The grammatization of European vernacular languages began in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance and continued up until the end of the 18th century. Through this process, grammars were written for the vernaculars and, as a result, the vernaculars were able to establish themselves in important areas of communication. Vernacular grammars largely followed the example of those written for Latin, using Latin descriptive categories without fully adapting them to the vernaculars. In accord with the Greco-Latin tradition, the grammars typically contain sections on orthography, prosody, morphology, and syntax, with the most space devoted to the treatment of word classes in the section on “etymology.” The earliest grammars of vernaculars had two main goals: on the one hand, making the languages described accessible to non-native speakers, and on the other, supporting the learning of Latin grammar by teaching the grammar of speakers’ native languages. Initially, it was considered unnecessary to engage with the grammar of native languages for their own sake, since they were thought to be acquired spontaneously. Only gradually did a need for normative grammars develop which sought to codify languages. This development relied on an awareness of the value of vernaculars that attributed a certain degree of perfection to them. Grammars of indigenous languages in colonized areas were based on those of European languages and today offer information about the early state of those languages, and are indeed sometimes the only sources for now extinct languages. Grammars of vernaculars came into being in the contrasting contexts of general grammar and the grammars of individual languages, between grammar as science and as art and between description and standardization. In the standardization of languages, the guiding principle could either be that of anomaly, which took a particular variety of a language as the basis of the description, or that of analogy, which permitted interventions into a language aimed at making it more uniform.
Article
History of European Vernacular Grammar Writing
Gerda Haßler
Article
History of the Catalan Lexicon
Josep Martines
Catalan is a western Romance language closely related to the Gallo-Romance languages, especially to Occitan. Therefore, most words of the Catalan basic lexicon have a great affinity to Occitan. Throughout its history, Catalan inherited from Latin many words of non-Indo-European (Iberian and Old Basque) and Indo-European (Proto-Celtic and Celtic) origin. It had contacts and received borrowings from several languages, mostly Germanic (Gothic and Frankish), Arabic, Aragonese, Occitan, Italian, French, and more recently English. Eventually, the use of Catalan gained strength in formal contexts (literary, scientific, administrative texts, among others) during the Middle Ages, which in turn encouraged the development of varied lexical resources (popular vocabulary and learned words), norms of correct usage, and elaborate register variation.
The progressive expansion of the Crown of Aragon toward the south and east of the Iberian Peninsula (13th century)—and its later integration into the Spanish monarchy at the end of the Middle Ages —prompted its contact with Spanish and a process of Hispanization of the Catalan lexicon. At the end of the Middle Ages, a change of its sociopolitical status provoked the beginning of a process of loss of social prestige and the interference of the Spanish lexicon. The end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century witnessed a process of recuperation of the usage in all spheres of society, the elaboration of a linguistic norm, the depuration of interference, and the activation of the resources of lexical and terminological production.
Article
History of the English Language
Ans van Kemenade
The status of English in the early 21st century makes it hard to imagine that the language started out as an assortment of North Sea Germanic dialects spoken in parts of England only by immigrants from the continent. Itself soon under threat, first from the language(s) spoken by Viking invaders, then from French as spoken by the Norman conquerors, English continued to thrive as an essentially West-Germanic language that did, however, undergo some profound changes resulting from contact with Scandinavian and French. A further decisive period of change is the late Middle Ages, which started a tremendous societal scale-up that triggered pervasive multilingualism. These repeated layers of contact between different populations, first locally, then nationally, followed by standardization and 18th-century codification, metamorphosed English into a language closely related to, yet quite distinct from, its closest relatives Dutch and German in nearly all language domains, not least in word order, grammar, and pronunciation.
Article
History of the Italian Lexicon
Paolo D’Achille
The basis of the Italian lexicon is primarily Latin, with substrate features already existing in the languages spoken before the diverse population on the peninsula was Latinized, prior to the gradual conquest by the Romans, and with terms borrowed from Greek. In addition to the lexemes continued directly from Latin, Italian also shows a Germanic superstrate (Gothic, Lombard, Frankish) and an Arabic adstrate; many Germanisms, Arabisms and Hellenisms were borrowed in the Middle Ages. These were almost always in an adapted form, before the vernacular was given any recognition, and today form part of the “core vocabulary.” The Italian lexicon has also been supplemented by new learned Latin borrowings, exogenous lexemes, borrowings from the other languages with which Italian has been in contact, either directly or indirectly, and dialects (linguistic systems which developed independently of Tuscan/Florentine-based Italian). Similarly, there have been endogenous developments, mainly neologisms.
