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The following article is committed to diachronic text linguistics. It aims to discuss the transformation processes of (media) text genres using the example of the weather forecast. The focus is on the development of a specific programme over the last 40 years on the German television channel ARD. The study examines the changes of the TV weather forecast over the course of the period under investigation and as a consequence how widely its programme has varied and to what extent it has been standardized. Based on the standard features of the weather forecast, I attempt to clarify the differences in its text-genre-specific and stylistic design using the selected corpus. The processes of change are thus described from a text-linguistic point of view, whereby the changes at the level of the communication situation, text function, text structure, topic or sub-topics, as well as the multimodal constitution of the text are analysed. The aim of the study is to determine which features can be observed over the years in the established text genre of the selected television weather forecast, and how they can be explained. In this way, understanding of the processes of change in media texts will hopefully be furthered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to advance our theoretical understanding of diversifying and homogenizing processes in human societies by exploring the sources of and threats to ethnolinguistic or cultural diversity. Invoking concepts such as ethnogenesis, schismogenesis, and structural transformations, it discusses the parallels as well as the divergences between biological and cultural theory. Models in historical linguistics risk importing unwarranted assumptions about diversification from biological models of speciation. A more pertinent theorization of ethnolinguistic diversity might build on anthropological perspectives such as those of Fredrik Barth, Gregory Bateson, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, all of whom recognized that such diversity reflects interaction rather than isolation. The empirical test of these considerations is the ethnography and history of language use among Indigenous peoples in Amazonia and the Andes. The conclusion is that premodern expansions of language families, in tolerating local cultural autonomy, multilingualism, and diglossia, did not threaten ethnolinguistic identities as has modern globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical markers offer important insights into the portrayal of place, social dynamics, and untold narratives within various landscapes. The vast collection of over 195,000 historical markers scattered throughout the United States provide a wealth of data that can shed light on distinctive representation patterns and narratives associated with different individuals and events. Yet, only a few studies examined historical markers as a valuable data source. The goal of this study is to investigate how Texas women are commemorated through historical markers and to uncover the spatial and temporal patterns and contexts associated with these commemorations. We utilize qualitative GIS method and a suite of corpus linguistics techniques to analyze the spatial, temporal, and thematic patterns of the historical markers in Texas that are dedicated to women. Our findings address the existing gender imbalance and shed light on the underrepresentation of women in Texas' historical narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore changes to settlement and mobility in the northern Raja Ampat Islands (Waigeo, Gam, and Batanta) over the past five centuries, a time when speakers of several Austronesian languages were moving throughout the archipelago. The evidence shows: (1) some settlement relocations were rapid, occurring within a generation, while other settlements remained fixed for hundreds of years; and (2) there were numerous clan and family scale movements that led to high levels of intermarriage between language groups and settlements. The results demonstrate that far from being a place of stasis caught between the worlds of Maluku and New Guinea, Raja Ampat settlement and mobility were highly dynamic. This dynamism prompts us to rethink the relationship between today’s settlement locations, their language affiliations, and the meta-narratives about their recent population histories. We propose that the deeper past of Raja Ampat may have also been characterized by dynamic movement and social flux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalisation poses a challenge for businesses with linguistically diverse staff, prompting the choice of English as the default corporate language. Although many studies extensively explored the role of corporate language policy in large corporations, employees' perceptions of such policy has not been explored adequately. Fewer studies investigate the trends in such perceptions in social media texts. This study fills this gap; it examines the barriers in multinational companies that have adopted a foreign language and analyses employees' attitudes. The study uses computer-assisted text analysis to investigate changes in employees' perceptions of an English-only policy in Rakuten, a Japanese company. It analyses a corpus of 704 social media posts on OpenWork from 2010 to 2018. The study finds some trends in employees' attitudes such as the inconsistency between expectation and reality in terms of 'Englishnization' and the popularity of the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). The findings suggest that Rakuten is not global in the true sense; the value of the TOEIC score is overestimated and the neoliberal employment system affects employees in complex ways. This study contributes to international business language with a bottom-up, employee-centred, and diachronic perspective on language management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a review of the book "Generative Linguistics: A Historical Perspective" by Frederick J. Newmeyer. The reviewer praises the book's comprehensive coverage of the history of generative linguistics, specifically the transition from post-Bloomfieldian structuralism to transformational-generative grammar (TGG). The book examines the impact of Noam Chomsky's work on linguistics, the reception of TGG in Europe, and the contested elections within the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). The reviewer commends Newmeyer's use of personal correspondence and archival material to provide a nuanced understanding of the field's development, and suggests that the book may inspire further research on the history of linguistics. [Extracted from the article]

