31-40 of 607 Results  for:

Clear all

Article

Germanic Languages in Contact in North America  

Michael T. Putnam

Over the course of 400 years, numerous speakers of Germanic languages have immigrated to North America. The primary purposes of these immigrations were to avoid political and religious persecution and seek economic stability and growth. These contact varieties of Germanic origin are the intense focus of linguistic research involving multiple sub-disciplines within the field (e.g., sociolinguistic, structural/formal, corpus, and experimental approaches). A deeper investigation into the exact nature of the factors and subsequent results of language shift and structural outcomes found in these varieties challenges a number of long-standing assumptions about language contact, shift, and change in these intense contact settings. First, upon closer inspection, calls for severe language attrition, decay, and loss are largely unattested, which divert the focus from reported language shift to a transition to a post-vernacular state of the contact language in a given area. Second, the specific outcomes of language attrition, innovation, and maintenance in various structural domains of grammar of these individuals and communities (e.g., phonetics/phonology, morphology, mental lexicon, syntax, etc.) provide a basis for comparison both within and beyond this language family. These comparisons enable linguistics to better understand the directions and limits of structural changes in contact Germanic, which can be applied to other populations past and present. Third, these findings collectively contribute broadly to research in contact and heritage linguistics, providing invaluable cross-linguistic data from multiple dyads (including those with non-European ethnic and linguistic backgrounds). Research on these vernaculars advances our collective understanding of contact and diasporic Germanic varieties around the world while additionally making lasting contributions to research on contact and heritage linguistics.

Article

Hip-Hop Language and Linguistics  

Andrew S. Ross and Elina Westinen

A significant sociopolitical event in New York City led to the emergence of the hip-hop musical genre, which is now a critical part of global popular culture and the performance landscape. In general terms, hip-hop, and in particular rap, can be understood as a form of spoken word or rhymed storytelling, accompanied by music. In the 1970s, the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway (1948–1972) effectively displaced many residents from the South Bronx, an area where residents were already faced with high levels of unemployment and poverty. These social conditions led to the birth of hip-hop as a performative genre that provided a space for the marginalized to express their voice. These non-mainstream origins and the limited political and societal power that accompanied these conditions led to hip-hop being seen as a form of resistance. Since these times, hip-hop has broken into the mainstream and is now a multi-billion-dollar part of the music industry. While hip-hop has grown as a genre of music and popular culture, so too has its reach on the global scale. Initially, this meant moving beyond New York, where different variations in African American English were incorporated along with more localized social and political concerns. Later, hip-hop began to spread around the world with a particularly unique ability to cross social, cultural, and geographic boundaries, as well as sociolinguistic boundaries. Emerging in various locations, it has proved its capacity to become translocal, taking on distinctly local features in a process of establishing authenticity inclusive of slang, dialect, accent, and phonological features as well as cultural markers and references to local political and social agendas. Hip-hop’s movement around the world has seen the emergence of important work on varieties of hip-hop. The underlying thesis here is that the localization of hip-hop is not merely global hip-hop adding in a few local features, but that it is always local, particularly in its linguistic features and general thematic and topical concerns.

Article

Morphological and Syntactical Variation and Change in Brazilian Portuguese  

J. Clancy Clements

In the history of Brazil, Africans and their descendants figure prominently. In many of the country’s regions, they represented a majority of the population, especially in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. The features of Brazilian Portuguese are described and the possible links between the demographic makeup of the country and the presence of the features are explored.

Article

Morphology of Determiners in the Romance Languages  

Franck Floricic

The question of articles and definiteness has given rise to a great deal of work, whether from a theoretical, typological, historical, or other perspective. Given the breadth of the field, it would be unrealistic in a synthesis of this kind to go through all the work that has been done on this subject, some of which may be relatively old. We have therefore focused on a certain number of aspects which seemed relevant to us, taking into consideration dialectal data which are not often taken into account. Another difficulty of the undertaking is that the question of articles concerns various fields of investigation: syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology. The focus of this contribution is therefore on the morphology of articles in Romance languages. After having sought to circumscribe the concept of determination, the origin and distribution of articles in a number of Romance varieties are described. Particular attention is paid to the phenomena of variation that manifest themselves at the phonomorphological level. The morpho-syntax of other kinds of determiners is discussed as well—demonstratives, quantifiers, and possessives. The question of the maintenance of case distinctions in the Romance determiners will also be addressed, as well as the discussed and intriguing question of lack of agreement within the noun phrase. Given their special status, it will be shown that personal and place names show particular constraints with respect to definite articles, due among other things to their historical genesis.