As mentioned, the vocabulary of Latin origin can be divided into two categories. The first one includes the “inherited” vocabulary, that is words that Italian (like all other Romance languages and dialects) inherited from Latin directly through continued verbal use. Although their number is relatively limited, they have been attested for the longest period and make up the majority of the “core vocabulary.” The second category includes Latinisms, which entered the language through learned written use, from the earliest stages of the language right up to the early 21st century. As most of these were also adapted in the process, they cannot always be clearly distinguished formally from lexemes inherited through popular use. The influx of such forms is to some extent still ongoing. In some cases, in particular in the modern and contemporary eras, it has occurred via other languages, primarily French and English.
Among the exogenous elements, that is borrowings, particularly noteworthy are the Gallicisms, Iberianisms, and Anglicisms, which entered Italian in the modern and contemporary era and were gradually integrated into the Italian lexicon (at least in writing) with adaptation by this stage no longer taking place (it was normal in earlier stages of the language). Calques remain frequent. Another remarkable phenomenon is internal loans or dialecticisms, that is lexemes once restricted to certain dialect areas or regions and that now form part of the common lexicon.
Endogenous processes are represented primarily by the creation of neologisms, that is lexemes created within Italian via the normal means of word-formation (principally derivation and compounding). But attention should also be paid to semantic change: many terms already in use have developed new meanings, in some cases additional to the original meanings, and in other cases replacing them.
Article
History of the Sardinian Lexicon
Ignazio Putzu
Ever since the fundamental studies carried out by the great German Romanist Max Leopold Wagner (b. 1880–d. 1962), the acknowledged founder of scientific research on Sardinian, the lexicon has been, and still is, one of the most investigated and best-known areas of the Sardinian language.
Several substrate components stand out in the Sardinian lexicon around a fundamental layer which has a clear Latin lexical background. The so-called Paleo-Sardinian layer is particularly intriguing. This is a conventional label for the linguistic varieties spoken in the prehistoric and protohistoric ages in Sardinia. Indeed, the relatively large amount of words (toponyms in particular) which can be traced back to this substrate clearly distinguishes the Sardinian lexicon within the panorama of the Romance languages. As for the other Pre-Latin substrata, the Phoenician-Punic presence mainly (although not exclusively) affected southern and western Sardinia, where we find the highest concentration of Phoenician-Punic loanwords.
On the other hand, recent studies have shown that the Latinization of Sardinia was more complex than once thought. In particular, the alleged archaic nature of some features of Sardinian has been questioned.
Moreover, research carried out in recent decades has underlined the importance of the Greek Byzantine superstrate, which has actually left far more evident lexical traces than previously thought. Finally, from the late Middle Ages onward, the contributions from the early Italian, Catalan, and Spanish superstrates, as well as from modern and contemporary Italian, have substantially reshaped the modern-day profile of the Sardinian lexicon. In these cases too, more recent research has shown a deeper impact of these components on the Sardinian lexicon, especially as regards the influence of Italian.
Article
The History of Variationist Germanic Linguistics
Frans Gregersen
The history of variationist linguistics (also known as variationist sociolinguistics or language variation and change) shows that over the years it has entered into competition and collaboration with a number of disciplines. It is in competition with Chomskyan theoretical linguistics, diverging from this hegemonic trend in methods, data, and types of analysis: variationist linguistics favors observation and dismisses introspection; it builds on everyday conversations with more speakers than one; and it uses quantitative methods in all analyses. Variationism collaborates with or is compatible with other types of analyses of language use and is sometimes seen as part of a larger sociolinguistic field also encompassing interactional linguistics, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and functional grammar, and systemic functional linguistics may complement or in other ways be used in otherwise mainly variationist enterprises. Indeed since one of the central variationist types of data is the sociolinguistic interview, variationist data may be analyzed by all of these disciplines.
The article is organized along the following historical framework: It circumscribes three periods ranging from approximately 1960 to ca. 2010: The founder period establishes the approach at the various European universities by producing a number of exemplary studies, primary among them William Labov’s dissertation and later book, The Social Stratification of English in New York City. In focusing on an urban environment, Labov identified a moot point in the dialectological tradition, which otherwise is not only compatible with variationism but would also, gradually, be profoundly transformed by it. He also studied a community whose sheer size makes sampling and concomitant discussions of representativity necessary. These are central discussions for any urban sociology.
