Linguistic Innovation Research Articles

Lexical Loans and Their Diffusion in Old English: of ‘gospels’, ‘martyrs’, and ‘teachers’

ABSTRACTThe study of borrowed vocabulary and language contact in the Old English period is technically problematic in many ways. Surviving texts give us few clues as to how loans functioned outside the clerical communities, what their regional and register distributions were, and to what extent written sources reflect the circulation of loans in spoken language. This may suggest that a descriptive catalogue of lexical loans is the only approach applicable to the Old English material. This paper, however, aims at an inferential analysis of several loans from Latin and Greek in the religious and educational domain based on contemporary approaches to linguistic innovation, diffusion and change, and the wider cultural context that would have ensured their currency and dissemination – social networks provided by medieval schools and monasteries, and the ecclesiastical community at large. Using a select body of educated loans, it argues that strong ties within monastic communities would generally have prevented contact-induced lexical change from spreading outside the monasteries. Yet the role of individual innovators with both clerical and non-clerical ties and early adopters with elementary Latin proficiency (parish priests) in diffusion of change should not be underestimated.

Creativity in translation through the lens of contact linguistics: a multilingual corpus of A Clockwork Orange

ABSTRACT​​​​Existing studies on the translation of Nadsat – the invented language in the novella A Clockwork Orange – do not provide an in-depth examination of Nadsat as a result of language contact between English and Russian, and ignore the role that translators play in linguistic innovation, as well as the motivating factors behind their creativity. This study addresses this conspicuous gap by examining a multilingual corpus of A Clockwork Orange from a language contact and language change perspective, and creating for the first time a link between adaptation, as understood in contact linguistics, and creativity in translation. The focus is on how Russian-derived nouns in the English version have been rendered in four versions of Nadsat (French, German, Greek, and Spanish), and how these differ from naturally occurring Russian loan nouns in these languages, in terms of gender assignment and inflectional suffixes. Results suggest that the level of creativity that translators demonstrate is not simply an indication of their talent, but rather a result of an interplay of factors related to translation, and that concepts from the field of language contact are particularly effective in reframing the way in which creativity is viewed in translation studies.

Emoticons: Between Linguistic Innovation and Symptom of the Posthuman Era

The purpose of this paper is to point out the fact that several features specific to online communication correspond to what contemporary cultural studies refer to as a posthuman shift in discourse. The differences between communication in general and online communication have often been debated, especially in the field of linguistics, and many theorists have pointed out several differences, but also similarities, between the two. I will not be focusing on such debates here, since my aim is oriented towards formulating an adequate contextualization of online communication, rather than establishing its functional principles in relation to communication in general. Thus, I will be analyzing some of the specific innovations of online communication within a theoretical framework that proves to be not only compatible, but quite essential to the understanding of these mutations.In the past few years, when referring to contemporary culture or society, theorists had proposed a concept - that of posthumanism - and the concept is gain- ing an ever growing visibility in this filed. In other words, after the world (or, at least, Western culture) has witnessed a classical era, a modern and a postmodern one, it seems that today, at a global level, we are entering the first stages of a major cultural paradigm: that of poshumanism. This cultural and social shift corresponds, in fact, to another massive change that is of great importance in contemporary geology: according to geologists, the Earth seems to have recently entered into an era which can be best described as the Anthropocene. To summarize, geologists have noticed the fact the man's intervention (and presence) on Earth was so significant that today these interventions made by man throughout time are the most relevant indicators for geological studies. Therefore, both geology and cultural studies seem to be giving an immense attention to the topic of man, mankind/humanity, in an unprecedented manner. There are, of course, numerous reasons for this intense focus on the human being, and some of them shall be discussed in this paper, however, what I wanted to point out at this stage is not the fact that posthumanism is important in today's theoretical studies, but rather the fact that (the concept of) humanity is witnessing a broad reinterpretation/redefinition, and some of the conclusions that theorists have reached are directly related to human communication. In fact, the way people communicate in contemporary society validates even more the need for a better clarification of the posthuman paradigm. Thus, in the following paragraphs I will discuss some of the features that define posthumanism according to several theorists specialized in this matter. Afterwards, I shall point out that online communication (or human communication enhanced by technology) corresponds entirely to the posthuman shift, and therefore, an analysis of online communication and its features should take into consideration this new paradigm of posthumanism as a theoretical framework, even though we are dealing with a concept that is highly debated and has not yet been completely clarified. Obviously, since we are witnessing what seems to be only the first stage of posthumanism, a broader description of the concept is, for now, inaccessible, leaving, eventually, only the possibility of formulating speculations that might prove to be relevant (or not) in the next years.One of the first and major contributions to the posthuman debate is related to N. Katherine Hayles' book, How We Became Posthuman. The author here clearly formulates most of her observations concerning the posthuman paradigm in relation to the ever-growing technological development, approaching subjects such as cybernetic anxiety, virtual bodies, narratives of artificial life, etc. (Hayles, 1999). However, it is the obvious that not all aspects concerning internet or artificial intelligence can be related to the concept of posthumanism, because in this case we would be dealing with another concept, that of digital culture, and digital culture, in general, is commonly associated to postmodernism (the previous major cultural paradigm). …

