370 research outputs found

    Beyond segment inventories:Phonological complexity measures and suprasegmental variables in contact situations

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    This article has three goals. First, it provides a broad cross-linguistic survey of phonological change in contact situations focusing on the suprasegmental domain. The term suprasegmental refers here to syllable structure, stress patterns, tonal patterns, and vowel and nasal harmony systems. Secondly, it assesses phonological change to suprasegmental variables whereby external influence causes an increase in complexity in the recipient language’s structure. Thirdly, using insights from the phonological typology literature, it provides a preliminary framework to evaluate suprasegmental phenomena, which can then serve as an additional tool to disentangle inheritance from contact-induced change. Data from 45 languages suggest that the suprasegmental domain provides fertile ground for inspecting contact-influenced increases in linguistic complexity. Overall, we argue that the data reviewed here highlight the relevance of phonological structure as a variable in studies of language contact, which have been mostly preoccupied with morphosyntactic variables

    Northeastern Illinois University, Academic Catalog 2023-2024

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    https://neiudc.neiu.edu/catalogs/1064/thumbnail.jp

    Tungusic languages

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    Tungusic is a small family of languages, many of which are endangered. It encompasses approximately twenty languages located in Siberia and northern China. These languages are distributed over an enormous area that ranges from the Yenisey River and Xinjiang in the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin in the east. They extend as far north as the Taimyr Peninsula and, for a brief period, could even be found in parts of Central and Southern China. This book is an attempt to bring researchers from different backgrounds together to provide an open-access publication in English that is freely available to all scholars in the field. The contributions cover all branches of Tungusic and a wide range of linguistic features. Topics include synchronic descriptions, typological comparisons, dialectology, language contact, and diachronic reconstruction. Some of the contributions are based on first-hand data collected during fieldwork, in some cases from the last speakers of a given language

    Archaeology Education in Ontario: A Relational Inquiry of Indigenous Museums and Artifacts

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    Many sectors of society, such as justice, health care, and education, are moving towards a relationship of Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Ontario’s secondary school History curriculum, however, especially that which concerns the deep history of Turtle Island, is still almost exclusively based on the findings of Western scientific archaeology and methods of artifact interpretation generated by colonially-trained archaeologists. Writers of this curriculum have traditionally not included Indigenous worldviews, ways of knowing, and relationships with artifacts in course content, even as professional archaeologists, historians, and curators are moving to more collaborative research frameworks with Indigenous communities. This research project investigates what Indigenous archaeologies entail, and how Indigenous approaches to understanding archaeological artifacts in museum contexts (re)centre, (re)member, (re)cognize, and (re)present Indigenous ways of knowing to decolonize my teaching of the history curriculum. Since I am not an Indigenous person, the research method and paradigm of my research is a Western qualitative approach based on critical and decolonizing methodologies that is affected by and respectful of Indigenous methodologies. Specifically, I conduct fieldwork in a selection of museums organized by Indigenous archaeologists/educators to learn how Indigenous experts are using artifacts to narrate history. One goal of the fieldwork is to identify themes, concepts, and approaches that Indigenous educators have selected to represent Indigenous histories to diverse public audiences. My dissertation applies that learning to consider what it means to change how I teach the history curriculum that spans the time before colonization. Drawing on concepts of multivocality, storytelling, fencing, and Métissage, the study interprets museum galleries as research data and recommends new directions in teaching the history curriculum of the time before colonization that align with the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Calls to Action

    A Companion to Language and Linguistics

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    The study guide contains educational material on the main topics of the course of theoretical linguistics: the nature of language and the central branches and approaches of language study; the phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic aspects of English; theories of language acquisition; writing system types and historical linguistics. Questions and practical tasks for each unit provide an opportunity for self-study of educational material. Meant for students, graduate students, teachers, and all interested in language and linguistics

    Language acquisition and universal grammar : a survey of recent research

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    openDipartimento di discipline linguistiche, comunicative e dello spettacoloCONSULTABILE PRESSO IL DIPARTIMENT

    Examining the Linguistic Ideology Throaty Sounds Are Bad for Performers : The History of Negative Attitudes Towards Glottal Stops and Laryngealization in English

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    This thesis analyzes explicit metadiscourse (Johnstone et al 2006) on throaty sounds, primarily focused on glottal segments and non-modal constricted voice quality in English. Authors contributing to this metadiscourse are argued to be an offshoot of the speech chain network which valorized and circulated the English accent known as RP or Received Pronunciation, studied by Agha (2003). The evaluated texts center on English-speaking elocution, singing training, voice, speech, and voice care. The analysis shows glottal and guttural articulations are framed negatively and often discouraged by appeals to both health and aesthetics. Many authors in this performance speech chain network assert a linguistic ideology in the form of a belief mediating between language use and social structure: throaty sounds are bad for performers. However, as glottal stops and other laryngeal sounds are basic and naturally occurring consonants in many of the world’s languages, there is counter evidence to the view of them as problematic, injurious, or aberrant. Instead, it is theorized here that the negative outlook on throaty sounds is more deeply tied to historical and current-day social evaluation of stigmatized speakers of English who use salient throaty sounds, notably via associations with class, gender, and racialization. Negative material effects stem from this linguistic ideology. This research raises questions about the cultural framing of vocal health and the iconicity of voice quality

    Degrees of Temporal Remoteness in Pano: Contribution to the Cross-linguistic Study of Tense

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    Beyond simply indicating future or past tense, the languages of the Pano family grammatically distinguish various degrees of temporal distance relative to a reference point, typically the moment of utterance; i.e., they possess what has been called ‘metrical tense’ (Chung & Timberlake 1985; Frawley 1992), ‘degrees of remoteness’ (Comrie 1985; Dahl 1985; Bybee et al. 1994; Botne 2012), or ‘graded tense’ (Cable 2013). This article offers a comparative analysis of the rich graded tense systems found in Pano, concentrating on morphologically expressed categories. In so doing, it seeks to expand our typological knowledge of languages exhibiting this feature, particularly in regards the internal organization of the systems, interactions between the graded tense markers and other grammatical categories (aspect, modality, evidentiality, negation, and number), and the probable sources of the graded tense markers. Despite being one of the largest genetic clusters with elaborate graded tense systems in the world, Pano languages have not been given (much) attention in crosslinguistic treatments of this feature

    Reconstructing Syntax

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    Contributing to the vigorous discussion of the viability of syntactic reconstruction, this volume offers methods for identifying i) cognates in syntax, and ii) the directionality of syntactic change, thus providing historical syntacticians with evidence that syntactic reconstruction is indeed both theoretically and practically feasible.; Readership: This volume is of interest to all historical syntacticians and historial linguists, as well as to specialists within Indo-European, Semitic, Austronesian and native American languages
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