Language Change

Existing studies on the translation of Nadsat – the invented language in A Clockwork Orange – neglect the fact that Nadsat is 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 inflection. 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.

Available from: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Qui4mZh2eAKjKjYm8HyA/full

Several new spoken corpora have seen the light of day in recent years. Few, however, are comparable to a corpus from an earlier period to facilitate diachronic investigations of spoken language. The new London–Lund Corpus 2 (LLC–2) of spoken British English, collected 2014–2019, fills this gap. The size and design of LLC–2 are comparable to those of the world’s first spoken corpus, the London–Lund Corpus (LLC–1) with data mainly from the 1960s–1970s, which means that, together, the two corpora allow us to make principled diachronic comparisons of speech over the past 50 years. This paper has two aims: (i) to critically examine the methodological aspects of the London–Lund Corpora as a diachronic resource, and (ii) to demonstrate the usefulness of the resource based on a case study of the development of constructions expressing advice in spontaneous conversation.
One of the most important challenges of the compilation of LLC–2 was to capture recordings of conversations that are comparable to those in LLC–1 in terms of the situational contexts in which they occur. In order to overcome this challenge, a large number of the conversations in LLC–2 were recorded at the University College London, which was also the main site of recording for LLC–1. This gave us speech situations that revolve around similar subject matters (e.g., common-room conversations, tutorials), and it also ensured that the speakers in LLC–2 share many of the same characteristics with those in LLC–1.
The usefulness of the London–Lund Corpora as a diachronic resource is demonstrated in a case study of the development of constructions expressing advice in spontaneous conversation. Advice is a pervasive feature of human communication, but it is also a notoriously sensitive undertaking where language plays a crucial role. Advice can be expressed in a variety of ways, ranging from more deontic (e.g., imperatives; do it!) to less deontic constructions (e.g., various types of modals; I would do it). Based on a quantitative analysis of a large number of constructions expressing advice in the London–Lund Corpora, this case study aims to find out whether speakers today prefer or avoid constructions that assert power and authority compared to 50 years ago (Leech, 2003). The preliminary results suggest an increased preference for advice to be expressed in more direct ways. A closer inspection of the distribution of the advice constructions shows that there are conversations in both corpora that slightly skew the results; i.e., they occur in advice-heavy contexts that do not exist in the other corpus (e.g., study abroad sessions in LLC–2). However, the overall distribution of the constructions is relatively even, thus suggesting that the London–Lund Corpora are a suitable resource for studying recent change in spoken English.

References
Leech, G. (2003). Modality on the move: The English modal auxiliaries 1961–1992. In R. Facchinetti, M. Krug & F. Palmer (Eds.), Modality in contemporary English (pp. 223–240). Mouton de Gruyter.

Neste traballo presentamos dous cambios fonolóxicos que se están a producir no galego actual, rexistrados desde hai varias décadas e que continúan a desenvolverse. A lingua galega encóntrase en contacto co español de maneira máis ou menos intensa en todas as capas da poboación, ao que se acrecenta o contacto coa lingua estándar nos últimos 30 anos. Tanto o español como a lingua estándar exercen unha influencia importante sobre as falas de todo o territorio, e diferentes cambios na gramática, na fonética e na prosodia son atribuíbles a contacto co español ou coa lingua estándar. Tamén se describen cambios que non parecen obedecer a esas causas, porque actúan en direccións diverxentes tanto da lingua española coma do estándar.
Dous deses cambios son modificacións do sistema de sibilantes e na pronuncia da gheada en áreas do occidente da Coruña, o primeiro deles é visto como un cambio interno, mentres que o segundo parece estar relacionado coa influencia do español. Neste traballo presentamos algúns dos primeiros resultados das investigacións iniciadas no marco do proxecto « Cambio lingüístico no galego actual  », que se desenvolve no Instituto da Lingua Galega. Nos casos que imos presentar mostraremos que ambos cambios se comportan de maneira similar nas comunidades rurais que rexistramos.
Mais o noso interese neste caso céntrase sobre todo nos individuos resistentes ao cambio e que manifestan comportamentos lingüísticos diverxentes. Por unha parte, mostraremos que estes comportamentos afectan por igual os cambios lingüísticos en desenvolvemento, independentemente de que obedezan a factores internos ou externos. E por outro lado discutiremos a importancia de considerar factores sociolingüísticos para explicar os comportamentos observados.

