The label “neoclassical compounds” (NC) encompasses a set of phenomena found in, but not limited to, Romance languages. They can be roughly characterized as the emergence, in the lexicon of a language, of lexical units totally or partially made up of elements borrowed from ancient (classical) languages, namely Greek and Latin, and constructed by means of processes not (or not necessarily) corresponding to the “canonical” morphological processes at work in the language in question. Historically, the existence of NC in Romance languages is linked, on the one side, to the role played by Latin, and partly Greek, in the intellectual history of Europe; and, on the other side, to the various waves of relatinization Romance languages were subject to at different times, with two major turning points, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the revival of classical authors advocated by Humanism and the Renaissance, and from the 18th century onward, with the development and democratization of scientific and technical knowledge. Progressively, NC have served as models for the emergence of productive word formation patterns which are, today, perfectly integrated into the derivational systems of Romance languages. However, rather than constituting a clearly delimited and homogeneous class, the label NC encompasses a constellation of phenomena sharing some characteristics that can globally be attributed to their common origin in the lexicon of neoclassical descent that has been transferred to Romance languages across the centuries.
Article
Neoclassical Compounding in the Romance Languages
Fabio Montermini
Article
English
Bernd Kortmann
English is by far the most widely spoken Germanic language, with approximately 400 million native speakers, another 500 million L2 speakers, and at least a billion of moderately competent speakers of English as a Foreign Language. In close to 60 countries, English enjoys official status or is one of the native languages. With several fully codified standard varieties used in different nation-states, English also qualifies as the most pluricentric of the Germanic languages. British and American English are still the most powerful norm-providing Standard Englishes worldwide and the leading target models in the international classroom of English as a second or foreign language. Many of the changes in their grammars in the course of the 20th century happened independently of each other. In American English, such changes typically started earlier, spread faster, and affected more words or structures compared with British English.
English is the most innovative of all Germanic languages when looking at its evolution since early medieval times, closely followed by the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Despite the fact that English and German both belong to the West Germanic branch, it is between these two languages that the greatest Germanic-internal typological distance holds, with German being placed at the pole of the structurally most conservative West Germanic language and (along with Icelandic) of all Germanic languages. English is highly analytic and exhibits many properties typically found in SVO languages, whereas German is still highly synthetic and shows many more typical properties of an SOV language.
Mobility, migration, and language and dialect contact have played crucial roles in the history and development of English right from inception in the early Middle Ages. The extent to which the multiple language contact situations in the history of English have shaped the language, especially its grammar, is still a matter of debate. What is a fact is that the major typological changes of the English language away from the highly synthetic language type of Old Germanic happened exactly in the late Old English and, above all, the Middle English periods. Early Modern English was primarily a period of standardization, the Great Vowel Shift, and a heavy extension of the vocabulary because of its massive borrowing from Latin and French. The main characteristics of Late Modern English are continuity, stability, and norm-oriented codification of the English language via dictionaries and grammars. Both modern periods, especially the 18th and the 19th centuries, saw the global spread of English in the wake of colonial expansion, laying the foundations to English becoming a true world language with many varieties in different parts of the world.
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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
Morphosyntactic Variation and Change in Italian
Michela Cennamo and Francesco Maria Ciconte
Italian is an Italo-Romance language based upon a form of Tuscan, old Florentine. For centuries, Italian was a literary language mastered only by well-educated elites. In contrast, almost the entire population spoke a local variety of Italo-Romance. The Italo-Romance varieties are not dialects—that is, variations—of Italian, but they are languages in their own right, which, like Tuscan, developed independently from Latin. The long-term and intensive coexistence of Italian and the Italo-Romance varieties has produced a great deal of variation, which still characterizes the linguistic repertoire of Italy. The diglossic relationship between Italian and the Italo-Romance varieties is thus the key to capturing such variation. The interrelation between a superstrate national language—that is, Standard Italian—and the deep-rooted local varieties has yielded interlanguage phenomena, which eventually led to substratum interference, that is, the occurrence of local features in Italian. This variation has not affected Standard Italian, but, rather, it has produced geo-varieties of Italian, altogether termed “Regional Italians.” The use of certain regional features has become the norm—a norm which is socially accepted and in fact constitutes the standard within the respective regional areas. Besides phonetic and prosodic variation and substantial lexical importation into Italian from the Italo-Romance varieties, a set of shared interference features has transcended isoglossic boundaries at the morphosyntactic level as well. At the same time, the traditional diamesic dichotomy between the spoken and written domain has loosened, allowing a variety of interrelated styles and registers. In this respect, contemporary Italian can be said to be undergoing a process of restandardization. The newly emerging standard variety, “Neo-Standard Italian,” encompasses originally regional morphosyntactic features which have become pan-Italian and are commonly used in almost all functional domains of communication.
After discussing some typical instances of morphosyntactic variation in the macro-areas of Regional Italians, this article analyzes some shared Romance phenomena with regard to the specific features of Italian and its regional variation, namely existential constructions, forms of address, futurity, mood, and negation, pointing to emerging new phenomena, coexisting with stable patterns of variation, some of which are already attested in earlier stages of the language and of the early vernaculars.