Punctuation, Exclamation and Tears:The Sorrows of Young Wertherin Japanese and Chinese Translation (1889–1922)

Rich in exclamations and ellipses, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther inhabits a linguistic space in German that does not immediately lend itself to literal translation. Its first translations into Japanese and Chinese coincided with periods of linguistic innovation, as writers and translators contributed to the development of vernacular writing. While in Japanese versions the rendered text faithfully evinces intermediate stages of vernacularization, Guo Moruo's 1922 translation represents a radical attempt to reshape language. By finding literal equivalents of Goethe's stylistic idiosyncrasies, Guo actively shapes the Chinese vernacular, i.e. he establishes the syntactical usage of an exclamation particle plus an exclamation mark. Since German and Chinese belong to different language families, his translation artificially creates intralingual affinities.

A Broad Appeal for Linguistic Innovation and Against Prescription

A Broad Appeal for Linguistic Innovation and Against Prescription

Migration and Dialect Contact

A great deal of research during the past 40 years and earlier investigates the outcomes of large-scale contact between mutually intelligible dialects. In the context of well-established types of dialect convergence, this article summarizes research from the past 10 years on migration-induced dialect contact. I devote particular attention to ongoing dialect contact in the urban settings of London, England; São Paulo, Brazil; Xining, China; Amman, Jordan; and New York City, United States. In all cases, the data show evidence of the expected process of dialect leveling, but linguistic innovations emerging from dialect contact are also prominent. Social network and identity factors are predicted to define much future dialect contact research.

