Instance Of Language Change Research Articles

Numeral Incorporation as Grammaticalization? A Corpus Study on German Sign Language (DGS)

Numeral incorporation describes the merging of a numeral sign with a lexical sign to create a single sign with a compositional meaning, e.g., “three weeks.” As a phenomenon of simultaneous morphology, numeral incorporation is unique to sign languages. While researchers disagree on the exact morphological structure of the construction, it has, thus far, mainly been described as a synchronic, phonological phenomenon. Using the DGS corpus, a language resource on German Sign Language, we explore the possibility of numeral incorporation resulting from a language change process, specifically a grammaticalization process. Our dataset comprises tokens belonging to nine different signs that may occur in numeral incorporations. We find a cline of three constructions in the corpus, which shows a progression from free morpheme to cliticized morpheme to bound morpheme (affix). A comparison of the usage frequency of the three constructions in different age groups reveals that signers use more incorporations the younger they are. Following the apparent time approach, these observations are taken as indicators of diachronic language change. We describe to what extent the properties of numeral incorporation fit with the grammaticalization hypothesis and conclude that while the emergence of numeral incorporation is an instance of language change and shows some aspects seen in grammaticalization, the gradual change fails to exhibit some crucial aspects of grammaticalization and, thus, should not be regarded as an example thereof.

Probing linguistic change in Arabic vernaculars: A sociohistorical perspective

AbstractIt is received wisdom in variationist sociolinguistics that linguistic and social factors go hand in hand in structuring variability in language and any consequent instances of language change. We address the complexity of such factors by exploring data from several Arabic dialects in the eastern Arab world. We demonstrate that language change does not always follow expected phonological trajectories, even in cases where older changes are reconstructed to have operated along so-called universal patterns. In our explanation of recent changes in these dialects, we emphasise the role of social motivations for language change and the interactions between these social constraints and purely linguistic ones. Our analysis of change is supported by historical accounts of variation and change in Arabic. We illustrate how general principles of sociolinguistic theory apply to the Arabic data and provide additional layers of sociolinguistic information that highlight the importance of diverse data for evaluating cross-linguistic generalisations. (Arabic, language change, historical sociolinguistics)

Neutral change

Language change is neutral if the probability of a language learner adopting any given linguistic variant only depends on the frequency of that variant in the learner’s environment. Ruling out non-neutral motivations of change, be they sociolinguistic, computational, articulatory or functional, a theory of neutral change insists that at least some instances of language change are essentially due to random drift, demographic noise and the social dynamics of finite populations; consequently, it has remained little investigated in the historical and sociolinguistics literature, which has generally been on the lookout for more substantial causes of change. Indeed, recent computational studies have argued that a neutral mechanism cannot give rise to ‘well-behaved’ time series of change which would align with historical data, for instance to generate S-curves. In this paper, I point out a methodological shortcoming of those studies and introduce a mathematical model of neutral change which represents the language community as a dynamic, evolving network of speakers. With computer simulations and a quantitative operationalization of what it means for change to be well-behaved, I show that this model exhibits well-behaved neutral change provided that the language community is suitably clusterized. Thus, neutral change is not only possible but is in fact a characteristic emergent property of a class of social networks. From a theoretical point of view, this finding implies that neutral theories of change deserve more (serious) consideration than they have traditionally received in diachronic and variationist linguistics. Methodologically, it urges that if change is to be successfully modelled, some of the traditional idealizing assumptions employed in much mathematical modelling must be done away with.

Language Change and Advertising Communication: Footloose and Fancy Free

Advertising is a very serious business but the language it employs is very playful and creative to communicate its meaning. The degree, to which the language is experimented in advertising communication, has largely been a question of prevailing social and economic forces. Advertising punchlines transcend the purity of linguistic expression and reflects the impressions of new media and new consumers. It is easy enough to understand that languages must undergo changes in their structures because of cultural modifications and word borrowing from the outside world. But hardly do we realize how extensive these linguistic changes can be in advertising media. In this paper, I review some of the topical advertisements in relation to language change. Many saleable print advertisements are reviewed and instances of language change are identified, categorized, and explained. It is based on the observations of selected advertisements where the language change phenomenon is predominant and how it further influences the common word choice. Language change is an ongoing and inevitable process but what we see in advertisements is more unnatural and forceful practice to invent something ‘distinct’ and ‘bizarre’ to capture the eyeballs. The results have shown that as long as the linguistic playfulness fetches money, the advertisers won't hesitate to bend the rules of the game and create a new lingo for their brands' publicity.