The history of variationism in general plays out differently in the various countries or regions of Germanic-speaking Europe, but in the second period it is characteristic that variationist linguistics gets a more or less favored place in a broader canvas of disciplines studying spoken language in use. The disciplines may take their cue from sociology (ethnomethodology, conversation analysis), philosophy (speech-act theory), or social psychology (accommodation theory). Thus, we have labeled this period the period of fragmentation.
The third period distinguished here is a period of larger corpora, when studies of variation may be carried out in tandem with, or indeed in collaboration with, other analyses; thus, in a way, modifying the previous period of fragmentation—at least institutionally.
The three periods happen at various points in time in the various countries discussed, and it could be argued that the two later periods overlap, but the framework used here nevertheless makes it possible to organize their overall history.
Article
Iconicity
Irit Meir and Oksana Tkachman
Iconicity is a relationship of resemblance or similarity between the two aspects of a sign: its form and its meaning. An iconic sign is one whose form resembles its meaning in some way. The opposite of iconicity is arbitrariness. In an arbitrary sign, the association between form and meaning is based solely on convention; there is nothing in the form of the sign that resembles aspects of its meaning. The Hindu-Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3 are arbitrary, because their current form does not correlate to any aspect of their meaning. In contrast, the Roman numerals I, II, III are iconic, because the number of occurrences of the sign I correlates with the quantity that the numerals represent. Because iconicity has to do with the properties of signs in general and not only those of linguistic signs, it plays an important role in the field of semiotics—the study of signs and signaling. However, language is the most pervasive symbolic communicative system used by humans, and the notion of iconicity plays an important role in characterizing the linguistic sign and linguistic systems. Iconicity is also central to the study of literary uses of language, such as prose and poetry.
There are various types of iconicity: the form of a sign may resemble aspects of its meaning in several ways: it may create a mental image of the concept (imagic iconicity), or its structure and the arrangement of its elements may resemble the structural relationship between components of the concept represented (diagrammatic iconicity). An example of the first type is the word cuckoo, whose sounds resemble the call of the bird, or a sign such as RABBIT in Israeli Sign Language, whose form—the hands representing the rabbit's long ears—resembles a visual property of that animal. An example of diagrammatic iconicity is vēnī, vīdī, vīcī, where the order of clauses in a discourse is understood as reflecting the sequence of events in the world.
Iconicity is found on all linguistic levels: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse. It is found both in spoken languages and in sign languages. However, sign languages, because of the visual-gestural modality through which they are transmitted, are much richer in iconic devices, and therefore offer a rich array of topics and perspectives for investigating iconicity, and the interaction between iconicity and language structure.
Article
Language and Linguistics in Medieval Europe
Deborah Hayden
During the period from the fall of the Roman empire in the late 5th century to the beginning of the European Renaissance in the 14th century, the development of linguistic thought in Europe was characterized by the enthusiastic study of grammatical works by Classical and Late Antique authors, as well as by the adaptation of these works to suit a Christian framework. The discipline of grammatica, viewed as the cornerstone of the ideal liberal arts education and as a key to the wider realm of textual culture, was understood to encompass both the systematic principles for speaking and writing correctly and the science of interpreting the poets and other writers. The writings of Donatus and Priscian were among the most popular and well-known works of the grammatical curriculum, and were the subject of numerous commentaries throughout the medieval period. Although Latin persisted as the predominant medium of grammatical discourse, there is also evidence from as early as the 8th century for the enthusiastic study of vernacular languages and for the composition of vernacular-medium grammars, including sources pertaining to Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Old Norse, and Welsh. The study of language in the later medieval period is marked by experimentation with the form and layout of grammatical texts, including the composition of textbooks in verse form. This period also saw a renewed interest in the application of philosophical ideas to grammar, inspired in part by the availability of a wider corpus of Greek sources than had previously been unknown to western European scholars, such as Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and De Anime. A further consequence of the renewed interest in the logical and metaphysical works of Aristotle during the later Middle Ages is the composition of so-called ‘speculative grammars’ written by scholars commonly referred to as the ‘Modistae’, in which the grammatical description of Latin formulated by Priscian and Donatus was integrated with the system of scholastic philosophy that was at its height from the beginning of the 13th to the middle of the 14th century.
