The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Breitbarth ◽  
Christopher Lucas ◽  
David Willis
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Child Language Acquisition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Patterns And Processes ◽  
Diachronic Development

The book constitutes the second volume of the two-volume work The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. While the first volume united a rich collection of ten case studies, the current second volume turns to the patterns and processes in the historical development of the expression of negation and its interaction with indefinites from a more general theoretical perspective. The volume is subdivided into two parts, one dealing with Jespersen’s cycle and one dealing with developments affecting indefinites in the scope of negation (the quantifier and free-choice cycles), including the diachronic development of negative concord. In each case, there are relevant empirical observations across the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The book considers both language-internal and language-contact motivations for the changes observed, developing a generative account of the developments in terms of semantic change, reanalysis, and child-language acquisition, integrating insights from functionalist approaches that invoke language use as a motivation behind these cycles. Language contact is shown to have played a significant role in the spread of negation systems. The result is a holistic account of language change in the domain of negation, developed from comparing the diachronies of languages across Europe and incorporating insights from a wide range of theoretical perspectives.

Introduction: Multicultural youth vernaculars in Paris and urban France

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNY CHESHIRE ◽  
PENELOPE GARDNER-CHLOROS
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Nursery School ◽  
Peer Groups ◽  
Recent Immigrant ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Linguistic Backgrounds

The papers in this Special Issue present some of the results of theMulticultural London English/Multicultural Paris Frenchproject, supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from October 2010 to December 2014 and by the FrenchAgence Nationale de la Recherche(ANR) from 2010–2012. The project compared language variation and change in multilingual areas of London and Paris, focusing on the language of young people of recent immigrant origin as well as that of young people whose families had lived in London or Paris for many generations. Similar projects in other European cities have documented the emergence of new ways of speaking and rapid language change in the dominant ‘host’ language, which are attributed to the direct and indirect effects of language contact; see, for example, Wiese 2009 on young people's language in Berlin, Quist 2008 on youth language in Copenhagen, and Svendsen and Røyneland 2008 on Norwegian). In London, young children from diverse linguistic backgrounds tend to acquire English in their peer groups at nursery school rather than from their parents, many of whom do not speak English or are in the early stages of learning English. Since their peers speak a wide range of different languages, the only language the young children have in common is English; and since many of their friends are also acquiring English, there is no clear target model, a high tolerance of linguistic variation, and plenty of scope for linguistic innovation. By the time they reach adolescence, young people's English has stabilized, and many innovations have become part of a new London dialect, now known as Multicultural London English (Cheshire et al., 2013). New urban dialects and language practices such as these have been termed ‘multiethnolects’: they contain a variable repertoire of innovative phonetic, grammatical, and discourse-pragmatic features. In multiethnic peer groups, where local children from many different linguistic backgrounds grow up together, the innovative features are used by speakers of all ethnicities, including those of local descent such as, in London, young monolingual English speakers from Cockney families. Nevertheless they tend to be more frequent in the speech of bilingual young people of recent immigrant origin, and by young speakers with highly multiethnic friendship groups (see further Quist 2008 for an account of the use of features associated with a multiethnolect in conjunction with nonlinguistic ‘markers’ of style, such as tastes in music and preferred ways of dressing). Our project aimed to determine whether a similar outcome had occurred in multicultural areas of Paris.

Sources of auxiliation in the perfects of Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Drinka
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Peripheral Areas ◽  
Explanatory Mechanism ◽  
Scribal Tradition

This paper explores the complex role of language contact in the development of be and have auxiliation in the periphrastic perfects of Europe. Beginning with the influence of Ancient Greek on Latin, it traces the spread of the category across western Europe and identifies the Carolingian scribal tradition as largely responsible for extending the use of the be perfect alongside the have perfect across Charlemagne’s realm. Outside that territory, by contrast, in “peripheral” areas like Iberia, Southern Italy, and England, have came to be used as the only perfect auxiliary. Within the innovating core area, a further innovation began in Paris in the 12th century and spread to contiguous areas in France, Southern Germany, and northern Italy: the semantic shift in the perfects from anterior to preterital meaning. What can be concluded from these three successive instances of diffusion in the history of the perfect is that contact should be regarded as one of the essential “multiple sources” of innovation, and as a fundamental explanatory mechanism for language change.

