Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

Scholarship in the field of sign historical linguistics has made important progress in recent years. Here we survey this progress in three areas of research that have received the most attention to date, namely, (i) qualitative approaches to understanding the typical pathways of diachronic change in signed languages, (ii) quantitative approaches to signed language classification, and (iii) archival approaches to historical sociolinguistic research on signing communities and their languages. We also discuss how early work on sign historical linguistics has shaped the field's current questions and approaches, and we look forward to future advances that can tap into underutilized sources of historical video data on signed languages.

This two-part guide/research report introduces the Generalised Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) tree analysis technique to variationist sociolinguistics using (ING) variation in Canadian Maritime English (CME) as a test case. GLMM tree analysis combines the advantages of tree-based recursive partitioning with the ability to include random effects in statistical modelling. In this, Part 1, the GLMM tree technique reveals a more nuanced pattern for age, gender, and education effects on variation between [ɪn] and standard [ɪŋ] for (ING) than simple mixed-effect regression modelling alone. Linguistic constraints on (ING) variation in this data, as well as the GLMM tree analysis's merits for testing (multi-)collinear predictors are explored in Part 2.

Language diversification and change can be studied using phylogenetic modelling of families over thousands of years, or by close observation of changes unfolding over a few decades at the community level. While the phylogenetic approach uses data from hundreds of languages to make cross-linguistic generalisations, community-level studies of sociolinguistic variation have until recently been limited to a very narrow language sample. However this is now changing, with variationist studies published on a wider range of languages. In this article I assemble a sample of variationist studies encompassing 63 languages from 26 families, and explore potential patterns regarding rates of change in linguistic features, and which features are associated with social identity signalling, which may lead to diversification. These observations largely converge with results obtained from phylogenetic methods, suggesting that more systematic meta-analysis of variationist studies will provide a new way to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of language.

Similarly to language, play is an essential component of human behaviour and culture. However, the links between play and language have been underexamined and often neglected beyond the aesthetic uses of language as found in literature. But playing pervades language. In this paper, we provide an overview of the central role of play in shaping language structure, use, acquisition, and evolution. Accordingly, many aspects of language structure can be related to playing, in part because of the human proclivity for order, regularity and symmetry, but also because ‘playful’ structures and playing with language can be expected to facilitate language acquisition, as well as other functions of language, particularly those related to social fitness. From an evolutionary perspective, in parallel with the increase of our playing behaviour (more time devoted to play and more diversity in types) as a result of biological and cultural changes, play can be argued to have provided a scaffolding for the emergence of more complex linguistic structures, as found in modern languages, and more complex uses of language, as found in modern pragmatics. More complex language use supports the emergence of more complex playing behaviour, which in turn enables more complex playing behaviour, enabling more complex language structures, in a feedback loop. Compared to other accounts, our paper provides a more nuanced view of the nature and origins of language structure and patterns of use, as a result of broader changes in human cognition and behaviour (particularly, on our proclivity to play) as we evolved towards more prosocial behaviour.

This paper provides a focused review of truth-value judgment tasks (TVJTs) as a method for eliciting interpretations in adult second language learners. We present the historical perspectives, the rationale for their use, the nature of the knowledge they target, and critical design considerations. Additionally, we discuss their effectiveness in uncovering how second language learners access and compute meaning, as well as emerging directions for research and pedagogy using this method. We advocate for refining TVJTs to more accurately capture linguistic competence by empirically validating relevant crucial design features. Moreover, we highlight some of the advantages of incorporating web-based TVJT experiments, which enhance transparency, facilitate replication, and accommodate a diverse learner population.

Within formal semantics, languages with no exponent of tense, or with optional tense, have begun to be incorporated into the theory of temporality only in the last couple decades. This article traces the development of their study, identifying empirical arguments that arbitrate between competing analyses of tenselessness. How future and past reference is established for root clauses, both in information-seeking exchanges and in narratives, requires differentiating at least three types of tenseless languages. Their temporal systems vary in whether they make use of a topic time, distinct from the eventuality and utterance times, and how they do so. While human language seems to allow for some variation in the temporal interpretation of tenseless clauses, it remains to be seen how constrained this variation is.

Mayan languages show variation in the morphosyntactic distribution of absolutive objects. A now commonly-adopted analysis ties this variation to differences in object movement and agreement. In so-called ‘high-absolutive’ languages, objects consistently raise to a position above the ergative subject, where they are targeted for $��\varphi �$-Agree by a probe on finite $��{\text{Infl}}^0�$. In ‘low-absolutive’ languages, on the other hand, objects remain low and enter into $��\varphi �$-Agree with a low functional head, v$��/�{\text{Voice}}^0�$. This paper surveys the constellation of empirical evidence for this basic division, specifically related to Ā-extraction constraints, the position of absolutive morphemes within the verbal complex, the availability of absolutive marking in nonfinite clauses, and the binding properties of absolutive objects. It then compares an object raising account with alternatives.