Inherent causes of language change

The inevitable causes of language change are considered in this article. It gives an up-to-date view of the phonetic natural tendencies which are the predictable result of a human’s anatomical, physiological and psychological make-up. В статті розглядаються неминучі причини зміни мови. Вона пропонує сучасний погляд на природні тенденції у фонетиці, які є передбачуваним результатом анатомічної, фізіологічної та психологічної будови людини

WOMEN, LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL CHANGE

The paper attempts to make a critical analysis on the language used by women. Many sociolinguists who observe the language of men and women found that there are the differences of the way men and women using language. Gender seems to affect the variation of lexical choices, the syntactic preferences, the way women and men perceive conversation, and the way women and men behave in conversation. A lot of studies have categorized the characteristics of women, such as: using polite language, indirect speech, personal pronoun, and hedging. Those characteristics pertain to women may give some negative image on women. The usage of hedging and indirect speech may be considered as incompetency by men, especially for women who become a leader in an organization. However, assertive women may also be seen as negative. Although nowadays women have a lot of opportunity to get a higher education and work in public sphere, the stereotype of women’s characteristic in using language has changed yet. I undertake the research based on two goals. First, it examines the social construction that affects women using language. Second, it tries to analyze the shift of the way of women use language in contemporary era. The changes make an incongruent situation between the persisted cultural values on women and the new value gained by women. The data will be taken from novels to describe clearly the situation of Indonesian women in facing their problems

Linguistically Grounded Models of Language Change

Questions related to the evolution of language have recently known an impressive increase of interest (Briscoe, 2002). This short paper aims at questioning the scientific status of these models and their relations to attested data. We show that one cannot directly model non-linguistic factors (exogenous factors) even if they play a crucial role in language evolution. We then examine the relation between linguistic models and attested language data, as well as their contribution to cognitive linguistics

Libraries, Language, and Change: Defining the Information Present

Changes in the information world are resulting in new concepts of resource sharing, new practices in the management of library resources, and an expanding role for libraries in the educational process. However, such concepts have not necessarily been identified, named, and defined in the language of contemporary librarianship. Although librarians and their associates in the information and educational processes need to be made aware of these subtle, but powerful, new issues, discussions cannot easily proceed until there is a shared understanding of them in the language of review and debate. This paper introduces three themes that encompass these issues: distance information, managed information, and transformational budgeting.Informatio

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

Observe the Sons of Ulster Talking Themselves To Death (Chapter in The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability)

Excerpt: Within Irish drama of the late 20\u27h century, the use of language as a marker for lrishness begins to shift away from a focus on accents and Hiberno-English, towards a use of language that attempts to actually establish new truths: truths about relationships and alliances, truths about history, truths about memory, and especially truths about identity. Language becomes the very means of change and hope, in drama that has become concerned with the use of language not as signifier of nation but as reiteration of the stories that might be able to change through that reiteration. What is \u27true\u27 is no longer shaped by someone else\u27s language, but by the incantatory retelling and recasting of stories in versions particularized by individuals. The words themselves become a means for an imposition of identity. Language is not only the tool, but also the subject for discussion and performance. Whereas some others, including Tom Murphy, Christina Reid, and Enda Walsh, have concluded that language does indeed change at least the perception of truth, Frank McGuinness, in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), concludes that language cannot always succeed in its efforts to create a new reality. A play in which eight men try to come to terms with the events leading up to the Battle of the Somme in France during WWI, The Sons of Uifter shows us that language may be able to change personal identity, but it can never change history, desirable though that may be