Diachronic features of Romanian in a broader comparative setting

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Alexandru Nicolae
Keyword(s):  
Structural Properties ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Romance Language ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Diachronic Development

Chapter 6 highlights the novel theoretical and empirical facts brought about by the word order changes that occurring in the passage from old to modern Romanian, showing how the diachrony of Romanian may contribute to a better understanding of the history of the Romance languages and of the Balkan Sprachbund, as well as to syntactic theory and syntactic change in general. One important dimension of diachronic variation and change is the height of nouns and verbs along their extended projections (lower vs higher V- and N-movement). The two perspectives from which language contact proves relevant in the diachronic development of word order in Romanian, language contact by means of translation and areal language contact, are discussed. The chapter also addresses the issue of surface analogy vs deep structural properties; once again, Romanian emerges as a Romance language in a Balkan suit, as Romance deep structural properties are instantiated by means of Balkan word order patterns.

Catch me if you can: Pathways of Dravidian influence in Sri Lanka Malay

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Nordhoff
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Relative Influence ◽  
Coarse Grained ◽  
History Of

AbstractDiscussions of the history of Sri Lanka Malay have so far tried to evaluate the development of Sri Lanka Malay with regard to the relative influence from the adstrates Sinhala and Tamil. This paper shows that such an approach is too coarse-grained and that the dialectal situation of especially Tamil has to be taken into account. After an overview of the dialectal situation we find on the island, three directions of language change are established: (1) Sinhala moves towards a general Tamil typology; (2) South Western Muslim Tamil moves towards Sinhala; and (3) Sri Lanka Malay moves towards South Western Muslim Tamil and/or Sinhala. A discussion of the problematic nature of the assumptions of “fixed targets” in language contact studies emanating from point (3) closes the paper.

scholarly journals “Carrefour Louisiane”

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
New Variety ◽  
Dialect Contact ◽  
Cajun French ◽  
Louisiana French ◽  
History Of ◽  
Linguistic Behavior

The history of Louisiana French (LF) is closely related to Louisiana’s particular societal and linguistic ecosystem, characterized by a mixed society where new forms of societal organization emerged and were reflected in new forms of linguistic patterns and linguistic behavior. From the beginning, language contact has been of crucial importance for the emergence, evolution and gradual decline of Louisiana French (“Cajun French”). In colonial times, contact between related French lects resulted in the formation of a new variety of regional French in North America with its own features and its own evolutionary dynamics. The continuing contact with English, however, which takes place in an entirely different ecological frame, results in the ongoing attrition of the minority language. The first part of the article deals with early stages of dialect contact in Louisiana; it will be shown that from a diachronic point of view Louisiana French has to be seen as a product of language mixing and dialect leveling. In the second part two specific aspects of current English-French language contact will be discussed. Both aspects serve to illustrate particularities of the linguistic situation in Louisiana now and then as well as the importance of certain universal mechanisms of contact-induced language change.

scholarly journals Cattle Plague and Society

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 8-33
Author(s):  
Johanna Widenberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Veterinary Medicine ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Retrospective Diagnosis ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Cattle Disease ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of

This article presents the findings of a study showing that rinderpest and anthrax were rife among cattle in eighteenth century Sweden and Finland. These diseases, which caused a widespread loss of animals, were the scourge of owners, medical practitioners and the authorities alike. The study also shows that the epizootic legislation and disease control that evolved at government level was influenced by the particular characteristics of rinderpest and anthrax. Previous research has identified the endemic nature of rinderpest and its far-reaching consequences for society. Yet major outbreaks of anthrax, and the degree to which the disease influenced the development of State epizootic control, were previously unknown. The study uses the perspectives of cultural history and the history of veterinary medicine, a wide range of historical sources, and a method of text analysis for making retrospective diagnoses. In this article the findings are compared with the results of studies of eighteenth century cattle disease and epizootic control in other European countries. Similarities and differences in theoretical perspectives and research methods are identified. Here the use of retrospective diagnosis in the history of veterinary medicine is discussed in particular.

