Language Change in Apparent and Real Time: the Community and the Individual
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Social Dimensions of Language Change
Social dimensions of language change Lev Michael 1 Introduction Language change results from the differential propagation of linguistic vari- ants distributed among the linguistic repertoires of communicatively inter- acting individuals in a given community. From this it follows that language change is socially-mediated in two important ways. First, since language change is a social-epidemiological process that takes place by propagating some aspect of communicative practice across a socially-structured network, the organization of the social group in question can affect how a variant propagates. It is known, for example, that densely connected social net- works tend to be resistant to innovations, where as more sparsely connected ones are more open to them. Second, social and cultural factors, such as lan- guage ideologies, can encourage the propagation of particular variants at the expense of others in particular contexts, likewise contributing to language change. The purpose of this chapter is to survey our current understanding of the social factors that affect the emergence and propagation of linguistic variants, and thus language change, by bringing together insights from vari- ationist sociolinguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, social psychology, and evolutionary approaches to language change. It is im- portant to note that there are, as discussed in Chapter 1, important factors beyond the social ones discussed in this chapter that affect variant propaga- 1 tion and language change, including factors related to linguistic production and perception, and cognitive factors attributable to the human language faculty (see Chapter 1). 1.1 Theorizing variation and language change As Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968) originally observed, theories of lan- guage that assume linguistic variation to be noise or meaningless divergence from some ideal synchronically homogeneous linguistic state { to be elim- inated by `averaging' or `abstraction' { encounter profound difficulties in accounting for language change. -
The Origin of Language and Communication
Athena and Eve — Johnson Papers lution, editors Jones, Martin and Pilbeam conceded that The origin of ‘there are no non-human languages’, and then went on to observe that ‘language is an adaptation unique to humans, and yet the nature of its uniqueness and its biological basis language and are notoriously difficult to define’ [emphasis added].3 In his book, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language communication and the Brain, Terrance Deacon noted: ‘In this context, then, consider the case of Brad Harrub, Bert Thompson and human language. It is one of the most distinctive Dave Miller behavioral adaptations on the planet. Languages evolved in only one species, in only one way, with- By age four, most humans have developed an ability out precedent, except in the most general sense. to communicate through oral language. By age six And the differences between languages and all other 4 or seven, most humans can comprehend, as well as natural modes of communicating are vast.’ express, written thoughts. These unique abilities of What events transpired that have allowed humans to communicating through a native language clearly speak, while animals remain silent? If we are to believe the separate humans from all animals. The obvious evolutionary teaching currently taking place in colleges and question then arises, where did we obtain this dis- universities around the world, speech evolved as a natural tinctive trait? Organic evolution has proven unable to process over time. Yet no-one is quite sure how, and there elucidate the origin of language and communication. are no known animals that are in a transition phase from Knowing how beneficial this ability is to humans, non-speaking to speaking. -
Sociolinguistics: Language Change Wardhaugh Chapter 8
Sociolinguistics: Language Change Wardhaugh chapter 8 (Labov’s homepage: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/home.html) Non-prestige dialects of English and Language Dispersion A common preconception about non-prestige dialects or colloquial forms of English is that they are unsystematic and 'lazy' forms of language, and that they either reflect or even encourage illogical thought. Over the past 4 decades many linguists have studied non-prestige and colloquial forms of English (and other languages) and arrived at the conclusion that these varieties are just as systematic as prestige varieties of English, that their 'non-standard' features are typically features found in prestige varieties of other languages, and that there is no basis for claiming that their phonology, morphology or syntax reflects 'illogical' or lazy thinking. We focus here on the dialect of English that has received the most attention: it is known variously as "Black English Vernacular" (BEV), "African American Vernacular English" (AAVE) or "Ebonics". The first two terms are the most commonly used terms used in sociolinguistic research; the third term has achieved wide recognition in the wake of a highly controversial resolution of the Oakland (CA) Board of Education involving the role of Ebonics in K-12 education. In what follows I will use the term AAVE, which is the most widespread term in current linguistic research. Some excellent readily accessible articles on AAVE are available on-line. Note1: the colloquial English spoken by African American communities spans a wide varieties of styles, often identical to or barely distinguishable from the English spoken by other ethnic groups, including the prestige white variety. -
Language Change: Progress Or Decay?