Poetry of Haitian Independence ed. by Doris Y. Kadish, Deborah Jenson

Reviewed by: Poetry of Haitian Independence ed. by Doris Y. Kadish, Deborah Jenson Marlene L. Daut (bio) Poetry of Haitian Independence Edited by DORIS Y. KADISH AND DEBORAH JENSON Translated by Norman R. Shapiro New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015 301pp. Contemporary Haitian literary criticism has often focused on questions of language and audience: for whom does the Haitian author write? In which language should she or he write, French or Haitian Kreyòl? And who read will read those works? No reader with even a cursory knowledge of Haitian society can be left unaffected by the fact that the majority of Haitians today (as in the nineteenth century) remain monolingual Kreyòl speakers, for whom the vast and rich Francophone literary tradition of the country dating back to the eighteenth century is largely inaccessible. Contemporary Francophone Caribbean novelists Jean Bernabé, Raphaël Confiant, and Patrick Chamoiseau in their famous 1989 manifesto “In Praise of Creoleness” decried the fact that the majority of mainstream Caribbean authors express themselves in European-origin languages rather than the varying Creoles spoken by the majority of Caribbean peoples. This fact led the trio to make a bold claim: “Caribbean literature does not yet exist” since it is a part of a “written production without a home audience.” The choice of Caribbean authors to publish primarily in English, French, or Spanish suggested to Bernabé, Confiant, and Chamoiseau that the writers themselves were ignorant of “the authors/readers interaction,” which is the “primary condition of the development of a literature” (886). The relative lack of Creole-language texts from the French Caribbean, signaled by these Caribbean writers, dominated the attention of much of twentieth-century Francophone postcolonial literary criticism.1 One of the continuing effects of these debates is that nineteenth-century Haitian authors (who wrote almost uniquely in French) have often been dismissed [End Page 789] as unimportant by those who suggest that their writings are bereft of originality, home audience, and rupture from French literature, and that furthermore this writing lacks the Creole-Kreyòl linguistic innovation that sets late twentieth-century Haitian letters apart from other Francophone Caribbean literary traditions. At first glance, the poems in The Poetry of Haitian Independence, all of which were originally composed in French, might appear to confirm the idea that nineteenth-century Haitian authors directed their texts to foreign (Francophone) readers rather than to Haitians themselves. However, this is far from the truth. These poems are filled with apostrophes to the Haitian people and brim with references to Haitian history, demonstrating the fervent and robust existence of a Haitian national culture that dates back to the earliest days of independence. The introduction to Doris Y. Kadish and Deborah Jenson’s edited collection of nineteenth-century Haitian poetry in translation, Poetry of Haitian Independence, which contains a beautiful foreword by the US-based Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat, puts these historically minded poems into the context necessary for understanding them beyond the limits of past scholarship on the topic, while also soundly refuting any singular charge of imitation that might be leveled at the poets themselves. Kadish and Jenson observe, for example, that “[t]he charge of imitation directed at the poetry of Haitian independence was also leveled at [Jacques] Delille, whose critics focused, among other things, on the stilted language that recurs so predictably in neoclassical writing” (xxx). The editors further contextualize both the form and language in which early Haitian poetry appears by explaining that the adoption by Haitian poets of certain neoclassical structures and symbols was a part of many nineteenth-century literary cultures. The neoclassic style may have been attractive to Haitian poets partly because, as they write, “Neoclassicism’s orientation was toward the public. . . . [and] served to fuel public consciousness.” They continue, “Thus, the seemingly incongruous references to mythology and antiquity in early Haitian poetry reflect a tribute to the democratic values of Greek society” (xxx). With these highly (and expertly) annotated poems, Kadish and Jenson urge a more broadly historicized method of understanding nineteenth-century Haitian literature, one that can help us to move beyond Jean Price-Mars’s famous charge of “collective bovaryism.” Kadish and Jenson write, “Although Price-Mars was advocating...

