Children do not speak like adults. This observation is not trivial in a framework in which language acquisition is framed as a process of parameter setting on the basis of universal principles and the child’s input. The present chapter summarizes two main views of language acquisition in this framework, maturation and continuity, with special reference to the acquisition of Romance languages. The debate is difficult to settle on the basis of monolingual data. The comparison of different monolingual populations has the inconvenience that factors like age, cognitive abilities, and abilities related to the performance system come into play in studies that are only interested in the linguistic differences. The multilingual child constitutes an individual with different grammars, but with the same prerequisites if the genetic endowment is concerned, with one performance system and one cognitive system, all facts which can help to settle the debate. Acquisitionists have shown that some routes to adult grammars are shorter and simpler than others. Some of the definitions of complexity, as presented in the literature, will be summarized in relation to the acquisition of grammatical domains in monolingual children. Since complexity can lead to cross-linguistic influence in the multilingual child, the study of this population, again, helps to prove the different definitions of complexity. If it is really the case that grammatical systems are not equally complex, this might also be related to the fact that linguistic variation is best described by parameters which differ in nature—some of which are core parameters (‘deep parameters’), others sub-case parameters—as well as by peripheral variation. Again, parameters which have different settings in the adult language are particularly interesting to study in the multilingual child. Language acquisition is embedded into the child’s linguistic experience, or input. Interestingly, a multilingual child’s input is divided by two, three, or more, in comparison to that of the monolingual child. Arguably, the study of children who acquire more than one language from birth is particularly apt to reveal those grammatical domains which are acquired with ease, even with much less input than the monolingual child receives. Very tentatively, the present article addresses the reduction of intralinguistic variation via child-directed speech and thus opens up a discussion of the relevance of the quality of input in the framework of parameter setting.
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Article
Natascha Müller
Article
Bilingualism/multilingualism is a natural phenomenon worldwide. Unwittingly, however, monolingualism has been used as a standard to characterize and define bilingualism/multilingualism in linguistic research. Such a conception led to a “fractional,” “irregular,” and “distorted” view of bilingualism, which is becoming rapidly outmoded in the light of multipronged, rapidly growing interdisciplinary research. This article presents a complex and holistic view of bilinguals and multilinguals on conceptual, theoretical, and pragmatic/applied grounds. In that process, it attempts to explain why bilinguals are not a mere composite of two monolinguals. If bilinguals were a clone of two monolinguals, the study of bilingualism would not merit any substantive consideration in order to come to grips with bilingualism; all one would have to do is focus on the study of a monolingual person. Interestingly, even the two bilinguals are not clones of each other, let alone bilinguals as a set of two monolinguals. This paper examines the multiple worlds of bilinguals in terms of their social life and social interaction. The intricate problem of defining and describing bilinguals is addressed; their process and end result of becoming bilinguals is explored alongside their verbal interactions and language organization in the brain. The role of social and political bilingualism is also explored as it interacts with individual bilingualism and global bilingualism (e.g., the issue of language endangerment and language death).
Other central concepts such as individuals’ bilingual language attitudes, language choices, and consequences are addressed, which set bilinguals apart from monolinguals. Language acquisition is as much an innate, biological, as social phenomenon; these two complementary dimensions receive consideration in this article along with the educational issues of school performance by bilinguals. Is bilingualism a blessing or a curse? The linguistic and cognitive consequences of individual, societal, and political bilingualism are examined.
Article
Matthew B. Winn and Peggy B. Nelson
Cochlear implants (CIs) are the most successful sensory implant in history, restoring the sensation of sound to thousands of persons who have severe to profound hearing loss. Implants do not recreate acoustic sound as most of us know it, but they instead convey a rough representation of the temporal envelope of signals. This sparse signal, derived from the envelopes of narrowband frequency filters, is sufficient for enabling speech understanding in quiet environments for those who lose hearing as adults and is enough for most children to develop spoken language skills. The variability between users is huge, however, and is only partially understood.
CIs provide acoustic information that is sufficient for the recognition of some aspects of spoken language, especially information that can be conveyed by temporal patterns, such as syllable timing, consonant voicing, and manner of articulation. They are insufficient for conveying pitch cues and separating speech from noise.