The omnipresence of multiple crisis diagnoses in contemporary public discourse deeply affects religious education (RE). At first sight, this does not seem to be surprising, insofar as it corresponds to the pedagogical ambition to meaningfully respond to challenges in the lifeworld of learners. Yet, what happens when current phenomena are framed as crisis? Prior to asking the question how RE responds to a particular crisis, one might consider the way in which the perception of reality as crisis emerges and works. Against this background, the paper investigates the use of 'crisis' in RE discourse since 1975. We consider developments up to 2019 using an evenly distributed, diachronic random sample of 485 papers from English RE journals, and then compare this with a synchronic corpus of 31 papers around the emergence of the Covid pandemic. With reference to critical political theory, crises are interpreted as part of normative orders that structure the perception of the respective present. Methodologically, we follow the approach of a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Results show how RE discourse frames its perception of the present by means of diagnosing crises. A critical examination of corresponding attributions and implications opens spaces for alternative ways of thinking and acting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines diachronic development patterns of the concessive though-fronting construction in American English, using corpus data. The findings of this study, on the one hand, show that the fronted expression has been dominantly an AdjP with a subject predicative complement function and a rather negative connotation, and that the major licensing verbs are linking verbs, which is in line with the previous observations in literature on its contemporary uses. However, the findings also show that the construction has undergone some interesting diachronic changes regarding the increasing dominance of AdjP as the syntactic category of the fronted expression, more diverse grammatical functions of the fronted expression than noted in previous literature, the change of the most preferred position of the concessive though-fronting clause, the strong preference for the singular countable bare NP without a/an, and the uses of the copula as the licensing verb. Furthermore, the attested data provide some examples that weaken the movement-based analysis. The findings, therefore, indicate that it is worth investigating its diachronic properties about expressions that occur in the pre-though position, the salient position of the concessive though-fronting clause, licensing verbs, and the relationship between the pre-though expression and its putative gap in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A metric method to numerically measure phonetic and phonemic distances or contrasts, between speech sounds, is put forward. The feature values of the compared phones taken from the standard IPA charts are treated as independent parameters that give rise to corresponding Euclidean distances. As an illustration, the general phone set is mapped to Ukrainian phonemes. The proposed model agrees well with the historical linguistic facts and experimental phonetic data. The described approach may find its due applications in various fields of linguistics and speech technologies, including historical and typological linguistics, language acquisition, phonetic studies, computational phonology, machine translation, information retrieval, and text-to-speech conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time and memory in Gertrude Stein are explored using on the one hand a fragment of her play, What Happened; and on the other hand, the conceptual underpinnings of Fourier transforms as applied in musical composition to relate the 'time domain' to the 'frequency domain' in the description of sonic events. The paper sets these concepts to work in a reconstruction of the operation of memory in interaction with real-time events – both the event being remembered and the act of remembering as an event in time itself, with memory being understood as a harmony-like resonance connecting those moments. The concept of 'harmony' here is given a wider understanding, extending from relations between sounds to relations between people (musicians, collaborators). The paper looks in detail at the collaborative diachronic resonances that lead from Stein's attending a birthday party in 1913, through her writing a play, then a collective reading of the play and the collaborative composition of an opera, to the reconstitution in-time of this act of memory in performance, in collaboration with musicians. Finally, the paper provides an answer to an important question raised by Stein on birthday cakes – is a cut a slice? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the dominating commercial and political dynamics that have influenced Anglophone agents' translation of Chinese women's writing from a diachronic perspective. It mentions as translated literature makes up a limited fraction of the books in the Anglophone market, translated literature written by women can be defined as a minority within a minority.

