Dynamics of Language Changes: Looking Within and Across Languages

289 Pages·2020·7.313 MB·

by  Keith Allan

Keith Allan   Editor
Dynamics
of Language
Changes
Looking Within and Across Languages
Dynamics of Language Changes
Keith Allan
Editor
Dynamics of Language
Changes
Looking Within and Across Languages
123
Editor
KeithAllan
MonashUniversity
Melbourne, VIC,Australia
ISBN978-981-15-6429-1 ISBN978-981-15-6430-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6430-7
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Dedication
The authors of Dynamics of Language Changes: Looking Within and Across
Languagesareallcolleagues,friendsand,inacoupleofcases,ex-studentsofKate
Burridge FAHA, Prof. of Linguistics at Monash University to whom this work is
dedicated.
Fig.1 KateBurridgein19911
Kate completed her undergraduate training in Linguistics and German at the
UniversityofWesternAustraliaandtravelledtotheUniversityofLondonwhere,in
1983, she was awarded her Ph.D. on syntactic change in Medieval Dutch. She
taught at the Polytechnic of Central London before joining the Department of
Linguistics at La Trobe University in 1984. In 2003 she took up the Chair of
Linguistics in what is now the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and
Linguistics at Monash University.
1PhotocopyrightheldbytheEditor.
v
vi Dedication
For many years Kate has been a regular presenter of language segments on
Australia’sABCRadio.Foritssixseasons(2006–2011)sheappearedweeklyasthe
linguistic expert on ABC TV’s lifestyle program ‘Can We Help?’ Kate is an
excellent communicator, familiar to the general public (including schoolkids) as
well as to the academic community. Through her consistently high level of com-
munity engagement, Kate seeks to apply the well-researched principles of lin-
guistics to everyday life, explicating notions about the ways people speak.
Kate has won many awards for her expertise in research and teaching. Her
research has illumined Pennsylvania German-speaking communities in Canada,
grammatical change in Germanic languages, the nature of euphemism and dys-
phemism, linguistic taboo, and English grammatical structure in general. In recent
times she has engaged with the impact of language attitudes in criminal justice
proceedings, with communication in health interactions, with cultural models of
ageing in Australia and with mental health communication among older
Australians.
Kate’s published output is far too extensive to list here (see https://research.
monash.edu/en/persons/kathryn-burridge). A sample of just ten items from her
corpus is:
(cid:129) 1991 (with Keith Allan) Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used As
Shield and Weapon (Oxford)
(cid:129) 1993 Some Aspects of Syntactic Change in Germanic (Benjamins)
(cid:129) 2002(withMargaretFlorey)‘Yeah-nohe’sagoodkid’:Adiscourseanalysis
of yeah-no in Australian English, Australian Journal of Linguistics 22:
149–71
(cid:129) 2004BloomingEnglish:ObservationsontheRoots,CultivationandHybrids
of the English Language (Cambridge)
(cid:129) 2006 (with Keith Allan) Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of
Language (Cambridge)
(cid:129) 2008 (with Bernd Kortmann) Varieties of English 3: The Pacific and
Australia (Mouton)
(cid:129) 2015(withRékaBenczes)Currentattitudestoageingasreflectedinthenames
of Australian aged care facilities, Names: A Journal of Onomastics 63(3):
127–45
(cid:129) 2016 (with Tonya Stebbins) For the Love of Language: An Introduction to
Linguistics (Cambridge)
(cid:129) 2017 (with Alex Bergs) Understanding Language Change (Routledge)
(cid:129) 2019 (with Kersti Börjars) Introducing English Grammar. Third, substan-
tially revised edition. First edn 2001. (Routledge)
This volume, Dynamics of Language Changes: Looking Within and Across
Languages, is a collection of essays by distinguished international scholars on
manydifferentaspectsofchangeswithinandacrosslanguages.Becausethebookis
nota monograph buta collectionof essays by a host of authors, theplacing ofthe
chapters in relation to each other was challenging and some readers may conceive
Dedication vii
of preferred alternative arrangements. Even so, we hope they will esteem the
content of each chapter and so appreciate the merit of the volume as a whole.
Dynamics of Language Changes comprises 17 chapters grouped into three parts.
PartI,‘LanguageChanges:LookingWithinaLanguage’consistsofeightchapters.
Chapter 1 explains how in an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea
addressee-based deictics develop discourse functions to mark information status.
Chapter 2 investigates the differing usages of never in Australian conversation.
Chapter 3 focuses on the revitalization of Indigenous Australian languages.
Chapter4 studiestheplaceandfunctionsofyouseinAustralianEnglish.Chapter5
assesses ways in which usage guides and interested lay folk react to emphatic
literally. Chapter 6 surveys attitudes to closing salutations in emails. Chapter 7
argues from idiomatic expressions that Australian English forms ‘the perfect
sandbox for historical linguistics’. Chapter 8 evaluates several lexical semantic
analysesoftheEnglishwordcup,incidentallyshowingitsextensiontoavarietyof
denotata. Part II, ‘Language Changes: Looking Across Languages’, consists of six
chapters. Chapter 9 scrutinizes translations of ‘semantic false friends’ in half a
dozen languages: words that have a common origin but have developed different
