the autonomy of language, but only from an approach which seeks to establish a connection between language and the contexts in which it is embedded. The author examines the psychological context in detail. He uses an interactiveactivation model of language processing to derive predictions about synchronic linguistic patterns, the course of linguistic change, and the structure of poetic rhymes. The majority of these predictions are borne out, leading the author to conclude that the structure of language is shaped by the properties of the mechanism which puts it to use, and that psycholinguistics thus qualifies as one likely approach from which to derive an explanation of linguistic structure.

Language Change
Language Change

Author: Joan Bybee

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-05-28

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1107020166

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This new introduction explores all aspects of language change, with an emphasis on the role of cognition and language use.

Information Structure and Language Change
Information Structure and Language Change

Author: Roland Hinterhölzl

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2009-05-05

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 3110216116

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The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are available only in written form and bear no or little information on prosody and intonation, it presents various methods of retrieving information-structural categories in such texts. Third, it presents empirical studies on the relation between word order and information structure of the four main texts of the Old High German period and embeds these results in the wider picture of word order change in Germanic. The volume will be of interest to students of German, English, and general linguistics as well as to researchers interested in diachronic syntax, philology of Older German, language change, information structure, discourse semantics, language typology, computational linguistics, and corpus studies.

Syntactic Structures
Syntactic Structures

Author: Noam Chomsky

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-05-18

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 3112316002

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No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

Usage-Based Approaches to Language Change
Usage-Based Approaches to Language Change

Author: Evie Coussé

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9027270090

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Usage-based approaches to language have gained increasing attention in the last two decades. The importance of change and variation has always been recognized in this framework, but has never received central attention. It is the main aim of this book to fill this gap. Once we recognize that usage is crucial for our understanding of language and linguistic structures, language change and variation inevitably take centre stage in linguistic analysis. Along these lines, the volume presents eight studies by international authors that discuss various approaches to studying language change from a usage-based perspective. Both theoretical issues and empirical case studies are well-represented in this collection. The case studies cover a variety of different languages – ranging from historically well-studied European languages via Japanese to the Amazonian isolate Yurakaré with no written history at all. The book provides new insights relevant for scholars interested in both functional and cognitive linguistic theory, in historical linguists and in language typology.

Language Creation and Language Change
Language Creation and Language Change

Author: Michel DeGraff

Publisher: MIT Press (MA)

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 9780262041683

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Research on creolization, language change, and language acquisition has been converging toward a triangulation of the constraints along which grammatical systems develop within individual speakers--and (viewed externally) across generations of speakers. The originality of this volume is in its comparison of various sorts of language development from a number of linguistic-theoretic and empirical perspectives, using data from both speech and gestural modalities and from a diversity of acquisition environments. In turn, this comparison yields fresh insights on the mental bases of language creation.The book is organized into five parts: creolization and acquisition; acquisition under exceptional circumstances; language processing and syntactic change; parameter setting in acquisition and through creolization and language change; and a concluding part integrating the contributors' observations and proposals into a series of commentaries on the state of the art in our understanding of language development, its role in creolization and diachrony, and implications for linguistic theory.Contributors : Dany Adone, Derek Bickerton, Adrienne Bruyn, Marie Coppola, Michel DeGraff, Viviane D�prez, Alison Henry, Judy Kegl, David Lightfoot, John S. Lumsden, Salikoko S. Mufwene, Pieter Muysken, Elissa L. Newport, Luigi Rizzi, Ian Roberts, Ann Senghas, Rex A. Sprouse, Denise Tangney, Anne Vainikka, Barbara S. Vance, Maaike Verrips.

Language Usage and Language Structure
Language Usage and Language Structure

Author: Kasper Boye

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 3110219174

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Addresses an issue hotly debated in the linguistic theory: the relation between language usage and language structure