Article
Language and Linguistics in Pre-Modern China and East Asia
Lei Zhu
Traditional Chinese linguistics grew out of two distinct interests in language: the philosophical reflection on things and their names, and the practical concern for literacy education and the correct understanding of classical works. The former is most typically found in the teachings of such pre-Qin masters as Confucius, Mozi, and Gongsun Long, who lived between the 6th and 3rd centuries bc, the latter in the enormous number of dictionaries, textbooks, and research works which, as a reflection of the fact that most Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic, are centered around the pronunciations, written forms, and meanings of these monosyllabic morphemes, or zi (“characters”) as they are called in Chinese. Apparently, it was the latter, philological, interest that motivated the bulk of the Chinese linguistic tradition, giving rise to such important works as Shuowen Jiezi and Qieyun, and culminating in the scholarship of the Qing Dynasty (1616–1911). But at the bottom, the philosophical concern never ceased to exist: The dominating idea that all things should have their rightful names just as they should occupy their rightful places in the universe, for example, was behind the compilation of Shuowen Jiezi and many other works. Further, the development of philology, or xiaoxue (“basic learning”), was strongly influenced by the study of philosophical thoughts, or daxue (“greater learning”), throughout its history.
The picture just presented, in which Chinese philosophy and philology are combined to form a seemingly autonomous tradition, is complicated, however, by the fact that the Indic linguistic tradition started to influence the Chinese in the 2nd century ad, causing remarkable changes in the analyzing techniques (especially regarding character pronunciation), findings, and course of development of language studies in China. Most crucially, scholars began to realize that syllables had internal structures and that the pronunciation of one character could be represented by two others that shared the same initial and final with it respectively. This technique, known as fanqie, laid the basis for the illustrious 7th-century rhyme dictionary Qieyun, the rhyme table Yunjing, and a great many works that followed. These works, besides providing reference for verse composition (and, consequently, for the imperial examinations held to select government officials), proved such an essential tool in the philological study of classical works, that many Qing scholars, at the very height of traditional Chinese linguistics, regarded character pronunciation as central to xiaoxue and indispensable for the understanding of ancient texts. While character pronunciation received overwhelming attention, the studies of character form and meaning continued to develop, though they were frequently influenced by and sometimes combined with the study of character pronunciation, as in the analysis of the relations between Old Chinese sound categories and the phonetic components of Chinese characters and in their application in the exegetical investigation of classical texts.
Chinese, with its linguistic tradition, had a profound impact in ancient East Asia. Not only did traditional studies of Japanese, Tangut, and other languages show significant Chinese influence, under which not the least achievement was the invention of the earliest writing systems for these languages, but many scholars from Japan and Korea actually took an active part in the study of Chinese as well, so that the Chinese linguistic tradition would itself be incomplete without the materials and findings these non-Chinese scholars have contributed. On the other hand, some of these scholars, most notably Motoori Norinaga and Fujitani Nariakira in Japan, were able to free themselves from the character-centered Chinese routine and develop rather original linguistic theories.
Article
Language Contact and the Lexicon of Romance Languages
André Thibault and Nicholas LoVecchio
The Romance languages have been involved in many situations of language contact. While language contact is evident at all levels, the most visible effects on the system of the recipient language concern the lexicon.
The relationship between language contact and the lexicon raises some theoretical issues that are not always adequately addressed, including in etymological lexicography. First is the very notion of what constitutes “language contact.” Contrary to a somewhat dated view, language contact does not necessarily imply physical presence, contemporaneity, and orality: as far as the lexicon is concerned, contact can happen over time and space, particularly through written media. Depending on the kind of extralinguistic circumstances at stake, language contact can be induced by diverse factors, leading to different forms of borrowing.
The misleading terms borrowings or loans mask the reality that these are actually adapted imitations—whether formal, semantic, or both—of a foreign model. Likewise, the common Latin or Greek origins of a huge proportion of the Romance lexicon often obscure the real history of words. As these classical languages have contributed numerous technical and scientific terms, as well as a series of “roots,” words coined in one Romance language can easily be reproduced in any other. However, simply reducing a word’s etymology to the origin of its components (classic or otherwise), ignoring intermediate stages and possibly intermediating languages in the borrowing process, is a distortion of word history. To the extent that it is useful to refer to “internationalisms,” related words in different Romance languages merit careful, often arduous research in the process of identifying the actual origin of a given coining. From a methodological point of view, it is crucial to distinguish between the immediate lending language and the oldest stage that can be identified, with the former being more relevant in a rigorous approach to comparative historical lexicology.
