scholarly journals Grammaticalization and language contact in a discourse-pragmatic change in progress: The spread of innit in London English

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
Heike Pichler
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Phonetic Reduction ◽  
Functional Versatility ◽  
Contact Effects

Abstract This variationist analysis investigates the development and spread of innit as an invariant tag in London English. The sociolinguistic distribution of innit in a socially stratified corpus of vernacular speech suggests that the form's emergence and spread were initiated and propelled system-internally through changes associated with grammaticalization. Frequency triggered phonetic reduction of isn't it to innit; loss of syntactic-semantic usage constraints and growing functional versatility enabled innit to seize the range of contexts and functions of grammatically-dependent tags (e.g. didn't you, weren't we), virtually ousting these from the system of negative-polarity interrogative tags. Examination of cross-linguistic data and comparisons with relevant pre- and non-contact varieties indicate multiple language contact and grammatical replication may have played an ancillary role. I flag some challenges of establishing contact effects in discourse-pragmatic change, and propose that the promotion of innit for invariant use was governed by its low salience and social indexicality of localness. (Innit, question tags, (Multicultural) London English, grammaticalization, language contact, grammatical replication)*

Bilingualism and sound change: perception in the /ʎ/-/j/ merger process in Majorcan Spanish

2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-133
Author(s):  
Assumpció Rost Bagudanch
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Balearic Islands ◽  
Chance Level ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Inhibiting Effect ◽  
Change Perception ◽  
Merger Process ◽  
Linguistic Behaviour ◽  
Contact Effects

AbstractYeísmo has been accounted for as a merger process occurring in Spanish irrespective of language contact effects though some scholars have claimed that the interference between Spanish and the variety of Catalan spoken in Majorca (Balearic Islands, Spain) has an inhibiting effect on yeísmo. This paper focusses on whether this inhibiting effect can be demonstrated at the perception level and whether it has an effect in the linguistic behaviour of bilinguals. To examine these effects, we conducted an identification experiment with three groups of listeners (Majorcan Catalan-dominant bilinguals, Spanish-dominant bilinguals and a control group of Spanish monolinguals). Results show that Catalan dominants do recognise [ʎ] stimuli, but Spanish dominants only identify [ʎ] at chance level. Consequently, it would seem that bilingual subjects display a bimodal performance at the perception level.

scholarly journals Bidirectionality of language contact: Spanish and Catalan vowels

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Annie Helms
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Balearic Islands ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Vowel Production ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Disproportionate Number ◽  
Probabilistic Nature ◽  
Contact Effects

The disproportionate number of studies in Barcelona and the Balearic Islands observing Spanish contact effects in Catalan production, rather than Catalan contact effects in Spanish production, is an oversight of bidirectionality and the probabilistic nature of social factors in situations of language contact. Accordingly, the present study analyzes both Catalan and Spanish mid front vowel production data from Barcelona to investigate whether Catalan contact effects occur in Spanish via a process of dissimilation, and whether such effects are strengthened in younger speakers due to the relatively recent implementation of Catalan linguistic policy in the educational and public spheres. The results are suggestive of dissimilation, where phonetic distinctions are maintained between Spanish /e/ and the two Catalan mid front vowels across both F1 and F2. Additionally, analyses of variance across F1 and F2 reveal that Spanish /e/ productions across F1 are more diffuse in younger speakers and Catalan mid front vowels across F2 are less diffuse, providing evidence of reciprocity in contact effects. These results underscore the bidirectional nature of language contact and advocate for the use of variance of F1 and F2 as a metric of phonological contact effects.

scholarly journals Studying Contact without Detailed Studies of the Languages Involved: A Non-Philological Approach to Language Contact

2012 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
Mark Donohue
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Social Contact ◽  
Data Types ◽  
Database Analysis ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Language Data ◽  
The Right ◽  
Detailed Work

<p>Studies of contact have revealed that all kinds of language material can, in the right circumstances, be borrowed from one language to another. Detecting, describing, and analyzing such situations typically involve the detailed study of at least two languages. An alternative involves detecting contact situations through database analysis. This cannot supplant the detailed work that requires detailed descriptive work in particular fields, but can allow us to examine large enough samples of languages that we can start to better understand, through calibration against known histories and other non-linguistic data types, likelihoods of different ‘social contact’ scenarios resulting in different kinds of linguistic traces, and also allow for the more targeted investigation of specific areas and language-to-language interactions. I shall describe the method, and illustrate its application in a number of case studies in regions for which we have good samples of language data.</p>

