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.

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.

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.

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.

UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE CHANGE.April M. S. McMahon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 361. $17.95 cloth, $14.36 paper.

1997 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-412
Author(s):  
Robert Bayley
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Language Attrition ◽  
Intended Audience ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Contact Language ◽  
History Of ◽  
Linguistic Evolution

This book, based on an undergraduate course at Cambridge University, provides a comprehensive introduction to language change. Chapter 1 sets forth the history of the study of language change and the basic questions in the field. The remainder of the book is divided into two parts. Chapters 2–7 examine internally motivated change at the phonological, syntactic, semantic, and lexical levels. Within each chapter, the author outlines important theoretical positions, from the Neogrammarians to the generative work of Lightfoot and more recent studies of grammaticalization. Although, as McMahon notes, the separation of types of language change by levels involves considerable idealization, the result is greater clarity of organization. The second part (Chapters 8–12), which is concerned with language contact, language variation, pidgins and creoles, language attrition and death, and linguistic evolution, is organized topically. It is this section that is perhaps of most interest to students of SLA. As in the first section, McMahon reviews the perspectives on language change that emerge from a wide variety of classic studies, including Bickerton's work on Guyanese Creole and Dorian's studies of East Sutherland Gaelic. Although specialists might be disappointed to see their favorite studies missing, the examples provide an effective introduction for the intended audience of undergraduates.

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.

History of the Spanish Lexicon

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven N. Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Derivational Morphology ◽  
Written Discourse ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Linguistic Innovation ◽  
Roman Province ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Considerable Detail

From an historical perspective, the Spanish lexicon consists of three different categories: (1) its historical core of words inherited from the Latin spoken in the Roman province of Hispania; (2) loanwords that entered Spanish over its long history as a result of contact at the levels of both oral and written discourse with other languages; and (3) words created internally through such mechanisms of derivational morphology as suffixation, prefixation, compounding, back-formations, and so on. Over the last 150 years, specialists in the history of the Spanish language have studied in considerable detail all three sources of lexical material. Although most of the lexical items inherited from spoken Latin have cognates in many (in some cases, all) of the Romance languages, Spanish has preserved some words that live on only in Spanish (and neighboring Portuguese) or only in Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, the geographical extremes of the Romance-speaking world, far removed from the centers of linguistic innovation. As a result of language contact, loanwords from the pre-Roman languages of the Iberian Peninsula, Visigothic, Arabic, Gallo-Romance (northern and southern French), Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, classical Latin, native languages of the New World, and English have entered and taken root in the Spanish lexicon. Although such lexical borrowings have often been studied within a cultural framework, recent research has focused on their introduction and incorporation as examples of contact-induced language change at the level of the lexicon. Throughout its history, Spanish has increased the size of its vocabulary through the creation of neologisms through processes of suffixation, prefixation, and composition. The study of such items has traditionally been the focus of specialists in diachronic derivational morphology. This subfield constitutes in many respects an important component of diachronic lexicology. Indeed, etymology and diachronic derivational morphology are two sides of the same coin. Lexical history is not limited to the study of additions to the vocabulary. Over time, many words have fallen into disuse or have become obsolete. Some recent work on the history of the Spanish lexicon has examined the various external and internal/structural causes of lexical loss in the history of the Spanish lexicon.

scholarly journals On historical language contact in English and its types: state of the art and new directions

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (s2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Lavidas ◽  
Alexander Bergs
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Early Language ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
Early English

AbstractThis article presents the state of the art of current research on the different types of language contact in early English. The article’s main aim is to show what kinds of phenomena have been investigated until now as possible areas of transfer/borrowing from other languages. We examine the main contact scenarios in Old and Middle English, which involve Latin, Celtic, French and Old Norse. We locate unanswered questions and underexamined hypotheses of historical language contact. We argue that the articles of the Special Collection on Language Contact in the History of English open new directions in the way we can investigate the role of early language contact in the development of English. New methodologies of research, the role of bilingualism in language change but also of the written types of contact, and the various domains of change in grammar, lexicon, and pragmatics offer insights into old and new hypotheses on scenarios of language contact.

Modern Greek V V dvandva compounds: A linguistic innovation in the history of the Indo-European languages

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Ralli
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Compound Formation ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
European Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Internal Change ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Asian Languages

This paper deals with [V V] dvandva compounds, which are frequently used in East and Southeast Asian languages but also in Greek and its dialects: Greek is in this respect uncommon among Indo-European languages. It examines the appearance of this type of compounding in Greek by tracing its development in the late Medieval period, and detects a high rate of productivity in most Modern Greek dialects. It argues that the emergence of the [V V] dvandva pattern is not due to areal pressure or to a language-contact situation, but it is induced by a language internal change. It associates this change with the rise of productivity of compounding in general, and the expansion of verbal compounds in particular. It also suggests that the change contributes to making the compound-formation patterns of the language more uniform and systematic. Claims and proposals are illustrated with data from Standard Modern Greek and its dialects. It is shown that dialectal evidence is crucial for the study of the rise and productivity of [V V] dvandva compounds, since changes are not usually portrayed in the standard language.

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