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.
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Article
History of the Catalan Lexicon
Josep Martines
Article
Morphological and Syntactic Variation and Change in European French
John Charles Smith
With the introduction of free compulsory elementary education by laws passed in 1881 and 1882, French children were exposed to the standard language as a matter of course. By the end of the First World War, therefore, a majority of the population was, for the first time, competent in French, as well as, or instead of, a regional or local dialect. However, this national language has always exhibited variation, including in its morphology and syntax, and this variation has often been a driving force behind change. Loci of variation include competing morphological exponents (‘overabundance’), morphomic (autonomously morphological) structure, the expression of number and gender, use of tenses and moods, agreement, negation, interrogation, and dislocation of elements to the beginning or end of the sentence. Geography and social class may still have some effect on variation in French, although it is often argued that their influence has largely been leveled, with style and register becoming more significant factors.
Article
Signed Languages in Co-Existence With Germanic Languages: A Typological Perspective
Myriam Vermeerbergen and Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen
Human natural languages come in two forms: spoken languages and signed languages, which are the visual-gestural languages used mainly by Deaf communities. Modern signed language linguistics only began around 1960. Studies have shown that signed languages share similarities with spoken languages at all levels of linguistic description, but that modality—whether vocal-auditory or visual-gestural—plays a role in some of the differences between spoken and signed languages. For example, signed languages show a more simultaneous organization than spoken languages, and iconicity and the use of space play a more important role. The study of signed languages is therefore an important addition to our knowledge of human language in general. Based on the research already carried out, it seems that different signed languages are structurally more similar to each other than different spoken languages. The striking similarities between signed languages have been attributed to several factors, including the affordances of the visual-gestural modality. However, more recent research has also shown differences between signed languages. Some of these may be due to independent diachronic changes in individual signed languages, others to influences from spoken languages. Indeed, for most signed languages there is an intensive contact with at least one, and sometimes several, spoken languages, which undoubtedly influence the signed languages, especially at the lexical level. However, the influence, whether lexical or grammatical, has been explored to a limited extent. It is particularly interesting to examine the extent to which unrelated signed languages are similar and different, and whether contact with the surrounding spoken languages plays a role in this.
Danish Sign Language and Flemish Sign Language are two signed languages that are not related. By contrast, Danish and Dutch both belong to the Germanic language family, Danish as a North Germanic language, Dutch as a West Germanic language. Some of the features shared by the two signed languages can be explained as modality dependent: they both use spatial morphology to express agreement and complex verbs of motion and location, and both use nonmanual features, that is, facial expression, gaze direction, and head movement, to express, for instance, topicalization and clause boundaries. Other shared features may not be explained as modality dependent in any straightforward way; this is the case with their preference for sentence-final repetition of pronouns and verbs. Moreover, the two signed languages share features that distinguish them from most Germanic languages: they lack a clear subject category and prototypical passive constructions, and they do not have V2-organization with the finite verb in the second position of declarative clauses. Much more research, especially research based on large annotated corpora, is needed to clarify the reasons why unrelated signed languages share many grammatical features, and the influences from spoken languages on signed languages.
Article
A Survey of Morpho-Phonology in Chinese Languages
Xiaopei Wang and Bing Li
The majority of morphemes are assigned a tone in Chinese languages. Tone fulfills the equivalent function as consonant and vowel phonemes. In Chinese, tonology interacts with morphology in two ways. First, in concatenative morphology, wherein morphemes or words are combined to form new words, tones in adjacent positions may affect each other and tone sandhi occurs. Tone sandhi rules display a high degree of sensitivity to morpho-syntax in many Chinese languages. Different types of tone sandhi take place in different construction types in one single language. A common tendency observed is that tone sandhi rules generally fall into two types, depending on the structural relation held between two subcomponents of a disyllabic structure (either a word or a phrase). One type demonstrates the lexical syndrome in that it applies merely in words of cohesion, including suffixed words, disyllabic compounds of the coordinate or modifier-head structure. In contrast, the other type applies in less cohesive constructions, such as words and phrases of the verb-object or subject-predicate structure. The sensitivity of tone sandhi to morpho-syntax across Chinese is of theoretical significance for understanding the overall organization of the grammar in general and the interaction between phonology and morpho-syntax in particular.
On the other hand, the special property of tone being superimposed on syllables enables it to act as a floating entity to convey grammatical or semantic meanings. In order to be phonologically licensed, the floating morphemic tone usually anchors on the stem. A rich body of morphemic tones are reported across Chinese languages, and their theoretical significance awaits further exploration.