Ideological Tension and Formal Experimentation in Vic Reid's <em>New Day</em>

Ideological Tension and Formal Experimentation in Vic Reid's New Day Jana Gohrisch (bio) In 1949 the ghost of Haiti needed to be laid to rest again. Ever since the enslaved of Saint Domingue overthrew colonial rule, abolished slavery and the established property and power relations in the 1790s, and gained independence in 1804, the specter of revolution had haunted the Caribbean and Europe. For conservative writers such as James Anthony Froude, Haiti symbolized the ultimate threat to white domination. In his travelogue The English in the West Indies or the Bow of Ulysses, he repeatedly invokes the danger of black rule to warn his readers about the concomitant "massacre of the French inhabitants" (1888: 7)1 to later conclude as follows: "political changes which prove successful do not begin in that way" (162). Apparently, the ghost still frightened the Caribbean in the late 1940s when Victor Reid wrote New Day and Jamaica fought for self-government and national independence. A revolution that "move[s] along too fast" (Reid 1949/1973: [End Page 71] 62)2 will turn over like a wagon, light-skinned Lucille Dubois tells the equally light-skinned narrator of Reid's novel, Johnny Campbell. Then eight years old, he is on his way to carry a message to Paul Bogle, the leader of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. Lucille continues: My grandparents were with Toussaint L'Ouverture and took part in the fight for freedom. My parents used to tell me of it, and what is happening here seem [sic] to be the beginning of another Haiti. . . . I am on your side, but I don't want our side to move along too fast. . . . If the revolution had come slowly, it might have come without bloodshed. I am a friend of Deacon Bogle, but I am afraid he might move along too fast. 1973: 62, (my emphasis) The significant change in the personal pronoun from "your" to "our" gives rise to the questions that interest me in this essay: Who exactly is this group of people for whom Lucille speaks? Whose interests does she share? Who exactly is afraid of the revolution she sees coming? What kind of revolution—that is, a radical overthrow of a social order—would move slowly and thus avoid violence? Whose ideologies are at work here with regard to class, gender, race, and ethnicity? And, more generally, how do narrative and ideology relate to each other? Focusing on narrative techniques and structures, I will argue that New Days ideological tension and formal experimentation are grounded in the conflicting political projects it intertwines across various temporal settings using a particular type of narrator. Regarding duration, order, and frequency, the narrated time spans eighty years of Jamaican history, but the sheer length of the novel's first part accords singular importance to its respective topic: the most powerful act of organized black resistance against the injustices of post-emancipation Jamaica, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. The retaliation on the part of the established order proved beyond doubt its dread of the Haitian ghost walking the region again. The novel continues with a short second part set on a tiny island to be concluded by a longish third part, which compresses the turbulent history of the 1930s and early 1940s into an ameliorative model of change. The overall aim of this essay is to examine the kind of cultural work [End Page 72] narrative can perform at a particular historical moment for a particular readership. To answer the question of how and for whom narrative does this it will be necessary to combine narratological and stylistic approaches with postcolonial and sociological ones. Entangled Histories In 1949, Victor Stafford Reid (1913–87), a Jamaican journalist and writer, published New Day, which met with the expectations of readers and reviewers, who (with few exceptions) praised the novel for its linguistic innovation and its nationalist politics. The Sunday Gleaner (March 20, 1949) hailed it as "a book that should put pride, fire and music into the soul of the inheritors of this island" (Barovier 1949). With a little less exuberance, The New Statesman and Nation (April 1, 1950) approved of the novel for both its...

Native American Literature and L’Écriture Féminine: The Case of Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is an especially important contemporary American author because she draws together two key elements that have characterized American literature for more than a generation: a concern with issues of identity and the stylistic innovations of postmodern literature. As a nodal point for these two different traditions, Erdrich is ideally situated to illustrate the continuing relevance of French feminist theory to the collective American literary project. Because of her stylistic and conceptual innovation, Erdrich’s early work provoked controversy. While authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko attacked her writing as superficially “post-modernist,” we argue that it is more accurately identified with the work of French feminists like Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, who effected a shift from essentializing identity politics toward experimental construction of subjectivity through linguistic innovation. Erdrich’s deconstruction of her female protagonists, and of gender identity more broadly, provides an effective avenue for continuing to explore the relevance of l’ecriture feminine in contemporary American literature.

Aktuelne tendencije u savremenom srpskom pesništvu

In the large number of cases, in the literary work of the poetesses who represent the core of the modern poetry scene, one can notice new artistic trend, through mutual impact of tradition and contemporary reality, rebellion and melancholy, classical and completely new syntax, which in the large number of cases leads to innovations in style and linguistics. Each poem, same as each person, has a soul, since it came alive and represents a part of person's spiritual world. Having analyzed the latest work of three contemporary middle aged poetesses, we will try to find an answer to the question whether and how often a general assumption of so called 'women's writing', which is usually accepted as a 'light reading', can be justified. Also, we tried to find out if criteria for a frequently present generalization in modern female poetry, are based on the artistic methods or non-literary elements.

