Elements that have pragmatic functions are, for example, pragmatic markers, modal particles, vocatives, conversational routines (apologies, thanks), interjections, pauses, tag questions, general extenders, response forms, and comment clauses.
Pragmatic markers are frequent in English and other Germanic languages. They can be analyzed based on a form-to-function approach drawing on different theoretical frameworks such as conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, or relevance theory. A pervasive change in the orientation of pragmatics has been achieved by its broadening to the study of variation. Pragmatic markers have, for example, been compared across languages regarding their position in the sentence and combinability with other pragmatic markers. Another “red thread” in the development of pragmatics in Germanic languages is the availability of spoken corpora facilitating the empirical analysis of the relationship between form, function, and context. Modal particles, interjections, and hesitation markers are regarded as subclasses of pragmatic markers that can be given a functional analysis. Modal particles are studied especially in German, where they are generally regarded as a special word class distinct from pragmatic markers. Address forms may vary across languages and varieties of languages depending on social factors and cultural preferences. Many Germanic languages (but not English) make a distinction between the informal T-pronoun of address in the singular (Swedish du; German du) and a formal plural V-form of address (Swedish ni; German sie). Politeness and speech acts are another central research area in pragmatics. Some researchers have applied a conversation analysis approach to the study of speech acts such as requests and compliments. The majority of speech act studies are based on discourse completion tests and role-plays. Corpora are less suited to analyze speech acts unless the forms are routinized. One way to solve this methodological problem is indicated by the development of schemes for pragmatically annotating speech acts in corpora.
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Article
Pragmatic Approaches to Germanic Languages
Karin Aijmer
Article
South-Eastern Gallo-Romance: Francoprovençal
Andres M. Kristol
Francoprovençal is on UNESCO’s red list of the world’s most endangered languages. It is in danger of disappearing within one to two generations. Historically spoken in a large region of south-eastern France, northern Italy and French-speaking Switzerland, and lacking political unity, it is not ‘a’ language, but a set of dialects with common characteristics. Lacking any standardisation, its dialects show many of the evolutionary possibilities of Western Romance languages. Long regarded as a late separation from the Oïl area, it was traditionally described as a conservative Gallo-Romance language, rejecting Oïl innovations from about the eighth century onwards. More recent research has shown that its earliest linguistic features date back to the very beginning of the linguistic fragmentation of Galloromania (6th century at the latest); it is therefore just as ‘old’ as the other Gallo-romance languages. It thus has its own characteristic mixture of conservative and innovative phenomena among the Gallo-romance languages.
Article
Suprasegmental Phenomena in Germanic: Tonal Accent
Pavel Iosad
Several Germanic varieties possess a phonological contrast usually referred to as “tonal accent.” They demonstrate phonological contrasts between words that are otherwise identical in their segmental make-up and the location of stress, as in (Urban East) Norwegian bønder ‘farmers’ and bønner ‘beans’, both segmentally [ˈbønːər]. Usually, the contrast is treated as implemented by pitch trajectories; hence, the name 'tonal accent.' Within Germanic, tonal accent contrasts are found in three (historically, perhaps four) areas. First, they occur in most varieties of Norwegian and Swedish, as well as in some Danish dialects; in addition, most varieties of Danish show a peculiar type of accentual distinction based on laryngealization, traditionally known as stød. Second, they are found in a set of West Germanic dialects along the middle Rhine and the Moselle, the so-called Franconian tonal area. Third, they are reported from many varieties of Low German, specifically North Low Saxon. Finally, they may have been present historically in Frisian.
Three aspects of Germanic tonal accent systems are of particular interest to linguistic theory. In terms of synchronic analysis, accents have been considered as sui generis objects, as fundamentally tonal phenomena, and as artifacts of contrasts in metrical (foot) structure and its mapping to intonation. Diachronically, Germanic accents are a poor fit to the cross-linguistic typology of tonogenesis: their development is intimately tied to processes manipulating metrical structures, such as vowel lengthening, syllable deletion and insertion, and clash resolution. Finally, they offer some enlightening case studies with respect to the role of language contact in the development of prosodic systems.
Article
Derivation in Germanic
Stefan Hartmann
Derivational word-formation processes play an important role in the Germanic languages. In particular, prefixation and suffixation are highly productive. In accordance with the so-called right-hand head principle, suffixes tend to determine the morphological category of a word, and are therefore often category-changing (e.g., verb to noun), while prefixes can lead to changes regarding the valency or case government of the items to which they attach. Derivational patterns differ in various aspects, including the degree to which they modify the semantics of their bases and their morphological productivity.