The present study has conducted a diachronic analysis of law and order metaphors in a self-compiled corpus of China's Government Work Reports (CGWR) over a span of 22 years (2000–2021). By mapping target domains with source domains, we categorized four major types of legal metaphors, including building, physical object, journey, and living being, among which physical object was overwhelmingly predominant. Our analysis suggests metaphorical expressions that highlight physicality more than specificity will constantly remain in use because the stability and universality of such metaphors are conducive to the dissemination and reinforcement of legal thoughts. Additionally, there is a direct correlation between legal metaphors and the government's economic, political, and social concerns, as evidenced by increasing attention paid to various security issues and new challenges in China. Given that the rule of law with Chinese characteristics becomes more institutionally recognized and systematically theorized, legal metaphors are implemented in a top-down manner to justify the exercise of power in CGWRs, making Chinese people identified with the governing philosophy and further contributing to the ideological construction of discourse. This study is thus conducive to a general but insightful understanding of how political stances are embodied and reinforced persuasively in discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical linguistics has witnessed an upsurge in quantitative corpus studies. The bulk of these studies involve the use of regression modelling. We point out a number of potential problems with this approach, and offer an alternative. For a multi-state language change, we propose a Markov model in continuous time. The major advantage of this technique, which has been used in medical contexts, is that it is especially geared towards dealing with time as a variable of interest, while it still allows one to look at the effect of several covariates. In this proof-of-concept article, we look at morphological shifts in preterites in Dutch, from 800ad to 2000ad (n = 14,314). This is a well-researched field, allowing us to investigate the performance of the multi-state Markov model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, the language management discourse in South Africa has focused on the development and intellectualization of the functional status of indigenous African languages in high-status domains. African languages are marginalized despite the existence of various empowering and restorative legislative provisions and policies of the new democratic dispensation. Of particular interest in this paper are the challenges that affect the localization of information and communication technologies in the higher education domain. The reliance mostly on former colonial languages for the transmission of knowledge in education has had a negative impact on the development and intellectualization of these languages. It has been argued that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) localization has the potential of improving information access in indigenous languages which can further facilitate the maximum utilization and development of these languages. The promotion of African languages and their use in scientific domains is critical in addressing historical linguistic inequalities and injustices in the South African higher education sector. In this paper, I argue that the dynamics associated with the connection between macro and micro level language management, and some socio-linguistic and socio-cultural factors affect the ultimate goal of achieving language management goals associated with ICT localization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles within the issue, including an analysis of the dystopian text "Hollow Kingdom," by Kira Jane Buxton, a diachronic analysis of crime fiction writing and re-writing, and the role of characterization within the short story cycle format.

This article offers a critical assessment of the evolution of Roger Lass's epistemology of linguistic change with particular reference to his two influential monographs on explanation: On Explaining Language Change and Historical Linguistics and Language Change. It analyses the most salient tenets espoused in each work and explains the major influences and the contexts in which they were written, as well as their reception by later language historians. It is thematically organised into the following sections: Introduction. Lass's 1980 and 1997 monographs on language change Biographical sketch Against naturalness and markedness Against functionalism Against the agency of speakers in language change Against language contact From Popper to Dawkins: from a dualist to a monist stance Conclusions [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept 'patriarchy' has endured decline in use by historians despite calls for its redemption. One of the main reasons is that uses of 'patriarchy' fall into potentially clashing categories: There are theories of 'patriarchy' as hierarchical authority in the family and there are theories of 'patriarchy' as a ubiquitous or universal structure through which men dominate women. I suggest that the first is more useful because it allows for a better historically situated understanding of patriarchal power. Yet, patriarchy as hierarchical authority is less applicable as a toolbox to understand gender history diachronically, something patriarchy as universal structure aspired to, and a project that we should not abandon along with the abandonment of patriarchy as universal structure. Instead, I argue for an understanding of patriarchal power as something that can help us think about how gendered bodies move through time. By turning more explicitly to the way in which patriarchal power appropriates the body and claims natural and universal status, it can be a potential conceptual tool in the historian's toolbox that helps us address the challenge of diachronic history of gendered bodies without resorting to a biological essentialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to draw attention to the particular situation regarding knowledge of the Grammar–Translation Method (GTM), or lack thereof, which still dominates a great part of the teaching and research scenes. Considering mainly what has been published in Spanish, it provides answers to the questions outlined in its title. To that end, it briefly addresses some aspects covered by research on the GTM which show how imprecise knowledge of this method can be. It focuses then on the teaching scene in Spain regarding the GTM in the context of a history of the methods. Its aim is to refute the belief presented in many academic forums by those who still assume that the History of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning begins with the GTM and summarise it as a history of the methods used to teach mainly grammatical contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the most significant international historical research on the history of language learning and teaching since the 1850s as a starting point, this paper builds on the four contributions to this special issue of Language & History to situate the two historical language teaching methods known as the Reform Method and the Grammar-Translation Method in more detail. Before introducing the origins of the Reform Method, the aims and approaches of these two methods are first considered. Then, based on the secondary literature, a brief investigation is made into the possible origins of the German term 'Grammatik-Übersetzungsmethode' and the English equivalent 'Grammar-TranslationMethod', respectively. Finally, the question of whether the Reform Movement can be considered a success or a failure with respect to the dissemination of oral competencies is addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dass Hammarström relativ unbekannt ist und wenig zitiert wird, liegt sicherlich daran, dass der klassische Strukturalismus, an den er anknüpfte, von anderen theoretischen Modellen abgelöst wurde. Ab 1953 war er Dozent für romanische Sprachen und ab 1955 auch Dozent für Phonetik in Uppsala, wo er das Institut für Phonetik begründete und als erster moderne Linguistik (Saussure, Trubetzkoy, Bloomfield) unterrichtete, was bei seinen historisch und philologisch orientierten Kollegen auf wenig Akzeptanz stieß. Nachdem er 18 Monate in Coimbra bei Armando de Lacerda zugebracht hatte, wo er im Sprachlabor die Aufnahmen auswertete, die er mit Lacerda in Südportugal gemacht hatte, promovierte Hammarström [1] mit der Arbeit I Étude de phonétique auditive sur les parlers de l'Algarve i . Dort baute er das Institut für Linguistik auf, das unter seiner Leitung sehr erfolgreich war (vgl. den Nachruf auf Hammarström auf der Homepage der Monash University).[1] Ihn "reizten die Probleme der Eingeborenensprachen, des australischen Englisch und der Immigrantensprachen", wie er in einem Interview in der Zeitung der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität JOGU 146 ([10]) sagte. [Extracted from the article]

The aim of this paper is to apply a corpus-based methodology, based on the measure of perplexity, to automatically calculate the cross-lingual language distance between historical periods of three languages. The three historical corpora have been constructed and collected with the closest spelling to the original on a balanced basis of fiction and non-fiction. This methodology has been applied to measure the historical distance of Galician with respect to Portuguese and Spanish, from the Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century, both in original spelling and automatically transcribed spelling. The quantitative results are contrasted with hypotheses extracted from experts in historical linguistics. Results show that Galician and Portuguese are varieties of the same language in the Middle Ages and that Galician converges and diverges with Portuguese and Spanish since the last period of the 19th century. In this process, orthography plays a relevant role. It should be pointed out that the method is unsupervised and can be applied to other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction argues for competing diachronic and synchronic accounts of melancholy in European and American culture. Taking the pioneering and yet belated work Saturn and Melancholy (1964) of Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, and Raymond Klibansky as its starting point, this article situates melancholy as at once its own, often local and non-specialist discourse as well as a conceptual web binding together medical, artistic, and social innovations, competitions, and turmoil. As a subject, melancholy demands interdisciplinary study, as Dürer's print Melencolia I continues to prove. As a locus of methodological innovation, melancholy in the wake of Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky continues to yield the alternative genealogies, conceptual histories, and formal artistic vocabularies of this volume's contributions whether moving backwards from Dürer to Homer or forward to the present day with Lars von Trier and major European novelists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although military metaphors have been used widely to discuss diseases, little research has been conducted from the perspective of diachronic quantitative analysis, especially in the Chinese context. The outbreak of the major disease Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) occurred in China in 2002 and 2003, which was followed by Corona Virus Disease-19 (COVID-19) in 2019 and 2020. A semantic network analysis is conducted to gain insights into the relationship between the external environment and the use of military metaphors in the Chinese coverage of diseases and to provide a basis for the analysis of COVID-19 discourse in China. A semantic network analysis is conducted to examine the use of military metaphors in the coverage of diseases in the People's Daily. The findings showed that the use of military metaphors in the contemporary Chinese coverage of disease has declined overall, but there were two peaks in the periods from 1966–1975 and from 1996–2006. These peaks could be explained by the contemporary cultural and social changes in China and/or the sudden emergence of infectious diseases throughout the country. The findings also showed that offensive military metaphors have been favored over defensive and military process metaphors, which may be related to the traditional demonization of disease in China. Finally, the findings showed connections between the collectivization of the subject and the use of military metaphors in the Chinese coverage of disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European language histories, including the history of Dutch, have often been portrayed as broadly linear developments towards one uniform standard language. In this biased account, rooted in the nation-building era around 1800, language diversity and multilingualism were largely rendered invisible. Against the background of clearly segregated spaces, politically and linguistically, border settings have particularly challenged the monolingual ideology of 'one nation–one language'. Taking a historical-sociolinguistic perspective, this article focuses on the Dutch-German borderlands in the long nineteenth century as an intriguing case to investigate historical multilingualism and language contact 'from below'. Despite the growing importance of nation-states and their standard languages, it is shown that multilingual practices and contact phenomena can still be traced in handwritten archival documents from the private sphere. Illustrative examples come from various family archives in the border area as well as from a unique collection of letters written by (Low) German labour migrants to their Dutch employer. These