Language & Linguistics Compass

Pell, Marc D.; Monetta, Laura

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00074.xpmid: N/A

In addition to difficulties that affect movement, many adults with Parkinson's disease (PD) experience changes that negatively impact on receptive aspects of their communication. For example, some PD patients have difficulties processing non‐verbal expressions (facial expressions, voice tone) and many are less sensitive to ‘non‐literal’ or pragmatic meanings of language, at least under certain conditions. This chapter outlines how PD can affect the comprehension of language and non‐verbal expressions and considers how these changes are related to concurrent alterations in cognition (e.g., executive functions, working memory) and motor signs associated with the disease. Our summary underscores that the progressive course of PD can interrupt a number of functional systems that support cognition and receptive language, and in different ways, leading to both primary and secondary impairments of the systems that support linguistic and non‐verbal communication.

Nichols, Johanna; Warnow, Tandy

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00082.xpmid: N/A

Over the last 10 or more years, there has been a tremendous increase in the use of computational techniques (many of which come directly from biology) for estimating evolutionary histories (i.e., phylogenies) of languages. This tutorial surveys the different methods and different types of linguistic data that have been used to estimate phylogenies, explains the scientific and mathematical foundations of phylogenetic estimation, and presents methodologies for evaluating a phylogeny estimation method.

Kessler, Brett

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00083.xpmid: N/A

Language classification differs from biological cladistics in that monogenesis cannot be assumed. Before a cladogram or family tree can be accepted, linguists must be convinced that the languages are related at all. Morpheme tables, or word lists, provide a good framework for investigating relatedness, but methodologies for quantifying and assessing the data statistically are still being developed. The comparative method furnished a viable statistic, recurrent sound correspondences, but by no means to see whether they exceeded levels expected by chance. Organizing correspondences into contingency tables permitted hypothesis testing, with Monte Carlo resampling methods providing the flexibility to support a wide variety of test statistics, including different ways of computing sound recurrences and phonetic similarity. Thus, techniques from both the comparative method and multilateral comparison can be deployed with rigorous numeric assessment. Experiments seek to increase the power of the tests to explore new hypotheses and verify long‐range language relationships.

Dimmendaal, Gerrit J.

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00085.xpmid: N/A

Africanists have been criticized by comparative linguists working on language families in other parts of the world for being lumpers. The present contribution reviews current views among specialists on genetic diversity on the African continent. In addition, some of the causal mechanisms behind this language diversity are investigated. More specifically, the role played by innovations in subsistence economies and climatological changes is discussed. Special emphasis, however, is put on attitudes towards the role of language as a marker of social identity and their effect on language diversity.

Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00077.xpmid: N/A

Phonological systems show clear signs of being shaped by phonetics. Sound patterns are overwhelmingly phonetically ‘natural’, in that they reflect the influence of physical constraints on speech production and perception, and categorical phonological processes often mirror low‐level gradient phonetic effects. The question of how best to explain and model the influence of phonetics on phonology has been approached in different ways, one of which situates the locus of explanation in the diachronic domain of language change, in particular sound change. On this view, recurrent sound patterns merely reflect recurrent sound changes with phonetic origins, typically in speech perception. Explicit models of sound change are reviewed and illustrated, in particular Ohala's listener‐based model and Blevins’ Evolutionary Phonology framework, and the relevance of exemplar‐based models of speech production and perception is also noted. Current issues of controversy regarding the adequacy of diachronic vs. synchronic explanations for the typology of sound patterns are surveyed.

Jucker, Andreas H.

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00087.xpmid: N/A

In a broad, sociologically based view of pragmatics, historical pragmatics is a field of study that wants to understand the patterns of intentional human interaction (as determined by the conditions of society) of earlier periods, the historical developments of these patterns, and the general principles underlying such developments. It is based on an empirical study of historical data in all the diversity in which it has survived. Written texts are seen as communicative acts in their own right and they are taken to comprise a broad range of varieties of language that can be located on several different variability scales, such as the scale from the language of immediacy to the language of distance. The field of historical pragmatics can be split into subfields on the basis of the linguistic unit under investigation; from expressions to utterances, discourses, and discourse domains. Future work in historical pragmatics is expected to rely even more heavily on corpus‐linguistic methodologies and to increase the sophistication of such analyses, particularly in terms of pattern searches for functional elements and the inclusion of contextual features.

King, Kendall A.; Fogle, Lyn; Logan‐Terry, Aubrey

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00076.xpmid: N/A

This article describes the newly emerging field of family language policy, defined as explicit and overt planning in relation to language use within the home among family members, and provides an integrated overview of research on how languages are managed, learned, and negotiated within families. A comprehensive framework for understanding family language policy is sketched by bringing together two independent and currently disconnected fields of study: language policy and child language acquisition. Within such a framework, this article reviews research on the role of language ideologies in shaping family language practices, and on the connection between different family language policies, such as the one person–one language approach, and child language outcomes. We argue that family language policies are important as they shape children's developmental trajectories, connect in significant ways with children's formal school success, and collectively determine the maintenance and future status of minority languages.

Charity, Anne H.

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00081.xpmid: N/A

In this article, I examine and promote the role of linguist as agent for social change. I discuss the history and mission of organizations and individual linguists who are dedicated to service through linguistics. I describe the social and community service activities of linguists that may fall just outside of the realm of linguistic scholarship in the most traditional sense. I then provide models for ways in which linguists can become even more socially engaged through social service and public outreach. I highlight the academic sharing and public dissemination of knowledge that linguists already possess as a way for all linguists to be socially active. I then describe my own experiences participating in and teaching service learning‐based research courses.

Speas, Peggy

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00069.xpmid: N/A

In some languages, every declarative sentence includes a morpheme specifying the speaker's evidence or source of information. This article provides an overview of the central theoretical questions addressed in recent research on Evidential morphemes. First, I discuss the question of whether Evidentials constitute a coherent closed‐class system, independent of other systems of grammar. Next, I briefly consider the evidence for an Evidential head in the syntactic representation. Finally, I review the ways in which Evidentials resemble and differ from epistemic modals.

Aldridge, Edith

doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00075.xpmid: N/A

This article surveys the principal generative syntactic analyses that have been proposed for ergativity, found primarily in Inuit, Austronesian, Mayan, and Pama‐Nyungan language families. The main puzzle for generative grammar is how to analyze the behavior of ergative and absolutive arguments in terms of the grammatical functions of subject and object. I show in this article that early approaches tend to treat the absolutive uniformly as a subject or an object, while later analyses move toward disassociating case from grammatical function. Descriptively speaking, this article identifies two types of morphological ergativity, differing in how absolutive case is assigned. Morphological ergativity is also distinguished from syntactic ergativity, which is characterized primarily by a restriction that only absolutives can undergo A’‐movement. In other aspects of the grammar, ergativity is not strikingly different from accusativity.