Academic literature on the topic 'Linguistics|Sociolinguistics|Language'

The article investigates the meaning of the term "sociolinguistics" in modern linguistics, the problems of sociolinguistics, as well as the history of development and the reasons for the relevance of sociolinguistic research. The article discusses the problems of sociolinguistics in the study of the state language of different countries and interethnic communication.

AbstractAs sociolinguistics continued to develop in the 1970s, members of the Council’s Committee on Sociolinguistics (1963–1979) reflected on the direction and intellectual impact of this emergent discipline. In this 1972 article, Dell Hymes, cochairman of the committee, describes several orientations toward the field among its practitioners, and argues for what he regarded as the most ambitious: a “socially constituted linguistics.” By this, Hymes meant a sociolinguistics that challenges linguistics’ core theoretical starting points of linguistic structure and grammar with a focus on the social meaning and functions of language in context. In relation to our “Sociolinguistic Frontiers” series, Hymes presciently argues that ultimately the field must address how inequality and language intersect, going “beyond means of speech and types of speech community to a concern with persons and social structure.”

This paper explores the contexts of emergence and application of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. This novel field of scientific enquiry draws on the convergence of methods and theoretical frameworks typically associated with Cognitive Linguistics and Sociolinguistics. Here, we trace and systematize the key theoretical and epistemological bases for the emergence of Cognitive Sociolinguistics, by outlining main research strands and highlighting some challenges that face the development of this field. More specifically, we focus on the following terms and concepts which are foundational to the discussion of Cognitive Sociolinguistics: (i) usage-based linguistics and language-internal variation; (ii) rule-based vs. usage-based conceptions of language; (iii) meaning variation; (iv) categorization and prototypes; and (v) the interplay between language, culture, and ideology. Finally, we consider the benefits of taking a Cognitive Sociolinguistic perspective in research by looking at the actual studies that are presented in the current volume.

Abstract The paper suggests a new hermeneutical take on receptive patristics. Receptive patristics means here the ways in which patristic texts are perceived in the community of patristic scholars and in ecclesiastical communities. The perceptions of the patristic materials that these two kinds of communities demonstrate are not always convergent. Their divergence can be explained on the basis of the distinction between normative linguistics and sociolinguistics. Ecclesiastical communities tend to treat the language of the Fathers and Mothers of the church in coherence with the way in which the proponents of normative linguistics treat the phenomenon of language. Patristic scholars, in contrast, usually treat them along the line of sociolinguistics. The approach to the language, which is applied by sociolinguistics, if adopted by ecclesiastical communities, could lead to a better understanding between them. It could foster the ecumenical rapprochement between confessional traditions, especially if they are based on patristic identities, such as in the case of Byzantine and Oriental churches. The academic method of sociolinguistics, thus, can be applied to the ecumenical studies and can positively contribute to practical ecumenism.

Although it is easy to do so, The sociolinguistics of sign languages (henceforth SSL) is not to be confused with Ceil Lucas's other books, The sociolinguistics of the deaf community (1989) and its sequels, the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities series. Whereas the latter volumes aim to present new research in the area of sociolinguistics pertaining to Deaf people and other users of sign languages, the book under review presents almost no new (to those already familiar with this field) information on aspects of sociolinguistic research on members of this language community. Instead, this book should more accurately be seen as a companion volume to her book (with Clayton Valli) Linguistics of American Sign Language: An introduction (2000; henceforth LASL). Like LASL, SSL is intended as a textbook for use in college-level courses dealing with linguistics (or a stand-alone course in sociolinguistics, as was Lucas's intention) of sign languages and Deaf communities.

Language learning cannot work without integrating other fields of knowledge such as psychology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, etc. Sociolinguistics is a branch of linguistics which discusses about language due to social factors. It has an important role in language learning especially in making it easily understandable for the language learners by understanding the language use of the native speakers. The contribution of sociolinguistics in Arabic language learning for foreign language learners can be seen from the relationship between language and social environment. In this case, it does not only learn about the elements or internal systems of Arabic language such as phonology, syntax, and morphology, but also the social context such as speech community, social class, language use and culture. It means sociolinguistics gives information about the definition and use of Arabic language based on the social context.