While many studies have shown that increased levels of economic globalization diminish the level of corruption among trading partners, there are studies that have raised doubts against this claim. In this article, we explore this relationship in a large sample of 138 countries and find that the effect of economic globalization on the level of corruption is not significant. The findings, however, are not indicative of the undesirability of economic globalization. In fact, we find that greater levels of economic development are associated with lower levels of corruption. Nevertheless, it does call for some precaution and monitoring as trade openness alone may not be the panacea for controlling corruption and other factors, for example, the importance of building of relevant institutions to curb corruption may need to be considered. Additionally, it is important to identify moderator and mediator variables that may change the strength and direction of the aforementioned relationship. W...

This article presents the history of the Latvian disjunctive conjunction jeb ‘or’ and analyzes its relationship with OLith. jeib ‘if’. Jeb as a disjunctive conjunction is a result of strictly Latvian development and originates from the concessive conditionals with two counterconditions in the protasis.

This paper investigates various aspects of grammaticalization of Polish and Kashubian periphrastic verb forms with mieć\miec and bëc and participles. The involvement of factors, which are due to language contact or to autonomous development is thoroughly explored and analyzed in the context of basic grammaticalization parameters. At the same time this contribution should prove with valid arguments the thesis of an inhomogeneous, variably realized and partly of others (all above pragmatic) factors dependent grammaticalization der habere-\esse-forms in the Slavia. So this paper refers both to the canonical differences in the realization of single grammaticalization parameters as well as broader developmental tendencies in the Slavia.

Prosody plays a crucial role in grammar selection, restricting the possible values of the parameters to be set. In the present work we present a formal account of this claim, using the Thermodynamical Formalism. In this framework, the sample of positive evidence presented to the child is chosen according to a Gibbs state defined by the potential associated to the prosody. Given a sample of sentences of the parental grammar and given a prosodic pattern, the child choses the grammar according to a maximum likelihood principle. We argue that such a model accounts for both language acquisition and language change. As an example we study the change in clitic placement from Classical to modern European Portuguese .

In this study, I present a new model for analyzing sociolinguistic variation within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT) and the Gradual Learning Algorithm (GLA). This model contributes to the advancement of sociolinguistic methodology as well as to OT and the GLA, unifying both linguistic and social factors. I propose a number of social constraints and incorporate them with linguistic constraints in the GLA. I show that incorporating social constraints yields variant-usage percentages that match real life occurrences. I follow the evaluation process of stochastic grammar in which social constraints are treated like linguistic constraints on a continuous scale of ranking strictness. Their ranking values may differ from one speaker or group of speakers to another. These differences in the ranking values may result in intra- and inter-speaker, intra- and inter-group, intra- and inter-community, or intra- and inter-dialect variation. The number and type of social constraints involved influence the percentage of occurrence of each variant and affect the ranking values of other constraints and the grammar chosen by a speaker or a group of speakers at a particular time and place.

This model enables us to show the effect of linguistic and social constraints simultaneously. It allows us to investigate individual as well as group grammars and shows that those grammars may act independently from each other. It also enables us to project expected percentages of variation by manipulating either the ranking values of constraints or the pair distribution of the output. Evidence comes from the study of the naturally occurring speech of migrant rural speakers of Colloquial Arabic to the city of Hims, Syria. These speakers show different degrees of variation, particularly regarding the use of the two variants [q] and [ʔ], based on various social factors, such as age, gender, residential area, and social class.

The aim of the study is to show how rural migrants adopt the new phonological system of the urban dialect to appear prestigious. The study will focus on the sound change of [q] to [ʔ] and the four stable variants [t] and [s] and [d] and [z]. It will show that variation may be influenced by different factors. The variable use of [q] and [ʔ] is attributed to prestige and social factors. The use of [t] and [s] and [d] and [z] is not social in nature; it has developed historically from the Standard Arabic (SA) [Ɵ] and [ð] respectively as a response to markedness constraints. Today, this variation is stable and each of the four variants is used in specific lexical items. Faithfulness constraints play a major role in maintaining the pronunciation of the input as [t] and [s] and [d] and [z] in the output. This stable phenomenon is further explained in terms of the two opposing effects of frequency (Bybee 2001).

In a situation where prestige plays a role in adopting a new variant, as in the case of rural migrants to the city of Hims, social constraints are viewed as the motivating force behind changing a grammar at a particular time and place. However, one should take into account that the activation of social constraints depends on the speaker’s selection or choice to activate them or not. Hence, these constraints may rank very high in the speech of a speaker who is highly aware of the social values attached to a certain sound. On the other hand, they may rank very low in the speech of a person who, for example, does not care to adopt a new form.