Article
Focus in Chinese
Peppina Po-lun Lee and Yueming Sun
Focus is a phenomenon intertwined between different levels of linguistics and context/discourse, and different languages appeal to different ways in marking focus. Chinese mainly adopts syntactic structures and focus markers for focus marking. Different from European languages, it is widely acknowledged that Chinese uses more syntax and less phonology in focus realization. It is argued that Chinese is a language that exhibits a reverse relationship between syntactic positioning and phonological prominence of focus, and focus types in Chinese are generally viewed from a grammatical perspective. With syntax as a prominent way of focus marking, Chinese appeals to a wide range of syntactic constructions to mark focus. While sentence-final position by default is taken as the position where new information is located, focus can be grammatically marked by constructions like shi…de ‘be…DE’ construction, bare shi construction, and bare de construction, with bare shi construction seemingly representing the closest to cleft constituent among the three. Apart from the variants in different shi constructions, object preposing is also another way of grammatical focus marking in Chinese, which involves the issue of whether the preposed object marks focus or subtopic, with both bearing a contrastive feature.
Apart from focus marking through syntactic constructions, Chinese appeals to preverbal focus adverbs as their focus particles. Natural language includes two types of focus particles—namely, restrictive and additive particles. For restrictive adverbs, Chinese appeals to the first group through the adjunction of the exclusive adverb, including zhi(-you/-shi) ‘only(-have/be)’, with exclusiveness conducted by grammatical mechanism. Apart from this, the second group includes the widely recognized restrictive focus particles that do not perform restrictive focus marking through adjunction. Typical members include jiu ‘only’, cai ‘only’, and dou ‘all’, which are sensitive to focus and affect the truth condition of a sentence. Among the restrictive focus particles, jiu and cai are most controversial, with both translated as only in English. For additive particles, one widely discussed focus-marking construction is lian...dou/ye ‘even...all/also’, which is argued to mark inclusive or additive focus. Other additive adverbs include at least four—namely, you ‘again/too’, ye ‘also’, hai ‘still’, and zai ‘again’, with their English counterparts taken as also, even, again, still, or too.
Focus markers in Chinese tend to be polysemous in meaning, making their semantics very complicated. On top of this, it is claimed that the linear order of constituents also plays an important role in focus structuring in Mandarin, with discourse and prosody structurally interacting with word order or syntactic structures to determine focus structures in Chinese. Linearity and syntax represent the two major ways of focus marking in Chinese. This is unlike English and other European languages, in which intonation and phonological prominence represent the major way.
Article
Germanic Languages in Contact in Central and South America
Karoline Kühl
West and North Germanic language varieties have been part of the Latin American language ecology since the middle of the 19th century, when European mass migration created Germanic-speaking immigrant communities in North, Central, and South America. The subsequent fate of the Germanic immigrant varieties in Latin America varied greatly in terms of how long intergenerational transfer has been maintained, if and to what degree language maintenance has been supported by linguistic codification and language teaching, and the degree of contact with the surrounding majority population. Some languages like the Mennonite Low German varieties have been quite repellent with regard to language change induced by contact with the majority languages Portuguese and/or Spanish, other (Germanic) immigrant varieties, and indigenous languages. However, contact with the majority population and other (immigrant) ethnic groups, bilingualism, and, accordingly, the influence of Spanish and/or Portuguese has been growing for most Germanic immigrant varieties at least since the 1950s.
The long-standing German dialectological research tradition into extra-territorial Germanic language islands has led to detailed accounts of many German varieties in Latin America. Accounts of other Germanic varieties are much more restricted, both in numbers and in extent: Some like Argentine Danish or Patagonian Afrikaans have been described only recently; others, like Swedish in Brazil and Argentine Dutch, hardly at all. In all cases, the accounts differ greatly regarding if, and to what extent, language contact is included as a cause of language change. Based on the scholarly coverage, the extent of contact-induced change in the Germanic varieties in Latin America appears to vary greatly, but whether this impression is due to the varying degrees of attention that the accounts devote to the effects of language contact or to particular sociolinguistic circumstances preventing or promoting language contact cannot be established. Still, contact linguistic profiles of many Germanic immigrant varieties in Latin America present themselves as a promising terra incognita for future research.
From a bird’s-eye perspective, we may in general terms conclude that the Germanic varieties in Latin America are characterized by lexical borrowing, at least for cultural loans and discourse-structuring elements, as well as ad hoc code-switching. Interestingly, a number of varieties show a similar pattern of integrating Spanish or Portuguese verb stems of verbs ending in -ir and -ar into a very similar inflectional Germanic paradigm (Misiones Swedish -era, Argentine Danish -is(ere), Riograndenser Hunsrückisch -ieren, Volga German -i(:)ere). In general, syntactical restructurings seem to be restricted, with the notable exception of standard deviant omission of mainly pronominal subjects and, partly, pronominal objects. Other developments are specific, applying only to individual varieties.
