Using Principles of Construction Grammar in the History of English Classroom

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Trousdale
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Discourse Functions ◽  
English Classroom ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter addresses teaching the History of English from a construction grammar perspective, one in which language is viewed as comprised of form-meaning pairings on a gradient between lexical and grammatical constructions and language change is viewed as a series of micro-steps that involve closely related changes in syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse functions. It considers the creation of new constructions, changes to existing constructions, and the relationship between individual words and the constructions in which they frequently appear. The chapter provides specific examples, drawn from all periods of English, from Old to contemporary English, to demonstrate to students this new and productive approach to historical linguistics.

Scales and Units

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn M. de Luna
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
The North ◽  
First Case ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
River Region ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Approaches

This chapter uses two case studies to explore how historians study language movement and change through comparative historical linguistics. The first case study stands as a short chapter in the larger history of the expansion of Bantu languages across eastern, central, and southern Africa. It focuses on the expansion of proto-Kafue, ca. 950–1250, from a linguistic homeland in the middle Kafue River region to lands beyond the Lukanga swamps to the north and the Zambezi River to the south. This expansion was made possible by a dramatic reconfiguration of ties of kinship. The second case study explores linguistic evidence for ridicule along the Lozi-Botatwe frontier in the mid- to late 19th century. Significantly, the units and scales of language movement and change in precolonial periods rendered visible through comparative historical linguistics bring to our attention alternative approaches to language change and movement in contemporary Africa.

Indigenous Peoples

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Te Paa-Daniel
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Treaty Of Waitangi ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Constitutional Revision

In 1992 the Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia, which owed its origin ultimately to the work of Samuel Marsden and other missionaries, undertook a globally unprecedented project to redeem its inglorious colonial past, especially with respect to its treatment of indigenous Maori Anglicans. In this chapter Te Paa Daniel, an indigenous Anglican laywoman, explores the history of her Provincial Church in the Antipodes, outlining the facts of history, including the relationship with the Treaty of Waitangi, the period under Selwyn’s leadership, as experienced and understood from the perspective of Maori Anglicans. The chapter thus brings into view the events that informed and influenced the radical and globally unprecedented Constitutional Revision of 1992 which saw the creation of the partnership between different cultural jurisdictions (tikanga).

scholarly journals Language change and language evolution: Cousins, siblings, twins?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cross Fertilization

The relationship between “language change” and “language evolution” has recently become subject to some debate regarding the scope of both concepts. It has been claimed that while the latter used to refer to language origins in the first place, both terms can now, to a certain extent, be used synonymously. In this paper, I argue that this can partly be explained by parallel develop-ments both in historical linguistics and in the field of language evolution research that have led to a considerable amount of convergence between both fields. Both have adopted usage-based approaches and data-driven methods, which entails similar research questions and similar perspectives on the phenomena under investigation. This has ramifications for current models and theories of language change (or evolution). Two approaches in particular – the concept of com-plex adaptive systems and construction grammar – have been combined in integrated approaches that seek to explain both language emergence and language change over historical time. I discuss the potential and limitations of this integrated approach, and I argue that there is still some unex-plored potential for cross-fertilization.

Armenian prosody in typology and diachrony

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica DeLisi
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Secondary Stress ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Primary Stress ◽  
Prosodic Word ◽  
History Of ◽  
Final Syllable ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Stress Patterns

AbstractThis paper examines the relationship between typology and historical linguistics through a case study from the history of Armenian, where two different stress systems are found in the modern language. The first is a penult system with no associated secondary stress ([… σ́σ]ω). The other, the so-called hammock pattern, has primary stress on the final syllable and secondary stress on the initial syllable of the prosodic word ([σ̀ … σ́]ω). Although penult stress patterns are by far more typologically common than the hammock pattern in the world’s languages, I will argue that the hammock pattern must be reconstructed for the period of shared innovation, the Proto-Armenian period.

The Conquest of Death

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legislative Policy ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
The Creation ◽  
State Growth ◽  
The Relationship

The Conquest of Death considers the concepts of violence and state power far more broadly and holistically than previous accounts of state growth by intertwining the national and the local, the formal and the informal to illustrate how the management of incidental acts of violence and justice was as important to the monopolization of violence as the creation of the machinery of warfare. It reveals how the creation and operation of everyday bureaucracy built systems of power far exceeding its original intent and allowed a greater centralized surveillance of daily life than ever before. In sum, this book forces us to think about state formation not in terms of the broad strokes of legislative policy and international competition, but rather as a process built by multiple tiny actions, interactions and encroachments which fundamentally redefined the nature of the state and the relationship between government and governed. The Conquest of Death thus provides a new approach to the history of state formation, the history of criminal justice and the history of violence in early modern England. By locating the creation of an effective, permanent monopoly of violence in England in the second-half of the sixteenth century, this book also provides a new chronology of the divide between medieval and modern while divorcing the history of state growth from a linear history of centralization.

