Looking for an easy-to-use, practical guide to conducting fieldwork in sociolinguistics? This invaluable textbook will give you the skills and knowledge required for carrying out research projects in ...'the field', including:
• How to select and enter a community
• How to design a research sample
• What recording equipment to choose and how to operate it
• How to collect, store and manage data
• How to interact effectively with participants and communities
• What ethical issues you should be aware of.
Carefully designed to be of maximum practical use to students and researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and related fields, the book is packed with useful features, including:
• Helpful checklists for recording techniques and equipment specifications
• Practical examples taken from classic sociolinguistic studies
• Vivid passages in which students recount their own experiences of doing fieldwork in many different parts of the world
Sociolinguistics provides a powerful instrument by which we can interpret the contemporary and near-contemporary use of language in relation to the society in which speakers live. Almost since the ...beginning of the discipline, however, attempts have been made to extrapolate backwards and interpret past linguistic change sociolinguistically. Some of these findings have influenced the discussion of the history of the English language as portrayed in the many textbooks for undergraduate courses. A consistent application of sociolinguistic theory and findings has rarely been attempted, however, despite the specialist literature which demonstrates this connection at specific points in the language's development.
This textbook provides students with a means by which a previously existing knowledge of a linear, narrative, history of English can be deepened by a more profound understanding of the sociolinguistic forces which initiate or encourage language change. Uniquely, it discusses not only the central variationist tendencies present in language change and their analysis but also the macrosociolinguistic forces which act upon all speakers and their language. Chapters investigate the political, cultural and economic forces which affect a society's use of and views on language; language contact, language standardisation and linguistic attrition are also covered. Discussion is illustrated throughout by apposite examples from the history of English. The volume enables students to develop a deeper understanding of both sociolinguistics and historical linguistics; it is also be useful as a primer for postgraduate study in the subjects covered.
In this magisterial study, Peter Burke explores the social and cultural history of the languages spoken or written in Europe between the invention of printing and the French Revolution, arguing that, ...from a linguistic point of view, 1450 to 1789 should be regarded as a distinct period. One major theme of the book is the relation between languages and communities (regions, churches, occupations and genders as well as nations) and the place of language as a way of identifying others as well as a symbol of one's own identity. A second, linked theme is that of competition: between Latin and the vernaculars, between different vernaculars, dominant and subordinate, and finally between different varieties of the same vernacular, such as standard languages and dialects. Written by one of Europe's leading cultural historians, this book restores the history of the many languages of Europe in a large variety of contexts.
FAITS DE LANGUE, FAITS DE SOCIÉTÉ Cuniță, Alexandra
Studii şi cercetǎri lingvistice,
07/2022, Letnik:
73, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Adopting Guillaume's perspective on the relationship between (fr.) langage, (fr.) langue and (fr.) discours, the present article attempts to identify the factors under the effect of which appear ...various categories of language facts and specify to what extent it is possible to transform certain ephemeral discoursive phenomena into language facts by virtue of the permissive character of language ("permissive" here is to be taken in Guillaume's sense). It also attempts to justify the point of view according to which language facts are interpretable in an indissoluble link with certain social phenomena.
How do we construct national identities in discourse? Which topics, which discursive strategies and which linguistic devices are employed to construct national sameness and uniqueness on the one ...hand, and differences to other national collectives on the o
Etymological reinterpretation, less aptly referred to as folk etymology, is a cognitiveprocess by which less familiar (”weak”) lexical units are ‒ on various levels of consciousness‒ reassigned to ...other semantic, syntactic or inflectional categories underthe influence of “stronger” words or patterns, more familiar to language users. Thisphenomenon can be observed not only in common nouns but also among propernames, though the latter are less often subjected to scholarly analysis in that respect.Moreover, while there exist studies of folk etymology in settlement names and microtoponyms,usually analysing legends of how names of towns, villages or landscapefeatures originated, not as much attention has been so far devoted to this phenomenonin relation to urban naming in Poland. This article studies the etymological reinterpretationof Polish urban names (mostly those of streets). Drawing on Witold Cienkowski’s1972 classic model of classifying the phenomena of folk etymology, it offers itsadaptation to fit the specificity of hodonyms by replacing the category of meaningwith that of motivation and by the inclusion of inflection as an additional factor. Theproposed classification is illustrated with examples from Polish cities.
The paper analyses interpretations of place names on the official websites of Czechmunicipalities. Not only folk etymology, but also quoting official scientific etymologiesis investigated. ...Relationships between the individual interpretations of a toponymare examined. Interpretations on websites often depart directly from folk etymologies,sometimes borrowed from municipal chronicles. On the other hand, some websitespresent official scientific interpretations or they even refer to authorities in the fieldof linguistics. The scientific interpretation is often compared to the folk one, oftenstating which one is considered to be more probable. However, folk etymologies aresometimes preferred to scientific interpretations. Folk interpretations may be basedon important factual knowledge, for example awareness of the older form of the toponym,but this does not assure the correctness of the interpretation.
Folk etymology is usually characterized as an erroneous etymological-semantic interpretationof a word. So far, the research of this phenomenon in the Czech context hasfocused almost exclusively on ...appellatives and oikonyms (names of settlements); folketymology in anoikonyms (names of non-settlement objects) has been the subject ofresearch very rarely.Therefore, the aim of this paper is to fill this gap by presenting a case study based onan analyse of folk etymologies in anoikonyms in the Sedlčany region in the CentralBohemia. It analyses and compares the scholarly and folk etymologies in ten chosenanoikonyms. The main goal of the research is to identify both linguistic and non-linguisticfactors leading to the development of folk etymology and affecting its formand result.The linguistic factors can be identified on lexical-semantic, word-formative and phoneticlevels. The affected names usually contain low frequency appellatives (e. g. dialect,archaic words), and their form can be also affected by various sound changes.The language users create a new interpretation of an etymologically non-transparentname by association with an acoustically similar word, often using not only theirfantasy, but in some cases also a very good knowledge of the named object and itssurroundings.