Quasi-realia as a means of objectifying fantastic worldview and the specifics of their translation (a case study of the children’s novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by R. Dahl)

A literary work is a reflection of the author’s worldview, objectified in a text with the help of linguistic and figurative means, which are always chosen according to the author’s intentions and aimed at rendering a particular image or thought. Markers of the author’s worldview usually comprise the elements which are the most efficient to reproduce the author’s understanding of the reality and pragmatics of his works. The system of the author’s linguistic means gives a vivid characteristic of his individual style and the peculiar worldview, making it possible to interpret the markers of the writer’s linguistic personality and the principles of shaping his artistic creed. Fantastic worldview as a form of quasi-reality representation in a fictional geographical space has numerous features, distinguishing it from real life. One of the features characterizing R. Dahl’s individual style is the use of quasi-realia, aimed at making the fantastic worldview convincing and producing the necessary aesthetic impact on a reader. Rendering grammatical and semantic integrity of the author’s linguistic innovations efficiently makes the translator advert to the macrocontext, use various translation techniques and study profoundly the author’s individual style, compelling them to face the problem of choosing the most appropriate translation equivalents. The contrastive analysis of quasi-realia translation into Ukrainian and German will make it possible to investigate the adequacy of rendering R. Dahl’s individual style as well as the peculiarities of the fantastic worldview presented in his children’s works.

L’Écriture en langue étrangère comme pratique et comme poétique: le cas de deux écrivains « francographes », Nancy Huston et Andreï Makine

This article examines the claims made by translingual writers Nancy Huston and Andreï Makine about the literary function of the foreign language, and also analyses how the poetic potential of foreign words is thematized in their fiction. It focuses on two novels which portray artistic trajectories in search of a language distinct from the imperfect words of everyday expression, be it through a nostalgically opaque language of childhood as in Le Testament français, or through an exploration of the meeting point of music and language as in Lignes de faille. While both writers emphasize the defamiliarizing function of the foreign language which, for Huston in particular, draws attention to its material form, their novels shift the site of linguistic defamiliarization from formal linguistic innovation to bilingual perception, which is likened to a ‘magic’ of words, an ‘optical illusion’ which serves to preserve childhood wonder and sensitivity.

Lookalike Professional English

Background: Our teaching case reports on a fieldwork assignment designed to have master of arts students experience first-hand how entrepreneurs write for the globalized marketplace by examining public displays of language, such as billboards, shop windows, and posters. Research questions: How do entrepreneurs use English to “style” themselves? What is the status of English in public displays? Which relationship with customers is cultivated by using English (among other languages)? How does English, or lookalike versions thereof, create a more innovative business? Situating the case: We use linguistic landscaping (LL) as a pedagogical resource, drawing on similar cases in a local English as a foreign language (EFL) community in Oaxaca, Mexico; EFL programs in Chiba-shi, Japan; francophone and immersion French programs in Montreal, QC, Canada and Vancouver, BC, Canada; and a study of the entrepreneurial landscape in Observatory's business corridor of Lower Main Road in Cape Town, South Africa. How this case was studied: We interviewed 36 students about their learning process in one-to-one post hoc interviews. Recurrent themes were increased self-monitoring, improved professional communication literacy, and expanded real-world understanding. About the case: The teaching case follows a three-pronged approach. First, we have students decide on a survey area, determine their empirical focus, establish analytical units, decide how to collect data, collect (sociodemographic) information about their survey area, and determine the degree of researcher engagement. Next, students conduct fieldwork, documenting the linguistic landscape in small teams of three to four students. In the third phase, students have returned from the field and discuss their initial findings, ideas, and observations during a data session with the instructors. Students decide whether they still stand by the decisions they made before they entered the field and are then asked to qualify how language is used in public space. Results: The main takeaway of the assignment is that students were more aware of the degree of linguistic innovation, rhetorical creativity, and ethnocultural stereotyping of entrepreneurial communication in their cities. Conclusion: As a pedagogical tool, LL offers possibilities for exploring entrepreneurial communication in all of its breadth and variety, providing access to perhaps the most visible and creative materialities of entrepreneurs and service providers: shop windows and signs.