Article
Vowel Length in the Romance Languages
Michele Loporcaro
This article classifies all the Romance languages and dialects with regard to the phonological property of vowel length, phonemic and allophonic, considering its relationship to its correlate in phonetic substance, namely vocoid duration. It examines the rise and fall of vowel length in Romance, starting with a reference to Latin, where vowel length was contrastive as was consonant length, while in the Latin-Romance transition the former became dependent on the latter, as a part of a syllable structure conditioning. Consequently, Proto-Romance can be reconstructed as featuring an allophonic rule that lengthens stressed vowels in non-final open syllables (short, OSL) identical to that operating today in standard Italian, all Italo-Romance dialects south of the La Spezia-Rimini line, and Sardinian, which I will label type A languages. Due to a series of later changes, the remaining Romance languages and dialects lost this allophonic rule, which gave rise to either of the two further types: on the one hand, languages lacking contrastive gemination and contrastive vowel length (type B, including Daco- and Ibero-Romance all along their documented history, as well as, today, most of Gallo-Romance); and, on the other hand, languages lacking contrastive gemination but displaying contrastively long versus short vowels (type C, including most of northern Italo-Romance as well as part of Raeto- and Gallo-Romance, but which arguably stretched from the Apennines to the North Sea in the Middle Ages).
This article examines all relevant sources of evidence, from Latin epigraphic inscriptions to experimental phonetic measurements, showing that they all chime perfectly with the picture just outlined. Needless to say, while the data from modern languages and dialects are observational, and those from older stages delivered by the written record need interpretation, reconstruction is, by definition, constructional: It can be supported by several sources of evidence but is in itself always provisional. Therefore, the story to be told here must be considered the best approximation to the historical truth that the present author deems reconstructible based on the available evidence.
Article
Bilingual Language Processing
John W. Schwieter
Psycholinguistic approaches to examining bilingualism are relatively recent applications that have emerged in the 20th century. The fact that there are more than 7,000 current languages in the world, with the majority of the population actively using more than one language, offers the opportunity to examine language and cognitive processes in a way that is more reflective of human nature. While it was once believed that exposing infants and children to more than one language could lead to negative consequences for cognition and overall language competence, current evidence shows that this is not the case. Among the many topics studied in psycholinguistics and bilingualism is whether two language systems share an integrated network and overlap in the brain, and how the mind deals with cross-linguistic activation and competition from one language when processing in another. Innovative behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroscientific methods have significantly elucidated our understanding of these issues. The current state of the psychology and neuroscience of bilingualism finds itself at the crossroads of uncovering a holistic view of how multiple languages are processed and represented in the mind and brain. Current issues, such as exploring the cognitive and neurological consequences of bilingualism, are at the forefront of these discussions.
Article
The Contribution of Romance Linguistics to the Development of Structuralism
Pierre Swiggers
Romance linguistics, a discipline emerging and taking shape in the 19th century, was initially, and primarily, oriented toward linguistic-philological text study, historical-comparative grammar and etymology. Its (almost inherently) historical and particularistic orientation was rather incompatible with the systematizing and generalizing goals of structural linguistics developing in the first decades of the 20th century. As a consequence, Romance scholars were not among the founders or leading figures of the emergent schools of structural linguistics, either in Europe or in the United States. Apart from the rather dogmatic “holistic” claims of areal norms put forward by the Italian school of neolinguistica, Romance scholars for a long time were reticent to posit universal or general principles with reference to language structure or to the evolution of languages. After World War II, Romance scholars in Europe and the United States became increasingly interested in the methods, techniques, and concepts of (respectively) European and American structuralism. The impact of structuralism can be traced in the career of individual Romance scholars, ranging from authors who more or less consistently followed a structuralist approach in the diachronic and/or synchronic study of Romance languages, to scholars who developed theoretical concepts that refined or extended the structuralist framework. In line with its century-old tradition, Romance linguistics, focusing on the study of the history, function, and meaning of individual words (and of proper names), became a catalyst in the development of structure-oriented approaches in dialectology, etymology, semantics, lexicology, and onomastics. In addition, scholars active in Romance-speaking countries have contributed to structuralism in a broad sense: structuralism in literary and semiotic studies, in philosophy, in psychology and psychoanalysis, and in anthropology.
Article
The Descriptive Tradition in Chinese Phonetics
Fang Hu
Even though the study of speech sounds has a long history in China, Chinese linguistics occurred as a modern discipline under the Western influence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bernhard Karlgren and Yuen-ren Chao established a descriptive tradition in Chinese phonetics that was rooted in Chinese philology. The idea was to provide a new scientific way for the description of speech sounds in modern languages and dialects on the one hand, and to explain the development of the sounds in the history on the other. Chinese linguistics has henceforth adopted a pan-chronic approach. Phonetics and phonology are integral to the study of speech sounds, and synchronic and diachronic aspects are parts of linguistics. Chinese phonetics has a descriptive spirit, rather than being theory oriented. From the very beginning, Chinese phonetics has been developing toward an evidence-based, experimental approach. This is because in a descriptive tradition, phonetic diversities and phonological universals need to be explained not only by abstract rules or principles but also by physical substances.