The authors begin this introductory text by posing four major questions for the study of language: what is the nature of language, how do we acquire it, how do we use it in speech production and comprehension, and how is it represented in the brain? These questions also define the orientation of the book, which aims to introduce the reader to the study of linguistics through four interrelated subfields: linguistics proper, developmental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. Conspicuously absent from the list, of course, is a fifth fundamental question about language: what is the relationship between language use and social structure? Sociolinguistics is only briefly defined and introduced, and discussion of sociolinguistics throughout the text is limited to the relationship between social structure and language variation and change.

As a wide-ranging inter-discipline which rose in the 1960s, sociolinguistics takes language as a part of society and culture and explores how to relate the rules of language with social factors as its basic task. At the same time, its theories and practices are not only an important supplement and development for linguistics, but also very important for theories and practices of foreign language teaching. The foreign language teaching must pay attention to the cultivation of students' communicative ability. However, foreign language teaching in China has ignored the communicative ability with only paying attention to the language form for a long time. The paper is intended to analyze the reasons why sociolinguistics encounters so many obstacles in English teaching in China and the existing problems of China’s foreign language teaching to help the readers have a better understanding of the application of sociolinguistics in China’s English teaching.

Mesthrie's Concise encyclopedia of sociolinguistics (hereafter, CESO) is a newly edited, condensed, and updated offshoot of the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, originally published in ten volumes in 1993. This laudable volume aims to “give a comprehensive overview of the main topics in an important branch of language study, generally known as Sociolinguistics” (p. 1). As theoretical background, the branch is traced from the Sanskrit scholar Pānini to more recent origins in historical linguistics, anthropology, rural dialectology, and the study of mixed languages. The field is further presented as the most proper of all branches for language study today, as Mesthrie – updating Labov's (1972) famous claim about the implications of the term sociolinguistics – writes that “having ‘human communication’ as part of the definition of language makes it impossible to study language comprehensively without due regard to social contexts of speech” (1). CESO is an attempt to catalog the relevant components of those social contexts.

This study investigates why and how bilinguals speakers tend to code switch on social media such as; Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Bilingual speakers who were born in the US, who adapted English as their second language or who have learned Spanish as their second language in school, usually tend to combine the two languages, English and Spanish, in order to get across their point of view to others. For this reason, this investigation was created to analyze how code- switching can influence people when it's exposed on media. There were three social medias with the total of 37 participants who had posted comments, status, pictures, videos in English, Spanish or mixing both where a good amount of people got influenced by. Therefore, the leading results were the following: (1) at every code switching done on any social media, users code switch or use the same style as a way to expand and influence others. (2) Users code switch as a way to expand a new culture and identity as being one big group.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the syntactic structure of Guerrero Nahuatl using Baker’s proposed Polysynthesis Parameter (1996). Baker (1996) claims that polysynthetic languages must have common features that aggregate to the concept of the Polysynthesis Parameter, which suggests that polysynthetic languages employ morphology for syntactic functions. Baker (1996) suggests that in polysynthetic languages, &thetas;-roles are assigned through either an agreement relationship (agreement morphemes) or a movement relation (Noun Incorporation). As a result, Baker (1996) claims that polysynthetic languages must be non-configurational due to the flexibility of the word order and the absence of true quantifiers which indicates that all overt NPs are adjuncts. Prior researchers have made competing claims regarding the structure of the Nahuatl languages and Baker (1996) Polysynthesis Parameter. In this thesis, I show that Guerrero Nahuatl is a non-configurational polysynthetic language. I provide data showing that &thetas;-roles are assigned through either an agreement relationship or through a movement relation (NI) as Baker (1996) predicated for polysynthetic languages. I also argue that Guerrero Nahuatl has free word order and no occurring true quantifiers. I provide evidence that all overt NPs are in adjunct positions rather than in actual A-positions. In addition, I show that there is an extensive use of null anaphora, and an absence of reflexive overt NPs.