Internal motivations and formal approaches

2020 ◽  
pp. 188-221
Author(s):  
Anne Breitbarth ◽  
Christopher Lucas ◽  
David Willis
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Free Choice ◽  
First Language ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Creation

This chapter argues that, while the creation of indefinites from generic nouns is grammaticalization in the form of upwards reanalysis from N to R, the quantifier and free-choice cycles do not in fact constitute instances of grammaticalization. Indefinites restricted to stronger negative-polarity contexts are not more functional than indefinites licensed in weaker negative-polarity contexts. Rather, it is argued that implicational semantic features requiring roofing by different types of operators situated in the Q head of indefinites, and in particular the way they are acquired in first language acquisition, are responsible for the diachronic developments. Negative concord items arise through an acquisitional mechanism maximizing the number of agreement relations in the acquired grammar consistent with the primary linguistic data.

English and Celtic: contact-induced change in history

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (s2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Hickey
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Contact Effects

AbstractThis paper offers an overview of current research into the contact between English and Celtic, both in its historical and geographical dimensions. It attempts to classify contact scenarios by their type and the linguistic effects they engender. A number of examples are discussed which illustrate typical contact effects, and generalizations are made about contact-induced language change which can be taken to apply to further cases of language contact beyond the anglophone world.

scholarly journals Non-Dravidian elements and (non)diasystematic change in Malayalam

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Savithry Namboodiripad
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Attractive Alternative ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Loanword Phonology ◽  
Fundamental Distinction ◽  
Ideal Framework ◽  
Dravidian Language ◽  
Semantic Domains ◽  
Contact Effects

By introducing a distinction between diaconstructions, which are language non-specific, and idioconstructions, which are language-specific, Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) cap- tures the fact that the borders between languages are often blurred (Höder 2012). Building on other construction-theoretic approaches, DCxG characterizes all languages as consisting of emergent sub-patterns of constructions. This includes hybrid or high-contact languages, which differ only in that those sub-patterns can be attributed (by analysts, not necessarily speakers) to a particular language. As such, DCxG provides an ideal framework for analyzing high-contact languages while also capturing smaller-scale contact effects. Crucially for those studying language contact, this does away with a need for a fundamental distinction between high- and low-contact languages (e.g., Faraclas &amp; Klein 2009, Mufwene 2000).This chapter presents a DCxG analysis of non-Dravidian sounds and words in Malayalam, a Dravidian language with considerable influence from Sanskrit and English, as spoken in Kerala, India. Both Sanskrit- and English-origin words are highly frequent and appear across a variety of semantic domains. Analogous to Latinate and Germanic morphophonological sub-patterns in English, Sanskrit and English words in Malayalam have phonological patterns which are not found in Dravidian-origin words, such as heteroorganic clusters, certain codas, and voiced aspirated stops. I argue that any analysis of Malayalam must account for non-Dravidian sub-patterns, and I consider DCxG to be an attractive alternative to constraint-based approaches to loanword phonology.

Intonation and Prosody in Creole Languages: An Evolving Ecology

2022 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 343-364
Author(s):  
Shelome Gooden
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Community Level ◽  
Language Typology ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Linguistic Inquiry ◽  
Creole Languages ◽  
Untapped Resource ◽  
Typological Classification ◽  
Contact Effects

Research on the prosody and intonation of creole languages has largely remained an untapped resource, yet it is important for enriching our understanding of how or if their phonological systems changed or developed under contact. Further, their hybrid histories and current linguistic ecologies present descriptive and analytical treasure troves. This has the potential to inform many areas of linguistic inquiry including contact effects on the typological classification of prosodic systems, socioprosodic variation (individual and community level), and the scope of diversity in prosodic systems among creole languages and across a variety of languages similarly influenced by language contact. Thus, this review highlights the importance of pushing beyond questions of creole language typology and genetic affiliation. I review the existing research on creole language prosody and intonation, provide some details on a few studies, and highlight some key challenges and opportunities for the subfield and for linguistics in general.