A theory that can take into account all the factors that lead to variation is a better theory than one that takes into account social factors in isolation and ignores grammatical factors or vice versa. Integrating social constraints into formal theory and showing that social constraints can have equal weight or even more weight than grammatical constraints in conditioning variation and change is essential in this study. Including social constraints in the computation provides explanation of the observed sociolinguistic variation between [q] and [ʔ] among members of the same social group or among different speakers or social groups. Interacting social constraints with linguistic constraints in the same framework is a simple comprehensive method to depict and explain the mental process of a speaker at a certain time and/or place. Feeding the GLA with the right output distribution gives the specific ranking values or grammar of each speaker or group of speakers. In other words, the model takes advantage of the stochastic grammar embedded in the GLA to generate grammars that match real life output percentages without trying all the possible rankings of constraints and counting the times those rankings give a certain output. Furthermore, where a statistical analysis fails to indicate the interaction between one social factor and others, the specificity implemented in the GLA by dividing a social factor into a number of social constraints enables us to see interaction among the same social constraints that emerged as insignificant in the statistical analysis. In this sense, implementing social factors as constraints and accounting for sociolinguistic variation within the framework of OT and the GLA has an advantage over other theories.

Cet article se propose d’étudier différents aspects du changement linguistique actuel dans le domaine du catalan nord-occidental grâce à un corpus contemporain conçu spécialement à ces fins. Pour ce faire, nous nous appuierons sur plusieurs méthodes dialectométriques – basées sur la distance de Levenshtein et l’interface Gabmap – afin de calculer et analyser la distance linguistique entre ces variétés en temps apparent et selon une perspective quantitative globale. Concrètement, notre attention se portera sur le processus de perte structurelle qui affecte plusieurs variétés nord-occidentales de Catalogne et d’Andorre à la suite d’une advergence progressive avec les variétés orientales et le standard, situation totalement opposée au phénomène de relative stabilité des dialectes situés dans les régions soumises à l’administration aragonaise. Nous prendrons donc en considération le double processus d’advergence verticale des variétés catalanes et andorranes avec les variétés de prestige et en revanche, la divergence horizontale entre celles-ci et les différentes variétés de la Franja ; le résultat en étant une plus grande incidence de l’effet-frontière. Par ailleurs, nous constaterons que le changement linguistique qui touche le catalan nord-occidental est un phénomène complexe dans lequel le processus séculaire d’orientalisation semble céder le pas à un processus plus récent et plus puissant de standardisation. Enfin, nous analyserons les modèles de diffusion des innovations ayant le plus de poids sur le changement linguistique et nous indiquerons la complémentarité des modèles de diffusion hiérarchiques et par propagation.

This article presents Slavic languages in diaspora (SLD) from a broad geographic and diachronic perspective, i.e., worldwide and including old and new Slavic migrant communities with diverse historical and political backgrounds. Accordingly, the definition of SLD is discussed on the one hand within the paradigm of contact linguistics and historical dialectology and on the other hand within the paradigm of the sociolinguistics of migrant communities. The article provides linguistically significant information from the history and demography of Slavic migrant communities (Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, BCMS, Bulgarian, and Czech) and describes their sociolinguistic framework. Furthermore, the article gives a brief comparative overview of the main linguistic features of SLD and the current state of research in the field.

https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-slavic-languages-and-linguistics-online/diaspora-slavic-languages-in-COM_036122

Contamination and blending are two different types of the morphological and lexical change etc). On the contrary in the Greek bibliography: a. the term συμφυρμός/ σύμφυρση is used for both procedures, giving the impression that contamination and blending are the same procedure of the language change or b. there is no reference for contamination as a different type of the sporadic morphological change. In our article we are going to: a. define the boundaries of these two different mechanisms, b. propose Greek terminology for their discrimination and c. point out the importance of their discrimination for better comprehension of the morphological changes of the Greek language. 1. Εισαγωγή Το 2003 κυκλοφόρησε από τις εκδόσεις Μεταίχμιο η ελληνική μετάφραση του έργου Ιστορική Γλωσσολογία της April McMahon, ενός από τα πιο σημαντικά έργα της σύγχρονης βιβλιογραφίας για τη θεωρία της γλωσσικής μεταβολής. 1 Στο υποκεφάλαιο της σποραδικής μορφολογικής μεταβολής (2003: 116-117) δίνονται τα είδη της λιγότερο συστηματικής αναλογίας, ένα από τα οποία είναι ο συμφυρμός (contamination), για τον οποίο διαβάζουμε (ό.π.: 117): «Ο συμφυρμός συνήθως επηρεάζει τύπους που ανήκουν σε παρόμοια σημασιολογικά πεδία». Ένα από τα παραδείγματα που δίνονται είναι το αγγλικό four που, αν και θα έπρεπε σύμφωνα με την ετυμολογία του να έχει αρχικό [k] (πρβλ. λατιν. quattuor, σανσκριτ. catvaras), αυτό αρχίζει από [f], διότι υπέστη συμφυρμό με το αμέσως επόμενο αριθμητικό five. Σε άλλο κεφάλαιο, και συγκεκριμένα στο κεφάλαιο της σημασιολογικής και λεξιλογικής μεταβολής (ό.π.: 279-283), περιγράφονται οι λιγότερο παραγωγικές μορφολογικές διαδικασίες. Σε αυτές ανήκει και ο συμφυρμός (εδώ δε δίνεται ο αγγλικός όρος του πρωτοτύπου), ο οποίος ορίζεται ως «σύνθεση συντομευμένων λέξεων» (ό.π.: 281).

