Scribes, Repertoires, and Variation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eitan Grossman ◽  
Jennifer Cromwell
Keyword(s):  
Language Variation ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Linguistic Practices ◽  
Culturally Embedded

As in spoken language, variation abounds in written texts. In the latter, linguistic and extralinguistic variation coexists: one finds variation in lexical and grammatical features, as well as in other textual parameters such as orthography, phraseology and formulary, palaeography, layout, and formatting. Such variation occurs both within the written output of individuals and across broader corpora that represent ‘communities’ of diverse types. To encapsulate this, we use the inclusive term ‘scribal repertoires’, a concept that is intended to cover the entire set of linguistic and non-linguistic practices that are prone to variation within and between manuscripts, while placing focus on scribes as socially and culturally embedded agents, whose choices are reflected in texts. This conceptualization of scribal variation, inspired by the relatively recent field of historical sociolinguistics, is applied to a range of phenomenon in the scribal cultures of premodern Egypt, across languages and socio-historical settings.

scholarly journals Reviving the genitive. Prescription and practice in the Netherlands (1770–1840)

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Krogull ◽  
Gijsbert Rutten
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Extreme Case ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
National Language ◽  
Prepositional Phrases ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
The One ◽  
Genitive Case

AbstractHistorical metalinguistic discourse is known to often prescribe linguistic variants that are not very frequent in actual language use, and to proscribe frequent variants. Infrequent variants that are promoted through prescription can be innovations, but they can also be conservative forms that have already largely vanished from the spoken language and are now also disappearing in writing. An extreme case in point is the genitive case in Dutch. This has been in decline in usage from at least the thirteenth century onwards, gradually giving way to analytical alternatives such as prepositional phrases. In the grammatical tradition, however, a preference for the genitive case was maintained for centuries. When ‘standard’ Dutch is officially codified in 1805 in the context of a national language policy, the genitive case is again strongly preferred, still aiming to ‘revive’ the synthetic forms. The striking discrepancy between metalinguistic discourse on the one hand, and developments in language use on the other, make the genitive case in Dutch an interesting case for historical sociolinguistics. In this paper, we tackle various issues raised by the research literature, such as the importance of genre differences as well as variation within particular genres, through a detailed corpus-based analysis of the influence of prescription on language practices in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch.

Reconsidering the Emergence of Non-core Dative Constructions in Modern Hebrew

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 309-323
Author(s):  
Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal ◽  
Nora Boneh
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Language ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Linguistic Phenomenon

This article critically scrutinizes the perceived view that the emergence of non-core dative constructions in Modern Hebrew is due to a Slavic-Yiddish influence. It studies the Biblical and Mishnaic sources, showing that these language strata contain highly similar constructions to the ones in Modern Hebrew. It additionally shows that parallel constructions existed in languages spoken in the Jewish communities at the time of the revival, revealing that this linguistic phenomenon is typologically widely attested. We therefore claim that this could be an example of an internalization of the old grammar in the new spoken language, enhanced by the fact that similar constructions are reflected in the non-Hebrew native languages of the revival era speakers. These speakers, at the same time, imported into their colloquial Hebrew a sub-type of non-core dative—the discursive dative—to which they could not have been exposed through the ancient written texts, since this type of dative construction occurs only in the spoken language.

Spoken Latin behind written texts

Diachronica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-449
Author(s):  
Timo Korkiakangas
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Language ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Free Part ◽  
Conservative Form ◽  
Written Texts

Abstract This study uses treebanking to investigate how spoken language infiltrated legal Latin in early medieval Italy. The documents used are always formulaic, but they also always contain a ‘free’ part where the case in question is described in free prose. This paper uses this difference to measure how ten linguistic features, representative of the evolution that took place between Classical and Late Latin, are distributed between the formulaic and free parts. Some variants are attested equally often in both parts of the documents, while perceptually or conceptually salient variants appear to be preserved in their conservative form mainly in the formulaic parts.