Travelling terms and local innovations: The <i>tsotsitaal</i> of the North West province, South Africa

This article focuses on the theme of linguistic innovation and expands on recent studies of the South African linguistic phenomenon tsotsitaal to show that it has travelled from its epicentre of Gauteng province into the North West province (henceforth North West), where it uses Setswana as its Matrix Language because it is the dominant language in the North West. Data were gathered from the North West’s three largest cities, namely, Rustenburg, Klerksdorp and Potchefstroom. The article presents examples of tsotsitaal spoken in the three cities and analyses its linguistic structure and lexical items. The significance of this tsotsitaal study is that it is the first to be conducted exclusively amongst first language (L1) Setswana speakers in an environment where the language is the most dominant – the North West. The study confirms previous literature which describes the phenomenon as a register of the urban form. It furthermore suggests that new lexical innovations at a local level are often drawn from the local base language, in this case Setswana, because the local language offers the best opportunities for semantic shift and multiple meanings.

Linguistic innovations in EFL and ESL

Linguistic innovations in EFL and ESL

The fate of linguistic innovations

Drawing on spoken corpus data, this study traces the emergence and development of Norman French-influenced innovations in the nativised L2 variety of Jersey English and compares them to features in the speech of French-speaking learners of English. The comparison shows that such innovations do not differ from errors in a learner variety on a formal linguistic level and that they arguably result from the same processes as are present in foreign language acquisition, such as transfer or simplification. The paper therefore argues that innovations can only be identified reliably in retrospect, once they are more widely accepted in the speech community. It also points to the social factors that are crucial in shaping the use and probable fates of former innovations in Jersey English and suggests a typology of innovations according to their developments.

On the social perception of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rican Spanish

AbstractTo decipher for the first time what, if any, social meaning is indexed by nonstandard intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rica, such as [paza] for pasa ‘raisin’, the present study digitally manipulates 12 utterances from six Costa Rican speakers to vary only in intervocalic [s] versus [z]. Based on 106 listeners’ responses to these stimuli, I find that intervocalic [z] indexes a lower social status for all speakers but also yields higher ratings of confidence, niceness, localness, and masculinity for male speakers. Given female speakers’ limited ability to evoke positive social meanings associated with [z], I argue that accessibility to the indexical field (Eckert, 2008) conditions men's and women's differential treatment of variation. Offering a satisfying explanation for the gender paradox (Labov, 2001:261–293), this work concludes that women agentively eschew nonstandard variants that result in no positive social gains but lead linguistic innovation when their access to the indexical field is unobstructed.

Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray: GRAMMATICAL COMPLEXITY IN ACADEMIC ENGLISH: LINGUISTIC CHANGE IN WRITING.

For at least two decades there has been a profusion of applied linguistics research on academic writing, inspired either by an interest in its language features or a quest for pedagogical effectiveness. A key issue is the identification of the grammatical and rhetorical complexity in academic discourse, as we can see in a wealth of influential works (e.g. Halliday and Martin 1993; Hyland 2004; Biber 2006). Little attention, however, has been given to diachronic changes in the language of academic writing. Thus Grammatical Complexity in Academic English: Linguistic Change in Writing is valuable reading for those applied linguists who are concerned with academic writing, discourse analysis, and changes in language over time. Based on large-scale corpus analysis, this book challenges stereotypical views about the grammatical complexity of academic writing, and its main theme is phrasal complexity and the discourse functions associated with it. From a synchronic perspective, the authors demonstrate how ‘academic written registers are unlike other registers in their reliance on phrasal complexity features rather than a clausal style of discourse’; from a diachronic perspective, more importantly, their study documents ‘linguistic innovations that have emerged in writing, especially science research writing’ (p. 39). Seven chapters revolve around this running theme. In Chapter 1, by problematizing the dominant stereotypes and assumptions of academic writing, the authors introduce the primary focus of their study. Chapter 2 spells out the corpus-based approach to linguistic analysis, as well as the specific corpora and analytical methods used in the study. Chapters 3–6 present the major findings of the research, with Chapters 3 and 4 on quantitative corpus findings, while Chapters 5 and 6 present more interpretive linguistic analyses. Chapter 7 summarizes the authors’ argument, leading into a discussion of applied implications.