sources give evidence of the Dutch-German borderlands as a multi-faceted sociolinguistic space well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, they suggest that established theories of multilingualism and language contact may require rethinking in order to account for less clear-cut and more fluid practices in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framed by theories and methods from critical discourse analysis and social semiotics, this comparative case study of six Missouri school systems asked: How do school districts represent and address their changing communities? Discourses of equity, language, identity, and demographic change were examined across school system websites, mission statements, and policies. Analyses showed that all cases except for one White rural district highlighted the value of diversity through their mission statements, homepage photos, and hyperlinks to policies and resources for changing communities. However, four districts also presented deficit perspectives about racially, culturally, and linguistically minoritized students and highlighted neoliberal educational reform values of marketable competitiveness and accountability. Only one highlighted social equity and inclusivity. Deeper analyses focused on three cases demonstrate how competing discourses reflect ideological debates in education, which can shape community engagement and perceptions of students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating resources are distinct in that they change over time in such a way that their previous content is replaced with updated content. This study examines how integrating resources can be modeled using the entities and relationships of the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM) and clarifies how they can be identified. While monographs have been extensively analyzed, integrating resources have received very little attention. Applying the model unmodified to integrating resources is neither practical nor theoretically sound. With the addition of two proposed relationships, the model can be extended to accommodate the diachronic relationship intrinsic between expressions and manifestations exhibited by integrating resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current state of archaeological research about slavery in Africa faces the challenge of recognising the existence and grasping the meanings of slaving practices from times without written records. These challenges translate into methodological difficulties as to how to identify the material signatures of slavery without having recourse to a pre-established, and therefore static, definition of slavery. Building on the contributions of archaeologists, historians and linguists, this article explores how Proto-Luban speakers, an ancient speech community belonging to the Bantu linguistic family, conceptualised slavery and might have used enslaved individuals in ritualised sacrifices to placate or please ancestors during the burial of powerful individuals in the Upemba Depression of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The reconstructed lexicon of the language once spoken in the area suggests that the process of killing individuals involved the reinterpretation of a durable set of meanings related to slaving practices in Central Africa as social actors responded to important changes in social and political life. The paper suggests that the method of direct association between archaeological and linguistic evidence allows scholars to shed new light on the antiquity of both slavery and human sacrifice among Proto-Luban speakers during the early second millennium AD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to offer a description of four of the existing subcorpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Both the principles of compilation and the sociolinguistic variables considered during the process of text selection will be described. The editorial practice underlying the computerisation of texts, as well as several pilot studies, will also be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presidential speeches are often investigated as privileged readings of the state of the nation. A recurrent theme in the speeches of Nigerian presidents is corruption, and this reflects the enormity of national concern with the impact corruption has on social life, the economy and infrastructure development. Whereas research on corruption appears to be overwhelming due to its significance, questions useful for a more nuanced understanding of the subject have rarely been posed. Thus, little is known about the intensity of articulation of corruption over time, how social moments of enunciation can shape the articulation of corruption, as well as the types of corruption that are of concern. To provide answers to these questions, this article uses corpora, combined with transitivity analysis in systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis, to analyse corruption in Nigeria from novel and especially diachronic standpoints. Findings show that (1) the articulation of corruption in the speeches, including the types expressed, have varied over time, and (2) the moments of enunciation of the speeches are often shaped, among others, by a need to gain legitimacy on assumption of office, a perception of how corrupt a preceding administration was and a verbalised determination to tackle corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to chart the diachronic progression of the English retranslations of Xi You Ji (The Journey to the West) and the intercultural trajectories of this ancient Chinese fictional canon. Empirically informed by WorldCat, the world's largest library catalogue, this study shows that retranslation progressively enables a national literature from a third world to exert a global influence. The century-long retranslation of The Journey to the West has undergone four cohesive phases from religious hybridism, secularisation, religious restoration to multimedia adaptation, registering an enormous proliferation since the twenty-first century. In addition, inter-semiotic translation, in the form of children's books, films, and television products, contributes strikingly to the literary impact of the source text. Reformulation and reinterpretation are also important themes in the process of retranslation, and they can be regarded as an intricate result of the relevant ideology, poetics, patronage and other socio-cultural factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite abundant discussions on English relative pronoun/relativizer alternation or variation, a more systematic and holistic examination needs to be carried out in a single research study to provide a totality of truth in relativizer alternation by including both language-internal and -external factors, while considering the effect size of each factor. With this goal in mind, this study examines subject relativizer alternation