This thesis focuses on the infinitive among Puerto Rican, Dominican and Cuban speakers, in contrast with Mexicans. Most grammars describe as ungrammatical some types of optative clauses in Caribbean Spanish (Bosque & Gutiérrez-Rexach, 2009): (4) a. *Nosotros estamos buscando otras alternativas, pero el director dice él tener ya todo seteao. We are looking for other alternatives, but the director says he to-have [inf] already everything checked. We are looking for other alternatives, but the director says he has already checked everything. (5) a. *Eso te pasa por tú ir demasiado rápido. That you [acus] happens because [-Q] you [nom] to-go [inf] too fast. That happens to you because of your going too fast.

Therefore, a variation phenomenon is produced (Silva-Corvalán, 2001): (4) b. Nosotros estamos buscando otras alternativas, pero el director dice que tiene ya todo seteao. We are looking for other alternatives, but the director says he has already everything checked.

We are looking for other alternatives, but the director says he has already checked everything (5) b. Eso te pasa porque vas demasiado rápido. That you [acus] happens because you [nom] go [ind] too fast That happens to you because you go too fast This project sharpens a specific look to clauses such as (4) and (5) on the basis of mood microvariation concerning the infinitive/indicative optionality, related to linguistic variables: subject type, person features, prepositions, subject specificity, subject co-references, topic-actor subject, and declaration features; and sociolinguistic variables: Caribbean sub-variety, age, and education level. Debates have arisen when studying subjunctive/infinitive optionality (Aponte, 2008; Kempchinsky, 2007; Morales, 1986, 1999). Less attention has been given to indicative/infinitive variation. This work proposes the application of procedural meaning hypothesis (Terkourafi, 2011) to explain that Caribbean speakers choose infinitive clauses because their grammar has a syntax-pragmatics micro-parameter. Using GoldVarb2001, phenomena such as (4) and (5) are analyzed from a query answered by 72 Carribeans, and 24 Mexicans; and 125 interviews. Caribbeans prefer the infinitive with first person singular, non-specific, and topic-actor subjects. This hierarchy demonstrates that Caribbean Spanish has its own structural configurations which privilege the syntactic-pragmatic interface.

The goal of this dissertation is to address the question of the Verb Second status of Old French as well as its decline by examining the interaction of syntax and Information Structure (IS) in the Left Periphery from the 13th century through the 16th century. Old French (OFr) has long been considered to be a Verb Second (V2) language, due to the overwhelming tendency for the finite verb to occur as the second constituent in matrix clauses, the hallmark of V2. Recently, the V2 analysis OFr has been called into question, due to the relatively high rate of clauses with more than one preverbal constituent (V>2). During this same period, our understanding of what V2 is has evolved in such a way as to place less emphasis on the number of preverbal constituents, and more on the theoretical underpinnings of the clause structure.

The results, obtained using a methodology for the annotation of IS in a corpus created for this project, support the V2 analysis of 13th century French, both in terms of its syntax and its IS. From a descriptively syntactic stance much of decline of V2 occurs between the 13th and 14th centuries (e.g. the rise in V>2 clauses, the decline in postverbal subjects). However, in examining the IS changes, we find that key aspects of the V2 grammar (e.g. V to C movement, EPP) are robust into the 15th century.

Ultimately, we find that examining Old French syntax through the lens of IS provides new insight into the interaction between IS and syntax in language change, especially with respect to both the manner and the timeline of the decline of V2 in the history of French.

Using the combined approach of Variationist Sociolinguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, this thesis undertakes the classification and analysis of certain prepositions in spoken Quebec French. The study examines 21 interviews that make up part of the Corpus de français parlé au Québec (CFPQ). The aim of this thesis is to examine the use of the variables expressing the concept of ‘possession’, and those equivalent to English before/in front of and after/behind. These three variables are represented as (POSS), (ANTE) and (POST). An initial quantification of the variants is carried out, which establishes the contexts of production, and helps determine the areas of linguistic analysis to be explored. For the (POSS) variable, the data is examined in terms of linguistic factors such as the reference of the possessor, the avoidance of hiatus, and inalienable/alienable possession. Interpersonal variation is also considered, including age and gender in addition to level of education. From the Cognitive Linguistic perspective, we investigate ‘reference point theory’ and how it can shed light on the alternation between the variants. The (ANTE) and (POST) variables are studied in terms of the type of reference (i.e. locative or temporal), the locating noun category, and the age, sex, and level of education of the speakers. The Cognitive Linguistic theory of ‘subjectification’ is also considered for these two variables. For the (POSS) variable, the reference of the possessor and the level of education are seen to be important factors for the use of possessive à. In addition, the ‘reference point theory’ contributes to our understanding of the use of this variant. With the (ANTE) and (POST) variables certain variants are seen to be employed both with and without an overt complement. The variant devant is predominantly found in contexts involving narrative discourse, and the variants en avant and en avant de are preferred for locative reference. Once again, the Cognitive Sociolinguistic approach highlights the possibility that the difference in variant choice is linked to the speakers’ cognitive construal of the situation.