This paper deals with an under-studied grammatical feature of Medieval and Early Modern Greek, viz. the concessive markers containing the adverb καλά/kala ('well'). The basic aim is to shed light on their historical evolution with a view toward understanding the complicated interconnection between the internal vis-à-vis the external factors in language change as well as the nature of the grammaticalization process allegedly involved in the change in question. Through a detailed investigation into the written record, it is illustrated that language contact and internal causes, though closely interwoven, they should be carefully distinguished with respect to the exact chronological period during which they were active. Further, the proposed analysis of the change takes a constructional perspective on the grammaticalization of the subordinating conjunctions and highlights the role of analogy as the principal mechanism in diachronic syntactic evolution.

origin, he has done more than anyone else in the past generation to establish linguistic anthropology as a scholarly field. In its four parts the present volume brings together 22 chapters by authors all but one based in the United States. It is designed to be user-friendly. The table of contents is followed by a synopsis of contents (chapter by chapter). The brief but useful preface is followed by notes on the contributors. The general bibliography (pp. 518^605) is quite extensive, and the index has few slips or omissions (pp. 606^625). Part I: 'Speech communities, contact, and variation' has seven contributions: 'Speech community' by Marcyliena Morgan, 'Registers of language' by Asif Agha, 'Language contact and contact languages' by Paul B. Garrett, 'Codeswitching' by Kathryn A. Woolard, 'Diversity, hierarchy, and modernity in Pacific Island communities' by Niko Besnier, 'The value of linguistic diversity: Viewing other worlds through North American Indian languages' by Marianne Mithun, and 'Variation in sign languages' by Barbara LeMaster and Leila Monaghan. Morgan plunges into the midst of the complexity which'speech community' may have, and indeed does have as groups of people are more and more closely examined in terms of what and how they speak. The succeeding six chapters clarify several aspects of the subject. As a student of Native American languages, I am especially impressed by Marianne Mithun's lucid grasp of the history and current status of such communities, and their role in the development of linguistics and anthropology themselves. The other chapters are lucid and helpful too. Part II: 'The performing of language', also has seven chapters: 'Conversation as a cultural activity' by Elizabeth Keating and Maria Egbert,'Gesture' by John B. Haviland, 'Participation' by Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Harness Goodwin,'Literacy practices across learning contexts' by Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, 'Narrative lessons' by Elinor Ochs, 'Poetry' by Giorgio Banti and Francesco Giannattasio, and 'Vocal anthropology: From the music of language to the language of song' by Steven Feld, Aaron A. Fox, Thomas Porcello and David Samuels. Those who may expect to find Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs will find them well represented in the General Bibliography. The chapter

In the light of different proposals of a phonologically based periodization of German, this article proposes – in analogy to areal linguistics – the introduction of »transition zones« for the history of German, in order to account for the »double-faced« issue of continuity (i.e., gradual transition) and discontinuity (i.e., »sharp boundaries«) in the description of linguistic phenomena. The case of Early New High German is used for explication of the proposal.

London, like many other large cities in Europe, is now home to immigrants from many different countries. In some areas of the city immigrant families now outnumber the White British families that have been living in the area for many generations. As a result the English spoken in these areas has changed rapidly, with many innovations that we argue are due to the indirect effect of multiple language contact. We discuss some of innovations in terms of why and how they have emerged, and consider the available evidence that can indicate whether the innovations are likely to survive.

This essay explores two female writers from two different eras – Mary Berry from the 21st century and Mrs. Isabella Mary Beeton from the Victorian era – and how they have used the written aspect of language to achieve what they want for their readers to know. A random number generator was used in the selection of recipes. Extracts from the “Book of Household Management”, Mrs. Beeton’s “Cookery Book”, and “Mary Berry Everyday: Make every meal special “, will be examined linguistically including the recipes. Lexical complexity, syntactic constructions, discourse structure, and use of other linguistic devices in their written work will be examined. The life of Mrs. Beeton and Victorian social mores will receive discussion. A closer look at the various sections regarding the “mistress”, apart from recipes, in the ‘Book of Household Management’. Other sections of Mary Berry’s Everyday apart from the recipes was also analysed and given interpretations. During the past and even today, there are prevailing linguistic features in a recipe thus establishing itself as a distinct type of narrative amongst all the other genres of texts. This written work could contribute to the large body of research concerning food-related discourse and recipes.