using ICE-GB. The results of language-internal and -external factors were addressed both qualitatively and quantitatively. This research sheds light on the grammatical variation, and it also provides succinct pictorial mechanism of subject relativizer alternation based on major findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The etymological study of Early Irish began in the Old Irish period (c. 700‒900 a.d.), under the influence of Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, and, because of its flexible hermeneutic potential, it enjoyed great popularity in the middle and early modern periods. It is only with the rise of modern comparative linguistics, especially of Indo-European linguistics in the second half of the 19th century, that the art of Irish etymology attained scholarly rigour. Over the past 150 years, paradigm shifts in Indo-European studies (laryngeal theory, accent/ablaut classes of inflection, derivational morphology) and the development of modern technology (digitisation of texts, e.g. eDIL, ISOS) have repeatedly chang-ed the methods and the course of Irish etymological studies. The impact of some of these external factors will be illustrated with examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this contribution is to analyze the linguistic practices of a migrant collective, speakers of a minoritized language, from a glottopolitical perspective. This will be illustrated by the description of the communicative practices of the migrant workers from Galicia (Spain) in Hanover (Federal Republic of Germany) in the 1960s and beyond. In order to do so, the articulation of two specific ideologemes held by German and Spanish institutions will be examined, namely the 'myth of return' that surrounded the Spanish migration to the FRG and the 'one nation, one language, one State' triad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Filip Vesdin, known by his monastic name Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo (1748–1806), was a Carmelite missionary stationed from 1776 to 1789 in Southwestern India. Vesdin authored an impressive opus of 32 books and smaller treatises on Brahmanic religion and customs, oriental manuscripts and antiques collections, language comparison and missionary history. This article focuses on the field of language comparison, principally on Vesdin's book De antiquitate et affinitate linguae Zendicae, Samscrdamicae, et Germanicae dissertatio (= Dissertation on the Antiquity and the Affinity of the Zend, Sanskrit, and Germanic Languages), published in Rome in 1798. In this rather short treatise (56 pages), the most important part consists of three word-lists where a large number of words from Avestan, Sanskrit and Germanic languages are compared in order to prove that these languages are related. The paper presents Vesdin's three word-lists together with a description and evaluation of his views on the relationships between these languages in order to highlight his significance in the history of comparative and historical linguistics. The paper also provides new insights into the relationship of De antiquitate to Vesdin's later proto-linguistic treatise, De Latini sermonis origine (1802). Abbreviations Av.: Avestan; Guj.: Gujaratī; IIr.: Indo-Iranian; Lat.: Latin; Malab.: Malabaricum (Vesdin's term for Malayāḷam); Malay.: Malayāḷam; MHG: Middle High Germa; NHG: New High German; NP: New Persian; OAv.: Old Avestan; OFris.: Old Frisian; OHG: Old High German; OSax.: Old Saxon; Pahl.: Pahlavi; PG: Proto Germanic; PIE: Proto Indo-European; Skt.: Sanskrit; YAv.: Young Avestan [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By appealing to the similarity between pre-vital and post-mortem nonexistence, Lucretius famously tried to show that our anxiety about death was irrational. His so-called Symmetry Argument has been attacked in various ways, but all of these strategies are themselves problematic. In this paper, I propose a new approach to undermining the argument: when Parfit's distinction between identity and what matters is applied, not diachronically (as he uses it) but across possible worlds, the alleged symmetry can be broken. Although the pre-vital and posthumous time spans that we could have experienced are indeed analogous with respect to our identity, they are not analogous with respect to psychological continuity, which forms the basis of prudential concern. Lucretius even anticipated the Parfitian distinction. He did not, however, notice the significance that it has for his Symmetry Argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, on the heels of the global financial crisis, two major crises hit Spain as its massive real estate bubble burst. The first was economic and had disastrous effects in all sectors of Spanish society. The second was a crisis of political legitimacy which called into question the validity of the very political institutions created during the transition from the Francoist dictatorship to democracy. What is particularly unique about Spain's contemporary experience is that the financial crisis, by putting people in serious economic peril, opened a dialogue about the lost opportunities in the transition from fascism to democracy. The rapid politicization of a massive component of Spanish society post-crisis amounted to a collective awakening, best captured by a popular slogan of protest in 2011 'dormíamos, despertamos.' Tracing some the history of the language of the plazas from Spain's most important post-crisis protests to the language of institutional change, reveals both the profound effects of the global financial crisis as well as the cultural and generational shift in the contemporary political arena. This paper analyzes the way in which these new movements present a alternative to the political narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a brief but hopefully clarificatory account of the three language families generally referred to by linguists as Southern African Khoisan, and outlines ongoing and unresolved linguistic debates concerning relationships between the three families. The need is emphasised for linguists to move away from pre-theoretical assumptions based on the colonial construct of "race", and—in the context of investigating diachronic language change—to include consideration rather of the social status of different speaker communities in relation to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analytical construct known as community of practice – a group of people linked by the pursuit of a joint enterprise and sharing a repertoire of resources to this end – is used extensively in sociolinguistic research into the diffusion of variation in connection with the construction of both identity and social meaning and as part of a common, locally-constructed style. Communities of practice are also crucial in the diffusion of standard as well as non-standard practices and I believe that this tenet – which certainly