Language Acquisition in Creolization and, Thus, Language Change: Some Cartesian‐ Uniformitarian Boundary Conditions

This essay prescribes some broad ‘Cartesian-Uniformitarian’ boundary conditions for linguistic hypotheses about Creole formation. These conditions make constructive connections between Creole studies, historical linguistics and language-acquisition research. Here ‘Cartesian’ has a mentalist sense, as in Chomsky (1966): I consider the formation of so-called ‘Creole’ languages to be ultimately reducible to the creation, in certain sociohistorical contexts, of certain idiolects (i.e., individual internal, or ‘I-’, languages) in the minds of the ‘first “Creole” speakers’. To avoid circularity, my use of the term ‘Creole’ in the phrase ‘first “Creole” speakers’ combines some of its original ethno-historical senses: I use the word ‘Creole’, in this particular context, to refer to the non-indigenous people of African or European descent that were born and raised in the colonial New World, in opposition to those that were born and raised in the Old Worlds of Africa and Europe. The term ‘Uniformitarian’ evokes Neogrammarian approaches to language change, as advocated, for example, by Osthoff and Brugmann (1878) and Paul (1890). It summarizes my fundamental working assumption that no sui generis or exceptional linguistic processes need to be postulated in order to explain the creation of these languages that have come to be labeled ‘Creole’: these languages were created by the same psycholinguistic mechanisms that are responsible for the creation of (I-)languages, and for linguistic diachronic patterns, everywhere else. Therefore, ‘Creole’ languages cannot be distinguished a priori from non-‘Creole’ languages on any linguistic-theoretical criteria – and ‘Creole’ languages can be genetically classified by the Comparative Method, on a par with non-‘Creole’ languages. Such assumptions go against popular claims about Creole genesis such as those in, for example, Thomason and Kaufman (1988), Lefebvre (1998) and Bickerton (1999). In establishing these Cartesian-Uniformitarian guidelines, I correct category mistakes that fail to distinguish explanations that apply to I-languages from explanations that apply to E(xternal)-languages and other social-group phenomena that I-languages are implicated in. One such category mistake concerns the ontology and time course of innovations in specific I-languages vs. their spread across populations of I-languages and into E-language communal norms. Then I investigate the possible – and impossible – contributions of first-language acquisition and second-language acquisition to ‘creolization’. In particular, I take my cues from: (i) studies of language- and dialect-contact situations where children and adults seem to play observably distinct roles; and (ii) recent discoveries about instances of Sign Language acquisition and creation where the Primary Linguistic Data seem remarkably restricted. As for elucidating the limits on the restructuring capacities of children and adults, and their respective contributions to language creation and change, it is epistemologically safer to investigate instances of diachronic development that are more recent than the now unobservable early stages of ‘creolization’. Throughout this essay, I use the term ‘creolization’ strictly as an a-theoretical abbreviation for the longer phrase ‘development of these languages that, for sociohistorical reasons, have been labeled “Creole” ’. In the perspective sketched here, creolization is just another instance of language change – or ‘language evolution’, in Mufwene's (2001, 2008) sense – the investigation of which is to shed light on Universal Grammar.

Understanding Language Death in Czech-Moravian Texas

Based on several decades of personal interaction with Texas speakers of Czech, the author’s article attempts to correlate social change with some specific stages of language obsolescence and language death. Many instances of language change in that community, as well as cultural and social change, may be explained by the linguistic model known as the wave theory. One hundred and fifty years passed between the introduction of Czech and the death of that language in Texas. From the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, the Czech-Moravians represented a closed community in which individuals defined their identity primarily by the Czech language, ethnicity, and culture. In the final five decades of the twentieth century, as the social template representing Texas speakers of Czech disintegrated, spoken Czech ceased to function as a living language, and much of the ancestral culture connected with the language was lost. Today some among the elderly, described as semi-speakers, terminal speakers, or ‘‘rememberers’’ of language, retain a limited knowledge, but the ancestral language now has only a symbolic function.

Towards a unified vision of classes of language acquisition and change

In this study, I analyse Mozambican African Portuguese (MAP), a non-native variety typically acquired as a second language (L2) by children, speakers of Bantu languages, as an instance of language change. Assessed diachronically, MAP/L2 constitutes an interesting object of research since it shows how linguistic and extra-linguistic factors can block the resetting of new/wrong parameter values, making the process of L2 change less gradual than L1 (normal) change and also less dramatic than creolization. To illustrate the argument, I present two case studies on MAP which show why, even assuming that in all cases we are dealing with language acquisition by children who are capable of attaining UG-consistent linguistic systems, these instances of language acquisition and change still look different in kind. These case studies show, more specifically, how the previous knowledge of L1 grammar makes MAP/L2 acquisition more difficult, requiring, for some parametric values, the exposure to extra-data. In post-colonial societies, these extra-triggers are not always available, due to the quantitative preponderance of L2 speakers. As a consequence, the visible effects of some new/wrong parameter settings become more frequent in the input and, instead of showing necessity of resetting, they are taken as cues for new parameter settings.