English in its socio-historical context

English Today ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 58-59
Author(s):  
J. M. Hernández-Campoy
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Empirical Validity ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
The Past ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Linguistic Material

Since Romaine's (1982) pioneering work, historical sociolinguistics has been studying the relationships between language and society in its socio-historical context by focusing on the study of language variation and change with the use of variationist methods. Work on this interdisciplinary sub-field subsisting on sociology, history and linguistics is expanding, as shown, for example, by Milroy (1992), Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (1996; 2003), Ammon, Mattheier & Nelde (1999), Jahr (1999), Kastovsky & Mettinger (2000), Bergs (2005), Conde-Silvestre (2007), Trudgill (2010), or Hernández-Campoy & Conde-Silvestre (2012). These works have been elucidating the theoretical limits of the discipline and applying the tenets and findings of contemporary sociolinguistic research to the interpretation of linguistic material from the past. Yet in the course of this development historical sociolinguistics has sometimes been criticised for lack of representativeness and its empirical validity has occasionally been questioned. Fortunately, in parallel to the development of electronic corpora, the assistance of corpus linguistics and social history has conferred ‘empirical’ ease and ‘historical’ confidence on the discipline.

Spoken Corpora Design

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
František Čermák
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Written Texts

From a linguistic point of view, spoken corpora should be primary for research but that has not been the case so far. Hence, the problem of what should be included in the corpora has hardly ever been considered. Often it would appear that anything spoken is included on an ad hoc basis. The need and scarcity of real prototypical spoken corpora points to a necessity of mapping the field in its entirety and identifying its relevant parameters. In order to do this the present paper translates the major differences between spoken and written texts into usable parameters. Ultimately this could enable the setting up of a representative spoken corpus with a clear core of real and typical spoken language, etc.

Local dialects, supralocal writing systems

2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gijsbert Rutten ◽  
Marijke J. van der Wal
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Historical Phonology ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Local Dialect ◽  
Clear Cases

In historical sociolinguistics, it is often assumed that ego-documents such as private letters represent the spoken language of the past as closely as possible. In this paper, we will try to determine the degree of orality of seventeenth-century Dutch private letters: the degree to which the spoken local dialect is represented in these texts, and at the same time, the extent to which scribes possibly converged towards supralocal writing systems. We study the orthographical representation of four phonemes in a corpus of letters from the provinces of Holland and Zeeland. Clear cases of local writing practices are revealed, contributing to our knowledge of the spoken language in the past, as well as to the different ways in which it was represented in written language. However, the degree to which local features appear in the corpus is remarkably low. Only a minority of the letters contains localizable features, and if a letter contains these, it is usually only in a minority of the positions which, historically, were phonologically possible. We conclude that, in general, scribes did not aim to write their local dialect, but employed an intended supraregional variety instead. Keywords: Historical sociolinguistics; Dutch, seventeenth century; ego-documents; letters; writing systems; historical phonology; language from below; orality

scholarly journals Towards developing colloquial Indonesian language pedagogy: A corpus analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 382-396
Author(s):  
Halim Nataprawira ◽  
Michael Carey
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Language ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Total N ◽  
Language Curriculum ◽  
Language Pedagogy ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Audio Recordings ◽  
Average Proportion ◽  
Official Status

This study was motivated by the situation that many students studying Indonesian language have problems to understand and communicate in spoken Indonesian. This is because Indonesian is a diglossic language in which different sets of grammar and vocabulary are used between the high and low diglossic variants, whereas students are usually only taught the high diglossic variant. Only the high diglossic variant of formal Indonesian has an official status, while the low diglossic variant of colloquial Indonesian does not. Sneddon observed that in everyday speech the linguistic features of high and low diglossic variants are merging into a middle variant that Errington called Middle Indonesian. This study examines the extent to which a middle variant of spoken Indonesian has formed by quantifying the amount of high and low linguistic elements that are present in a corpus of everyday spoken Indonesian derived from audio-recordings and written texts containing spoken language. We collected and classified a 14,000+ word corpus of spoken Indonesian. With reference to published descriptions of high (formal) and low (colloquial) diglossia, each colloquial item in the corpus was counted and calculated as a ratio to the total N of the corpus. Colloquial features were found with an average proportion of 0.39 across the corpus, indicating that colloquial Indonesian lexicon and grammar may contribute as much as 39% to everyday spoken Indonesian. This result evidences the need to include this middle variant of spoken Indonesian in the design and resourcing of materials within the Indonesian language curriculum.