holds for the present – could also be extended to the past, adding a new dimension to the historical study of standardisation. In this paper I intend to reconstruct a fifteenth-century community of practice on the evidence afforded by the late Middle English collection of correspondence known as the Stonor Letters. I will analyse the linguistic resources that members of this community of practice shared, paying particular attention to spelling focusing as demonstrated by the reduced frequency of spelling variants in their letters when compared to the orthography of letters by non-members. This perspective can thus help view historical proto-standardisation in a new light, one which associates it with processes of identity construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Victorian period in Britain saw the curious emergence of the word 'brick' as a term of high praise, picking out for commendation certain qualities of character: reliability and a lack of whimsy. The novels and everyday conversation of the period were full of such phrases as 'you're a brick' or 'he's a regular brick'. In this paper, I trace the history of this phrase in the respectable as well as popular literature of the period, including some ironic attempts to claim for it a classical pedigree. I offer some hypotheses about how we might understand the metaphor of the brick in terms of the needs and values of mainstream British (and more generally, imperial) culture in the period. As an illuminating contrast, I consider the fate of a similar metaphor from mid-twentieth-century culture, 'square', which picks out roughly similar qualities of character but to reprove them. I conclude with some theoretical reflections on how the study of outdated colloquialisms might bring the resources of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the history of moral concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developed within the cross-linguistic framework of meteorological constructions formulated by Eriksen, Kittilä and Kolehmainen, the present article reviews and analyses manners of the encoding of precipitation events in isiXhosa (S 41). These include expressions of rain, hail, sleet, and snow. Overall, the evidence provided corroborates various synchronic and diachronic aspects of the framework posited by Eriksen et al. Furthermore, the study reveals several properties of precipitation constructions in isiXhosa that may have implications for a broader typological theory: greater complexity in the encoding of the event of rain in comparison to the other types of precipitation; lack of uniformity with respect to the morphosyntactic encoding of precipitation phenomena; onomatopoeic sources of precipitation verbs and nouns, and their relation to ideophones; presence of the expletive predicate type in non-Indo-European languages; and certain regularities concerning the argument structure of precipitation verbs, their (in)transitivity and valency changing processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A century after the slaves of Saint-Domingue won their liberty, their descendants, the free peasantry of the Republic of Haiti, remained impoverished and without access to channels of recourse. Their isolation was exacerbated by the linguistic divide in Haiti, where French was the exclusive language of official and written contexts while the majority of the population spoke only Haitian Creole. At the start of the twentieth century, a movement began to dismantle this linguistic hierarchy. Haitian poets and novelists started using Creole in their works of literature in order to contest the notion that Creole was an inferior language. They believed that a linguistic revolution would allow Haiti's monolingual masses to participate in public life for the first time in Haiti's history. Georges Sylvain, Frédéric Marcelin, and their colleagues effectively opened the debate around the status of Creole, and founded a national literature in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a case for reassessing the 'integrity' (meaning: completeness and condition of being unmarred) of stage-oriented translations as written texts. First, I argue that theatre translations can fully lend themselves to a literary analysis, which leads us to make a case for studying them with a diachronic perspective, and to consider them as historiographical tools. The idea of integrity of translated play-texts, however, faces a major obstacle: not only has the inseparability of text and performance been put forward by a prominent branch of semiotics, but this inseparability is argued to be a fundamental component of the translation process by critics and practitioners. The idea of an 'integrity' (meaning: completeness) of the target text is unquestionably negated in certain types of collaborative practices. After considering some of the main criticisms put forward, the article will envisage cases in which the textual integrity can still be validated. Without altogether refuting these objections, this article still maintains that, at least, the integrity (meaning: unmarred, unviolated) of the target text, in some cases, can be preserved through the processes of collaborative translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The family of Iranian languages consists of several groups, of which the Kurdish language(s) is among the most diverse and problematic. Lack of authentic knowledge of the present state of Kurdish languages and, in some cases, the absence of proper methodologies are among the main obstacles in the way to proper historical study of these languages. Among the most complicated issues in Kurdish studies is Gurani. Common to most linguistic studies of Gurani is their assumption of a mass migration of the Kurds from the Caucasus and northern Iran to the central Zagros area and a subsequent assimilation of local groups including the ‘Gurāns’. We have investigated the data and the assumptions of some of the more influential researches and have attempted to shed a new light on the concept of ‘Gurani’. The outcome of this study—besides a critique of the methodology of linguistic approaches to Gurani—is the redefinition of Gurani not as a distinct practical language or dialect but as a literary idiom which, cannot be cast into any linguistic categories. It is also shown how Gurani has played a vital role in preserving and transmitting cultural data of diverse groups of people in the Zagros area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the text-critical challenge and the variationist analysis in application to the historical linguistics of Biblical Hebrew, coming out in recent research, particularly in Historical Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew by Robert Rezetko and Ian Young (2014). Different textual transmissions have become part of the linguistic corpus and an indispensable part of historical-linguistic research. Variationist analysis corroborates