Reconstructing Non-Standard Languages
Reconstructing Non-Standard Languages

Author: Lenore A. Grenoble

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9027257345

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Focusing on language contact involving Russian, and the linguistic varieties that emerged from that contact in different social settings, this book analyzes issues and methodologies in reconstructing both the linguistic effects of language contact and the social contexts of usage. In-depth analyses of Odessan Russian, a southern Russian contact variety with Yiddish and Ukrainian elements, and Russian lexifier pidgins illustrate the reconstruction process, which involves making the most of all available documentation, particularly literature and stereotypical descriptions. Historical sociolinguistics of this kind straddles the fields of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and contact; this book brings together the methods and theories of these areas to show how they can result in a rich reconstruction of linguistic and socially-conditioned variation. We reconstruct the circumstances and social settings that produced this variation, and demonstrate how to reconstruct which variants were used by different types of speakers under different circumstances, and what kinds of social identities they indexed.

Variation and Reconstruction
Variation and Reconstruction

Author: Thomas D. Cravens

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2006-04-05

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 902728525X

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The relation of language variation to reconstructed languages and to the methodology of reconstruction has long been neglected. The articles in the present volume consider this relationship from a number of different angles, with a number of different focuses. Several of the papers discuss evidence from Germanic, either Proto-Germanic (Joseph, Schwink), or daughter languages such as Dutch (Goss & Howell), Afrikaans (Roberge), Newcastle English (Milroy), and a Wisconsin German dialect (Geiger & Salmons). Other papers look at Italian (Cravens), Spanish (Harris-Northall), and the non-Indo-European languages or families Aramaic (Miller), and Proto-Hmong-Mien (Ratliff), and the Southeast Asian languages Phan Rang Cham and Tsat (Thurgood). In doing so they bring together a number of interconnected issues which are of current concern in comparative and historical linguistics.

Linguistic Reconstruction
Linguistic Reconstruction

Author: Anthony Fox

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9780198700012

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"Anthony Fox's new textbook is primarily for students with an elementary knowledge of general linguistics who need an up-to-date introduction to historical linguistics, particularly to new developments in the theory and practice of linguistic reconstruction." -- Back cover.

Writing in Nonstandard English
Writing in Nonstandard English

Author: Irma Taavitsainen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9781556199455

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This book investigates linguistic variation as a complex continuum of language use from standard to nonstandard. In our view, these notions can only be established through mutual definition, and they cannot exist without the opposite pole. What is considered standard English changes according to the approach at hand, and the nonstandard changes accordingly. This book offers an interdisciplinary and multifaceted approach to this central theme of wide interest.The articles approach writing in nonstandard language through various disciplines and methodologies: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, historical linguistics, dialectology, corpus linguistics, and ideological and political points of view. The theories and methods from these fields are applied to material that ranges from nonliterary writing to canonized authors. Dialects, regional varieties and worldwide Englishes are also addressed.

Morphology and Language History
Morphology and Language History

Author: Claire Bowern

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9027248141

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This volume aims to make a contribution to codifying the methods and practices linguists use to recover language history, focussing predominantly on historical morphology. The volume includes studies on a wide range of languages: not only Indo-European, but also Austronesian, Sinitic, Mon-Khmer, Basque, one Papuan language family, as well as a number of Australian families. Few collections are as cross-linguistic as this, reflecting the new challenges which have emerged from the study of languages outside those best known from historical linguistics. The contributors illustrate shared methodological and theoretical issues concerning genetic relatedness (that is, the use of morphological evidence for classification and subgrouping), reconstruction and processes of change with a diverse range of data. The volume is in honour of Harold Koch, who has long combined innovative research on understudied languages with methodological rigour and codification of practices within the discipline.

Variation, Contact, and Reconstruction in the Ancient Indo-European Languages
Variation, Contact, and Reconstruction in the Ancient Indo-European Languages

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-05-20

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 9004508872

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This book reflects the vibrancy of historical linguistics, showing how research on ancient Indo-European languages contributes to the understanding of the principles and patterns of language organization and change, including studies on typologically natural tendencies and cognitive universals.