Romanian Pre-School Children’s Linguistic Innovations

본 논문의 목적은 루마니아 어린이들이 일상적인 대화를 통해서 루마니아어를 그들의 모국어로 습득하는데 과정에서 나타나는 창조성과 관련된 몇몇 양상에 대한 논의를 제기하는데 있다. 먼저, 아동들이 사용하는 단어들의 잘못된 발음과 그 이후의 과정에 대해서 살펴볼 것이고, 이후 어떤 특정한 대상을 지시하는 일반적인 단어들에 대한 지식이 없는 상태에서 새로운 용어를 접하게 되었을 때 그것을 대상과 연결시키는 방식에 대해서 살펴볼 것이다. 본 연구에 사용된 자료들은 1세에서 5세에 이르는 본 저자의 친구와 동료의 아이들 그리고 본인의 아이들로부터 장기간에 걸쳐서 수집한 것이다. 다른 언어를 습득하는 (예를 들어, 영어, 독어, 폴란드어) 경우와의 비교를 통해서 어린이의 언어습득에는 매우 많은 유사성이 있다는 점을 볼 수 있었다. 하지만 동시에 여기에는 언어별로 특징적인 점들과 개별 아동들로부터 나타나는 특별한 경향이 존재한다는 점 또한 볼 수 있었다. 본 연구에 사용된 분석틀은 슬로빈 (Slobin)의 발달에 있어서의 공통성과 특수성 (‘developmental universals’ and ‘particulars’, 1985)이다.The paper aims at bringing to the fore some aspects related to the creativity of young children acquiring Romanian as their mother tongue when they use language in everyday, casual conversation. First, we shall look at the ‘faulty’ pronunciations of their words and at the processes that lie behind them and then we shall move on to the way in which they coin new terms when their lexicons have not yet acquired the usual words for a specific referent. The data employed for this study have been collected in time, from children (aged between 1 and 5 years) of friends and colleagues of mine, as well as from my own child. A comparison with children acquiring other languages (such as English, German and Polish) indicates that there are many similarities in the process of language acquisition among children, but at the same time, there are also language specific features and child-particular tendencies. The framework employed for the analysis is Slobin’s (1985) ‘developmental universals’ and ‘particulars’

What does the Form Ðrowian in the Taunton Fragment Stand For?

The Taunton Fragment is an eleventh-century bilingual (Latin-Old English) collection of expositions of gospel pericopes. In addition to contributing to understanding of pastoral care in Anglo-Saxon England, it provides invaluable information about linguistic innovations that take place during the transition period from Late Old to Early Middle English. The present article focuses on one such development—the form ðrowian. Taken at its face value, that is, as a ii class weak verb meaning ‘to suffer; torment’, it causes discrepancy between the syntactic structure and the lexical meaning in the Old English text, on the one hand, and lack of correspondence between the Latin and Old English rendition, on the other. A close examination of this form in the Old English corpus suggests that it might be the earliest recorded example of the verb throw in the sense ‘to hurl’. The present article proposes that this semantic development originates in the glosses and Latin-influenced texts. Among the major causes of this innovation are polysemy and homonymy resulting from phonological and morphological changes as well as linguistic creativity of the Anglo-Saxon translators, glossators, and scribes.