Language change: progress or decay? Third edition JEAN AITCHISON Professor of Language and Communication, University of Oxford published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011–4211, USA www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain © Cambridge University Press 1991, 2001 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published by Fontana Press in 1981 Second edition published by Cambridge University Press in 1991 Reprinted 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1998 Third edition 2001 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeface 10/12 pt Photina [gc] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 521 79155 3 hardback ISBN 0 521 79535 4 paperback Contents Preface page ix Part 1 Preliminaries 1 The ever-whirling wheel 3 The inevitability of change 2 Collecting up clues 19 Piecing together the evidence 3 Charting the changes 37 Studying changes in progress Part 2 Transition 4 Spreading the word 55 From person to person 5 Conflicting loyalties 68 Opposing social pressures 6 Catching on and taking off 84 How sound changes spread through a language -
The Origins and the Evolution of Language Salikoko S. Mufwene
To appear in a shortened version in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics, ed. by Keith Allan. I’ll appreciate your comments on this one, because this project is going to grow into a bigger one. Please write to [email protected]. 6/10/2011. The Origins and the Evolution of Language Salikoko S. Mufwene University of Chicago Collegium de Lyon (2010-2011) 1. Introduction Although language evolution is perhaps more commonly used in linguistics than evolution of language, I stick in this essay to the latter term, which focuses more specifically on the phylogenetic emergence of language. The former, which has prompted some linguists such as Croft (2008) to speak of evolutionary linguistics,1 applies also to changes undergone by individual languages over the past 6,000 years of documentary history, including structural changes, language speciation, and language birth and death. There are certainly advantages, especially for uniformitarians, in using the broader term. For instance, one can argue that some of the same evolutionary mechanisms are involved in both the phylogenetic and the historical periods of evolution. These would include the assumption that natural selection driven by particular ecological pressures applies in both periods, and social norms emerge by the same 1 Interestingly, Hombert & Lenclud (in press) use the related French term linguistes évolutionnistes ‘evolutionary linguists’ with just the other rather specialized meaning, focusing on phylogenesis. French too makes a distinction between the more specific évolution du langage ‘evolution of language’ and the less specific évolution linguistique ‘linguistic/language evolution’. So, Croft’s term is just as non-specific as language evolution and évolution linguistique (used even by Saussure 1916). -
Syntactic and Semantic Features for Code-Switching Factored Language Models Heike Adel, Ngoc Thang Vu, Katrin Kirchhoff, Dominic Telaar, and Tanja Schultz
This is the author’s version of an article that has been published in this journal. Changes were made to this version by the publisher prior to publication. The final version of record is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TASLP.2015.2389622 IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING 1 Syntactic and Semantic Features For Code-Switching Factored Language Models Heike Adel, Ngoc Thang Vu, Katrin Kirchhoff, Dominic Telaar, and Tanja Schultz Abstract This paper presents our latest investigations on different features for factored language models for Code-Switching speech and their effect on automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance. We focus on syntactic and semantic features which can be extracted from Code-Switching text data and integrate them into factored language models. Different possible factors, such as words, part-of-speech tags, Brown word clusters, open class words and clusters of open class word embeddings are explored. The experimental results reveal that Brown word clusters, part-of-speech tags and open-class words are the most effective at reducing the perplexity of factored language models on the Mandarin-English Code-Switching corpus SEAME. In ASR experiments, the model containing Brown word clusters and part-of-speech tags and the model also including clusters of open class word embeddings yield the best mixed error rate results. In summary, the best language model can significantly reduce the perplexity on the SEAME evaluation set by up to 10.8% relative and the mixed error rate by up to 3.4% relative. I. INTRODUCTION The term Code-Switching (CS) denotes speech with more than one language. -
Studies in Historical Linguistics and Language Change Grammaticalization, Refunctionalization and Beyond