There is a great need for improving our understanding of functional outcomes of CI success beyond measuring percent correct for word and sentence recognitions. Moreover, greater understanding of the variability experienced by children, especially children and families from various social and cultural backgrounds, is of paramount importance. Future developments will no doubt expand the use of this remarkable device.
Article
Alastair Pennycook
Critical applied linguistics is a field of inquiry and practice that connects questions of power and inequality—domination (constraining possibilities), disparity (inequitable access), discrimination (ideological exclusion), difference (cultural distinction), and desire (social preference)—to applied linguistic concerns. It brings together common applied linguistic interests such as classroom utterances, translations, conversations, genres, second-language acquisition, and media texts with critical sociological engagement with ideology, neoliberalism, colonialism, gender, racism, sexuality, and so on. While critical applied linguistics may therefore suggest certain domains of inquiry—language and migration, workplace discrimination, anti-racist education, and language revival, for example—it also insists that all domains of applied linguistics—classroom analysis, language testing, sign language interpreting, and language and the law—need to take into account the inequitable operations of the social world, and to have the theoretical and practical tools to do so effectively. Critical applied linguistics can also be understood as the intersection of a range of related critical projects, from critical pedagogy, critical literacies, and critical discourse analysis to critical approaches to language policy, critical language testing, and critical language awareness. As a domain of applied work, critical applied linguistics seeks not just to describe but also to change inequality through forms of research, pedagogy, and activism.
Article
Jiayu Wang and Guangyu Jin
Since critical discourse analysis (CDA) was introduced to China, it has developed into an influential field. Studies in CDA in China from the 1990s to 2020 can be delineated through four stages of development. The first stage focused on introducing the theories and concepts in CDA to China’s academia. During the second stage, CDA in China was no longer confined to reviewing theories abroad but was extended to deeper and more extensive theoretical, methodological, and empirical investigations. During the third stage, Chinese scholars in CDA became more concerned with domestic issues than in the previous stages and started to conduct interdisciplinary studies. The fourth stage marked the flourishing of CDA studies in terms of the numbers of studies published and scholars engaged in the field, and in terms of the breadth and the variety of research methods, topics, and disciplines involved. Chinese scholars tend to gear CDA to China’s social, political, and cultural contexts.
Article
Dorien Van De Mieroop
Rather than thinking of identity as something that defines a person in such a way that it makes them distinguishable from others, researchers using discourse analytical approaches within linguistics—especially in the fields of pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics—tend to adopt a social constructionist perspective and thus view identity as a multimodally constituted activity or process. From this perspective, identity is not something one is or has, but something that one does or creates by means of various linguistic and paralinguistic resources as well as bodily movements. This performative view of identity has a number of implications. Rather than thinking of identity in the singular, a plural conceptualization of identities is capitalized on. Moreover, these identities should not be regarded as pertaining to only the ‘large’ macro-level sociodemographic categories individuals belong to, such as gender, race, and social class; identities are often described in much more nuanced terms. Such a fine-grained approach is needed to do justice to this performative perspective on identity, as it helps to capture the many dynamic and extremely fleeting ways in which people engage in identity work. Furthermore, all these identity constructions are not necessarily always consistent with one another, and they may sometimes even be contradictory, as people may not always be—or be able to be—equally prone to enacting a particular identity. This may depend on what they are doing and with whom, as identities are also related to the identities other people may construct around them. All these aspects make the analysis of identity quite a complex endeavor, as not only can their plural and fleeting nature make identities quite hard to capture, but it can also be quite a challenge to pin down precisely at which points in an interaction we can actually observe identity work in action.
Article
Wolfgang Pöckl
It is often said that languages for specific purposes (also named special languages or technolects) are the product of a division of labor. Although this concept was introduced only as late as 1776 (by Adam Smith, in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations), the idea that professions or occupations of all kind are characterized by a particular vocabulary that is not understood by all native speakers was already manifest in the writings of medieval scholars (for instance, in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia).