Concrete examples from Ibero-Romania, Gallo-Romania, Italo-Romania, and Balkan-Romania highlight the variety of different Romance loans and reflect the diverse historical factors particular to each linguistic community in which borrowing occurred.
Article
Language Ideologies
Susan Gal
Language ideologies are representations about the nature, structure, and use of linguistic forms in a social world. These understandings are never only about language. They are politically positioned, morally and aesthetically loaded evaluations of the situated linguistic practices to which a social group attends. Language ideologies are evident in practices and in embodied dispositions, or may be implicit in textual form and in material infrastructures. Sometimes they are explicit in discourse. Language ideologies are indispensable in social life because they mediate between aspects of language and other sociocultural phenomena such as identities, interactional stances, and hierarchies of cultural value.Speakers must draw on their presumptions about language and speech to interpret talk and thereby engage in everyday interactions, including child socialization, political debate, ritual speech, intellectual exploration, and governance. Language ideologies have considerable sociopolitical and historical consequences as metacommunications that frame the meaning of enregistered signs-in-use. Mediatingsemiotically between linguistic practices and social as well as linguistic structures, ideologies shape the direction of linguistic and social change. Semiotic concepts of indexicality, differentiation, rhematization, fractality, and erasure are essential in analysis. Language ideologies are evident in communities of all kinds. Scholars, too, have ideological presuppositions which orient their research and have political consequences. A study of a social group's language ideologies is indispensable in projects of language documentation, revitalization, poetics, and multilingual sustainability.
Article
Language of Social Media and Online Communication in Germanic
Steven Coats
This article provides an overview of language practices that have emerged as a result of technological developments related to telecommunications and the internet, primarily in text-based modalities, and discusses research into social media and online communication in Germanic languages. It begins by providing a brief history of the communication technologies and platforms that underlie computer-based communication (CMC), then considers language features common to text-based CMC modalities that have developed since the 1970s such as email messages, mailing lists and message boards, chatrooms, SMS (Short Message Service), instant message (IM), and social media platforms such as Twitter/𝕏 or Facebook. For text communication in these modalities, features such as abbreviation, nonstandard orthography, use of emoticons and emoji, and performative marking of verbs are common in the Germanic languages, and new discursive practices have emerged for use of the hashtag (#) and the “at” sign (@). The article then reviews some of the findings of research into CMC for English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, and the Scandinavian languages, noting the diversity of theoretical approaches and analytical frameworks employed. Selected focus issues are discussed, including ethnographic and interactive studies of Germanic CMC and approaches to the study of multimodal online language on video-streaming and -sharing websites such as YouTube. The article concludes by noting some desiderata for research into Germanic language social media and online communication.
Article
Linguistics in Premodern India
Émilie Aussant
Indian linguistic thought begins around the 8th–6th centuries bce with the composition of Padapāṭhas (word-for-word recitation of Vedic texts where phonological rules generally are not applied). It took various forms over these 26 centuries and involved different languages (Ancient, Middle, and Modern Indo-Aryan as well as Dravidian languages).
The greater part of documented thought is related to Sanskrit (Ancient Indo-Aryan). Very early, the oral transmission of sacred texts—the Vedas, composed in Vedic Sanskrit—made it necessary to develop techniques based on a subtle analysis of language. The Vedas also—but presumably later—gave birth to bodies of knowledge dealing with language, which are traditionally called Vedāṅgas: phonetics (śikṣā), metrics (chandas), grammar (vyākaraṇa), and semantic explanation (nirvacana, nirukta). Later on, Vedic exegesis (mīmāṃsā), new dialectics (navya-nyāya), lexicography, and poetics (alaṃkāra) also contributed to linguistic thought.
Though languages other than Sanskrit were described in premodern India, the grammatical description of Sanskrit—given in Sanskrit—dominated and influenced them more or less strongly. Sanskrit grammar (vyākaraṇa) has a long history marked by several major steps (Padapāṭha versions of Vedic texts, Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, Mahābhāṣya of Patañjali, Bhartṛhari’s works, Siddhāntakaumudī of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita, Nāgeśa’s works), and the main topics it addresses (minimal meaning-bearer units, classes of words, relation between word and meaning/referent, the primary meaning/referent of nouns) are still central issues for contemporary linguistics.