Studies in Historical Linguistics and Language Change Grammaticalization, Refunctionalization and Beyond Edited by Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen and Mar Garachana Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Languages www.mdpi.com/journal/languages Studies in Historical Linguistics and Language Change Studies in Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Grammaticalization, Refunctionalization and Beyond Special Issue Editors Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen Mar Garachana MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade Special Issue Editors Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen Mar Garachana Utrecht University Barcelona University The Netherlands Spain Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Languages (ISSN 2226-471X) from 2018 to 2019 (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages/ special issues/Lingustics LanguageChange) For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03921-576-8 (Pbk) ISBN 978-3-03921-577-5 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of Bob de Jonge. c 2019 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Special Issue Editors .................................... -
29 Language Death and Dying
764 Walt Wolfram 29 Language Death and Dying WALT WOLFRAM For as long as humans have used language to communicate, particular lan- guages have been dying. In an important sense, obsolescence is simply part of the natural life cycle of language. At the same time, language death has taken on heightened significance in recent decades because it is occurring in epi- demic proportions.1 According to Krauss (1992), up to 90 percent of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages face possible extinction in this century, including 80 percent of the languages of North America. By comparison with endangered biological species, language endangerment is astronomical; biologists estimate that less than 8 percent of all mammals and less than 3 percent of all birds are imperiled. Nonetheless there is little public concern over the state of the world’s languages while concern for endangered biological species is considered an international crisis. The proliferation of symposia, special interest groups, and publications (e.g. Dorian 1989, Hale et al. 1992, Robins and Uhlenbeck 1991, Wolfram 1997, Grenoble and Whaley 1998a) dedicated to obsolescing language varieties in the last couple of decades points to the escalating severity of language endan- germent. On a theoretical level, the loss of a language variety without ad- equate documentation deprives language scientists of an essential database for inquiry into the general knowledge of human language; on a social level, it deprives people of one of the most integral components of diverse cultural behavior (Hale 1998). Both the theoretical and humanistic issues underscore the concern for language death here, but our focus is on describing and under- standing the process of language death as a sociolinguistic phenomenon rather than the theoretical and/or practical implications of the situation. -
A Probabilistic Approach to Language Change
A Probabilistic Approach to Language Change Alexandre Bouchard-Cotˆ e´∗ Percy Liang∗ Thomas L. Griffithsy Dan Klein∗ ∗Computer Science Division yDepartment of Psychology University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 Abstract We present a probabilistic approach to language change in which word forms are represented by phoneme sequences that undergo stochastic edits along the branches of a phylogenetic tree. This framework combines the advantages of the classical comparative method with the robustness of corpus-based probabilis- tic models. We use this framework to explore the consequences of two differ- ent schemes for defining probabilistic models of phonological change, evaluating these schemes by reconstructing ancient word forms of Romance languages. The result is an efficient inference procedure for automatically inferring ancient word forms from modern languages, which can be generalized to support inferences about linguistic phylogenies. 1 Introduction Languages evolve over time, with words changing in form, meaning, and the ways in which they can be combined into sentences. Several centuries of linguistic analysis have shed light on some of the key properties of this evolutionary process, but many open questions remain. A classical example is the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language, the reconstructed common ancestor of the modern Indo-European languages. While the existence and general characteristics of this proto-language are widely accepted, there is still debate regarding its precise phonology, the original homeland of its speakers, and the date of various events in its evolution. The study of how languages change over time is known as diachronic (or historical) linguistics (e.g., [4]). Most of what we know about language change comes from the comparative method, in which words from different languages are compared in order to identify their relationships. -
INTD0112 Introduction to Linguistics