Article
History of the French Lexicon
Olivier Bertrand
The French lexicon of the early 21st century has two main sources: In the early 21st century, approximately 87% of the vocabulary comes from Latin and 13% from many other languages. The French lexicon was created and developed roughly from the 7th–8th century ce up to the early 21st century. There are three ways to create vocabulary: inheritance from popular Latin, borrowing from other languages (as well as from written Latin), and internal creation (through semantic extension, derivation, and compounding).
Article
Register and Enregisterment in Germanic
Jürgen Spitzmüller
Enregisterment denotes the sociolinguistic process within which specific forms of speaking, writing, or signing are subsumed by a social group into a coherent, distinctive whole (a language, a dialect, a standard, a slang etc.), which is often also given a label (such as Viennese, Spanglish, chatspeak, youth slang, officialese) and associated with specific contexts of use, media, groups of users, purposes, and ends, which are expected to be “typical” with regard to these forms. The product of such a process, an allegedly distinct set of communicative means that is associated (indexically linked) with assumed contexts and hence evokes specific expectations as far as their use is concerned, is called a register, register of discourse, or register of communication.
According to the sociolinguistic theory of enregisterment, registers are interpretive or ideological concepts rather than ontological facts; that is, there is often not much empirical evidence that these forms of communication are really used in the exact way, as distinctively, or as coherently as the register allocation would suggest, but nevertheless there is a shared belief throughout the relevant community that this is the case. Since such shared beliefs do have an impact on how people categorize the world they find themselves in, however, registers are not dismissed as “false beliefs” about language, but are rather seen as a core ingredient of the social use of language, particularly in relation to processes of social positioning, and of alienation and social discrimination, as well as the construction of social identities. Furthermore, many scholars have pointed out that enregisterment is not merely a “folk-linguistic” phenomenon (as opposed to allegedly “nonideological” forms of inquiry practiced by linguistic experts), since enregisterment processes are often propelled by linguistic scholars, and registers (such as “ethnolects” or “netspeak”) sometimes even derive from academic discourse.
Since the concept has gained great prominence in contemporary sociolinguistics, registers and enregisterment have been widely researched in Germanic languages, most notably English but also other Germanic languages such as German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. Enregisterment processes have been identified with regard to multiple historical and contemporary dimensions with which registers are being linked, among them nation states (language standardization and pluricentric standard variation), regions (regional and urban varieties), gender (e.g., “female speech,” “queer slang”), class (e.g., received pronunciation), age (e.g., “youth slang”), media (e.g., “netspeak”), profession (e.g., “officialese”), and ethnicity (e.g., “ethnolects”).
Article
Writing Systems in Modern West Germanic
Martin Evertz-Rittich
The writing systems of the modern West Germanic languages have many features in common: They are all written using the Modern Roman Alphabet and exhibit a certain depth, that is, in addition to the pure grapheme–phoneme correspondences, prosodic, morphological, and syntactic information that is systematically encoded in their writing systems. A notable exception is the writing system of Yiddish, which is not only written with an alphabet evolved from the Hebrew script but is also almost completely transparent.
Except for Yiddish, all writing systems of modern West Germanic languages use graphematic syllable and foot structures to encode suprasegmental properties such as vowel quantity. Paradigmatic relations are represented by morphological spellings (especially stem and affix constancy). Syntagmatic relations are expressed, for example, in compound spelling, which adheres to the same principles in all writing systems under discussion.
The writing systems of modern West Germanic languages have been studied by grapholinguists in varying depth. While German is probably the best researched writing system in the world, some writing systems, such as Luxembourgish, await thorough grapholinguistic investigation.
Article
Central Italo-Romance (Including Standard Italian)
Elisa De Roberto
Central Italo-Romance includes Standard Italian and the Tuscan dialects, the dialects of the mediana and perimediana areas, as well as Corsican. This macro-area reaches as far north as the Carrara–Senigallia line and as far south as the line running from Circeo in Lazio to the mouth of the Aso river in Le Marche, cutting through Ceprano, Sora, Avezzano, L’Aquila and Accumoli. It is made up of two main subareas: the perimediana dialect area, covering Perugia, Ancona, northeastern Umbria, and Lazio north of Rome, where varieties show greater structural proximity to Tuscan, and the mediana area (central Le Marche, Umbria, central-eastern Lazio varieties, the Sabine or Aquilano-Cicolano-Reatino dialect group). Our description focuses on the shared and diverging features of these groups, with particular reference to phonology, morphology, and syntax.
