Suchergebnisse

AbstractSocietal multilingualism and multilectalism have been among the leading justifications for language policies, especially in the Global South, where many of these have failed. I associate the failures with poor choices of official languages and media of education, which are not consistent with the linguistic behaviors of the majority of the citizenry and the socioeconomic structures of the relevant polities. I review some cases of adequate and inadequate policies around the world and explain ecologically some reasons for either their successes or their failures. In a subset of the cases, I assess the results as mixed. My recommendation is of course not to follow the policy of a particular polity simply because it has succeeded there but to also check whether the ecology of its success is similar to that of the new polity. The relevant ecology includes the socioeconomic structure/system and the linguistic practices of the citizenry for whom the policy is intended. Among the issues to address is, for instance, whether the language adopted as the official language and medium of education is easy for the majority of the citizenry to learn successfully. Another is whether the language policy will make the economic development of the nation more inclusive and empower the majority economically and politically.

Policy might partly shape the English-language acquisition of Hispanics migrating to the U.S. mainland, particularly policies related to limited-English-language disability benefits and immigration reform. Using data from the American Community Survey, we find that island-born Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland, as U.S. citizens, may have lower incentives to learn English than Hispanic immigrants because of their higher participation in LEP disability programs. However, among Mexican immigrants, recent immigration reform aimed at interior enforcement might have increased incentives for Mexican immigrants to learn English to reduce their probability of detection, if speaking English proxies for undocumented status.

1: Modularity in Underlying Structure -- 1.1 Introduction -- 1.2 On Defining Grammatical Relations in a Modular Theory -- 1.3 What is a Lexical Entry? -- 1.4 The Organization of Argument Structure: the Thematic Hierarchy -- 1.5 Case Theory and the Lexicon -- 1.6 S and S?: Extended X-bar Theory and the Lexical Clause Hypothesis -- 1.7 Dominance, Precedence and Phrase Markers -- Notes -- 2: Syntactic Projection and Licensing -- 2.1 Preliminaries: Licensing, the UTAH, the Projection Principle and the Theta Criterion -- 2.2 X-bar Theory and the Projection of Heads -- 2.3 Licensing Non-head Daughters: Thematic Grids and Thematic Relations -- 2.4 Functional Categories and Licensing -- 2.5 Summary -- Notes -- 3: On Configurationality Parameters -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 Parametric Variation in D-Structure Principles -- 3.3 What is a Nonconfigurational Language? -- 3.4 The Empirical Evidence for D-Structure Variation -- 3.5 Summary and Conclusions -- Notes -- 4: Projection, Pronouns, and Parsing in Navajo Syntax -- 4.1 Introduction -- 4.2 An Overview of Navajo Syntax and Morphology -- 4.3 Parsing, Null Arguments, and Grammatical Relations in Navajo -- 4.4 On Navajo Nominals as Adjuncts -- 4.5 Navajo Agreement and Incorporated Pronouns -- 4.6 Conclusion: Projection from the Lexicon in Navajo -- Notes -- 5: Concluding Remarks -- References -- Index of Names -- Index of Subjects.

The article discusses the prospects for the conceptual systematization of forms and methods of individual participation in language and politics relations. This type of relations complex is proposed to be analyzed differentially using two intersecting, but not coinciding, semantic circles formed around the categories of "language policy", on the one hand, and "politics of language", on the other hand. There is a whole spectrum of heterogeneous interactions - political and linguistic relations - in which the participants are involved not only at the institutional, but also at the group and individual levels. This kind of involvement can acquire both a deliberate, conscious character and not motivated in a specific way, a spontaneous form associated not so much with goal achievement as with accompanying effects and consequences. This implies a certain nuance: the categories "subjects" and "actors" can be understood as attributes namely of language policy itself, while "agents" are bodies of the politics of the language in a proper sense of the concept. Some demonstrate political intentions in the field of linguistic situations in general (on the meso- and macro-contours), while others can function at the level of private claims, for example, in defending linguistic rights and in practice at the micro-level.

This booklet is an introduction to the linguistic study of the Indigenous languages spoken in Canada. The following topics are covered: approaching the study of Indigenous languages from an informed and respectful perspective; the geographical distribution of Indigenous languages in Canada; some notable structural properties of Indigenous languages; the writing systems used for Indigenous languages; the effects of contact between Indigenous and non-Indigenous languages; the current vitality of Indigenous languages in Canada.

AbstractIn this article, we analyse translation in the context of revitalisation from the point of view of Language Making. Both translation and revitalisation are based on the idea of languages as distinct entities, and together they are doubly inclined to draw clear-cut borders between languages. The data come from a series of translation courses targeted at speakers and learners of Karelian, a critically endangered Finnic language spoken in Finland and Russia. By analysing the reflective assignments of the translation course participants and focusing on how they report on encountering and overcoming lexical gaps, we examine a very concrete case of Language Making: the creation of new lexical items for Karelian for the purposes of a translation task. Since coining neologisms in our data is mostly based on borrowing or calquing, the data illustrate how the participants perceive language boundaries and the connections between Karelian and other languages. Contrary to what the intersection between translation and revitalisation suggests, a rather flexible view on linguistic borders is displayed. Participants fill in lexical gaps by drawing on all linguistic resources available to them: mainly Finnish and Russian, but also "international" resources and occasionally other languages or other Karelian dialects. To a lesser extent, the data also display the participants' competing and conflicting ideologies of what is Karelian, what belongs to it and on which or whose model to base the neologisms.