Human language is unparalleled in both its expressive capacity and its diversity. What accounts for the enormous diversity of human languages ? Recent evidence suggests that the structure of languages may be shaped by the social and demographic environment in which the languages are learned and used. In an analysis of over 2,000 languages Lupyan and Dale [25] demonstrated that socio-demographic variables, such as population size, significantly predicted the complexity of inflectional morphology: Languages spoken by smaller populations tend to employ more complex inflectional systems. Languages spoken by larger populations tend to avoid complex morphological paradigms, employing lexical constructions instead. This relationship may exist because of how language learning takes place in these different social contexts . In a smaller population, a tightly-knit social group combined with exclusive or almost exclusive language acquisition by infants permits accumulation of complex inflectional forms. In larger populations, adult language learning and more extensive cross-group interactions produce pressures that lead to morphological simplification. In the current paper, we explore this learningbased hypothesis in two ways. First, we develop an agent-based simulation that serves as a simple existence proof: As adult interaction increases, languages lose inflections. Second, we carry out a correlational study showing that English-speaking adults who had more interaction with non-native speakers as children showed a relative preference for over-regularized (i.e., morphologically simpler) forms. The results of the simulation and experiment lend support to the linguistic niche hypothesis: Languages may vary in the ways they do in part due to different social environments in which they are learned and used. In short, languages adapt to the learning constraints and biases of their learners.

Multidirectional language contact involving more than two languages is little described. However, it probably represents the most common type of contact in the world, where colonization, rapid socioeconomic and demographic change, and society-wide multilingualism have led to dramatic linguistic change. This book presents fascinating cases of multidirectional contact and convergence between highly diverse languages in an emerging linguistic area in Suriname and the Guianas and proposes a framework for comparable studies.

Here is the first chapter of my most recent book (thanks to Benjamins for permission to post and it share it here).
TOC and abstract of the entire book can be accessed here: https://www.academia.edu/18162995/The_Written_Questionnaire_in_Social_Dialectology_History_Theory_Practice_Dec._2015_

Notwithstanding the popular stereotype of the American South as a uniform re- gion, the Southeastern US represents one of the most diverse dialect areas in the Unites States. It is an area of robust dialect diversity, including a full range of ar- eal, social, and ethnic variation. At least three major dialect boundaries cut across the Southeastern states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, including a seaboard region to the east, a highland region to the west, and an intermediate Coastal Plain and Piedmont region. Within the context of dialect di- versity in the South is a set of enclave dialect communities, that is, communities that have been set apart from mainstream populations and, in some cases, from the major dialect boundaries set forth in dialect surveys such as Kurath (1949), Carver (1987), and Labov, Ash, and Boberg (fc.). Admittedly, the notions of "enclave community" and "historical isolation" are diffi cult to defi ne in a prec...

An understanding of the roles of different age-groups in contact-induced language change brings us closer to understanding the mechanisms involved in a change. But contact-induced changes are often documented long after the initiation and diffusion of the change, and sociolinguistic information such as which age groups were major agents of change cannot be investigated. Where the information is available, there are several contexts where contact-induced change led by different age groups of children has been documented (e.g. Cheshire et al. 2011; Kerswill & Williams 2000; O’Shannessy 2005, 2013). The reason that such
a change spreads and gains currency in some contexts, but not in others, known as the actuation problem (Weinreich et al. 1968: 102), is not well understood. In this paper I outline the emergence of the Australian mixed language Light Warlpiri (O’Shannessy 2005, 2012, 2013) and some specific morphosyntactic developments in it that were led by young children, and examine the type of context that allows such innovation to take hold.

En el presente artículo se pretende considerar dos cambios fonéticos en el español de Gran Canaria y sus consecuencias para el inventario de fonemas de esta variedad. Más específi camente, se describen los alófonos de las obstruyentes interruptas producidos mediante la aproximantización y la sonorización post-vocálica. Los dos procesos contribuyen al debate sobre los rasgos contrastivos en la lengua española, especialmente el rol del rasgo continuo y el uso del contraste tenso/fl ojo en vez de sordo/sonoro. Se argumenta que los cambios observados en el dialecto tienen carácter debilitante con paralelismos en los cambios históricos de las lenguas romances y, si su trayectoria sigue el mismo camino, pueden llevar a la recategorización fonemática. Palabras clave: sonorización, español canario, dialectología, cambio lingüístico, desfono-logización

This paper presents two phonetic changes taking place in the Spanish of Gran Canaria and their consequences for the phonemic inventory of this variety. More specifi cally, alophones of non-continuant obstruents produced by aproximantisation and post-vocalic voicing are described. Th e two processes contribute to the debate on contrastive features to be used with respect to Spanish obstruents, especially on the role of the feature continuant and the use of the tense/lax contrast instead of voiced/voiceless. It is argued that the changes observed in the Canary Islands are instances of lenition parallel to the historical changes experienced by Romance languages and, if their trajectory is not altered, they may lead to phonemic recategorisation.