scholarly journals Phylogenetic Methods in Historical Linguistics: Greek as a Case Study

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne O. Mooers ◽  
Panayiotis A. Pappas
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
General Mechanism ◽  
Current Frequency ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
Lexical Change ◽  
History Of

AbstractWe review and assess the different ways in which research in evolutionary-theory-inspired biology has influenced research in historical linguistics, and then focus on an evolutionary-theory inspired claim for language change made by Pagel et al. (2007). They report that the more Swadesh-list lexemes are used, the less likely they are to change across 87 Indo-European languages, and posit that frequency-of-use of a lexical item is a separate and general mechanism of language change. We test a corollary of this conclusion, namely that current frequency-of-use should predict the amount of change within individual languages through time. We devise a scale of lexical change that recognizes sound change, analogical change and lexical replacement and apply it to cognate pairs on the Swadesh list between Homeric and Modern Greek. Current frequency-of-use only weakly predicts the amount of change within the history of Greek, but amount of change does predict the number of forms across Indo-European. Given that current frequency-of-use and past frequency-of-use may be only weakly correlated for many Swadesh-list lexemes, and given previous research that shows that frequency-of-use can both hinder and facilitate lexical change, we conclude that it is premature to claim that a new mechanism of language change has been discovered. However, we call for more in-depth comparative study of general mechanisms of language change, including further tests of the frequency-of-use hypothesis.

scholarly journals The professionalization of Brazilian nursing in the written media of the end of the nineteenth century: a gender analysis

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 1265-1271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Braga do Espírito Santo ◽  
Taka Oguisso ◽  
Rosa Maria Godoy Serpa da Fonseca
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Professional School ◽  
Gender Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Relationship

The object is the relationship between the professionalization of Brazilian nursing and women, in the broadcasting of news about the creation of the Professional School of Nurses, in the light of gender. Aims: to discuss the linkage of women to the beginning of the professionalization of Brazilian nursing following the circumstances and evidence of the creation of the Professional School of Nurses analyzed from the perspective of gender. The news articles were analyzed from the viewpoint of Cultural History, founded in the gender concept of Joan Scott and in the History of Women. The creation of the School and the priority given in the media to women consolidate the vocational ideal of the woman for nursing in a profession subjugated to the physician but also representing the conquest of a space in the world of education and work, reconfiguring the social position of nursing and of woman in Brazil.

scholarly journals Language change and language evolution: Cousins, siblings, twins?

Glottotheory ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cross Fertilization

AbstractThe relationship between “language change” and “language evolution” has recently become subject to some debate regarding the scope of both concepts. It has been claimed that while the latter used to refer to the language origins in the first place, both terms can now, to a certain extent, be used synonymously. In this paper, I argue that this can partly be explained by parallel developments both in historical linguistics and in the field of language evolution research that have led to a considerable amount of convergence between both fields. Both have adopted usage-based approaches and data-driven methods, which entails similar research questions and similar perspectives on the phenomena under investigation. This has ramifications for current models and theories of language change (or evolution). Two approaches in particular, the concept of complex adaptive systems and construction grammar, have been combined in integrated approaches that seek to explain both language emergence and language change over historical time. I discuss the potential and limitations of this integrated approach, and I argue that there is still some unexplored potential for cross-fertilization.

I “Concetti spaziali per televisione” di Lucio Fontana: dalle proposte del Manifiesto Blanco ai primi ambienti

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Mari
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Dimension ◽  
Spatial Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Television Medium ◽  
The Relationship

This essay investigates Lucio Fontana’s “Luminous Images in Movement”, realized by the artist in 1952, when the Manifesto of the Spatial Movement for Television was published. Analyzing little-known and new documents and re-examining the historical and artistic context in which they were born, the essay proposes a re-reading of these researches highlighting their environmental dimension. A case in point within a “pre-history” of the relationship between art and television, Fontana’s interest in the new television medium is thus included in the original path that from the Manifiesto Blanco leads the artist to the creation of his first pioneering “environments”.

Oxford at the Crossroads

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
International Committee ◽  
Oxford English Dictionary ◽  
Alma Mater ◽  
New School ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reflects on questions of language, culture, community, and the state via the history of Oxford University (1860 to 1939). After considering Matthew Arnold’s ambivalence about his alma mater, it turns to the quarrel over the identity of the English language between the historian E. A. Freeman and the lexicographer James Murray and its impact on the Oxford English Dictionary. The second section traces this quarrel through the disputes about the creation of the new School of English in Oxford in the 1890s, focusing on the relationship to the established School of Literae Humaniores and the idealist assumptions underpinning the debate. The third section shows what bearing this had on the creation of the International Committee for Intellectual Co-operation, the precursor to UNESCO, in the interwar years. It centres on Gilbert Murray, then Professor of Greek at Oxford, and concludes with his public exchange with Tagore in 1934.

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