This study seeks to examine and compare motivational orientations of French learners across different dimensions: cultural background (USA vs. Russia), educational modality and age (college students vs. private courses learners), gender, and time of studying foreign language. 613 American and Russian learners of French completed the questionnaire addressing 10 motivational factors to study French language. Despite differences in nationality, age, educational background and learning experience, all groups of participants produced nearly identical motivational rankings. The rankings are topped by the Travelling orientation, which seems to be universally appealing, followed by the orientations within the Idealistic motivational cluster (Aesthetic Factors, Culture, Knowledge, and Ideal Self). The Pragmatic motivational cluster (Instrumental orientation, which is sometimes coupled to Emigration and Friendship dimensions) is by far less important. This disposition is also confirmed by the qualitative data. With regard to specific orientations it has been found that US learners score consistently higher in Sociability motivation, whereas Russians score higher in the Peers’ Encouragement and Aesthetic categories. In regard to gender differences, this study shows that male students appear to be more personable, e.g. among American learners males consistently outscore females in the Friendship category. Referring to age differences, it was found that the overall level of motivation tends to decline with age.

This dissertation examines the social and interactional foundations of a grammatical divergence between Tactile American Sign Language (TASL) and Visual American Sign Language (VASL) in the Seattle DeafBlind community. I argue that as a result of the pro-tactile movement, structures of interaction have been reconfigured and a new language has begun to emerge. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research, more than 190 hours of videorecordings of interaction and language use, 50 interviews with members of the community, and more than 14 years of involvement in a range of capacities, I analyze this social transformation and its effect on the semiotic organization of TASL.

I identify two processes as requisite for the emergence of TASL: deictic integration and embedding in the social field. Deictic integration involves the coordination of grammatical systems with modes of access and orientation that are reciprocal across a group of language-users. Embedding in the social field involves: (1) the legitimation of the language for taking up valued social roles, along with the embodied knowledge necessary for doing so, and (2) authorization of some language-users to evaluate linguistic forms and communicative practices as correct or not.

In this dissertation, I track these processes among DeafBlind people and I show how they are leading to new mechanisms for referring to the immediate environment and tracking referents across a stream of discourse (Chapter 7), new rules for the formation of lexical signs (Chapter 8), and a new system for generating semiotically complex signs, which incorporate both linguistic and non-linguistic elements (Chapter 9). In order to understand the social and interactional foundations of these emergent systems, I examine the history of two institutions around which the Seattle DeafBlind community was built (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, I show how social roles, given by the history of those institutions, were reconfigured by DeafBlind leaders and how this led to changes in modes of access and orientation (Chapters 5 and 6). I argue that as relations between linguistic, deictic, and social phenomena grew tighter and more restricted, a new tactile language began to emerge. I therefore apprehend language emergence not as a process of liberation or abstraction from context, but as a process of contextual integration (Chapter 1).

In the spring semester of 2012 the author taught a new course in the graduate program in linguistics at a comprehensive state university in a large American metropolis: Language and Tourism. For the first time in at this university, a graduate course focusing solely on the analysis of tourism materials, e.g. official tourism websites, travel programs, brochures, etc., was offered as an elective to students who had taken a sociolinguistics course without such a narrow focus. Thirteen students pursuing their Master of Arts (MA) degrees – twelve in the MA Program in Linguistics and one in the MA Program in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) – enrolled in and successfully completed this course. This chapter, which provides an overview of a graduate level linguistics course in Language and Tourism based on the author's critical reflections on teaching (Brookfield, 2017), offers suggestions for how sociolinguistic concepts can be taught through the study of tourism and encourages more linguistic-based research in the instruction of tourism studies.