In the Middle Ages most Romance languages conquered a more or less wide range of domains. The question arose whether they were also appropriate to serve as a medium of scholarship. The disciplines taught at the universities (arts, theology, law, medicine) had a strong Latin tradition; their knowledge was popularized by means of translations, which enriched the vocabulary and the syntactic flexibility of the emerging languages. Thus, the translators—sometimes organized in “schools”—contributed to the elaboration of the target languages and to their emancipation from Latin. Aside from the septem artes liberales, however, a second group of (seven) disciplines without Latin roots (called artes mechanicae) established and introduced mainly native vocabulary typical of the respective occupational fields.
During the first centuries of modern times, more and more scholars felt that their mother tongue should take the place of Latin as a means of propagating scholarship and new findings. In the 17th and 18th centuries, French held the lead among the modern languages in nearly all fields of knowledge; it maintained its dominant position among the Romance languages until the second half of the 20th century. On a global level, German was a strong rival in the humanities and several scientific disciplines in the 19th century; for many decades, however, English has been the universal medium of communication in the scientific community. This process has given rise to many discussions about language planning measures to be taken in order to curtail the Anglo-American supremacy.
Before the 18th century, special languages did not have a strong impact on the physiognomy of developed languages. In the sphere of academic disciplines, translations of canonical Latin texts entailed a general re-Latinization and, as a consequence, a process of convergence of the Romance languages. The technical languages of trade and artisanry were highly fragmented so that their special vocabulary was used and understood only in limited geographical areas.
In the Age of Enlightenment, the growing prestige of experts, on the one hand, and philosophical considerations about the optimization of language(s), on the other hand, led to increasing harmonization efforts on national and supranational levels. Organizations were founded with the purpose of creating and standardizing terminologies for various kinds of subjects (technical products, medicine, etc.).
Special languages, far from being homogeneous varieties, are differentiated vertically. Linguists use to distinguish between three levels of communication: specialists inter se (e.g., physician—physician), specialist—skilled worker (physician—nurse), and specialist—layman (physician—patient). Studying how technical terms seep into common language and what changes they undergo during this process is a great challenge for linguists.
Article
Salvatore Attardo
Interest in the linguistics of humor is widespread and dates since classical times. Several theoretical models have been proposed to describe and explain the function of humor in language. The most widely adopted one, the semantic-script theory of humor, was presented by Victor Raskin, in 1985. Its expansion, to incorporate a broader gamut of information, is known as the General Theory of Verbal Humor. Other approaches are emerging, especially in cognitive and corpus linguistics. Within applied linguistics, the predominant approach is analysis of conversation and discourse, with a focus on the disparate functions of humor in conversation. Speakers may use humor pro-socially, to build in-group solidarity, or anti-socially, to exclude and denigrate the targets of the humor. Most of the research has focused on how humor is co-constructed and used among friends, and how speakers support it. Increasingly, corpus-supported research is beginning to reshape the field, introducing quantitative concerns, as well as multimodal data and analyses. Overall, the linguistics of humor is a dynamic and rapidly changing field.
Article
M. Teresa Espinal and Jaume Mateu
Idioms, conceived as fixed multi-word expressions that conceptually encode non-compositional meaning, are linguistic units that raise a number of questions relevant in the study of language and mind (e.g., whether they are stored in the lexicon or in memory, whether they have internal or external syntax similar to other expressions of the language, whether their conventional use is parallel to their non-compositional meaning, whether they are processed in similar ways to regular compositional expressions of the language, etc.). Idioms show some similarities and differences with other sorts of formulaic expressions, the main types of idioms that have been characterized in the linguistic literature, and the dimensions on which idiomaticity lies. Syntactically, idioms manifest a set of syntactic properties, as well as a number of constraints that account for their internal and external structure. Semantically, idioms present an interesting behavior with respect to a set of semantic properties that account for their meaning (i.e., conventionality, compositionality, and transparency, as well as aspectuality, referentiality, thematic roles, etc.). The study of idioms has been approached from lexicographic and computational, as well as from psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic perspectives.
