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December 22, 2010
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The major aim of this paper is to demonstrate through the grammar of the verb phrase in Standard English (StdE) and Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) that NPE is a distinct language. The paper draws on data collected from 30 Nigerian University Graduates from three ethnolinguistic regions. Although many scholars have pointed out that NPE is a language (Agheyisi, West African Pidgin: Simplification and Simplicity, University of Stanford, 1971; Elugbe and Omamor, Nigerian Pidgins: Background and Prospects, Heinemann, 1991), not many of them have examined the verb phrase in NPE with a view to showing that its grammar is distinctive. It has been shown in this paper that the NPE verb phrase is sharply different from StdE verb phrase, and because the verb is at the centre of the clause and can determine its argument, it can be argued that NPE whose verbal grammar is radically different from that of English is a separate language. The pattern of clustering of NPE verb phrases with other NPE verb phrases or other crieterial features of NPE is also a demonstration that NPE is a distinct language. Finally, the subjects made sharp switches from StdE to NPE, speaking in blocks of first one code and then the other: this is like the behaviour of bilinguals moving from one language to another.
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December 22, 2010
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The subject of this dialectological paper is a synchronous description of the major phonetic, morphological and accentual characteristics of the dialects that exist in the upper and middle river basin of the Moravica and in the upper flow of the Studenica, i.e. in the regions which belong to the municipalities of Arilje and Ivanjica (in west Serbia).
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December 22, 2010
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In this paper I have attempted to classify and explain 30 words and phrases representative of language medley in Northern France. They illustrate a mixture of Germanic and Romance languages: Flemish in French and Picard, French in Flemish, Picard in French and vice versa. I will discuss imagination, word-play and lexical creativity in code-switching situations, as well as the dynamics of regional variation in the epilinguistic data under consideration.
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December 22, 2010
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Linguistic Change in Southwest German: from apical to uvular r We start with a brief description of the realization of /r/ in standard German and proceed to examine the evolution of the /r/ in Alemannic dialects in general. We then look at the specific conditions which apply to the /r/ in southwest Germany. Recordings for the ‘Atlas of Southwest German’ demonstrate a multitude of variations of the /r/; in the west, the uvular R dominates, whereas in the east the apical r is the most common realization. In the area around Lake Constance, there is a third variant, namely dorsal r. According to the definition of sound change established by Haag (Teuthonista 6: 1–35, 1929), the change from apical to uvular r should be classified as the older one; it was a conscious adoption of uvular r, first by speakers in towns and their immediate surroundings, which then became incorporated into regional dialects. The transformation of lingual to dorsal r, on the other hand, is regarded in Haag's terms as a current sound change, which is still in progress.
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December 22, 2010
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Dialect atlases comprise considerable numbers of linguistic feature maps, i.e. dialect maps representing one linguistic feature each. Large amounts of data like these are often difficult to handle. This article presents a new quantitative method for the automatic analysis of such large corpora of linguistic feature maps. It makes use of geographical similarities between single maps to establish a system of criteria for structural relatedness. Furthermore, it employs statistical techniques to test whether given linguistic relations between the maps coincide significantly with structural relations. To achieve this, each underlying point-symbol map is converted into an area-class map (with all the original information still available). These area-class maps yield additional information regarding their structural composition. Cluster analysis is then employed to obtain groupings of similar maps. Such groupings facilitate the search for language-internal factors that influence the geographical distribution of linguistic variants, as the relevance of any given linguistic parameter for spatial patterns can be tested using statistical methods. Moreover, language-external factors, such as topographical conditions, can be tested in the same way. Thus, this new method allows for a profound and substantiated investigation of the regularities that can be found in the geographical distributions of linguistic variants.
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December 22, 2010
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The Majorcan dialectologist Antoni M. Alcover (1862–1932) was the first researcher to record information for use in the study of the conjugation of Catalan verbs. He compiled almost 500,000 verb forms corresponding to the complete conjugation of 75 verbs in 149 localities in the Catalan-speaking area. These data were published under the title “La flexió verbal en els dialectes catalans”. From 1999, work began to complete and computerize these materials in order to make them accessible to scholars in the field and to the public. These computer applications have a descriptive character: they show dialectal and subdialectal areas, and isoglosses, in a graphic form. However, it is also possible to use these materials from an interpretative point of view. The aim of this paper is to apply a suitable dialectometric analysis to the “Verbal flexion” materials, which can only be interpreted using quantitative analysis techniques. Taking multiple answers into account, we use the calculation of the Mean Degree of Confluence and we compare the results with the dialectometric analysis obtained applying Hans Goebl's methodology, which is based on the use of single answers.
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December 22, 2010