Article

Non-Finite Verb-Forms in the Romance Languages  

Nigel Vincent

The distinction between finite and non-finite forms, although a standard part of traditional grammatical descriptions, is not easy to establish and is not necessarily the same from language to language, not least because of the different ways the forms in question have developed over time and the different constructions that they are part of. Nor is terminology in this domain used consistently in the literature. The present article therefore begins with a brief overview of these issues before moving on the consider the Latin patterns which lie behind modern Romance developments. These in turn will be examined form by form and construction by construction with exemplification drawn, as appropriate, from different Romance varieties. The approach blends synchrony with diachrony. Space does not permit exhaustive coverage of all forms in all languages, but nonetheless examples are drawn from across the family with a view to demonstrating significant regional and historical differences. Where relevant, cross-reference will also be made to other articles in the present collection which address in greater detail some of structures considered here.

Article

Number Marking in Nouns and Adjectives in the Romance Languages  

Franck Floricic

Even though Romance languages are taken to be well-known because of their clearly identified ancestor, they continuously offer a source of patterns and phenomena that are far from being properly taken into account in typological surveys. Corbett rightly pointed out that the question of number has erroneously been held to be simple and straightforward. Needless to say, if many Romance varieties suffer from endangerment or from sociological marginalization, other varieties like French are in some sense trapped in the ice of their norm and such a situation may lead in some cases to questionable analyses. Any French speaker will hold that the feminine of adjectives such as natif [naˈtif] ‘native’ is formed by substituting [f] for [v] and adding final -e at the orthographic level, hence the feminine singular form native [naˈtiv], as in, say, vert-e ‘green’. It is clear, however, that the opposition between natif and native relies on voice-alternation of the adjective final consonant. Various examples of this kind can be adduced to show how phonetic processes contribute to morphological oppositions.

Article

Pidgins and Creoles With Germanic Lexifier Languages  

Peter Bakker

There are pidgins with Dutch, English, German, and Scandinavian lexifiers, and creoles with Dutch (three), German (one), and English (dozens) lexifiers. Pidgins and creoles have been documented in all parts of the world. They have developed in contact between Europeans and indigenous populations, often as part of the colonial enterprise. Pidgins are often associated with trade and initial phases of contact, and they do not display all design features of natural languages, whereas creoles tend to be mother tongues and complex natural languages. Pidgins that have developed into creoles may maintain the original label “pidgin” (e.g., Tok Pisin < Talk Pidgin), even though they have developed into full-fledged complex languages and hence creoles, or pidgincreoles. Germanic-lexifier pidgins share properties with other pidgins, such as invariant forms for nouns and verbs, personal pronouns, optional tense marking, lack of aspect marking, and a limited lexicon. Germanic creoles likewise share properties with other creoles, such as preverbal marking of aspect, mood, and/or tense, the development of optional plural marking, and the presence of definite and indefinite articles. Germanic pidgins, however, often show articles, whereas other pidgins rarely display them. Creole languages worldwide share a number of properties, in that similar grammatical categories developed independently from one another, after having lost most of the grammatical system of the lexifiers. Most creole languages are associated with forced population displacement (blackbirding, slavery), but the German creole Unserdeutsch of Papua New Guinea is associated with a school. The three Dutch-lexifier creoles came into being in Guyana and the Virgin Islands, and they all developed independently. Berbice Dutch Creole is quite deviant, and several theories have been launched to explain the presence of a significant component from one specific Nigerian language, Eastern Ijo. English-lexifier creoles are conveniently divided into two groups, Pacific creoles and Atlantic creoles. Both groups seem to go back to one source, judged by the quantity of shared lexical and grammatical similarities that are so specific that they cannot be due to independent processes of creolization. There are also mixed languages and other contact phenomena involving Germanic languages, and a full list of these is provided with selected references.

Article

Raciolinguistics  

Jennifer Phuong, María Cioè-Peña, and Arianna Chinchilla

Raciolinguistics, or the study of language in relation to race, is an emergent field primarily stemming from U.S. academia and centering critical theories, including educational and applied linguistics. There currently exists a debate as to whether the theories that undergird raciolinguistics should be the grounding for a field (i.e., raciolinguistics) or a theoretical underpinning (i.e., raciolinguistic perspectives/ideologies) of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, particularly works that are rooted in the embodied experiences of racialized people. H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball edited a volume that brought together scholars whose works address the intersection of race and language to consider raciolinguistics as a field. Still, others believe it is necessary to understand phenomena that go beyond named languages while still rooted in hierarchical conceptualizations of race. As such, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa have introduced and continue to build on a raciolinguistic perspective by rooting contemporary phenomena in colonial histories. Using this lens, they position language evaluations and assessments of racialized people as extensions of colonial racial projects rooted in dehumanization and commodification. Since then, scholars from multiple fields have engaged with raciolinguistics and raciolinguistic ideologies to explore language and race using a variety of methods (e.g., discourse analysis, mixed methods), contexts (e.g., diverse places and participants), scales (e.g., policy, interpersonal interactions), and institutions (e.g., healthcare, education). Regardless of the specific framing of raciolinguistics, the field and perspective both foreground racial and linguistic justice.