This chapter deals with the theoretical foundations of Balkan Sprachbund studies: their purpose and aims, terminology and methods, and the areal and intralinguistic evidence for the regularity of contact-induced Balkanization processes on the peninsula. Instead of deconstruction, Balkan Sprachbund theory is supported by positivism, historicism, structuralism, social relevance and sufficient field data. These together demonstrate that it is possible to acquire new and profound insights into linguistic convergence in general and to provide Balkan linguistics with paradigms for research and models of interpretation. The concepts of linguistic boundary, dialect, regular correspondences in the functions of linguistic units, parallel grammaticalization, lexicalization, and semantic neutralization are stressed as crucial for understanding the nature of linguistic and cultural convergence and divergence that may manage to either evade or intensify identity loss. I argue that a facts-on-the-ground-based Sprachbund theory is capable of making predictions on the basis of the regularity of linguistic convergence in the Balkans. It is further argued that, for the first time in Balkan linguistics, thorough attention is being paid to bilingual symbiotic groups in zones of ongoing intimate contact on the part of the language and speech behaviour of their members.

This paper investigates the relationship between the Cornish language and officialdom over the past thousand years. The social status of Cornish is examined along with attitudes towards the language held by monarchy, government and their agencies. During the middle-ages, Cornish was relatively stable and indeed enjoyed some prestige amongst the gentry who used Cornish as their preferred language for family mottoes. However, following the Tudor accession, the number of Cornish speakers was greatly reduced following the brutal repression of several popular uprisings when a significant proportion of the Cornish speaking population were exterminated. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Cornish continued to be used amongst the poor in Cornwall's fishing communities. The revival of Cornish began around 1900 and the number of speakers grew throughout the 20th century. Nevertheless, the government and state education system provided no support for Cornish language learners until 2002 when the European Union granted Cornish official “minority language” status under Part II of the 1992 Council of Europe Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. In 2005, the government confirmed modest funding support for the Cornish language. Local government in Cornwall are currently implementing a Cornish language strategy to determine a standard written form for Cornish that can be used for official purposes, such as signage, and for education in schools.

Variation of sentence length across time and genre: influence on the syntactic usage in English Abstract The goal of this paper is threefold: i) to present some practical aspects of using full-text version of Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), the largest diachronic multi-genre corpus of the English language, in the investigation of a linguistic trend of change; ii) to test a widely held assumption that sentence length in written English has been steadily decreasing over the past few centuries; iii) to point to a possible link between the changes in sentence length and changes in the English syntactic usage. The empirical proof of concept for iii) is provided by the decline in the frequency of the non-finite purpose subordinator in order to. Sentence length, genre and the likelihood of occurrence of in order to are shown to be interrelated.

This study aims at analysing language change on social media which are now popular and dynamic. Combining Technological Determinism theory and Computer-mediated Discourse Analysis, it investigates the language use on focus WhatsApp groups and discovers that the medium is full of abbreviations, nonstandard spellings, emojis, and logograms. It is concluded that the writing system on WhatsApp often departs from the standards of the English language, a situation in which a word can be represented by any form depending on the user. This platform provides users with diverse communication opportunities. However, it represents a threat to language stability and portends a great danger to language use. Therefore, it should be dealt with great care.

En comunidades dinámicas de contacto de grupos y lenguas, los individuos definen su posición social no sólo mediante la selección de una variedad lingüística concreta, sino que demuestran su relación con diferentes grupos a través de la mezcla de elementos pertenecientes a diferentes variedades o „lenguas“. De este modo, hay que considerar la interferencia lingüística no sólo como „error“ en el habla del individuo, sino como técnica de identificación.
Pero la interferencia no actúa de manera uniforme en el acto del hablar: según varios factores (distancia entre las lenguas, grado de planificabilidad del discurso, „permeabilidad“ de las lenguas, tradiciones comunitarias, factores individuales como la capacidad de movilidad lingüística), se presentan distintos tipos de interferencias en los diversos planos de la lengua.
Mediante ejemplos del contacto lingüístico entre gallego y castellano, se ofrece un bosquejo para una posible tipología de las interferencias que determinan la posición social, en la que distinguimos interferencias de transposición, de convergencia, de divergencia y de hipercorrección.

