Motives For Language Change

This specially commissioned volume considers the processes involved in language change and the issues of how they can be modelled and studied. The way languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself, its internal organisation, and how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the phenomenon of language change has been approached from a variety of perspectives by linguists of many different orientations. This book, originally published in 2003, brings together an international team of leading figures from different areas of linguistics to re-examine some of the central issues in this field and also to discuss new proposals. The volume is arranged into sections, including grammaticalisation, the typological perspective, the social context of language change and contact-based explanations. It seeks to cover the subject as a whole, bearing in mind its relevance for the general analysis of language, and will appeal to a broad international readership.

The author concludes from these data that dynamic identity construction, followed by willingness to act in conformity with expectations, are key elements in the planned behaviour and reasoned action which all authorities take in relation to language."--BOOK JACKET.

Presenting new or little-known data, the authors explore the phenomenon of language change, highlighting an often ignored distinction between concepts such as language policy and planning, and language revival and revitalization movements.

It considers what forms of sexism are found in language and whether these differ among languages. It also looks at how sexist language can be changed and evaluates the effectiveness of these reforms.

The second edition of the definitive reference on contact studies and linguistic change—provides extensive new research and original case studies Language contact is a dynamic area of contemporary linguistic research that studies how language changes when speakers of different languages interact. Accessibly structured into three sections, The Handbook of Language Contact explores the role of contact studies within the field of linguistics, the value of contact studies for language change research, and the relevance of language contact for sociolinguistics. This authoritative volume presents original findings and fresh research directions from an international team of prominent experts. Thirty-seven specially-commissioned chapters cover a broad range of topics and case studies of contact from around the world. Now in its second edition, this valuable reference has been extensively updated with new chapters on topics including globalization, language acquisition, creolization, code-switching, and genetic classification. Fresh case studies examine Romance, Indo-European, African, Mayan, and many other languages in both the past and the present. Addressing the major issues in the field of language contact studies, this volume: Includes a representative sample of individual studies which re-evaluate the role of language contact in the broader context of language and society Offers 23 new chapters written by leading scholars Examines language contact in different societies, including many in Africa and Asia Provides a cross-section of case studies drawing on languages across the world The Handbook of Language Contact, Second Edition is an indispensable resource for researchers, scholars, and students involved in language contact, language variation and change, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and language theory.

The volume portrays a panorama of recent linguistic research in Poland in terms of comparison and juxtaposition as driving forces in an attempt to grasp descriptive and explanatory aspects of linguistic use and organization. The spectrum of contributions spans all the levels of language. The constellation of methodological perspectives juxtaposes the generative theory and recent developments in cognitive linguistics, synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and a measure of freedom has also been allocated to a more traditional structurally-oriented and/or eclectic spirit. The notions of comparison and contrast have become the major force and the common denominator for all contributions in the service of explicating the central and the focal from what appears nebulous. A well-documented discussion on horizontal bonds between phonological primes and a refreshing new attempt to handle the phonology of Old English i-umlaut are complemented with equally illuminating topics in derivational morphology such as grinding, diminutives, suffix distributional preferences and compound nouns. In a similar fashion, drawing upon the fundamental phenomenon of dynamic alternating processes, syntactic topics focus on such problems as grammatical constructions with locatum verbs, the status of English NPN forms and a new typology of Old English verbs. Cognitively grounded phenomena are handled with equal zest, and range across the vast territory of backstage cognition: from the ‘slip-of-the-tongue’, through novelty of meaning achieved through collocation/construction environment, to a discussion on the emergence of metaphorical senses in Old English lexical concepts for ‘fire’ and ‘light’. This stage inevitably leads us to further juxtapositions championed in the volume embracing subjectification and objectification in viewing arrangement, as well as dynamically anchored viewing impositions of ‘the self’ of the textual narrator. The contributions dealing with levels of discourse aspire to bring us closer to goals and norms in politeness and co-operation strategies, and also to an in-depth analysis of stylistic features based on corpora. The coda falls onto normative linguistics and thus closes the territory of contrast and juxtaposition. It provides an insight into how a reflective thespian and a devoted linguist differ in viewing language without compromising the status and validity of their respective stances.

Speakers tend to compose their utterances in such a way that the message they want to get across is hardly ever fully encoded by the meanings of the words and the grammar they use. Instead speakers rely on hearers adding conceptual and emotive content while interpreting the contextually appropriate meanings and intentions behind utterances. This insight, which is of course particularly relevant in all kinds of indirect, figurative or humorous talk, lies at the heart of the linguistic discipline of pragmatics. If pragmatics is the study of meaning-in-context, then cognitive pragmatics can be broadly defined as encompassing the study of the cognitive principles and processes involved in the construal of meaning-in-context. While it would seem only natural that pragmatics as such should have addressed such cognitive issues anyway, it has mainly been due to the historical rooting of this discipline in the philosophy of language that psychological aspects have not been in the pragmatic limelight to date. Being part of the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this volume is the first to systematically survey this terrain from a wide range of perspectives. It collects state-of-the-art contributions by leading experts from the fields of pragmatics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, clinical linguistics and historical linguistics. The volume is divided into four parts which tackle the following questions: Part I: The cognitive principles of pragmatic competence What are the general cognitive principles underlying pragmatic competence, i.e. the skill to arrive at context-dependent meanings of utterances? What are the cognitive underpinnings of language users' ability to compute or infer intended meanings in the role of hearers and to give hints as to how to decode intended meanings in the role of speakers? Part II: The psychology of pragmatics What are the actual cognitive processes taking place during online construal of meaning-in-context on the basis of encoded messages? How is pragmatic competence acquired in childhood? What are the types, sources and effects of pragmatic disorders, i.e. impairments of pragmatic competence? Part III: The construal of non-explicit and non-literal meaning-in-context What are the cognitive principles and processes involved in the construal of meanings of non-explicit and indirect utterances? How do we process figurative meanings, humour and gestures? Part IV: The emergence of linguistic structures from meaning-in-context What are the repercussions of the (repeated) construal of context-dependent meanings on linguistic structures and the linguistic system? How does the system change under the influence of the construal of meanings in social situations? Reduced series price (print) available! [email protected].

This volume presents the results of the largest ever language attitude/motivation survey in second language studies. The research team gathered data from over 13,000 Hungarian language learners on three successive occasions: in 1993, 1999 and 2004. The examined period covers a particularly prominent time in Hungary’s history, the transition from a closed, Communist society to a western-style democracy that became a member of the European Union in 2004. Thus, the book provides an ‘attitudinal/motivational flow-chart’ describing how significant sociopolitical changes affect the language disposition of a nation.