Upper German dialects make heavy use of diminutive strategies, but little is known about the actual conceptual effects of those devices. This paper is the first to present two large-scale ...psycholinguistic experiments that investigate this issue in East Franconian, a dialect spoken in Bavaria. Franconian uses both the diminutive suffix -la and the quantifying construction a weng a lit. ‘a little bit a’ to modify noun phrases. Our first experiment shows that diminutization has no effect on conceptualization of magnitude: People do not think of a smaller/weaker/shorter etc. referent when the NP is modified by the morphological diminutive, the quantifying construction, or their combination. The second experiment involves gradable NPs and shows that, again, the morphological diminutive has no effect on how people conceptualize the degree to which a gradable nominal predicate holds; in contrast, a weng a reduces it significantly. These experiments suggest that diminutization does not have uniform effects across semantic domains, and our results act as a successful example of extending the avenue of cognitive psychology into dialectology with the active participation of a speaker community.*
The Slovak Dictionary from Literature and Dialects in Banska Bystrica in 1923 which was elaborated and published by Karel Kalal and Miroslav Kalal occupies a specific place in the interwar ...Czechoslovak bilingual lexicography. This dictionary was -- undoubtedly because of its name which explicitly states the term dialect -- often particularly understood and used as a dialect dictionary in the Slovak and Slavic dialectology, especially in the years before issuing the Dictionary of Slovak Dialects. There have always been and still are the problems with its citing, since several incorrect bibliographic data, to which the author draws attention in the text, are stated about this work in the professional (encyclopedic and linguistic) literature.
The aim of this paper is to present the preliminary results of my research on the Vulgar Latin in the Lusitania province. The research is being conducted within the framework of the computational ...project LLDB and concerns the regional diversification of Latin. By providing support graphics, this software allows the visualisation of data according to the different linguistic levels as well as their statistical distribution in diachronic perspective. Key words: regional diversification of Latin, Latin dialectology, Latin epigraphy, vulgar Latin, Latin of Hispania, Lusitania
Language documentation has been carried out in Iran since the late 1800s but in a sporadic way, and even now, the scholarly picture of the country’s linguistic landscape is fragmentary. The present ...article responds to this state of affairs in a modest way by working toward a systematic overview of the language situation in one area of the country: Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province of western Iran, where the high Zagros Mountains open onto the Iranian Plateau. In this study, conducted in the context of the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) research programme, we chronicle our research process for this region, beginning with an inventory of languages spoken here—varieties of Bakhtiari, Charmahali, and Turkic—and an overview of their geographical distribution. This initial step enabled us to select 30 varieties from 26 locations across the province for in-depth research, including implementation of the ALI language data questionnaire. Data generated by the study have resulted in two language distribution maps as well as a series of linguistic structure maps. Initial analysis of lexical and phonological data provides insight into defining features of each language as well as structures shared between them as a result of language contact in the region.
What are the large-scale patterns and generalizations that emerge when investigating morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a bird’s eye perspective? To address this question, this study ...draws on the questionnaire-based morphosyntactic database of the
Handbook of Varieties of English, utilizing a number of quantitative analysis techniques (frequency and correlation measures, multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, and principal component analysis). We demonstrate (i) that the database yields a number of generalizations and implicational tendencies relating to vernacular angloversals and universals of New Englishes, (ii) that there is a surprisingly consistent typological division between English L1 vernaculars, on the one hand, and English-based pidgins and creoles on the other hand, and (iii) that World Englishes can, on aggregate, be seen to vary along two major dimensions which we interpret as being indicative of morphosyntactic complexity and analyticity. In conclusion, we offer that the
Handbook’s morphosyntactic database presents some interesting methodological challenges to dialectology and dialectometry.