Article

Translanguaging  

Ricardo Otheguy and Ofelia García

Translanguaging frames the study of bilingualism within theoretical and applied linguistics in a way that transcends the speaker’s separate codes or languages, named or not. These codes or languages are regarded as possessing a social ontology but not a cognitive linguistic one. While linguistic features such as (depending on the theory) phonemes, morphemes, sentences, lexical and grammatical signs, constructions, rules, checks, movements, derivations, and so on can legitimately be seen as cognitively real by their different proponents, their allocation to different languages or codes cannot. The separate allocation of these linguistic features to separate codes or languages is of considerable social relevance to the individuals and communities said to be using them, but should not be uncritically translated into representations of two separate grammars. Under translanguaging, named languages (Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, Hindi, Quechua, Spanish, Swahili, Yoruba, etc.) exist only as sociopolitically institutionalized constructions, not as objects endowed with psycholinguistic reality. The term translanguaging makes reference to the following 10 interconnected and mutually supporting proposals: (a) a broadly conceived pedagogical alternative to the strict language separation typical of many language education programs; (b) a denial of the dual correspondence hypothesis about the repertoire of bilinguals, under which the sociocultural conception of bilinguals as having two separate languages is assumed to reflect a dual cognitive representation; (c) the adoption of an alternative representation involving a unitary repertoire of linguistic features, under which a single inventory of lexical and morphosyntactic units best describes the psycholinguistics of bilingualism; (d) an integrated view of bilingual speech performance, under which speakers pick and choose from their unitary repertoire the lexical and morphosyntactic features appropriate to the moment, the context, and the interlocutor; (e) the denial that this process of selection sometimes constitutes normal or unmarked language use but other times involves mixing or switching between languages or codes; (f) the necessary rejection, if the above are to be implemented, of the idea that only the language practices of speakers with institutional power in Western societies are normal and universal; (g) the related recognition that named languages have gone hand in hand with the historical process of colonial expansion and nation-building, which relied on named languages to establish its system of control, including particularly the control of minoritized speakers, especially minoritized children in school; (h) the related critique of the abyssal thinking that has prevented scholars in Europe and the United States from seeing what lies across the abyssal line dividing the geographic and philosophical North from the modes of knowledge of the South; (i) the adoption of the scholarship of the Global South, dealing with the transformation of pedagogical practices to recognize the dynamic bilingualism of language learners, replacing in many settings the now outdated notion of additive bilingualism; and finally and perhaps most importantly, (j) the affirmation of a view of schooling for fluent or emergent bilingual students that focuses not exclusively on the teaching and assessment of named languages but of communicative capacities broadly conceived that reflect the autochthonous practices of bilinguals and their communities.

Article

Usage-Based Approaches to Germanic Languages  

Martin Hilpert

The theoretical outlook of usage-based linguistics is a position that views language as a dynamic, evolving system and that recognizes the importance of usage frequency and frequency effects in language, as well as the foundational role of domain-general sociocognitive processes. Methodologically, usage-based studies draw on corpus-linguistic methods, experimentation, and computational modeling, often in ways that combine different methods and triangulate the results. Given the availability of corpus resources and the availability of experimental participants, there is a rich literature of usage-based studies focusing on Germanic languages, which at the same time has greatly benefited from usage-based research into other language families. This research has uncovered frequency effects based on measurements of token frequency, type frequency, collocational strength, and dispersion. These frequency effects result from the repeated experience of linguistic units such as words, collocations, morphological patterns, and syntactic constructions, which impact language production, language processing, and language change. Usage-based linguistics further investigates how the properties of linguistic structures can be explained in terms of cognitive and social processes that are not in themselves linguistic. Domain-general sociocognitive processes such as categorization, joint attention, pattern recognition, and intention reading manifest themselves in language processing and production, as well as in the structure of linguistic units. In addition to research that addresses the form and meaning of such linguistic units at different levels of linguistic organization, domains of inquiry that are in the current focus of usage-based studies include linguistic variation, first and second-language acquisition, bilingualism, and language change.