Suchergebnisse

Mainland Southeast Asia provides a dramatic demonstration of the areal phenomenon in linguistics: When languages are spoken historically in the same location they often show significant parallels in the organization of a wide range of structural domains, whether the languages descend from the same historical source. The effects of areal diffusion raise fundamental questions for the traditional essentialist vision of languages as entities with offspring that diverge, with shared innovations marking divergent branches and internal processes of evolution accounting for diversity among modern languages. Recent theoretical and empirical research on linguistic diversity, language change, and social diffusion of innovation argues for a unit-based approach to language change and relatedness, where the units of analysis are individual speakers and individual linguistic items. This review begins with discussion of the language situation in Mainland Southeast Asia, where the language "genealogies" have been dramatically permeated by socio-historical contact, then explores theoretical and methodological implications for research on language both generally and in its areal context.

By analyzing conceptual transfer this volume offers new insight in areal linguistics. Mainland Southeast Asia unifies great linguistic richness consisting of numerous languages and countless varieties of genetically diverse language families. Nevertheless, the area is known as a prime example for linguistic convergence. Exemplified by spatial reference in Thai, Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese, this study reveals conceptual borrowing due to language contact as an areal defining feature. The results from the field-based data analysis may help answer what extent cultural impact can be used as evidence for the existence of linguistic areas. A speaker's cultural background might have a stronger impact on the choice of spatial language encoding than expected. Method and structure of argumentation can provide a model for similar questions addressing the existence of linguistic areas as well as to other cognitive dimensions within the Southeast Asian area under consideration. Therefore, the study can be seen as a significant contribution to analyze possibly existing conceptual areas empirically and exemplarily. Additionally, the investigation can serve as an important complement to empirical assumptions of conceptual transfer

"Issues in multilingualism and its implications for communities and society at large, language acquisition and use, language diversification, and creative language use associated with new linguistic identities have become hot topics in both scientific and popular debates. A ubiquitous aspect of multilingualism is language contact. This book contains twelve articles that discuss specific aspects of Contact Linguistics. These articles cover a wide range of topics in the field, including creoles, areal linguistics, language mixing, and the sociolinguistic aspects of interactions with audiences. The book is dedicated to Pieter Muysken whose work on pidgin and creole languages, mixed languages, code-switching, bilingualism, and areal linguistics has been ground-breaking and inspirational for the authors in this book, as well as numerous other scholars working on the various facets of this rapidly expanding field"--

The Balkans were the first linguistic area (sprachbund) to be identified as such. The concept was originally proposed to explain diffusion among languages that were genealogically unrelated or distantly related in terms of normal linguistic change as opposed to notions of corruption and impurity. The fact that the sprachbund cannot be as neatly bounded as the traditional language family has led to some calls for abandoning the concept, but it remains a useful heuristic referring to the results of historical and social processes of language contact. Recent conflations of areal linguistics and typology miss these processes, which are themselves grounded in speaker interaction. Issues of causation in the emergence of sprachbunds involve both language shift and language maintenance, influenced by various social factors playing roles. This review examines both the history and the current state of Balkan linguistics as a part of the study of language.

The Handbook of Language Contact offers systematic coverage of the major issues in this field - ranging from the value of contact explanations in linguistics, to the impact of immigration, to dialectology - combining new research from a team of globally renowned scholars, with case studies of numerous languages.An authoritative reference work exploring the major issues in the field of language contact: the study of how language changes when speakers of distinct speech varieties interactBrings together 40 specially-commissioned essays by an international team of scholarsExamines language contac

The present volume seeks to unite the research of a range of scholars working on features of non-standard, vernacular English which show an areal distribution, i.e. which cluster geographically across the world. The volume is concerned with dialect input, innovations among varieties of English andthe areal diffusion of features among varieties. These and similar issues form the central focus of the volume. Raymond Hickey, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

Abstract
Retroflexion is a well-known areal feature of South Asia. Most South Asian languages, regardless of their genetic affiliation, contrast retroflex consonants with their non-retroflex dental counterparts. However, South Asian languages differ in the phonotactic restrictions that they place on retroflex consonants. This paper presents evidence that a large number of South Asian languages have developed a co-occurrence restriction on coronal obstruents that can be described as retroflex consonant harmony. In these languages, roots containing two non-adjacent coronal stops are primarily limited to those with two dentals (T…T) or two retroflexes (Ṭ…Ṭ), while those containing a combination of dental and retroflex stops are avoided (*T…Ṭ, *Ṭ…T). Historical-comparative evidence indicates that long-distance retroflex assimilation has contributed to the development of this phonotactic pattern (T…Ṭ → Ṭ…Ṭ). In addition, the paper demonstrates that the distribution of languages with and without retroflex consonant harmony is geographic in nature, not genetic. Retroflex consonant harmony is characteristic of most languages in the northern half of the South Asian subcontinent, regardless of whether they are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian or Munda (but not Tibeto-Burman). It is not characteristic of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages in the south. Thus, retroflex consonant harmony constitutes an areal feature within South Asia.

This study focuses on a previously untapped interface between discourse and areal linguistics. It assigns a different primary status to usage at the stage of theory development. Using actual discourse data from Northern Germany, it provides an integrated comparative description of areal linguistic variations in terms of their linguistic structure and discursive function.