scholarly journals Information Structure and Language Change

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regine Eckardt ◽  
Augustin Speyer
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Semantic Composition ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Germanic Languages

This article explores the effect of language change on focusing and focus constructions based on observations and case studies. It begins by analysing bleached focus and contrasts it with independent focus. It also makes a distinction between universal focus effects and language-specific focus operators to show how language change can affect the specific parts of the grammar of focus. The discussion then turns to the emergence of focus sensitive particles, with particular reference to the semantic units that precede focus as part of semantic composition. The Jespersen Cycle is considered as a classic example of independent focus that gets bleached and finally lost. The article concludes by looking at information structure and syntactic change in the rise and loss of V2 in Germanic languages. It demonstrates how bleached focus can bridge the gap between the formal focus and informal notions of information structure.

scholarly journals Syntactic Change in Late Modern English

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Smitterberg
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
Original Case ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Many ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
Late Modern

Syntactic Change in Late Modern English presents a stability paradox to linguists; despite the many social changes that took place between 1700 and 1900, the language appeared to be structurally stable during this period. This book resolves this paradox by presenting a new, idiolect-centred perspective on language change, and shows how this framework is applicable to change in any language. It then demonstrates how an idiolect-centred framework can be reconciled with corpus-linguistic methodology through four original case studies. These concern colloquialization (the process by which oral features spread to writing) and densification (the process by which meaning is condensed into shorter linguistic units), two types of change that characterize Modern English. The case studies also shed light on the role of genre and gender in language change and contribute to the discussion of how to operationalize frequency in corpus linguistics. This study will be essential reading for researchers in historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics.

scholarly journals Children coping with COVID-19: Intersectional understandings of film and media access in a crisis

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Atkinson ◽  
Firdoze Bulbulia
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Media Access ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Film Education ◽  
The World ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
The Impact

As a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns across the world, digital access has become paramount, as most aspects of education have moved online. Drawing together five case studies located in South Africa, Argentina, the Netherlands, India and Ethiopia, this article assesses the role of film education during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a specific focus on the impacts of digital access. We examine multimodal forms of film education, and how these were used to inform, entertain and educate children during the crisis by the varying work undertaken by the organizations. Applying theories of intersectionality, we address the need for context-specific approaches to film education, focusing upon the impact that the societal and individual contexts had on the dissemination of film education in each country.

Some properties of texts in terms of ‘information distribution’ across languages

2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erich Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Global Level ◽  
Information Distribution ◽  
Intuitive Notion ◽  
Micro Level

On a global level, an attempt will be made to relate relatively macro-level intuitions about properties of texts to more micro-level notions and to empirically testable lexicogrammatical properties. The strategy will be to (a) partly reduce an intuitive notion of ‘information distribution’ in texts and sentences to more technical and better understood notions of ‘information structure’, ‘informational density’ and ‘grammatical metaphoricity’, and (b) operationalize these latter notions in such a way as to make them empirically testable on electronic corpora, using the ‘shallow’ concepts of ‘explicitness, density, and directness’ as properties of semantics-to-grammar mapping in sentences. It will furthermore be suggested that aspects of intuitive qualities of texts, such as ‘content orientation’ vs. ‘interactant orientation’ and others can be partly modelled in terms of (a) and (b). The argumentation in this paper thus proceeds from intuitive text-level notions to more technical and clause-based concepts, and from these concepts to operationalizations. It then moves ‘upwards’ again to text-level properties, exploring the relationships between the two levels. Finally, an outline is attempted of some implications for studies of language contact and language change.

Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Hierarchical Structures ◽  
Theoretical Issue ◽  
Austronesian Languages ◽  
Diachronic Syntax ◽  
Syntactic Variation ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
T Domain

This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters address a central theoretical issue in diachronic syntax: whether syntactic variation can always be attributed to differences in the features of items in the lexicon, as the Borer-Chomsky conjecture proposes. In answering this question, all the chapters develop analyses of syntactic change couched within a formalist framework in which rich hierarchical structures and abstract features of various kinds play an important role. The first three parts of the volume explore the different domains of the clause, namely the C-domain, the T-domain and the ν‎P/VP-domain respectively, while chapters in the final part are concerned with establishing methodology in diachronic syntax and modelling linguistic correspondences. The contributors draw on extensive data from a large number of languages and dialects, including several that have received little attention in the literature on diachronic syntax, such as Romeyka, a Greek variety spoken in Turkey, and Middle Low German, previously spoken in northern Germany. Other languages are explored from a fresh theoretical perspective, including Hungarian, Icelandic, and Austronesian languages. The volume sheds light not only on specific syntactic changes from a cross-linguistic perspective but also on broader issues in language change and linguistic theory.

Community, dialect and urbanization in the Arabic-speaking Middle East

1995 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Holes
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
The Social ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
Everyday Communication

The purpose of this paper is to explain how changes in the social structure of the countries of the Arabic-speaking Middle East are being reflected in new patterns of dialect use. The last 30 years have seen an enormously increased interest in Arabic as a living mode of everyday communication, reflected in many dialectological, typological and sociolinguistic studies. As a result, we now have a much clearer overall picture of the dialect geography of the eastern Arab world, and the beginnings of an understanding of the dynamics of language change. Inevitably, the focus of many studies has been geographically specific, so that the area-wide nexus between social change and linguistic change has not always been seen in a sufficiently broad context. By examining three case studies documented in the literature, I aim to point up similarities in the dynamics of change which are often obscured by distracting local particularities.

Systematization and the origin of rules

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Haiman
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
Design Features ◽  
Complementary Distribution ◽  
The World ◽  
Functional Analog ◽  
Constituent Order ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Germanic Languages

One of the design features of language is its systematicity: to a considerable extent, the rules of grammar relate not to the world outside, but only to other rules. They exist in autonomy from external motivations. Subject-verb inversion in the Germanic languages as a marker of interrogatives is a well-known example of such an externally unmotivated rule. The notion of systematization implies a process whereby such rules have evolved from pre-systematic externally motivated origins. In this particular case: Greenberg’s constituent order universal #11 proposed that only those languages with sentence-initial interrogative words will ever allow subject-verb inversion in questions. There is, however, an obvious functional basis for fronting question words: Jespersen’s principle of actuality. Moreover, of the languages which front question words, many demarcate focussed from presupposed material by a focus-marking flag. In other languages, it may be that the verb itself may function as such a flag, that is, subject-verb inversion may be the functional analog of a demarcative focus marker. The best evidence for the functional unity of focus marking and subject-verb inversion is their complementary distribution, sometimes within the same language. The genuine systematicity of subject-verb inversion may then be the outcome of functional external motivations, and a series of analogical steps. More generally, it may be that other aspects of the autonomization or emancipation of language can be explained by reference to processes that are attested in observed language change. Analogy leads to systematization (and possibly even to recursiveness), as ritualization leads to displacement, and its linguistic aspects (sound change and grammaticalization) lead to arbitrariness, discreteness, and double articulation.

Syntactic and Prosodic Reflexes of Information Structure in Germanic

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gisbert Fanselow
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Acoustic Properties ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Left Edge ◽  
Word Order Variation ◽  
Order Variation ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Finite Verb

This chapter deals with syntactic and prosodic reflexes of information structure in the Germanic languages. It begins with an overview of givenness and word order variation in the TP, along with aboutness topics and the prosodic prominence of topics and foci. It then considers the postulation of a focus head in Germanic and how contrast seems to intensify the acoustic properties of topics and foci. It shows how the left edge of verb second clauses acts as a slot for placing contrastive elements in all Germanic languages, but that the position is also filled on purely formal grounds. The article also describes the conditions of information structure that decide whether an XP can go to the position preceding the finite verb/auxiliary in the verb second (V2) constructions. Finally, it discusses two types of V2 constructions: unrestricted V2 constructions and pragmatically restricted V2 constructions.

scholarly journals The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Experimental Work ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Experimental Approaches

This book offers a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Different chapters examine the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors’ introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part II covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part III is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world’s language families.

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