2024 Jan, 6
1st Edition
Understanding Language Contact
By Evangelia Adamou, Barbara E. Bullock, and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio
Copyright 2024
Description
Understanding Language Contact offers an accessible and empirically grounded introduction to contact linguistics. Rather than taking a traditional focus on the outcomes of language contact, this book takes the novel approach of considering these outcomes as an endpoint of bilingualism and multilingualism. Covering speech production and comprehension, language diffusion across different interactional networks and timeframes, and the historical outcomes of contact-induced language change, this book:
Discusses both how these areas relate to one another and how they correspond to different theoretical fields and methodologies;
Draws together concepts and methodological/theoretical advances from the related fields of bilingualism and sociolinguistics to show how these can shed new light on the traditional field of contact linguistics;
Presents up-to-date research in a digestible form;
Includes examples from a wide range of contact languages, including Creoles and pidgins; Indigenous, minority, and heritage languages; mixed languages; and immigrants’ linguistic practices, to illustrate ideas and concepts;
Features exercises to test students’ understanding as well as suggestions for further reading to expand knowledge in specific areas.
Written by three experienced teachers and researchers in this area, Understanding Language Contact is key reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students approaching bilingualism and language contact for the first time.
Read more…
Adamou E., B. Bullock & J. Toribio (under contract). Understanding Language Contact. London: Routledge [Understanding Language series]
2022 May, 30
Caused Accompanied Motion
Bringing and taking events in a cross-linguistic perspective
Editor(s) : Anna Margetts (Monash University), Sonja Riesberg (CNRS-LaCiTO & University of Cologne) and Birgit Hellwing (University of Cologne)
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.134
This volume investigates the linguistic expression of directed caused accompanied motion events, including verbal concepts like BRING and TAKE. Contributions explore how speakers conceptualise and describe these events across areally, genetically, and typologically diverse languages of the Americas, Austronesia and Papua. The chapters investigate such events on the basis of spoken language corpora of endangered, underdescribed languages and in this way the volume showcases the importance of documentary linguistics for linguistic typology. The semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion shows considerable crosslinguistic variation in how meaning components are conflated within single lexemes or distributed across morphemes or clauses. The volume presents a typology of common patterns and constraints in the linguistic expression of these events. The study of crosslinguistic event encoding provided in this volume contributes to our understanding of the nature, extent and limits of linguistic and cognitive diversity.
Anna Margetts, Sonja Riesberg, and Birgit Hellwig. Caused accompanied motion: Bringing and taking events in a cross-linguistic perspective (Typological Studies in Language). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2022 – 437p.
In press on May 2022
2022 Mar, 21
Logophoric speech is not indirect: towards a syntactic approach to reported speech constructions
Tatiana Nikitina & Anna Bugaeva
From the journal Linguistics
https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0067
Abstract
The distinction between direct and indirect speech has long been known not to reflect the crosslinguistic diversity of speech reporting strategies. Yet prominent typological approaches remain firmly grounded in that traditional distinction and look to place language-specific strategies on a universal continuum, treating them as deviations from the “direct” and “indirect” ideals. We argue that despite their methodological attractiveness, continuum approaches do not provide a solid basis for crosslinguistic comparison. We aim to present an alternative by exploring the syntax of logophoric speech, which has been commonly treated in the literature as representative of “semi-direct” discourse. Based on data from two unrelated languages, Wan (Mande) and Ainu (isolate), we show that certain varieties of logophoric speech share a number of syntactic properties with direct speech, and none with indirect speech. Many of the properties of indirect speech that are traditionally described in terms of perspective follow from its syntactically subordinate status. Constructions involving direct and logophoric speech, on the other hand, belong to a separate, universal type of structure. Our findings suggest that the alleged direct/indirect continuum conflates two independent aspects of speech reporting: the syntactic configuration in which the report is integrated, and language-specific meaning of indexical elements.
Nikitina, T. & Bugaeva, A. (2021). Logophoric speech is not indirect: towards a syntactic approach to reported speech constructions. Linguistics, 59(3), 609-633. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0067
2020 Jul, 27
The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact
Evangelia Adamou & Yaron Matras (eds)
The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact provides an overview of the state of the art of current research in contact linguistics. Presenting contact linguistics as an established field of investigation in its own right and featuring 26 chapters, this handbook brings together a broad range of approaches to contact linguistics, including:
• experimental and observational approaches and formal theories;
• a focus on social and cognitive factors that impact the outcome of language contact situations and bilingual language processing;
• the emergence of new languages and speech varieties in contact situations, and contact linguistic phenomena in urban speech and linguistic landscapes.
With contributions from an international range of leading and emerging scholars in their fields, the four sections of this text deal with methodological and theoretical approaches, the factors that condition and shape language contact, the impact of language contact on individuals, and language change, repertoires and formation.
This handbook is an essential reference for anyone with an interest in language contact in particular regions of the world, including Anatolia, Eastern Polynesia, the Balkans, Asia, Melanesia, North America, and West Africa.