One unique tradition of Chinese linguistics uses an active-articulator-based terminology for describing the place of articulation. The active-articulator-based terminology captures an anterior versus posterior distinction between apical articulations in Mandarin dialects. Meanwhile, it introduced confusion when the active-articulator-based terminology was used as a general framework. Linguistic contrasts of phonation and aspiration in consonants are of particular interest in Chinese linguistics because they are correlated with tonal developments. Wu dialects are rich in laryngeal distinction, and fine-grained phonetic details reveal how obstruent devoicing has been interweaving with tones.
Chinese vowels are featured by apical vowels and diphthongs. Apical vowels function as vowels in Chinese syllables, but there is a long debate on whether apical vowels are vowels or syllabic consonants. Accumulative evidence from both acoustic and articulatory studies shows that apical vowels are more vowel-like than consonant-like. Chinese dialects have complex inventories of diphthongs and triphthongs and even teraphthongs in a few rare cases. The nature of diphthong is essential to the understanding of the complexity of Chinese syllables. And there is a typological difference between falling and rising diphthongs in Chinese dialects. Falling diphthongs are a single articulatory event with a dynamic spectral target, while rising diphthongs are sequences of two spectral targets.
Article
The DP-Domain in Germanic
Philipp Rauth
The domain of the so-called Determiner Phrase (DP) includes the lexical noun as well as its associated determiners (articles, pronouns), numerals, quantifiers, and modifiers (adjectives, possessors, relative clauses, attributive PPs). The reason why nominals are referred to as DPs is the assumption that they are structurally headed by the determiner, or more precisely by the article, rather than by the noun itself. The lexical NP thus has an extended functional DP-layer. The specifier of D can be occupied by certain pronouns such as demonstratives, which are considered phrasal. In addition to the DP-layer, numerals, quantifiers, adjectives, and possessives constitute a series of further functional layers between D and N.
Common features of the Germanic DP-domain are, to name but a few, an absent indefinite plural article, prenominal adjectives and possessive constructions like s-genitives, and possessor doubling. However, North and West Germanic differ considerably with respect to, for instance, definiteness marking, the placement of demonstrative reinforcers, and the unmarked position of possessive pronouns and possessor-DPs. It is these differences that pose a challenge to researchers who aim to find a unified structural analysis for the DP in Germanic. A common strategy to account for different word-order preferences are low base positions and movement: The unmarked position of possessive determiners is postnominal in North Germanic (huset hans ‘house.def his’, Norwegian) and prenominal in West Germanic (sein Haus ‘his house’, German). Therefore, the possessive pronoun is often assumed to be base-generated in a structurally low position. West Germanic possessives then precede the head noun by obligatorily rising to the DP-layer, while in North Germanic they (preferably) stay in situ.
In the last 20 years, generative research on the syntax of less prominent as well as nonstandard Germanic varieties has gained momentum. Studies of this kind enable an additional perspective on phenomena that would be difficult to analyze if only the standard varieties were considered. For instance, the exact grammaticalization path of the reinforcement of the Proto-Germanic demonstrative *þo- by the interjection *sai must remain speculative due to the lack of Proto-Germanic data. A look at contemporary data can help: Some modern Germanic varieties show a similar reinforcement of demonstratives by locative adverbs (die do birdies ‘those there birds’, Pennsylvania German), which can serve as a blueprint for reconstructing the grammaticalization path of the Proto-Germanic reinforced demonstrative.
Article
Dutch
Freek Van de Velde
This chapter presents a bird's eye perspective on Dutch, taking a historical perspective. Indeed, many characteristics of Dutch can only be understood by diachronically tracing the origin and development of its phonology, morphology, and syntax. For phonology, the major trends are an increasing phonemic importance and proliferation of vowels, an erosion of the Auslaut, and a closing and diphthongization of long vowels. For grammar the trends can be summarized as a gradual loss of inflectional morphology, a concomitant rise in configurationality, and a gradual crystallization in fixed expressions. Both in its structure and in its development there is considerable overlap with drifts in the neighboring languages, and indeed, Dutch is often found to occupy an intermediate position between its West-Germanic neighbors, not only geographically, but ‘typologically’ as well. Dialect variation is mainly organized along a geographic east–west axis, linking up with Franconian-Ingvaeonic contacts in the Early Middle Ages.