Article
Major Isoglosses in Romània
Marcello Barbato
An isogloss is defined as a line that divides two areas in which a single feature has distinct values. The features apply to all linguistic levels and can be synchronic or diachronic. In Romance studies, isoglosses are generally traced on the basis of phonological and diachronic features. Very early on it was observed that, depending on the feature selected, different zones were outlined (noncoincidence of isoglosses). From this arose skepticism with respect to the possibility of delineating dialect groups. It was noted, however, that isoglosses often follow a trend that is at least parallel, if not coinciding (isogloss bundles). Research has therefore recognized the existence of dialect boundaries and has continued to investigate the correlation between these boundaries and physical or cultural ones.
The isogloss is a problematic instrument for several aspects: It imposes a two-dimensional representation of linguistic reality that leaves no space for vertical variation (diastratic, diaphasic). Moreover, varieties do not always demonstrate a juxtaposition that can be represented by an isogloss (e.g., linguistic enclaves or bilingual areas). A further question is whether it is necessary to establish a hierarchy of isoglosses (phonological, morphological, lexical, etc.). Despite these issues, the isogloss remains a fundamental instrument for linguistic geography.
The major isogloss bundles distinguish dialect groups: Sardinian, Romanian, Galician-Portuguese, Astur-Leonese, Castilian, Navarro-Aragonese, Catalan, Gascon, Occitanic, French, Alpine Romance, Cisalpine Romance, and Italian. For each bundle, the article attempts to determine whether and how it has changed over time, and what the possible cultural correlations of this might be.
Article
Missionary Dictionaries
Otto Zwartjes
Missionary dictionaries are printed books or manuscripts compiled by missionaries in which words are listed systematically followed by words which have the same meaning in another language. These dictionaries were mainly written as tools for language teaching and learning in a missionary-colonial setting, although quite a few dictionaries have also a more encyclopedic character, containing invaluable information on non-Western cultures from all continents. In this article, several types of dictionaries are analyzed: bilingual-monodirectional, bilingual and bidirectional, and multilingual. Most examples are taken from an illustrative selected corpus of missionary dictionaries describing non-Western and languages during the colonial period, with particular focus on the function of these dictionaries in a missionary context, the users, macrostructure, organizational principles, and the typology of the microstructure and markedness in lemmatization.
Article
Missionary Grammars
Otto Zwartjes
Missionary grammars are printed books or manuscripts compiled by missionaries in which a particular language is described. These grammars were mainly written as pedagogical tools for language teaching and learning in a missionary-colonial setting, although quite a few grammars have also a more normative character. Missionary grammars contain usually an opening section, a prologue, in which the author exhibits the objectives of his work. The first part is usually a short introduction into phonology and orthography, followed by the largest section, which is devoted to morphology, arranged according to the traditional division of the parts of speech. The final section is sometimes devoted to syntax, but the topics included can vary considerably. Sometimes word lists are appended, containing body parts, measures, counting, manners of speaking, or rhetorical figures. The data presented in the grammar are mainly based on an oral corpus, whereas in other cases high registers from prestigious texts are used in which the eloquence or elegance of the language under study is illustrated. These grammars are modeled according to the traditional Greco-Latin framework and often contain invaluable information regarding language typologies, semantics, and pragmatics. In the New World, Asia, and elsewhere, missionaries had to find an adequate methodology in order to describe typological features they had never seen before. They adapted European models to new linguistic realities and created original works which deserve our attention within the discipline of the history of linguistics alongside contemporary pedagogical works written in Europe. This article concentrates on sources written in Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin during the colonial period, since these sources outnumber the production of missionary grammars in other languages.
Article
Models of Human Sentence Comprehension in Computational Psycholinguistics
John Hale
Computational models of human sentence comprehension help researchers reason about how grammar might actually be used in the understanding process. Taking a cognitivist approach, this article relates computational psycholinguistics to neighboring fields (such as linguistics), surveys important precedents, and catalogs open problems.