Article
Northern Gallo-Romance: langue d’oïl (Including French)
John Charles Smith
The linguistic area of Gallo-Romance includes contemporary France, together with some contiguous areas. The (often moribund) local varieties spoken in the northern half of this area, together with standard French (which developed from a koinéized version of the speech of Paris at, or just after, the end of the Middle Ages) present interesting typological differences from many other Romance varieties. Their segmental phonology is characterized by a much larger number of vowels than is typical of Romance in general. Many of these vowels are the result of processes of nasalization and of diphthongization followed by remonophthongization that have not taken place, or not taken place to the same extent, elsewhere. Unlike many Romance varieties, Northern Gallo-Romance varieties are not pro-drop languages, so that sentences almost always require an overt subject, which may be a clitic pronoun. Finally, a striking syntactic feature of French is dislocation, where elements are moved to positions outside the nuclear or core sentence, giving rise to the view that French is, or is becoming, a discourse-configurational language.
Article
Sardinian
Michele Loporcaro and Ignazio Putzu
Sardinian is documented in continuous texts from the 11th century onward, at a historical period when the Republic of Pisa, at that time a maritime power, exerted its influence (linguistic and otherwise) on the island. In earlier centuries, Sardinian gradually became differentiated from Latin under Byzantine rule, which resulted in Greek influence. Later, Catalan, Spanish, and finally Italian were the main sources of contact pressure on Sardinian qua official languages, endowed with prestige, in subsequent periods, whereas Sardinian dialects were progressively relegated to spoken and informal usage. At present, language shift toward Italian is rampant, and Sardinian, in both its main varieties (Logudorese and Campidanese), now counts as seriously endangered.
The phonology of Sardinian is markedly different from that of the rest of the Romance languages, its main peculiarity lying in the stressed vowel system, in which the outcomes of Latin /iː/ and /e/ and /oː/ and /u/, respectively, remained distinct. Another peculiarity of Sardinian phonology is the preservation of Latin word-final -/s/ and -/t/ in the verbal and nominal inflection, which contributes to shape the inflectional morphology of Sardinian. Finally, the definite article /su/ ‘the.m.sg’, an outcome of Latin ipsum rather than illum, is also characteristic for Sardinian. By contrast, the syntax of Sardinian does not exhibit on the whole similarly marked peculiarities compared to the rest of the Romance languages. The properties just mentioned demarcate Sardinian stricto sensu, consisting of Logudorese and Campidanese, from the Tuscanized varieties spoken at the northern fringe of the island, Sassarese and Gallurese.
Their origin is debated, and many scholars now believe that they are varieties imported from Corsica, a scenario that seems implausible to the present writers. Instead, we provide evidence in support of the traditional view that Sassarese and Gallurese arose by modification of originally Sardinian dialects due to Pisan-Genoese influence in the late Middle Ages, which resulted in their being reshaped. Finally, the island also hosts two Romance language enclaves: Catalan in Alghero (in the northwest) and Genoese in Carloforte and Calasetta (in the southwest).
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 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.
Article
Endangered Chinese Dialects
Qingwen Zhang and Guanen Chen
Starting from an overview of the 10 major Chinese dialect groups, the article aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to endangered Chinese dialects. It delineates the causes and indicators of endangerment, describes the geographical distribution and speaking population of endangered dialects, and elucidates the influence of dominant languages on the linguistic traits of endangered dialects. The paper concludes with an exploration of ongoing preservation efforts dedicated to safeguarding endangered Chinese dialects.
The decrease in language use, influenced by the dominance of Mandarin and other dominant dialects, is identified as the primary cause of endangerment. The implementation of the language policy designating Mandarin as the standard national language to be used in education, administration, and public domains throughout the country has further contributed to this decline. Indicators of endangerment include decreased language use, bilingualism or multilingualism in dominant dialects, and limited domains of usage resulting in language shifting. The disruption of linguistic transmission from older to younger generations is another factor contributing to a diminishing population of speakers. Geographically, the largest cluster of endangered Chinese dialects is distributed at the junction of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Hunan provinces. These dialects have a small population of speakers, ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands.
Linguistically, the impact of dominant dialects on endangered dialects pertains to their phonological, lexical, and grammatical properties. While phonological instability displayed due to the influence of dominant dialects, certain stable features are identified, such as the retention or development of Middle Chinese voiced stops and affricates, as well as the preservation of sharp sounds. Lexical properties of endangered dialects are discussed in two aspects: (a) distinctive words in endangered dialects, including dialect-specific words, ancient Chinese words, and those related to folk culture; (b) word order variation between the endangered dialect and its dominant dialect. The erosion of grammatical properties is also noted, with endangered dialects borrowing features from dominant dialects.
The article emphasizes the importance of preserving linguistic diversity and protecting endangered Chinese dialects. The National Language Resources Protection Project in China is introduced as a comprehensive initiative aimed at surveying, collecting, and recording language resources. The project includes the publication of books, symposia, and an online platform showcasing audio and video recordings of endangered dialects. However, a comprehensive approach that includes explicit language policies and the establishment of dialect-promoting institutions are necessary for comprehensive protection.
