Motives for Language Change
Motives for Language Change

Author: Raymond Hickey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-01-16

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1139433679

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This specially commissioned volume considers the processes involved in language change and the issues of how they can be modelled and studied. The way languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself, its internal organisation, and how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the phenomenon of language change has been approached from a variety of perspectives by linguists of many different orientations. This book, originally published in 2003, brings together an international team of leading figures from different areas of linguistics to re-examine some of the central issues in this field and also to discuss new proposals. The volume is arranged into sections, including grammaticalisation, the typological perspective, the social context of language change and contact-based explanations. It seeks to cover the subject as a whole, bearing in mind its relevance for the general analysis of language, and will appeal to a broad international readership.

The Unfolding of Language
The Unfolding of Language

Author: Guy Deutscher

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2006-05-02

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 1466837837

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Blending the spirit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves with the science of The Language Instinct, an original inquiry into the development of that most essential-and mysterious-of human creations: Language "Language is mankind's greatest invention-except, of course, that it was never invented." So begins linguist Guy Deutscher's enthralling investigation into the genesis and evolution of language. If we started off with rudimentary utterances on the level of "man throw spear," how did we end up with sophisticated grammars, enormous vocabularies, and intricately nuanced degrees of meaning? Drawing on recent groundbreaking discoveries in modern linguistics, Deutscher exposes the elusive forces of creation at work in human communication, giving us fresh insight into how language emerges, evolves, and decays. He traces the evolution of linguistic complexity from an early "Me Tarzan" stage to such elaborate single-word constructions as the Turkish sehirlilestiremediklerimizdensiniz ("you are one of those whom we couldn't turn into a town dweller"). Arguing that destruction and creation in language are intimately entwined, Deutscher shows how these processes are continuously in operation, generating new words, new structures, and new meanings. As entertaining as it is erudite, The Unfolding of Language moves nimbly from ancient Babylonian to American idiom, from the central role of metaphor to the staggering triumph of design that is the Semitic verb, to tell the dramatic story and explain the genius behind a uniquely human faculty.

Language Change
Language Change

Author: Anna Mauranen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-12-03

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1108588476

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English as a lingua franca (ELF) has become ubiquitous in today's globalised, mobile and fast-changing world. It is clear that it will have an unprecedented impact not only on how we communicate but also on our understanding of language use and change. What exactly ELF brings to our life and to language theory is a question which requires an interdisciplinary take. This book gathers together leading scholars from world Englishes, typology, language history, cognitive linguistics, translation studies, multilingualism, sociolinguistics and ELF research itself to seek state-of-the-art answers. Chapters present original insights on language change, based on theoretical approaches and empirical studies, and provide clear examples of social, interactional and cognitive changes that ELF instigates. The picture which unfolds on the pages of this book is complex, dynamic and makes a convincing case for the importance of English as a lingua franca on language change at a global scale.

Grammaticalization and Language Change
Grammaticalization and Language Change

Author: Kristin Davidse

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9027273235

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This collective volume focuses on the latest developments in the study of grammaticalization and related processes of change such as degrammaticalization, constructionalization, lexicalization, and petrification. It addresses topical issues relating to the motivations, sources, defining features, and outcomes of these changes. New theoretical reflections are offered on the pragmatic motivation of grammaticalization paths, process-oriented differences between grammaticalization, lexicalization and degrammaticalization, the question of gradualness and pace of grammaticalization, and deictics as a distinct source of grammaticalization. The articles describe various constructional and distributional changes affecting deictics, determiners, reflexives, clitics, nouns, affixes, adverbs and (auxiliary) verbs, mainly in the Germanic and Romance languages. The volume will be of great interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization and related changes, and to all linguists working on the interface between morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse.

Globally Speaking
Globally Speaking

Author: Judith Rosenhouse

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2008-05-22

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1783091533

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This volume accounts for the motives for contemporary lexical borrowing from English, using a comparative approach and a broad cross-cultural perspective. It investigates the processes involved in the penetration of English vocabulary into new environments and the extent of their integration into twelve languages representing several language families, including Icelandic, Dutch, French, Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Persian, Japanese, Taiwan Chinese, and several languages spoken in southern India. Some of these languages are studied here in the context of borrowing for the first time ever. All in all, this volume suggests that the English lexical 'invasion', as it is often referred to, is a natural and inevitable process. It is driven by psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and socio-historical factors, of which the primary determinants of variability are associated with ethnic and linguistic diversity.