Article
Morphologization and the Boundary Between Morphology and Phonology in the Romance Languages
Paul O'Neill
This article analyses, from a Romance perspective, the concept of morphologization and seeks to answer the following question: At what point does a historically proven phonological cause-and-effect relationship, whereby phonological feature X causes and determines phonological feature Y, cease to hold and the dephonologized Y element stand as a marker of some morphological distinction? The question is relevant to cases in which the original phonological conditioning element is still present and where it has disappeared. I explain that the answer to this question depends entirely on one’s conception of morphology and phonology. I argue against theories that adhere to the principle of lexical minimization and have a static conception of morphology, which is restricted to the concatenation of idiosyncratic morphemes. These theories are forced by their theoretical underpinnings, which are often ideological and not supported by robust empirical evidence, to explain morphologized phenomena as being synchronically derived by phonology. This approach comes at a huge cost: the model of phonology is endowed with powerful tools to make the analysis fit the theory and which ultimately diminishes the empirical content and plausibility of the phonological hypotheses; such approaches also constitute serious problems for language acquisition and learning. I argue for more dynamic and abstractive models of morphology, which do not impose strict restrictions on lexical storage. I ultimately view morphologization as an instance of morphologically conditioned phonology and uphold that there is no strict boundary between the phonology and morphology but both systems overlap and interact.
I analyze data and phonological explanations of metaphony in nouns and verbs in Italo-Romance, plural formation in Spanish and Portuguese, the distribution of velar allomorphy in the Italian and Spanish verbs, and the distribution of verbal stress in Surmiran Romansh and Spanish. With reference to the latter, the contribution dedicates significant space exploring the extent to which the diphthong/monophthong alternation in Spanish, and different types of allomorphy in Surmiran Romansh, is a matter of phonologically conditioned allomorphy or morphologically conditioned phonology.
Article
Morphology in Typology: Historical Retrospect, State of the Art, and Prospects
Peter M. Arkadiev
Morphology, understood as internal structure of words, has always figured prominently in linguistic typology, and it is with the morphological classification of languages into “fusional,” “agglutinating,” and “isolating” proposed by the linguists and philosophers of the early 19th century that the advent of typology is often associated. However, since then typology has shifted its interests toward mapping the individual parameters of cross-linguistic diversity and looking for correlations between them rather than classifying languages into idealized “types” and to syntactically and semantically centered inquiries. Since the second half of the 20th century, morphology has been viewed as just one possible type of expression of meaning or syntactic function, often too idiosyncratic to yield to any interesting cross-linguistic let alone universal generalizations. Such notions as “flexive” or “agglutinating” have proven to be ill-defined and requiring revision in terms of more primitive logically independent and empirically uncorrelated parameters. Moreover, well-founded doubts have been cast upon such basic notions as “word,” “affix,” and the like, which have notoriously resisted adequate cross-linguistically applicable definitions, and the same has been the fate of still popular concepts like “inflection” and “derivation.” On the other hand, most theoretically oriented work on morphology, concerned with both individual languages and cross-linguistic comparison, has largely abandoned the traditional morpheme-based approaches of the American structuralists of the first half of the 20th century, shifting its attention to paradigmatic relations between morphologically relevant units, which themselves can be larger than traditional words. These developments suggest a reassessment of the basic notions and analytic approaches of morphological typology. Instead of sticking to crude and possibly misleading notions such as “word” or “derivation,” it is necessary to carefully define more primitive and empirically better-grounded notions and parameters of cross-linguistic variation in the domains of both syntagmatics and paradigmatics, to plot the space of possibilities defined by these parameters, and to seek possible correlations between them as well as explanations of these correlations or of the lack thereof.
Article
Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Edwin L. Battistella
Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890–1938) was a Russian émigré scholar who settled in Austria in 1922, serving as Head of Slavic Linguistics at the University of Vienna and participating in the Prague Linguistics Circle. Trubetzkoy wrote nearly 150 works on phonology, prosody, comparative linguistics, linguistic geography, folklore, literature, history, and political theory. His posthumously published Grundzüge der Phonologie (Principles of Phonology) is regarded as one of the key works in the science of phonology. Here Trubetzkoy, influenced by Saussurean insights, elaborated on the linguistic function of speech sounds, the role of oppositions, and markedness. He was also concerned with developing universal laws of phonological patterning, and his work involves the discussion of a wide variety of languages. The Grundzüge became the classic statement of part of Prague School linguistics, which later influenced both European and American linguistics, notably in Chomsky and Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English. Less well-known are Trubetzkoy’s historical and political works on Eurasia and Eurasianism. In Europe and Mankind, Trubetzkoy argued that Russia was not culturally part of Europe but should evolve to form its own political systems based on its geography and common legacy with the peoples of Eurasia.
