The Dynamics of the Linguistic System PDF Download

Author: Hans-Jörg Schmid
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192546376
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This volume outlines a model of language that can be characterized as functionalist, usage-based, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. The core idea is that linguistic structure is not stable and uniform, but continually refreshed by the interaction between three components: usage, the communicative activities of speakers; conventionalization, the social processes triggered by these activities and feeding back into them; and entrenchment, the individual cognitive processes that are also linked to these activities in a feedback loop. Hans-Jörg Schmid explains how this multiple feedback system works by extending his Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model, showing how the linguistic system is created, sustained, and continually adapted by the ongoing interaction between usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Fulfilling the promise of usage-based accounts, the model explains how exactly usage is transformed into collective and individual grammar and how these two grammars in turn feed back into usage. The book is exceptionally broad in scope, with insights from a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines. It provides a coherent account of the role of multiple factors that influence language structure, variation, and change, including frequency, economy, identity, multilingualism, and language contact.

Author: Hans-Jörg Schmid
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191852466
Category : Language and languages
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This text offers a model of language that can be characterized as functionalist, usage-based, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. Schmid argues that linguistic structure is not stable, but continually refreshed by usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. This wide-ranging volume will be of interest to linguists from a wide range of fields.

Author: Sabrina Bond
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781639895144
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description

Author: Lutz Marten
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1849508739
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
For the whole of the last half-century, most theoretical syntacticians have assumed that knowledge of language is different from the tasks of speaking and understanding. There have been some dissenters, but, by and large, this view still holds sway. This book takes a different view: it continues the task set in hand by Kempson et al (2001) of arguing that the common-sense intuition is correct that knowledge of language consists in being able to use it in speaking and understanding. The Dynamics of Language argues that interpretation is built up across as sequence of words relative to some context and that this is all that is needed to explain the structural properties of language. The dynamics of how interpretation is built up is the syntax of a language system. The authors' first task is to convey to a general linguistic audience with a minimum of formal apparatus, the substance of that formal system. Secondly, as linguists, they set themselves the task of applying the formal system to as broad an array of linguistic puzzles as possible, the languages analysed ranging from English to Japanese and Swahili. It argues that knowledge in language consists of being able to use it in speaking and understanding. It analyses a variety of languages, from English to Japanese and Swahili. It appeals to a wide audience in the disciplines of language, linguistics, anthropology, education, psychology, cognitive science, law, media studies, and medicine.

Author: Christopher S. Butler
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027294186
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
This book brings together a collection of articles characterized by two main themes: the contrastive study of parallel phenomena in two or more languages, and an essentially functional approach in which language is regarded, first and foremost, as a rich and complex communication system, inextricably embedded in sociocultural and psychological contexts of use. The majority of the studies reported is empirical in nature, many making use of corpora or other textual materials in the language(s) under investigation. The book begins with an introductory section in which the editors provide surveys of the state of the art in both functional and contrastive linguistics. The other five sections of the volume are devoted to (i) a cognitive perspective on form and function, (ii) information structure, (iii) collocations and formulaic language, (iv) language learning, and (v) discourse and culture.

Author: Christopher Butler
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027253835
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
This book brings together a collection of articles characterized by two main themes: the contrastive study of parallel phenomena in two or more languages, and an essentially functional approach in which language is regarded, first and foremost, as a rich and complex communication system, inextricably embedded in sociocultural and psychological contexts of use. The majority of the studies reported are empirical in nature, many making use of corpora or other textual materials in the language(s) under investigation. The book begins with an introductory section in which the editors provide surveys of the state of the art in both functional and contrastive linguistics. The other five sections of the volume are devoted to (i) a cognitive perspective on form and function, (ii) information structure, (iii) collocations and formulaic language, (iv) language learning, and (v) discourse and culture.

Author: Wander Lowie
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 1788925262
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book honours the contribution of Marjolijn Verspoor to the development and implementation of dynamic usage-based (DUB) approaches in second language (L2) research and pedagogy. With chapters written by renowned experts in the field, the book addresses the dynamics of language, language learning and language teaching from a usage-based perspective. The book contains both theory and empirical work: the initial theoretical chapters present cutting-edge thinking in relation to both the scope of DUB theory and its applications, providing conceptual perspectives from cognitive grammar and linguistics, thinking-for-speaking (TFS), and Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) approaches, united by their shared underpinnings of language as a dynamic system of conventionalized routines. The second half of the volume showcases state-of-the-art methodologies to study dynamic trajectories of language learning, empirical investigations into the above-mentioned theoretical concepts, and innovative classroom implementations of DUB language pedagogy.

Author: Paul Bouissac
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262543
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Personal pronouns have a special status in languages. As indexical tools they are the means by which languages and persons intimately interface with each other within a particular social structure. Pronouns involve more than mere grammatical functions in live communication acts. They variously signal the gender of speakers as parts of utterances or in their anaphoric roles. They also prominently indicate with a range of degrees the kind of social relationships that hold between speakers from intimacy to indifference, from dominance to submission, and from solidarity to hostility. Languages greatly vary in the number of pronouns and other address terms they offer to their users with a distinct range of social values. Children learn their relative position in their family and in their society through the “correct” use of pronouns. When languages come into contact because of population migrations or through the process of translation, pronouns are the most sensitive zone of tension both psychologically and politically. This volume endeavours to probe the comparative pragmatics of pronominal systems as social processes in a representative set from different language families and cultural areas.

Author: Iwan Wmffre
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: 9783034317054
Category : Historical linguistics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Analysis of language as a combination of both a structural and a lexical component overlooks a third all-encompassing aspect: dynamics. Dynamic Linguistics approaches the description of the complex phenomenon that is human language by focusing on this important but often neglected aspect. This book charts the belated recognition of the importance of dynamic synchrony in twentieth-century linguistics and discusses two other key concepts in some detail: speech community and language structure. Because of their vital role in the development of a dynamic approach to linguistics, the three linguists William Labov, André Martinet and Roman Jakobson are featured, in particular Martinet in whose later writings - neglected in the English-speaking world - the fullest appreciation of the dynamics of language to date are found. A sustained attempt is also made to chronicle precursors, between the nineteenth century and the 1970s, who provided inspiration for these three scholars in the development of a dynamic approach to linguistic description and analysis. The dynamic approach to linguistics is intended to help consolidate functional structuralists, geolinguists, sociolinguists and all other empirically minded linguists within a broader theoretical framework as well as playing a part in reversing the overformalism of the simplistic structuralist framework which has dominated, and continues to dominate, present-day linguistic description.

Author: Rajend Mesthrie
Publisher: Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd
ISBN: 1775822273
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Linguistics – the close study of language and languages – is an indispensable foundation for all forms of knowledge. The African continent is blessed with hundreds of languages which act as local repositories of culture and interaction. South Africa alone has eleven official languages, plus Sign Language, many heritage languages, and new languages of global movements and migration. Part of the linguist’s business is to document, record and affirm languages and diversity. Applied linguists use their training to understand and enhance the role of language in education and upliftment, and the opportunities and challenges of new technologies of communication. The International Congress of Linguists meets every five years to reflect the development of the field and 2018 is the first time that the congress is being held in Africa. This book is a collection of the plenary and focus papers presented at the conference and thus represents current thinking in the major branches of language study as represented by leading local and international scholars. The papers discuss the history of languages, their structure, acquisition, diversity and use. At the same time due regard is paid to the African continent in connection with its linguistic diversity, multilingualism and educational and societal concerns. The Congress is meant to affirm the value of the languages of Africa, of languages and Linguistics in general, as well as to inspire and equip younger scholars to undertake advanced research into language in its many facets.