Linguistic Structure And Change

Download or read book Perspectives on Language Structure and Language Change written by Lars Heltoft and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume centers on three important theoretical concepts for the study of language change and the ways in which language structure emerges and turns into new structure: reanalysis, actualization, and indexicality. Reanalysis is a part of ongoing everyday language use, a process through which language is reproduced and changed. Actualization refers to the processes through which a reanalyzed structure spreads throughout single communities and society. Indexicality covers the way in which parts of a linguistic system can point to other parts of the system, both syntagmatically and paradigmatically. The inclusion of indexicality leads to fine-grained analysis in morphology, word order, and constructional syntax.

Download or read book Language Structure, Variation and Change written by Ian E. Mackenzie and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original account of the dynamics of syntactic change and the evolving structure of Old Spanish that combines rigorous manuscript-based investigation, quantitative analysis and a syntactic approach grounded in Minimalist thinking. Its analysis of both successful and failed changes demonstrates the degree of unpredictability caused by the interaction of competing factors and will shed fresh light on the assumed unidirectionality of linguistic change. Importantly, it reveals that Old Spanish and modern Spanish are more similar to one another than is usually supposed and demonstrates that many of the differences between the two varieties are quantitative rather than qualitative. This theoretically sophisticated examination of historical corpora will provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Old and modern Spanish, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax.

Download or read book Language Change written by Joan Bybee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new introduction explores all aspects of language change, with an emphasis on the role of cognition and language use.

Download or read book Linguistic Structure and Change written by Thomas Berg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Berg challenges context-free theories of linguistics; he is concerned with the way the term 'explanation' is typically used in the discipline. He argues that real explanations cannot emerge from a view which asserts the autonomy of language, but only from an approach which seeks to establish a connection between language and the contexts in which it is embedded. The author examines the psychological context in detail. He uses an interactiveactivation model of language processing to derive predictions about synchronic linguistic patterns, the course of linguistic change, and the structure of poetic rhymes. The majority of these predictions are borne out, leading the author to conclude that the structure of language is shaped by the properties of the mechanism which puts it to use, and that psycholinguistics thus qualifies as one likely approach from which to derive an explanation of linguistic structure.

Download or read book Information Structure and Language Change written by Roland Hinterhölzl and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are available only in written form and bear no or little information on prosody and intonation, it presents various methods of retrieving information-structural categories in such texts. Third, it presents empirical studies on the relation between word order and information structure of the four main texts of the Old High German period and embeds these results in the wider picture of word order change in Germanic. The volume will be of interest to students of German, English, and general linguistics as well as to researchers interested in diachronic syntax, philology of Older German, language change, information structure, discourse semantics, language typology, computational linguistics, and corpus studies.

Download or read book Syntactic Structures written by Noam Chomsky and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

Download or read book Patterns of Language written by Robbins Burling and published by Brill Academic Pub. This book was released on 1992 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a comprehensive introduction to linguistics, This book includes chapters on variation and change in lexicon, phonology, and syntax. It also covers topics such as pidgins and creoles, first and second language acquisition, development of language in the human species, growth of writing, printing in information technology and others.