Lexicalization and Language Change
Lexicalization and Language Change

Author: Laurel J. Brinton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-10-27

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9781139445733

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Lexicalization, a process of language change, has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Broadly defined as the adoption of concepts into the lexicon, it has been viewed by syntacticians as the reverse process of grammaticalization, by morphologists as a routine process of word-formation, and by semanticists as the development of concrete meanings. In this up-to-date survey, Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Traugott examine the various conceptualizations of lexicalization that have been presented in the literature. In light of contemporary work on grammaticalization, they then propose a new, unified model of lexicalization and grammaticalization. Their approach is illustrated with a variety of case studies from the history of English, including present participles, multi-word verbs, adverbs, and discourse markers, as well as some examples from other Indo-European languages. The first review of the various approaches to lexicalization, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of historical linguistics and language change.

The Handbook of Language Contact
The Handbook of Language Contact

Author: Raymond Hickey

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 800

ISBN-13: 1119485061

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The second edition of the definitive reference on contact studies and linguistic change—provides extensive new research and original case studies Language contact is a dynamic area of contemporary linguistic research that studies how language changes when speakers of different languages interact. Accessibly structured into three sections, The Handbook of Language Contact explores the role of contact studies within the field of linguistics, the value of contact studies for language change research, and the relevance of language contact for sociolinguistics. This authoritative volume presents original findings and fresh research directions from an international team of prominent experts. Thirty-seven specially-commissioned chapters cover a broad range of topics and case studies of contact from around the world. Now in its second edition, this valuable reference has been extensively updated with new chapters on topics including globalization, language acquisition, creolization, code-switching, and genetic classification. Fresh case studies examine Romance, Indo-European, African, Mayan, and many other languages in both the past and the present. Addressing the major issues in the field of language contact studies, this volume: Includes a representative sample of individual studies which re-evaluate the role of language contact in the broader context of language and society Offers 23 new chapters written by leading scholars Examines language contact in different societies, including many in Africa and Asia Provides a cross-section of case studies drawing on languages across the world The Handbook of Language Contact, Second Edition is an indispensable resource for researchers, scholars, and students involved in language contact, language variation and change, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and language theory.

Cognitive Pragmatics
Cognitive Pragmatics

Author: Hans-Jörg Schmid

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-08-31

Total Pages: 664

ISBN-13: 3110214210

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Speakers tend to compose their utterances in such a way that the message they want to get across is hardly ever fully encoded by the meanings of the words and the grammar they use. Instead speakers rely on hearers adding conceptual and emotive content while interpreting the contextually appropriate meanings and intentions behind utterances. This insight, which is of course particularly relevant in all kinds of indirect, figurative or humorous talk, lies at the heart of the linguistic discipline of pragmatics. If pragmatics is the study of meaning-in-context, then cognitive pragmatics can be broadly defined as encompassing the study of the cognitive principles and processes involved in the construal of meaning-in-context. While it would seem only natural that pragmatics as such should have addressed such cognitive issues anyway, it has mainly been due to the historical rooting of this discipline in the philosophy of language that psychological aspects have not been in the pragmatic limelight to date. Being part of the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this volume is the first to systematically survey this terrain from a wide range of perspectives. It collects state-of-the-art contributions by leading experts from the fields of pragmatics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, clinical linguistics and historical linguistics. The volume is divided into four parts which tackle the following questions: Part I: The cognitive principles of pragmatic competence What are the general cognitive principles underlying pragmatic competence, i.e. the skill to arrive at context-dependent meanings of utterances? What are the cognitive underpinnings of language users' ability to compute or infer intended meanings in the role of hearers and to give hints as to how to decode intended meanings in the role of speakers? Part II: The psychology of pragmatics What are the actual cognitive processes taking place during online construal of meaning-in-context on the basis of encoded messages? How is pragmatic competence acquired in childhood? What are the types, sources and effects of pragmatic disorders, i.e. impairments of pragmatic competence? Part III: The construal of non-explicit and non-literal meaning-in-context What are the cognitive principles and processes involved in the construal of meanings of non-explicit and indirect utterances? How do we process figurative meanings, humour and gestures? Part IV: The emergence of linguistic structures from meaning-in-context What are the repercussions of the (repeated) construal of context-dependent meanings on linguistic structures and the linguistic system? How does the system change under the influence of the construal of meanings in social situations? Reduced series price (print) available! [email protected].