ADAMOU Evangelia & MATRAS Yaron (eds), 2021, The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact, London: Routledge (Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics), 576 p.
Published July 27, 2020
2019 Oct, 31
Façonner la parole en Afrique de l’Ouest
Cécile Leguy
Se dépayser dans une autre culture bien loin de la sienne, découvrir de façon vivante de nouveaux modes de communication et de sociabilité, tout cela sans voyager ? C’est le pari proposé au lecteur par la collection « Entendre la voix des autres », dirigée par la célèbre anthropologue britannique, Ruth Finnegan. La cible privilégiée en est le public lycéen ou étudiant, mais cette collection s’adresse plus largement à toute personne soucieuse de s’ouvrir un tant soit peu au monde.
Dans ce volume, en dix-huit alertes petits chapitres, Cécile Leguy, professeur d’anthropologie linguistique à la Sorbonne-Nouvelle, embarque avec elle son lecteur au Mali, chez les Bwa où elle a fait de longs séjours d’étude. En une série de brèves anecdotes autobiographiques, relatées sans façon dans une langue simple et claire, elle fait partager ses expériences d’« étrangère ingénue » à qui se révèlent, au fil de la vie quotidienne, d’autres façons de penser et de dire, la laissant entre perplexité et émerveillement. Ces découvertes successives la conduiront insensiblement à s’intégrer dans cette nouvelle civilisation pour laquelle elle professe un profond attachement. A partir de ces situations ordinaires, le lecteur est invité à découvrir par son intermédiaire ce qui, dans cette société, s’échange vraiment, en filigrane des mots, révélant ainsi toute la riche complexité et la délicatesse de cette culture verbale. (Jean Derive, Professeur émérite de littérature comparée)
LEGUY Cécile, 2019, Façonner la parole en Afrique de l’Ouest, Londres: Balestier Press (coll. Entendre la voix des autres), 132 p.
Paru le 31 octobre 2019
2019 Apr, 30
Dmitry Bondarev, Alessandro Gori, and Lameen Souag (fr/en) (eds)
Creating Standards.
Interactions with Arabic script in 12 manuscript cultures
Manuscript cultures based on Arabic script feature various tendencies in standardisation of orthography, script types and layout. Unlike previous studies, this book steps outside disciplinary and regional boundaries and provides a typological cross-cultural comparison of standardisation processes in twelve Arabic-influenced writing traditions where different cultures, languages and scripts interact. A wide range of case studies give insights into the factors behind uniformity and variation in Judeo-Arabic in Hebrew script, South Palestinian Christian Arabic, New Persian, Aljamiado of the Spanish Moriscos, Ottoman Turkish, a single multilingual Ottoman manuscript, Sino-Arabic in northwest China, Malay Jawi in the Moluccas, Kanuri and Hausa in Nigeria, Kabyle in Algeria, and Ethiopian Fidäl script as used to transliterate Arabic. One of the findings of this volume is that different domains of manuscript cultures have distinct paths of standardisation, so that orthography tends to develop its own standardisation principles irrespective of norms applied to layout and script types. This book will appeal to readers interested in manuscript studies, sociolinguistics, literacy studies, and history of writing.
Content
- Introduction: Orthographic Polyphony in Arabic Script Bondarev, Dmitry ( 1-38)
- Persian Language in Arabic Script: The Formation of the Orthographic Standard and the Different Graphic Traditions of Iran in the First Centuries of the Islamic Era Orsatti, Paola (39-72)
- Writing Judaeo-Arabic Wagner, Esther-Miriam (73-92)
- Cross Palaeographic Traditions. Some Examples from Old Christian Arabic Sources La Spisa, Paolo (93-110)
- Uses and Written Practices in Aljamiado Manuscripts Castilla, Nuria de (111-130)
- How to write Turkish? The Vagaries of the Arabo-Persian Script in Ottoman-Turkish Texts Schmidt, Jan (131-146)
- Developing Consistency in the Absence of Standards – A Manuscript as a Melting- Pot of Languages, Religions and Writing Systems Ivušić, Branka (147-176)
- Standardisation in Manuscripts written in Sino-Arabic Scripts and xiaojing Sobieroj, Florian (177-216)
- A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? The Use of Jawi Script in a Few Early Malay Manuscripts from the Moluccas Putten, Jan van der (217-236)
- Standardisation Tendencies in Kanuri and Hausa Ajami Writings Bondarev, Dmitry / Dobronravin, Nikolay (237-270)
- Kabyle in Arabic Script: A History without Standardisation Souag, Lameen (273-296)
- Beyond ‘aǧamī in Ethiopia: a short Note on an Arabic-Islamic Collection of Texts written in Ethiopian Script (fidäl) Gori, Alessandro (297-312)
BONDAREV, Dmitry, GORI, Alessandro, and SOUAG, Lameen (eds), Creating Standards: Interactions with Arabic Script in 12 Manuscript Cultures, Berlin: De Gruyter, 326 p.
Paru fin avril 2019