Article
Cristine Severo, Sinfree Makoni, and Ashraf Abdelhay
The notion of language crossing is discussed from the perspective of Southern language practices and epistemologies. The notion of language is expanded to include the voices and metalanguages of subjects who were historically invisibilized and silenced, with a focus on Southern contexts that underwent processes of colonization and liberation, specifically Africa. This also includes speaking across the human/nonhuman dimension. Language crossing not only is a contemporary and Northern practice but also includes a complex set of arrangements, alliances, and negotiations inscribed in the meaning-making process that cannot be reduced to the modern ideas of linguistic, national, or ethnic borders. By drawing on the decolonial sociolinguistic critique of language and linguistics, the concept of crossing is revised and elaborated in light of the insights from certain African sociolinguistic situations. Southern perspectives of language crossing should be able to include the role of objects, animals, nature, and humans in language practices. The following questions are addressed: (a) What does language crossing look like when viewed from the global South/s? (b) What can those who study language crossing learn from the perspective of a global Southern gaze? (c) What can African multilingualisms teach us about the situated dimensions of the notion of language crossing? The conclusion argues that language crossing in Southern contexts is connected to issues of legitimacy, authenticity, and belonging that characterize a sense of community, which is a complex and context-based notion. This means that different peoples, individuals, or groups may have different understandings of what counts as communication and language use. By crossing the disciplinary Northern boundaries toward an approach that dialogues with Southern voices and experiences, the political nature of the notion of boundary is problematized.
Article
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
Anne Weber, Bettina Fetzer, and Vahram Atayan
Discussing the language of science and technology in the Romance languages is highly complex and challenging for several reasons. On the one hand, there are different fields to be included, namely computer sciences, engineering, mathematics, as well as physics and astronomy. On the other hand, English has become (or even has always been in the case of computer sciences) the lingua franca in all these fields, so there seems to be rather little to analyze from a synchronic perspective as far as the Romance languages are concerned, and accordingly there is rather little up-to-date linguistic research on it. In the beginning, that is, during the late 1980s, the focus was on specific phenomena, while modern research often deals with didactic aspects and language teaching.
When it comes to the state of research in the different Romance languages, it turns out that it is mainly Canadians who are noted for playing a major role in the analysis of French technolectes. Numerous studies, some of which were conducted by German Romanists, center on the lexis and terminology of specific fields in French. As for Portuguese, most works have been published in Brazil, and lately the focal point seems to have primarily been placed on computer science and mathematics. Studies regarding Italian typically reveal a major interest in the general structure of terminology and its relation to everyday language use. Moreover, special emphasis is often placed on historical matters, especially the role of Galileo. Finally, the influence of specific text types as well as didactic aspects of special languages at different levels of education is also a subject of interest. With regard to Spanish, it should first be pointed out that, due to diatopic variation, it is hardly possible to talk about one single concept of the language of science and technology. Only a few comprehensive works on this area of research exist, yet many individual studies have been published in the last few decades, primarily on information science, especially the influence of English on Spanish, as well as on terminology in different fields. In Catalan, specialized languages emerged rather early, and their development has been systematically encouraged since the 20th century; the center of interest in current research is mainly on information science.
Article
The expression language of the economy and business refers to an extremely heterogeneous linguistic reality. For some, it denotes all text and talk produced by economic agents in the pursuit of economic activity, for others the language used to write or talk about the economy or business, that is, the language of the economic sciences and the media. Both the economy and business contain a myriad of subdomains, each with its own linguistic peculiarities. Language use also differs quite substantially between the shop floor and academic articles dealing with it. Last but not least, language is itself a highly articulate entity, composed of sounds, words, concepts, etc., which are taken care of by a considerable number of linguistic disciplines and theories. As a consequence, this research landscape offers a very varied picture.
The state of research is also highly diverse as far as the Romance languages are concerned. The bulk of relevant publications concerns French, followed at a certain distance by Spanish and Italian, while Romanian, Catalan, and Portuguese look like poor relations. As far as the dialects are concerned, only those of some Italian cities that held a central position in medieval trade, like Venice, Florence, or Genoa, have given rise to relevant studies. As far as the metalanguage used in research is concerned, the most striking feature is the overwhelming preponderance of German and the almost complete absence of English. The insignificant role of English must probably be attributed to the fact that the study of foreign business languages in the Anglo-Saxon countries is close to nonexistent. Why study foreign business languages if one own’s language is the lingua franca of today’s business world? Scholars from the Romance countries, of course, generally write in their mother tongue, but linguistic publications concerning the economic and business domain are relatively scarce there. The heterogeneity of the metalanguages used certainly hinders the constitution of a close-knit research community.