This thesis addresses the language contact situation between the regional variety of Italian spoken in Pescara, in the Abruzzo region, eastern Italy, and the Italo-Romance substratum language of the same area, Pescarese, the nearly extinct local variety of a wider regional class of vernacular languages, referred to as Abruzzese. One of the main goals of the thesis is to carry out a comparative description of the phonological systems of intonation of the two languages and the discussion on their contact situation, also taking into account the possible influence of other varieties of Italian spoken in the surrounding areas.

Even though there are several descriptive studies on the intonational systems of regional Italian varieties and some work on the most alive regional languages (such as Sardinian and Friulan), to our knowledge no studies have dealt with Pescara Italian and with Pescarese so far. Also, to the present data, little work has been carried out on language contact and change in the prosodic field (Elordieta 2003, 2006; Colantoni and Gurlekian 2004; Mennen 2004; O’Rourke 2005; Alvord 2006; Heffernan 2006; Simonet 2008, 2010; Elordieta and Irurtzun 2012, 2016; Romera and Elordieta 2013, Nance 2014, among others), especially in the context of Italian in contact with the substratum Romance languages (Romano, 2000). To my knowledge, apart from general remarks on the matter, no previous studies have systematically compared the prosodic patterns of a regional variety of Italian with its substratum language. 

The thesis has a twofold objective. First, it contributes to the Italian studies on intonation, being the first extensive study of the intonation of both an endangered Italo-Romance language and its corresponding regional Italian. Second, it enters the context of studies on prosodic change and contact, as it describes intonational variation in a special situation of language contact, which is the contact between sister languages, one of which (Italian) first entered Pescara only as a written language. Thus, rather than a situation of oral contact between two intonation systems, this study deals with a situation of contact of two sister languages, in which the intonation system of one of the languages (Italian) is being built. This type of



contact situation is common to many areas of the Italian peninsula, and this study could be the first of a long series of analogous comparative analyses.

A cross-sectional production study was carried out with 8 young native speakers of Pescara Italian, 6 old native speakers of Pescara Italian and 6 old native speakers of Pescarese. To elicit the speech. A Discourse Completion Task was used, presenting 57 situations to which the speakers were asked to react orally, in order to record spontaneous versions of various sentence types. The use of different age groups allowed assessing how the intonation system of Pescara Italian intonation has undergone change in time, how this change is encoded in synchronic variation and whether this variation was and is being maintained, undone or reinterpreted. 

Auditory inspection and acoustic analysis of the speech productions show that Pescara Italian intonation is influenced by its substratum language (Pescarese), as well as by Central Italian varieties, not genetically related to it. A fair amount of inner variation in Pescara Italian intonation was found, and this study will argue that part of the Pescara Italian system is derived by transfer from substratum, either by direct transfer or by prosodic modification of the Pescarese intonation pattern. A special substratum feature marking the prominent phrase of certain sentence types is found in Pescarese, which has been integrally transferred to regional Italian (ex: Maria beve [il latte di mandorle.] ‘Maris drinks almond milk’ uttered with a salient high plateau joining the first and last stressed syllables of the phrase in brackets); a mandatory rule for Pescarese vocatives was found, adding an extra initial syllable when the name is initially stressed (ex: Cla’! 
A Cla’! “Claudio!”) in order to provide segmental material (the exra syllable [a]) to which to align a pretonic rise. 

The patterns that are transferred from Pescarese will be called “conservative” variants. Among them, there are also patterns, in Pescara Italian, that are similar but not identical to the corresponding Pescarese pattern. They have been transferred from Pescarese in early stages of contact, when written Italian first entered Pescara, but have suffered prosodic modification, while


adapting to fit the different metric nature of a new language. Finally, other intonation patterns of Pescara Italian are absent in Pescarese: they have entered Pescara Italian by contact with other Italian varieties, especially from the Rome region. Those patterns are referred to as “standard-like” or “innovative”.

For many sentence types, multiple intonation strategies are documented, even within the same speaker, generally one conservative and one innovative. By comparing the intonational system of young and old speakers of Pescara Italian, this thesis is able to document the process of prosodic change and track the interplay between conservative and innovative variants in time. In some cases, either the conservative pattern, initially transferred from Pescarese, is replaced over time by the standard-like pattern (as, for instance, the vocative contour or the boundary tone of yesno questions), or there is no dominance or evolution of one pattern towards the other and the two are maintained (as for the pitch accent of contrastive statements or that of wh-questions). 