Advances in Proto-Basque Reconstruction with Evidence for the Proto-Indo-European-Euskarian Hypothesis
Advances in Proto-Basque Reconstruction with Evidence for the Proto-Indo-European-Euskarian Hypothesis

Author: Juliette Blevins

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-09-03

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 042900026X

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This book presents a new reconstruction of Proto-Basque, the mother language of modern Basque varieties, historical Basque, and Aquitanian, grounded in traditional methods of historical linguistics. Building on a long tradition of Basque scholarship, the comparative method and internal reconstruction, informed by the phonetic bases of sound change and phonological typology, are used to explain previously underappreciated alternations and asymmetries in Basque sound patterns, resulting in a radically new view of the proto-language. The comparative method is then used to compare this new Proto-Basque with Proto-Indo-European, revealing regular sound correspondences in basic vocabulary and grammatical formatives. Evaluation of these results supports a distant genetic relationship between Proto-Basque and Proto-Indo-European, and offers new insights into specific linguistic properties of these two ancient languages. This comprehensive volume, which includes a detailed appendix including Proto-Basque/Proto-Indo-European cognate sets, will be of general interest to linguists, archeologists, historians, and geneticists, and of particular interest to scholars in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, language change, and Basque and Indo-European studies. Errata for the book can be found at: https://julietteblevins.ws.gc.cuny.edu/proto-basque/

Reconstruction and Resumption in Indirect A‘-Dependencies
Reconstruction and Resumption in Indirect A‘-Dependencies

Author: Martin Salzmann

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-04-24

Total Pages: 510

ISBN-13: 1614512205

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This monograph investigates A’-dependencies in Standard German, Alemannic and Dutch where the dislocated constituent is indirectly, i.e. not transformationally, related to the position where it is interpreted. The study focuses on relative clauses and shows that an important part of the relativization system in these languages, long relativization, involves a hitherto ignored construction termed resumptive prolepsis. This construction is characterized by base-generation of the operator in the matrix middle-field and a resumptive pronoun in the position of the variable. It is shown that it involves short A’-movement in the matrix clause, empty operator movement in the complement clause and an ellipsis operation that links the two operators. While the link is directly visible in German and Dutch, Swiss German provides a more abstract version of resumptive prolepsis. Through a detailed examination of reconstruction effects and the properties of resumption in these constructions, the book provides new evidence for the role of ellipsis in A’-movement and for a base-generation analysis of resumption. More generally, it makes an important contribution to the modeling of long-distance dependencies and the study of A'-syntax.

Reconstructing Grammar
Reconstructing Grammar

Author: Spike Gildea

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2000-07-15

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 9027298564

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Comparative linguistics and grammaticalization theory both belong to the broader category of historical linguistics, yet few linguists practice both. The methods and goals of each group seem largely distinct: comparative linguists have by and large avoided reconstructing grammar, while grammaticalization theoreticians have either focused on explaining attested historical change or used internal reconstruction to formulate hypotheses about processes of change. In this collection, some of the leading voices in grammaticalization theory apply their methods to comparative data (largely drawn from indigenous languages of the Americas), showing not only that grammar can be reconstructed, but that the process of reconstructing grammar can yield interesting theoretical and typological insights.

Lexical Reconstruction in Central Chadic
Lexical Reconstruction in Central Chadic

Author: H. Ekkehard Wolff

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-11-23

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 1009346385

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Due to a long history of contact, the Chadic languages are the internally most diverse of the Afroasiatic language families, especially in terms of their sound systems. In this ground-breaking study, the author draws on his extensive research experience to unpack the morpho-phonological principles that underpin the languages' diverse prosody effects, arguing that massive variation results from diachronic processes called 'prosodification' of segmental units. The study compares data from 66 of the 79 known languages from the Central branch of the Chadic language family, most of them unwritten and under-researched. It traces language changes for 228 lexical items that can be reconstructed from the proto-language's basic vocabulary, unearthing typological features that link Central Chadic to its deep Afroasiatic heritage. It is accompanied by a set of online appendixes, providing the full analytical apparatus of all lexical reconstructions, with explicit identification of each of the diachronic sound changes and processes involved.