scholarly journals “Giler” Atau “Gile”: Slanga Kata Penguat

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Fatimah Subet ◽  
Muhammad Zaid Daud
Keyword(s):  
Language Variation ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Educational Background ◽  
Written Communication ◽  
The Public ◽  
And Linguistics

Abstrak Makalah ini bertujuan meninjau pemilihan ejaan “giler” ataupun “gile” yang kerap digunakan dalam slanga yang dijadikan sebagai kata penguat. Tinjauan dibuat untuk menentukan sama ada perkataan ini mendahului atau mengikuti kata adjektif dan berfungsi menguatkan maksud yang terkandung dalam kata atau frasa adjektif berkenaan. Data dikutip melalui temu bual secara rawak dan pengisian borang soal selidik oleh 360 orang responden secara dalam talian dengan aplikasi Google Forms. Kajian mendapati dua perkataan ini telah berfungsi sebagai slanga kata penguat yang sering digunakan, dan menjadi bahasa kebiasaan dalam pertuturan mahupun dalam penulisan tidak formal dalam kalangan masyarakat tanpa mengira umur, jantina, taraf pendidikan, pekerjaan mahupun etnik. Kata kunci: kata penguat, slanga, bahasa dan linguistik, variasi bahasa Abstracts This article focuses on the use of the slang word “giler” or “gile” (lit.: mad, crazy) which has become common usage as an intensifier. The occurrence of this word, whether before or after adjectives, and its intensifying function in adjectival phrases, is examined. Data was collected through random interviews and online questionnaires. Thestudy reveals that these slang words are often used as intensifiers, and are commonly used both in spoken language and informal written communication by the public, regardless of age, gender, educational background, profession or ethnicity. Keywords: intensifiers, slang, language and linguistics, language variation

scholarly journals When Two Basic Principles Clash: About the Validity of Written Chat Language as a Research Tool for Spoken Language Variation. Flemish Chatspeak as a Test Case

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benny De Decker ◽  
Reinhild Vandekerckhove ◽  
Dominiek Sandra
Keyword(s):  
Language Variation ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Research Tool ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Code Mixing ◽  
Spoken Interaction ◽  
Speech Variation ◽  
Mixed Code

Written chatspeak is said to be marked by two basic principles: (1) write like you speak and (2) write as fast as possible. As for Flemish chat language, the first principle seems to result in a multilayered mixed code, in which dialectical, substandard Flemish and standard Dutch features interact in an eclectic way. In addition, most of the chatters insert English words in their chat discourse as well. This intensive code mixing is assumed to be – at least to a considerable extent – a reflection of the daily speech of these Flemish chatters. But what about the validity of this assumption? Can chatspeak function as an alternative dataset for the study of (spoken) language variation and change and thus as a research tool for e.g. the study of Flemish teenage talk and the representation of non-standard speech in spoken interaction? The dependent variables for the present test case are two substandard Flemish (or ‘tussentaal’) features that urge the chatters to violate the second principle, since their use implies an extension of the utterance. The central question is whether the second principle prevents the use of these substandard forms in Flemish chatspeak. In other words, do the analyses undermine the validity of using written chat corpora as a graduator for speech variation? We finish with a small excursion on the use of English by the Flemish chatters: can we separate English insertions that are triggered by the chat medium from English insertions that are not?

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