Lexical diversity, the amount of lexical variation shown by a particular concept, varies between concepts. For the concept
, for instance, nearly 3000 English expressions exist, including
, and
. For ...the concept
, however, a significantly smaller number of lexical items is available, like
or
. While earlier variation studies have revealed that meaning-related concept characteristics correlate with the amount of lexical variation, these studies were limited in scope, being restricted to one semantic field and to one dialect area, that of the Limburgish dialects of Dutch. In this paper, we investigate whether the impact of concept characteristics, viz. vagueness, lack of salience and proneness to affect, is manifest in a similar way in other dialects and other semantic fields. In particular, by extending the scope of the earlier studies to other carefully selected semantic fields, we investigate the generalizability of the impact of concept characteristics to the lexicon as a whole. The quantitative approach that we employ to measure concept characteristics and lexical diversity methodologically advances the study of linguistic variation. Theoretically, this paper contributes to the further development of Cognitive Sociolinguistics by showcasing how meaning can be a source of lexical diversity.
Les parlers francoprovençaux valaisans présentent un système des clitiques sujets de la 3
personne du singulier relativement atypique au sein des langues romanes. Comme le français, le romanche et ...certains parlers nord-occitans, gallo-italiens et toscans, ils ont développé un clitique sujet – celui-ci est resté d’emploi facultatif dans les parlers étudiés ici –, mais ont abandonné l’opposition entre le masculin et le féminin héritée des démonstratifs latins dont les formes actuelles sont issues. Parallèlement, ils ont développé, en partie du moins, de nouvelles distinctions morphologiques: la forme du clitique sujet est différente devant verbe à initiale vocalique ou consonantique. Les matériaux de l’
permettent d’étudier et – on l’espère du moins – de comprendre le déroulement de ces évolutions grâce à la synchronie des microsystèmes qui coexistent dans l’espace géolinguistique valaisan.
Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa (1880–1958) studied Hispanic folklore in the American Southwest, Spain, and Spanish America. His research foregrounds Spanish language, verbal arts, and culture of the ...people of greater New Mexico (New Mexico and southern Colorado). Three decades into an energetic career of fieldwork, research, and teaching, Espinosa allied himself with Spanish Nationalism, largely motivated by his religious beliefs. His foundational work in linguistics and dialectology endures, but his contributions to US folklore studies have been largely erased. Critics condemn his insistent identification with Peninsular Spanish rather than Mexican cultural roots and his conservative politics. A more likely motivation for his quest for Spanishness is the Historic Geographic theory and methodology he clung to in the search for origins and dissemination of folktales. Peeling back layers of outdated theory and politics reveals decades of solid fieldwork and documentation, still relevant today. The American Folklore Society (AFS) Notable Folklorists of Color 2019 exhibition and 2022 website have rekindled interest in the career of Espinosa, a past president of AFS.
Este trabajo presenta los resultados de un estudio piloto previo al desarrollo de la aplicación Dialectos del español . En esta investigación se simuló el funcionamiento de la futura aplicación ...mediante un cuestionario Google Forms con preguntas sobre 19 variables morfosintácticas y 5 cuestiones de léxico que se difundió por varios medios de comunicación social y que completaron 547 participantes de diversos países hispanohablantes. Además de aportar una colección de datos relativos tanto a fenómenos ya es tudiados en la bibliografía dialectal y sociolingüística, como a otros que no han sido explorados hasta la época, este estudio ha servido para poner a prueba la metodología que se usará en la aplicación. Esta se orientará no solo a la descripción de la dis tribución geográfica de los fenómenos, sino también a la del cambio lingüístico en curso por innovaciones de los hablantes más jóvenes o por los efectos de los movimientos migratorios nacionales e internacionales.
This study aims to present the conversation robot teacher Tical a wider scale and with the resources synthesis and voice commands . Tical, which became operational as a prototype during the III ...International Congress of Dialectology and Sociolinguistics at UEL in 2014, remains a field of evidence for applications of some theories that maintains an interdisciplinary character among them like Geolinguistics (CARDOSO, 2014a, 2014b), In this paper we present the results obtained by Zivani (1999) and the results obtained in the literature. The 'linguistic robot', even though it had a very limited database and presented several typical failures of such systems and equipped with these resources, served largely to carry out tests related to all areas of knowledge involved and proved to be functional enough to The need to continue the project and research: 'listen', 'speak', perform quick searches and 'know linguistics'.
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