This article accounts for a case of pragmatic borrowing in a weak or casual language contact situation where English is a foreign language for the recipient language community, Spanish. The study ...describes and analyzes representative and specific examples of one English pragmatic discourse phraseological marker, namely, oh wait, in a sample of spontaneous synchronic comments made by football followers in Spanish football chats. The main purpose is to gain new insights into the use and distribution of oh wait in Spanish by focusing on its spelling variations, distribution, semantic and mainly pragmatic meanings and functions. The analysis shows that chat participants consciously resort to this foreign pragmatic marker as an ironic device with multiple simultaneous functions which affect the four levels of chat conversations, namely, the interaction or conversation itself, the previous statement or utterance, the other participants or interlocutors, and the user, participant or writer him/herself.
•Oh wait: a borrowed ironic pragmatic marker frequent in Spanish football chats.•How and why this English marker is incorporated into Spanish football comments.•Semantic and functional adaptability in Spanish: narrowing and broadening.•Oh wait multifunctionality operates at four different levels of discourse.•Different native and non-native (imperfect) uses of oh wait.
This paper investigates the influence of the relative size of speech communities on language use in multilingual regions and cities. Due to peoples' everyday mobility inside a city, it is still ...unclear whether the size of a population matters for language use on a sub-city scale. By testing the correlation between the size of a population and language use on various spatial scales, this study will contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which sociodemographic factors influence language use. The present study investigates two particular phenomena that are common to multilingual speakers, namely language mixing or Code-Switching and using multiple languages without mixing. Demographic information from a Canadian census will make predictions about the intensity of Code-Switching and language use by multilinguals in cities of Quebec and neighborhoods of Montreal. Geolocated tweets will be used to identify where these linguistic phenomena occur the most and the least. My results show that the intensity of Code-Switching and the use of English by bilinguals is influenced by the size of anglophone and francophone populations on various spatial scales such as the city level, land use level (city center vs. periphery of Montreal), and large urban zones on the sub-city level, namely the western and eastern urban zones of Montreal. However, the correlation between population figures and language use is difficult to measure and evaluate on a much smaller sub-urban scale such as the city block scale due to factors such as population figures missing from the census and people's mobility. A qualitative evaluation of language use on a small spatial scale seems to suggest that other social influences such as the location context or topic of discussion are much more important predictors for language use than population figures. Methods will be suggested for testing this hypothesis in future research. I conclude that geographic space can provide us information about the relation between language use in multilingual cities and sociodemographic factors such as a speech community's size and that social media is a valuable alternative data source for sociolinguistic research that offers new insights into the mechanisms of language use such as Code-Switching.
The Upper Guinea Creoles (UGCs) are a family of closely related Afro-Portuguese languages, comprising three branches: continental (Casamance and Guinea-Bissau), insular (Cape Verde) and ABC (Dutch ...Antilles). Several continental and insular UGC varieties make use of a specific set of adverbs which can be called “ideophones” following Dingemanse’s (2012) definition of the term. This paper aims at providing a comprehensive study of UGC ideophones. Based on a database collected from native speakers, it characterizes the main phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic features of ideophonic items in UGCs. In addition, it investigates the origins of UGC ideophones and compares the use and behavior of this word class in continental and insular UGCs, showing the degree of both African and Portuguese influence on each UGC variety considered.
Lectal coherence in a border bilingual community Gradoville, Michael; Fernandez, Sofía; Long, Avizia ...
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics,
05/2024, Letnik:
17, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
While studies of lectal coherence, the extent to which speakers’ uses of multiple linguistic variables correlate, have not historically been frequent within sociolinguistics, recent studies have ...added to our knowledge of co-variation between variables. The present study contributes to this growing body of knowledge by analyzing co-variation of the Spanish voiced obstruent series /bdɡ/ in the bilingual border community of Rivera, Uruguay. On the basis of 5,569 tokens from sociolinguistic interview data from 40 Riverense Spanish speakers, we acoustically analyze mean constriction of /bdɡ/ for each speaker and each phoneme, taking into consideration the influence of Portuguese cognates and Spanish orthography on /b/. Results show positive correlations between constriction of /d/, /ɡ/, and /b/ (when the latter is spelled and has a /b/ cognate), which is expected given the parallel social patterning for these sounds. However, the relationship between these portions of the data and the contrast of /b/ on the basis of orthography and cognates is much weaker. While one factor that could contribute to this empirical observation is methodological in nature, individual lects reflect the unique linguistic histories of their users, including who their interlocutors are, and in a linguistically diverse community, diverse lects can be expected.
The mutual influence of Indic and Iranic languages in the ‘contact zone’ of the upper Indus valley and the adjoining mountain ranges has long been known to scholarship. Previous scholarship has ...observed lexical borrowings in the ancient period, and phonological and morphological features in the modern period. Outside of this area, the Indic and Iranic languages developed in different ways, largely in accordance with the prominence of the syllable and the word, respectively, in their phonologies. The important Middle Indic languages of Gandhari and Apabhramsha, however, appear to have participated in certain structural changes that affected all of the contemporary Middle Iranic languages, above all the reduction of final syllables. The fact that the earliest attestation of these changes in Middle Indic occurs in languages strongly associated with the Indo-Iranian contact zone suggests that contact may have played a critical role. The chronology of these changes in Middle Indic also suggests that they occurred in the ‘Saka-Kuṣāṇa Age’ in the early centuries of the common era.
Describing themselves as linguists who work on the fringes of sociolinguistic studies of sign languages, the authors explore their interest in how influences from different languages and different ...modalities are employed by different sign language communities, by different groups and individuals within those communities, and by the ideological significance that is often attached to these phenomena.
El estudio, realizado en el ámbito de una pequeña comunidad escolar en Santa Rosa –en el estado de Paraná al sur de Brasil, en la zona de frontera entre Argentina y Paraguay– se concentra en analizar ...desde un punto de vista sociolingüístico y psicolingüístico, las actitudes lingüísticas locales hacia las cuatro principales lenguas utilizadas en el lugar: portugués, alemán, español y guaraní. Los datos se recolectaron por medio de cuestionarios entre 54 sujetos infantiles, estudiantes del segundo al quinto grado (de entre 7 y 11 años de edad), y parecen revelar ciertos indicios de fracturas en la relación entre los dos principales grupos étnicos del lugar –‘blancos’ (mayoritariamente germanodescendientes) e ‘indígenas’ (guaraníes)– que no resultan evidentes en una observación más superficial de la vida cotidiana local ni en el discurso público de los sujetos adultos al respecto.
Abstracta
El presente estudio rastrea el impacto en el paisaje lingüístico de las elecciones autonómicas vascas del año 2020. A partir de un trabajo de campo en dos localidades de distinto perfil ...demográfico y político y de encuestas entre los partidos en liza, analizamos, por una parte, la presencia o ausencia en el espacio público de las distintas formaciones y sus estrategias de comunicación. Por otra parte, examinamos los recursos de tipo semiótico empleados en la campaña y la distribución de las dos lenguas de uso en la comunidad en las señales del corpus. Los resultados nos permiten detectar el traslado de los recursos físicos tradicionales al ámbito virtual, esfera que asimila cada vez con más fuerza la funcionalidad de los primeros. Asimismo, se revelan tendencias y tensiones en la elección de lenguas, de acuerdo con la posición en el espectro ideológico, que nos obligan a repensar el propio concepto de autoría en este tipo de investigaciones.