meanings.Chapter 10 examinesborrowingintotheEnglishlexiconandtheexport
of English vocabulary into other languages. Chapter 11 examines words that have
gone into and out of English at different times and with different motivations.
Chapter12 looksatperiodizationacrossRomancelanguagestoassessthemeritof
descriptions like ‘Old’, ‘Middle’ and ‘Modern’. Chapter 13 appraises cultural
keywords in Philippine English, showing their adaptation to profound changes in
the core values of social structures in the speech community. Chapter 14 looks at
the outcomes of language contact in one language of the Sepik region of Papua
New Guinea. Part III, ‘Language Changes: Other Aspects’ has three chapters.
Chapter15 considershowpeoplewhoareborndeafandlosetheirsightlaterinlife
go about adapting Australian sign language for tactile delivery and reception.
Chapter 16 is an essay on sound symbolism in English that leads to semantic
change. Chapter 17 analyses the poetic and musical structure of some traditional
songs in a minority language of Northeast India.
We the contributors all hope that much-loved Kate will enjoy this book, our
humble offering of essays on aspects of changes within and across languages.
Contents
Part I Language Changes: Looking Within a Language
1 Different Sources, Same Path—From Addressee-Based Deictics
to Markers of Discourse Status. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Anna Margetts
2 The Punctual Never in Australian English: The Mysterious Case
of the Missing Vernacular Universal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Isabelle Burke
3 Standardise This! Prescriptivism and Resistance
to Standardization in Language Revitalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Vicki Couzens, Alice Gaby, and Tonya Stebbins
4 Here’s Looking at youse: Understanding the Place of yous(e)
in Australian English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Jean Mulder and Cara Penry Williams
5 Language Literally Changes: Usage Guides and Their Influence
on Language Attitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Alyssa A. Severin
6 Closing Salutations in Email Messages: User Attitudes
and Interpersonal Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Simon Musgrave
7 What Do You Think This Is, Bush Week? Construction
Grammar and Language Change in Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Alexander Bergs
8 On Cups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Keith Allan
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x Contents
Part II Language Changes: Looking Across Languages
9 Partial Semantic False Friends and the Indeterminacy
of Translation in Philosophical Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Pedro J. Chamizo-Domínguez
10 Both a Borrower and a Lender Be: English as Importer
and Exporter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Barry J. Blake
11 What’s the Score?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Kersti Börjars and Nigel Vincent
12 Old, Middle, and Modern: Temporality and Typology . . . . . . . . . . 183
John Charles Smith
13 Cultural Keywords in Philippine English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Pam Peters
14 Language Contact and Language Change in the Sepik Region
of New Guinea: The Case of Yalaku. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Part III Language Changes: Other Aspects
15 From Seeing to Feeling: How Do Deafblind People Adapt Visual
Sign Languages?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
Louisa Willoughby, Howard Manns, Shimako Iwasaki,
and Meredith Bartlett
16 Sound Symbolism and Semantic Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
Réka Benczes
17 The Singpho Water Flowing Song: Searching for the Poetics
in a Rich Maze of Linguistic Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Stephen Morey
Appendix: The Arrival of Chau Alawng at the Home of His Lover,
Ing—Text and Translation (Lines 139–180). .... ..... .... 281
Index .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... 283
Editor and Contributors
About the Editor
Keith Allan MLitt, Ph.D. (Edinburgh), FAHA. Emeritus Professor, Monash
University.Selectedbooks:LinguisticMeaning(Routledge,1986;2014);Euphemism
andDysphemism:LanguageUsedasShieldandWeapon(withKateBurridge,OUP,
1991); Natural Language Semantics (Blackwell, 2001); Forbidden Words: Taboo
and the Censoring of Language (with Kate Burridge, CUP, 2006); Concise
Encyclopaedia of Semantics (Elsevier, 2009); The Western Classical Tradition in
Linguistics Second Expanded Edition (Equinox, 2010); Cambridge Handbook of
Pragmatics (with Kasia Jaszczolt, CUP, 2012); Oxford Handbook of the History of
Linguistics (OUP, 2013); Routledge Handbook of Linguistics (2016); Oxford
Handbook of Taboo Words and Language (OUP, 2018) Homepage: http://users.
monash.edu.au/*kallan/homepage.html.
Contributors
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald LCRC JCU, Cairns, QLD, Australia
Keith Allan Monash University, Peregian Springs, QLD, Australia
Meredith Bartlett Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
RékaBenczes InstituteofCommunicationandSociology,CorvinusUniversityof
Budapest, Budapest, Hungary
Alexander Bergs Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany
Barry J. Blake La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Isabelle Burke Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
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