Announcements INTD0112 ► Can’t think of any. Introduction to ► Questions? Linguistics Lecture #23 May 10th, 2007 Language death Language death ► You should have been dazzled by now by the ►Question: How does a language die and remarkable range of linguistic variation that we become extinct? discussed over the course of the term. Answer: When it ceases to be acquired as a ► Guess what! It could’ve been much more dazzling if we still had access to thousands of “extinct” native language by children. languages. ►But why does that happen? ► Estimates on the number of languages that could Several reasons. Linguists typically talk have existed today if none had become extinct about four types of language death. range from 10,000 to 600,000, with 150,000 being considered realistic by most researchers. Sudden language death Radical language death ► Sudden language death occurs when all of the ► Radical language death is similar to sudden speakers of the language die or get killed. This language death in its abruptness. Rather than the was the case with Tasmanian. In 1887, the last speakers dying, however, they all stop speaking speaker of a Tasmanian language died, and so did the language. Often the reason for this is survival the language. under the threat of political repression or even ► Another example occurred in 1962 when a (no genocide. doubt imported) influenza killed all speakers of ► Speakers, to avoid being identified as “natives”, Trumai, up until then spoken in a single village in simply stop speaking their native language. Brazil. Only 10 speakers were left. Children are thus unable to learn that language, and the language ends up dying. -
LNGT0101 Introduction to Linguistics Language Change
11/26/2012 Announcements LNGT0101 Introduction to Linguistics • HW5 is due on Wed (5pm by e‐mail; in class for hard copy). • I extended the original due date for the LAP report till Friday Dec 7th. Deadline: 12noon. • A linguistics talk this week: ‘The So‐called Japanese Subject Marker ‐ga‘ by Prof. Masako Hoye in Hillcrest 103 at 4:30pm. Lecture #20 Nov 26th, 2012 2 So, do you guys speak English? • Yes! • And so did Shakespeare: Language change A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. • Translation? Not really! 3 4 So, do you guys speak English? So, do you guys speak English? • Yes! And so did Chaucer: • Yes! And so did the author of Beowulf: Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote Wolde guman findan πone πe him on The droght of March hath perced to the roote. sweofote sare geteode. • Translation? • Translation? When April with its sweet showers He wanted to find the man who harmed The drought of March has pierced to the root. him while he slept. 5 6 1 11/26/2012 Languages change over time A puzzle regarding language change • So, you get the obvious point: Languages do change • Functionally, language change is problematic over time. since it hinders communication. • There are two main questions with regard to language change: • Socially, language change is also problematic, First, why does a language change? because it engenders negative stereotypes Second, how does a language change? that could lead to discrimination. -
Constructing a Protolanguage: Reconstructing Prehistoric
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. article template Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0200 Constructing a protolanguage: Reconstructing prehistoric languages in a usage-based construction grammar framework Stefan Hartmann1 and Michael Pleyer2,3 1 Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft, University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1186-7182 2 Centre for Language Evolution Studies and 3 University Centre of Excellence IMSErt - Interacting Minds, Societies, Environments, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Toruń, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6685-391X Keywords: Protolanguage, construction grammar, usage-based linguistics, linguistic reconstruction, syntactic reconstruction This is the Author Accepted Manuscript of this publication, i.e. the final manuscript reflecting all changes that were made after peer-review. The final published version will be available at the publisher’s website once the article has been published. Summary Construction grammar is an approach to language which posits that units and structures in language can be exhaustively described as pairings between form and meaning. These pairings are called constructions and can have different degrees of abstraction, i.e. they span the entire range from very concrete (Armadillo, avocado) to very abstract constructions such as the ditransitive construction (I gave her a book). This approach has been applied to a wide variety of different areas of research in linguistics, such as how new constructions emerge and change historically. It has also been applied to investigate the evolutionary emergence of modern fully- fledged language, i.e. the question of how systems of constructions can arise out of prelinguistic communication. In this paper we review the contribution of usage-based Construction grammar approaches to language change and language evolution to the questions of a) the structure and nature of prehistoric languages and b) how constructions in prehistoric languages emerged out of non-linguistic or protolinguistic communication.