Language Contact

2020 ◽  
pp. 857-870
Author(s):  
Klaus Beyer
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Contact Linguistics ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Network Approach ◽  
Areal Linguistics ◽  
French Tradition

The chapter starts with a short history of contact studies related to Africa. It briefly looks at early works from Heine (pidgins in the Bantu area) and the French tradition exemplified in the LACITO series on language contact. Considerable space is given to the developments of the last ten years or so when areal linguistics (Aikhenvald and Dixon), linguistic geography (Heine and Nurse), and contact linguistics (Childs, Mesthrie) were put center stage in the African linguistic context. The second part of the chapter looks at methodological issues. Substantial space is given to social contexts in the description of contact-induced language change. The social network approach and other sociolinguistic tools are demonstrated by means of a brief case study from a West African rural contact zone.

An Alternative Account of the History of Archaeology in the Nineteenth Century

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Directions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Historians of science (whether philosophers, epistemologists, historians of science, or sociologists of science) have been stubbornly reluctant to deal with archaeology in favour of other disciplines such as geology and medicine. Most histories of archaeology have, therefore, been written by archaeologists and this book is no exception. Being trained in the subtleties of stratigraphy and typology does not, however, provide archaeologists with the necessary tools to confront the history of their own discipline. Many of the histories of archaeology so far written revolve around a narrow, almost positivistic, understanding of what the writing of one’s own disciplinary history represents. This volume attempts to overcome these limitations. Questions addressed have been inspired by a wide range of authors working in the areas of history, sociology, literary studies, anthropology, and the history of science. It uses the case of nineteenth-century world archaeology to explore the potential of new directions in the study of nationalism for our understanding of the history of archaeology. Key concepts and questions from which this study has drawn include the changing nature of national history as seen by historians (Berger et al. 1999b; Hobsbawm 1990) and by scholars working in the areas of literature and political studies (Anderson 1991); transformations within nationalism (Smith 1995); new theoretical perspectives developed within colonial and post-colonial studies (Asad 1973; Said 1978); the relationship between knowledge and power (Foucault 1972 (2002); 1980b); and the consideration of social disciplines as products of history (Bourdieu 1993; 2000; 2004). Perhaps historians and sociologists of science’s lack of enthusiasm to engage with archaeology derives from its sheer lack of homogeneity. The term comes from the Greek arkhaiologia, the study of what is ancient. It most commonly encompasses the analysis of archaeological remains, but the emphasis on what body of data lies within its remit has always differed—and still does—from country to country and within a country between groups of scholars of the various academic traditions. For some it revolves around the study of artistic objects, as well as of ancient inscriptions and coins, for others it encompasses all manifestations of culture from every period of human existence.

Language Contact in Berber

2020 ◽  
pp. 448-466
Author(s):  
Lameen Souag
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Family ◽  
Arabic Speakers ◽  
South Central ◽  
Northern Algeria ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Central Sahara ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Sahel Region

The Berber languages are indigenous to North Africa, in which their first written attestations date back more than two millennia, and extend south from the Mediterranean across the Sahara well into the Sahel. At present, most Berber speakers live in Morocco and Algeria, but smaller communities of speakers continue to be scattered throughout this range, between the Atlantic and western Egypt. Major Berber languages include Shilha, Tamazight, and Rif in Morocco; Kabyle and Shawi in northern Algeria; Tuareg throughout the south-central Sahara, particularly in Mali and Niger; and, at a smaller scale, Nafusi in northeastern Libya. Like any other language family, Berber has been in contact with a variety of languages, and the relatively good early documentation of Mediterranean languages allows this contact to be traced back almost three millennia. However, its contact with Arabic is remarkable for the unusually wide range of examples of intense language-contact phenomena that it provides, enabled by widespread fluent bilingualism, especially among men. Such phenomena are especially pervasive in smaller varieties surrounded by Arabic speakers, many of which are in danger of disappearance. Berber itself has significantly impacted Maghrebi Arabic and languages of the Sahel region, but this chapter discusses only the impacts of other languages on Berber.

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