Article
Aidan Pine and Mark Turin
The world is home to an extraordinary level of linguistic diversity, with roughly 7,000 languages currently spoken and signed. Yet this diversity is highly unstable and is being rapidly eroded through a series of complex and interrelated processes that result in or lead to language loss. The combination of monolingualism and networks of global trade languages that are increasingly technologized have led to over half of the world’s population speaking one of only 13 languages. Such linguistic homogenization leaves in its wake a linguistic landscape that is increasingly endangered.
A wide range of factors contribute to language loss and attrition. While some—such as natural disasters—are unique to particular language communities and specific geographical regions, many have similar origins and are common across endangered language communities around the globe. The harmful legacy of colonization and the enduring impact of disenfranchising policies relating to Indigenous and minority languages are at the heart of language attrition from New Zealand to Hawai’i, and from Canada to Nepal.
Language loss does not occur in isolation, nor is it inevitable or in any way “natural.” The process also has wide-ranging social and economic repercussions for the language communities in question. Language is so heavily intertwined with cultural knowledge and political identity that speech forms often serve as meaningful indicators of a community’s vitality and social well-being. More than ever before, there are vigorous and collaborative efforts underway to reverse the trend of language loss and to reclaim and revitalize endangered languages. Such approaches vary significantly, from making use of digital technologies in order to engage individual and younger learners to community-oriented language nests and immersion programs. Drawing on diverse techniques and communities, the question of measuring the success of language revitalization programs has driven research forward in the areas of statistical assessments of linguistic diversity, endangerment, and vulnerability. Current efforts are re-evaluating the established triad of documentation-conservation-revitalization in favor of more unified, holistic, and community-led approaches.
Article
Lenore A. Grenoble
Language shift occurs when a community of users replaces one language by another, or “shifts” to that other language. Although language shift can and does occur at the level of the individual speaker, it is shift at the level of an entire community that is associated with widespread language replacement and loss. Shift is a particular kind of language loss, and differs from language attrition, which involves the loss of a language over an individual’s lifetime, often the result of aging or of language replacement (as in shift). Both language shift and attrition are in contrast to language maintenance, the continuing use of a language. Language maintenance and revitalization programs are responses to language shift, and are undertaken by communites who perceive that their language is threatened by a decrease in usage and under threat of loss.
Language shift is widespread and can be found with majority- or minority-language populations. It is often associated with immigrant groups who take up the majority language of their new territory, leaving behind the language of their homeland. For minority-language speaker communities, language shift is generally the result of a combination of factors, in particular colonization. A nexus of factors—historical, political, social, and economic—often provides the impetus for a community to ceasing speaking their ancestral language, replacing it with the language of the majority, and usually politically dominant, group. Language shift is thus a social issue, and often coupled with other indicators of social distress.
Language endangerment is the result of language shift, and in fact shift is its most widespread cause.Since the 1960s there has been ever-increasing interest across speaker communities and linguists to work to provide opportunities to learn and use minority languages to offset shift, and to document speakers in communities under the threat of shift.
Article
Elizabeth Lanza and Hirut Woldemariam
The linguistic landscape (henceforth LL) has proven to be a fruitful approach for investigating various societal dimensions of written language use in the public sphere. First introduced in the context of bilingual Canada as a gauge for measuring ethnolinguistic vitality, in the 21st century it is the focus of a thriving field of inquiry with its own conference series, an increasing number of publications, and an international journal dedicated exclusively to investigating language and other semiotic resources used in the public arena. The scholarship in this domain has centered on European and North American geographical sites; however, an increasingly voluminous share of studies addresses the LL of sites across the world through both books and articles. African contributions have added an important dimension to this knowledge base as southern multilingualisms bring into question the very concept of language in that speakers and writers draw on their rich linguistic repertoires, avoiding any compartmentalization or separation of what is traditionally conceived of as languages. The LL of Ethiopia has contributed to this growing base of empirical studies in the exploration of language policy issues, identity constructions, language contact, and the sociolinguistics of globalization. A new language policy of ethnic federalism was introduced to the country in the 1990s following a civil war and through a new constitution. This policy was set to recognize the various ethnolinguistic groups in the country and the official use of ethnic/regional languages to satisfy local political and educational needs. Through this, languages previously unwritten required a script in order for speakers to communicate in them in written texts. And many regions have chosen the Latin script above the Ethiopic script. Nonetheless, some languages remain invisible in the public sphere. These events create an exciting laboratory for studying the LL. Given the change of language policy since the late 20th century and the fast-growing economy of Ethiopia (one of the poorest countries on the continent) the manifest and increasingly visible display of languages in the LL provides an excellent lens for studying various sociolinguistic phenomena.