Feature diffusion vs. contact effects in the evolution of new Englishes

2000 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edgar W. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Contact Conditions ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The World ◽  
Contact Effects

This paper proposes an investigation of New Englishes in a diachronic and typological-comparative perspective. It is suggested that the structural and functional constituents of these varieties can be accounted for by either of two processes, labelled diffusion (the largely unmodified transmission of earlier forms of English (dialectal and standard) through space and time), and selection (the choice of a new, typically indigenous item in a process of feature competition under language contact conditions); some tentative properties of these processes are discussed. Subsequently, the framework is applied to a documentation and interpretation of negation patterns as found in many New Englishes around the world.

scholarly journals Cumbersome paths to indefiniteness. Evidence from an Old Occitan customary

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 245-275
Author(s):  
Mikolaj Nkollo
Keyword(s):  
Free Choice ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Old Occitan ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Clausal Negation ◽  
Syntactic Properties

The central problem of this paper is the evolution of common nouns assumed to have turned into indefinite pronouns. The linguistic data have been retrieved from the Costuma d’Agen, a 13th-century Occitan Customary. The choice of this text is warranted by multiple relations obtaining between the architecture of legal codices and the presence of indefinite expressions. In this text, the contexts in which re (< Lat. acc. rem), ‘anything’ or ‘nothing’ occurs have been identified. This word is shown to be pervasive in Negative Concord (NC; under the scope of no(n), the expression of clausal negation), thereby meeting the requirements imposed upon negative polarity items (NPIs). Outside NC, re appears in conditional protases and temporal clauses introduced by ‘before’. Irrespective of the context in which it appears, Old Occitan re turns out to be fairly advanced on the grammaticalization scale: unlike its etymon, it no longer inflects for number, it does not take determiners and fails to function as a subject in the Costuma d’Agen. Comparative evidence from Gascon 13th century texts proves that, although the descendants of rem of that period occur in the same structural environments (all of them are, by then, free-choice items, FCIs), they do not evolve at the same pace as their Occitan cognate. In other words, even in neighboring linguistic zones, these expressions differ with respect to the degree of persistence of syntactic properties inherent to Latin common nouns. Finally, re is matched against other FCIs, such as hom or home ‘anybody’ or ‘nobody’ and autrui ‘someone else’ or ‘someone else’s’. Compared to re, the medieval developments of these items are far more diversified and retain more original features of their etymons. The difference is traced back to the greater conceptual salience of the animate domain.

scholarly journals GRAMMATICALIZATION OF NOUNS IN JORDANIAN ARABIC: EVIDENCE FROM ʃIKIL AND OMIR

2021 ◽  
pp. 16-22
Author(s):  
Murad AL KAYED
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Jordanian Arabic ◽  
Polarity Item ◽  
Lexical Meaning ◽  
Negative Polarity Item ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Phonetic Reduction

The current study aims at exploring the grammaticalization of the nouns ʃikil 'shape' and omir 'age' in Jordanian Arabic. The data were collected from Jordanian T.V. series and interviews with native speakers of Jordanian Arabic. The sample of the study consisted of 300 tokens of ʃikil and 200 tokens of omir. The researcher collected the data, then he analysed the functions of these two words. The study found out that ʃikil was used 100 times as a noun meaning 'shape', and 200 times as an evidential particle. Besides, omir was also used as a noun 60 times and 140 times as a negative polarity item. The findings of the study showed that ʃikil has one lexical meaning 'shape', and it evolved by the process of grammaticalization into an evidential particle. ʃikil underwent the process of semantic bleaching, since it lost its content meaning and developed to serve a grammatical function of evidentially. Bedsides, it was decategorized as it lost the grammatical features of nouns, i.e. it cannot be pluralized and cannot accept definite articles. Also ʃikil lost its stress as part of phonetic reduction. Similarly, omir has one lexical meaning 'age' and developed into a negative polarity item. Omir was affected by the process of semantic bleaching and decategorization as it was developed from its original meaning as a noun meaning 'age' into a negative polarity item. Additionally, omir underwent the process of phonetic reduction as it lost stress. The study found out that ʃikil and omir underwent three stages of grammaticalization: semantic bleaching, decategorization, and phonetic reduction.

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