What is it? The Linguistic Landscape (LL) is a relatively new field which draws from several disciplines such as applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and cultural geography. According to Landry and Bourhis (1997), “the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration” (p. 25). More recently, the type of signs that can be found in the public space has broadened to include the language on T-shirts, stamp machines, football banners, postcards, menus, products, tattoos, and graffiti. Despite this wider variety of signs, Landry and Bourhis’s (1997) definition still captures the essence of the LL, which is multimodal (signs combine visual, written, and sometimes audible data) and can also incorporate the use of multiple languages (multilingual).

The introduction to the volume lays out its conceptual, theoretical and empirical background. It highlights how grammatical change has been a major area of interest within French linguistics, but that standard French is too often the exclusive empirical focus, while insights from comparative Gallo-Romance data tend to be lacking. Sociolinguistic theory has traditionally formed a modest part of linguistic research on both historical and contemporary French, but the introduction highlights a renewed interest in variationist sociolinguistics, issues of language contact, and the status of minority languages with France. The introduction concludes with an overview of Smith’s contribution to linguistics and summaries of the chapters that together form the volume.

This chapter introduces the intertwined relationship between language, identity, politics, and law, and provides a road map for the book. It begins with an example of a language conflict that invites the reader to consider complexities involved in the promulgation of an official language law. It then outlines the steps that this book will take to help the reader make sense of multilingual legal orders today. It sets the stage for the project by reviewing existing literature that has tackled related issues in various academic fields, including linguistics (and its subfields such as sociolinguistics, linguistic ecology, and language policy and planning), law, and political science, and evaluating the limitation in scope and reach of such works.

In the field of mass communication and media, the use of language has become so versatile that it can help to improve relationship between peoples, but it can somehow have a negative effect on the mutual understanding. Rhetoric makes it clear and persuasive to communicate to make language work for their purposes. Sociolinguistics in the contrastive analysis deals with speech communities and the language use in particular contexts such as dialects or bilingualism in society and language variation and change over time, especially in the post-COVID-19 era. This chapter presents Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory and William Labov's sociolinguistic method, analyzing genres and registers in the systemic functional linguistics perspective to derive a conceptual framework for the study of news report. The resulting framework provides for the identification of news writing style in mass media and other social networks and its performance in language use regarding the power of words to avoid the ambiguity in situational contexts and to better interpersonal and intercultural communication.

The introduction argues for the importance of language-learning and multilingualism in the history of early modern England. English-speakers who ventured beyond Dover could not rely on English and had to become language-learners, while even at home English urban life was often multilingual. It brings together early modern concepts of linguistic ability with approaches from sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and the social history of language in order to show how we can think about linguistic competence in a historical perspective. It demonstrates the importance of ‘questions of language’ to the social, cultural, religious, and political histories of early modern England, and to the question of England’s place in a rapidly expanding world. After an overview of the book’s structure, aims, and parameters, it closes by asking how taking a polyglot perspective might shift our understandings of early modern English history.

In recent decades, phraseology has ceased to be a marginal philological discipline and has become an important area in both discourse analysis (“repeated” or “prefabricated” discourse) and applied linguistics (translation and language teaching). The fact that idiomaticity is one of its most characteristic features creates an added difficulty for translators and second language learners, since knowledge of lexicon and regular grammar is not sufficient for the communicative mastery of a language and for the socialization of the speakers in the speech community concerned. This is where sociolinguistics comes into play: the (passive and active) use of phraseological units (PU) or phrasemes becomes a relevant sociolinguistic factor as an index of collective identity in Peirce's terms and as an indicator, a marker, or a stereotype, according to Labov. Furthermore, the conservation of repertories of PU throughout history, and especially proverbs and other expressive formulas, is a symbol of the linguistic and cultural personality of the Catalan language community.