Article
Nigel Fabb
The linguistic study of literature addresses the ways in which language is differently organized in verbal art (literature): form is added to language, altered, attenuated, and differently grouped. These different kinds of organization are normatively subject to limits, some derived from limits on general linguistic form or language-specific linguistic form. However, linguistic form can in principle be altered in any way at all, for example, in avant-garde texts or to produce artificial languages for literature; this possibility raises the general question of whether some organizations of literary language are cognitively transparent and others are cognitively opaque.
Of the various added forms, the most extensively studied has been metrical form, which requires the words of the text to be grouped into lines. Metrical form combines a non-linguistic counting system with a rhythmic system that adapts the rhythmic systems of ordinary phonology; most accounts of meter have focused on the rhythms as these are of greater linguistic interest than counting (which plays no significant role in language in general). The metrical line may have a special status, as a cognitively privileged level of grouping, possibly because it is fitted to working memory. Rhyme and alliteration are two common kinds of added form; most linguistic interest has been in what counts as “similarity of sound” between two words, whether at a surface or underlying level. Rhyming and alliterating words are distributed relative to the grouping into lines and other constituents. The other major kind of added form is parallelism, where two sections of text are structurally similar, usually in syntax and vocabulary. The various added forms may allow for variation (e.g., every line in an English sonnet can be in a different rhythmic variation of iambic pentameter), and can be intermittently present; there is no clear equivalent to ‘grammaticality’ in literary linguistic form. This may be because literary linguistic form holds as a presumption about a text, derived by inference, rather than as a constitutive structural device.
All literary texts have a discourse structure, which includes division into various types of group or constituent, including the division of a narrative into episodes, exploiting verbal cues of episodic boundaries. Narratives also require the tracking of referents such as people and objects across the discourse, which draws on the study of pronominals. Literary texts may also have a distinctive vocabulary, borrowing or inventing words to an unusual degree, and engaging in various kinds of wordplay.
Literary texts have ‘style’ and ‘markedness’, ways in which the language varies in noticeable ways but without coding a different linguistic semantics. These stylistic variations are sometimes treated as having determinate interpretations, but there are also approaches to stylistic variations in literature that treat them as having a non-determinate relation to meaning. Literature cannot have a different semantics or pragmatics from ordinary language, but meaning can be ‘difficult’ in literature in ways not characteristic of much ordinary language (but in common with ritual speech and other ways of speaking).
A major mode of linguistic investigation involves corpora, over which statistical analyses are undertaken. This has a relation to the question of whether our literary-linguistic knowledge has a probabilistic basis, a question that ties the study of language to questions of expectation in aesthetics (e.g., music) more generally. Literature exists in various modalities—writing, oral literature, and signed literature—and linguistic approaches to literature have been sensitive to this, as well as to the special questions about how texts are set to music in songs.
Article
Mirka Honkanen
Orthography is not a neutral tool for representing language in writing. Spelling is a linguistic variable capable of carrying social meaning, and orthographies are technologies embedded in larger societal structures. Spelling plays a role in the construction of national and other social identities, the delimitation of languages, the authentication and stigmatization of speaker groups, standardization, and the written representation of paralinguistic features. In these and further ways, orthography is a topic of high sociolinguistic relevance. After written language had long received less sociolinguistic attention than speech, there is now a growing body of sociolinguistic research into spelling variation and orthography as a socioculturally situated practice.