that some explicit innovative processes in the standard literary idiom of the Persian period were reversed by the conservative tendency, distinctive in the Qumran corpus, so that it will be more accurate to speak about two different stages in Late Biblical Hebrew development: Persian period and Late Hellenistic--early Roman periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colloquialization has been identified as one of the most important factors in short-term language change, and has been proposed as playing a particularly important role in Australian English. At the same time, some studies have observed the contrasting trend of densification (as one manifestation of anti-colloquialization), where information is condensed into fewer words—a characteristic of written language unlike the more diffuse expression expected in spoken styles. There is limited research into the dynamic between these complementary patterns of language change using large diachronic corpora and comprehensive sets of features associated with colloquialization and densification. This paper addresses these gaps by applying the multidimensional method of Biber (1988) to the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus (1901-2015). A quantitative analysis (at both the macro-level of factor (or dimension) scores and the micro-level of individual features) provides substantive evidence for the effects of both processes of language change. It is proposed that five factors (editorial policy, communicative aims of the register, intended audience, production mechanisms and broader social context) interact in shaping the relationship between these two processes in this register. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In comparison with late Middle English, a period characterised by a high level of orthographic variation, the beginning of the 16th century witnesses the emergence of an identifiable standard English spelling, which was not completed in print until about 1650 (Nevalainen 2006: 32; Rutkowska 2013: 48). Punctuation is no exception, and it is in the early modern period when the English language definitely consolidates a wider inventory of punctuation symbols which, after their incorporation into the English system of punctuation, were soon immersed in a process of specialisation for the expression of new syntactic relations. The study of punctuation has traditionally focused on Old and Middle English handwritten material - literary and scientific texts in particular - while the early modern period has been generally left unexplored (Calle-Martín forthcoming). The existing approaches to the topic are, however, descriptions of the specific systems found in individual texts, which offer a minute analysis of the choices and preferences of particular scribes. The diachronic approach has been frequently disregarded, perhaps on the erroneous assumption that punctuation lacks uniformity. The present paper, therefore, sets out to analyse scribal punctuation from a diachronic perspective in Early Modern English in order to shed some new light on the standardisation of punctuation symbols in the expression of three types of clauses: coordinate clauses, adjectival clauses (defining and non-defining relative clauses) and conditional if-clauses. The study relies on handwritten material from the Málaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose for the historical period 1500-1700. The corpus has been compiled so as to contain both theoretical treatises and recipe material written in the 16th and 17th centuries, which allows for a diachronic and variationist approach to the study of punctuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a radical departure from the orthodoxies of postcolonial African cultural and linguistic nationalism, the paper calls for acceptance of English as an African language with a central argument that insists that all languages widely used in Africa ought to be classified as either indigenous or non-indigenous. This argument rests on a vigorous critique of what the author identifies as the principle of absolute autochthony as the only determinant of which languages are African and which are not. As the most eloquent and influential proponent of this principle, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is the central focus of the paper with regard to both the positive and negative aspects of his ideas and positions on the language question in colonial and postcolonial Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the history of a single word and its movement from pre-Islamic Arabia to the languages of modern Europe. It focuses on the key moment of the early nineteenth century when the Arabic ‘ghazwā’ served as the root and model of the French ‘razzia’ in the early Algerian colony. Tracing the history of the ghazwā through Islamic history and its subsequent emergence in Romance forms, the essay is comparative in the sense that it asks what happens in the movement of ideas and practices through loanwords. It suggests that the violence of modern empire was linguistic in a sense which encompasses the connections between thoughts, words and deeds, whilst critiquing literatures on lexical borrowing which tend to assume the innocence of linguistic exchange. A broader conclusion on transnational history is essayed through a consideration of the razzia in the context of the so-called ‘langue franque’: that métissage of Romance languages and Arabic which prevailed amongst traders across the Mediterranean in the early modern period, and which disappeared in the imperial Mediterranean of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a comparison is made of the expression of possibility in West Nyanza Bantu languages in order to reconstruct the origins of Luganda’s two most frequent possibility markers, viz. the near-synonymous auxiliaries -sóból- and -yînz-. Earlier Luganda diachronic corpus-driven analyses showed that -yînz- has been involved in expressing all possibility categories since the 1890s, which is when Luganda was first reduced to writing, while -sóból- acquired deontic possibility as a meaning only in the 1950s. Although this would suggest that -yînz- is the possibility marker with the greatest time depth in Luganda and across West Nyanza, with -sóból- a relative newcomer, the comparative data which is presented in this article indicates the opposite. It is shown that while -yînz- only exists in some West Nyanza languages (namely in the subgroup which includes Luganda, Lusoga and Lugwere), -sóból- is attested in all West Nyanza languages as well as in other Great Lakes Bantu languages outside West Nyanza. The fact that the cognates of -sóból- in all Great Lakes Bantu languages carry a dynamic modal meaning ‘be able’ suggests that its modal usage is older in any of the individual languages considered here than what language-internal Luganda data seems to suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]