Furthermore, when change takes place, the two variants can  either gradually approximate their phonetic shapes, resulting in language convergence (Colantoni and Gurlekian 2004, O’Rourke 2005, Simonet 2008, 2010, Romera and Elordieta 2013) or remain phonetically distinct, with one possibly gradually taking over the other in terms of percentage of use, as in (Alvord 2006, Swerts and Zerbian 2010). It may also happen that one of the two variants gradually de-associates with the sentence type and undergoes pragmatic shift, or “reallocation” (Britain and Trudgill 1999), especially when it is already associated with another pragmatic function within the system. 

Yes-no questions and contrastive focus statements represent an example of how different pragmatic functions may entail different trends of change: two similar phonetic patterns were found as multiple strategies for both yes-no questions and contrastive statements in Pescara Italian: a rise-fall pitch accent with a peak at the end of the pretonic syllable, (L+H*)H+L*, which is the conservative variant, and a rise-fall pitch accent with the peak fully inside the tonic vowel, H*+L, which is the innovative variant. 




When used for questions, they converged to one another in time, into a rise-fall with an intermediate alignment of the peak, in the tonic onset, that is half way between the positions of the conservative and innovative variants. When used for contrastive statements, however, the same pitch accents show a stronger tendency to maintain variation and preserve their distinct phonetic shapes, with a  minority of cases of an intermediate contour, which is however not implemented with one unique intermediate peak, like for yes-no questions, but with two peaks, one pretonic and one tonic, as an overlapping of the two variants. 

As the coexistence of the same pair of identical phonetic forms evolves differently in the two cases, the only contrast being in the pragmatic sentence type, this example provides evidence that the evolution trend of inner variation does not necessarily depend on the phonetic form of the contours, but may only depend on the pragmatics of the sentence type.

Nach dem Aufbrechen der weltweiten Systemkonfrontation, deren Wirkung in fast jeder Konfliktstruktur zu spüren war, sind inter-ethnische Konflikte auch in Europa wieder zum vorherrschenden Muster gesellschaftlicher Auseinandersetzung geworden (Seewann 1992: 23). In Südosteuropa sehen sich mit ihrer Identität kämpfende Nationalstaaten immer wieder mit der eigenen Multiethnizität konfrontiert und erlebten in den letzten Jahren die Schwierigkeiten, die daraus erwachsen. Das Lösungsspektrum reichte oft über Marginalisierung der Minderheiten in einer ethnozentristischen Politik nicht hinaus (Romaine: 23). Minderheiten wiederum werden im europäischen Diskurs seit langem in sprachliche Kategorien gegossen. Sprache als Kulturträger par excellence ist auch ein Grundpfeiler der zögerlichen Minderheitenpolitik der Europäischen Union. Mit der Osterweiterung steht diese in der hoffnungsvollen Rolle des Mediators. Denn nachdem die europäischen Staaten in den letzten 200 Jahren dem nationalstaatlichen Monolingualismus verfallen waren, bietet erst die Europäische Union wieder die Perspektive, Vielsprachigkeit als kulturellen Reichtum zu verstehen (Krumm: 9f.). Der Zuwachs zur EU hat diese Vielfalt noch potenziert: In den neuen Mitgliedsstaaten wurden fast doppelt so viele Minderheitengruppen gezählt wie in den alten zusammengenommen (vgl. Euromosaic II) und bilden in mehr als der Hälfte der Staaten einen Anteil von über 10%. Daher setzt sich inzwischen die Einsicht durch, dass Minderheiten ein Problem der Gemeinschaft sind und "für nationale Minderheiten [...] der Erhalt und die Weiterentwicklung der Sprache die notwendige Basis [ist], um ihre Kultur, Tradition und Identität zu bewahren" (Erster Bericht der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 2000: 4, zit. nach Elle: 7). Ein möglicher Weg dahin ist die Verlagerung des politischen Zentrums weg von den Einzelstaaten zur Europäischen Union hin, die als EU der Nationen und Regionen vor allem letzteren wieder mehr Gewicht verleiht. Die europäischen Regionen, die weitaus älter sind, als die sie inkorporierenden Nationalstaaten, bieten in ihrer Überschaubarkeit die Chance zur Entmarginalisierung auch der regionalen Minderheiten. Die Unterstützung von

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Gender assignment and exponence changed dramatically from Old to Middle English. This paper provides insights on the mechanisms and chronology of this change by quantitatively analysing the annals 1129-1154 of the Peterborough Chronicle. A logistic regression reveals substantial effects of formal, semantic and extralinguistic parameters on gender reassignment.
Lexical-to-referential-gender transition is largely a directed development in which correspondence of sex and gender plays a major role. At the same time, instances of random gender-reassignment occur and produce gendered noun-phrases incompatible with both the Old English as well as the Middle English system of gender-assignment. Pronouns adopt referential agreement before adnominals as a diachronic application of the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1979) predicts.