Sociolinguists investigate the social role of orthographies and spelling choices. When orthographies are developed for previously unwritten languages, decisions have to be made not only regarding phonemic representation but also between creating distance from and closeness to related languages. Orthography becomes a highly debated topic also when spelling reforms are proposed; different ideological, aesthetic, financial, educational, and sociopolitical arguments are typically brought forth. Standardized spellings are seen by language users as granting languages and speakers authority. When non-standardized spellings are used in transcripts of speech, they have been shown to assign sociolinguistic stigma to the speakers represented. Non-standardized spellings are used in different less than fully regulated orthographic spaces, such as digital writing, company and personal names, literary texts, subcultural publications, advertising, and private writing. Sociolinguistic studies on spelling often rely on data from digital communication such as text messaging or social media interactions. Such studies not only describe and classify different kinds of non-standardized spellings but also increasingly establish quantitative tendencies, explore correlations with macro-level sociodemographic factors, and show the potential for respelling to construct identities, personae, and meaning at the micro level of the utterance. Spelling can index identities and stances, act as a contextualization cue, and represent prosodic and dialectal features.
Article
The varieties of Canadian French are the result of both conservatism and innovation. The conservatism is manifested in the retention of archaic structures, which derive on the one hand from the dialects of northern and western France, the areas of origin of the Quebecker and Acadian settlers, and on the other hand from the common vernacular of the Ile-de-France area, the français populaire. Innovation has occurred independently of France because of the political rupture between France and New France in 1763, which also severed emotional ties: France had to cede territories to Great Britain due to its defeat in the Seven Years’ War and chose to separate from its North American colony while holding onto more profitable colonies, such as Guadeloupe. All normative influence on the development of Canadian French stopped. Since the French-speaking territories in North America have never been united administratively, and English has been the dominant language for the majority of citizens in Canada, no common institution providing prescriptive guidelines as to language use (such as the Académie Française in France) has been established. The varieties of Quebec and Acadian French spoken in Canada—and subsequently in the United States—developed freely. This resulted in an almost indescribable amount of linguistic variants in all fields. Whereas the phonological systems of Canadian and standard French (i.e., the hexagonal norm), in other words the inventory of sounds, barely differ, there is considerable variation in phonetics (i.e., pronunciation). The traditional areas of settlement for speakers of predominantly northern French dialects (Quebec) and predominantly western French dialects (Acadia and Maritime Provinces) have stayed administratively separate, resulting in considerable variation among the varieties of Canadian French.
Article
Valentin Werner
Pop cultural linguistics represents an emerging research subfield. It can be conceptualized as a specific type of media linguistics concerned with the study of performed language as represented in various pop culture manifestations, such as music, TV series, movies, comics, cartoons, and video games, among others. Pop culture is thus viewed as a broad category that includes artifacts with a commercial, entertainment-related purpose that are (mass-)mediated, fall within the mainstream, and represent largely fictional and scripted content. Linguists working in pop cultural linguistics explicitly take account of the current social and practical relevance of pop culture and the fact that it is largely a multimodal phenomenon with a strong linguistic component and the potential for affective engagement. Pop cultural linguistics possesses inherent relevance for the broader area of cultural studies, which may benefit from quantitative and qualitative approaches used in linguistics to increase the overall validity of findings and to develop a comprehensive picture of pop culture artifacts.
The main object of study in pop cultural linguistics is performed language. While performed language was traditionally sidelined in linguistics due to its alleged “inauthentic” nature, it has gradually been acknowledged as a regular part of everyday language use and thus has been normalized in linguistic study. The increasing availability of resources relevant for pop cultural linguistics, such as language corpora and thematic bibliographies, illustrates the vitality of the field, as does the growing body of research. Research in pop cultural linguistics is methodologically eclectic and commonly adapts approaches and frameworks used in established linguistic subfields, such as sociolinguistics, stylistics, or corpus linguistics. It serves to explore salient topics, such as the linguistic construction of authenticity and identity from a sociolinguistic angle or the representation of politeness from a pragma-stylistic point of view, occasionally also applying a contrastive perspective in terms of performed language vs. natural conversation. Pop cultural linguistics is further characterized by increasing methodological reflection and a growing recognition of the affordances of multimodal analysis, even though these aspects will have to be addressed more explicitly in the future.
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