Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Toward a Computational Dialectology

This innovative study on the phenomenon of 'grammaticalization' and its manifestation in Chinese provides new insights into language change in Chinese and a large number of grammatical topics. Grammaticalization occurs in all of the world's languages. Xiu-Zhi Zoe Wu demonstrates general linguistic principles present and active in the phenomenon of grammaticalization whilst also describing the modelling of language in formal theoretical approaches to syntax; so this book fills two major gaps in the current study of linguistics. Grammaticalization and Language Change in Chinese illuminates how studies of language development and change provide special insights into the understanding of current, synchronic systems of language. Using patters from Chinese, the author establishes cross-linguistic generalizations about language change and grammaticalization. This book should be of great interest to Chinese linguists and readers interested in language change in different languages.

This chapter compares two computational frameworks developed over the last decade to support investigations into the emergence and use of language, Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) and Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG). Both of these representational formalisms are rooted in the construction grammar tradition, sharing basic assumptions about the nature of linguistic units and the crucial role played by contextual factors. Nonetheless, they have arisen from different perspectives and with different goals: FCG was designed to support computational language game experiments that address the evolution of communication in populations of robotic agents, while ECG was designed to support cognitive modeling of human language acquisition and use. We investigate how these differing emphases motivated different design choices in the two formalisms and illustrate the linguistic and computational consequences of these choices through a concrete case study. Results of this comparison sharpen issues relevant to computational construction grammar in general and may hold lessons for broader computational investigations into linguistic phenomena.

Construction Grammar as a framework offers a new perspective on traditional historical questions in diachronic linguistics and language change: how do new constructions arise, how should competition in diachronic variation be accounted for, how do constructions fall into disuse, and how do constructions change in general, formally and/or semantically, and with what implications for the language system as a whole? This volume offers a broad introduction to the confluence of Construction Grammar and historical syntax, and also detailed case studies of various instances of syntactic change modeled within Construction Grammar. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar as a theory is particularly well suited for modeling historical changes in morphosyntax, and it also documents challenging new phenomena that require a theoretical account within any competing framework of syntactic change.

We use language in many ways: as a practical tool, to communicate ideas; as a social tool, to maintain relationships and mark our identity; as an artistic tool, in poetry, prose, drama, songs, and so on. For many people, using a particular language, or using language in particular ways, goes right to the heart of who they consider themselves to be. Small wonder, then, that so many people have strong opinions about language.

This paper investigates an information structure category (focus) in the Polynesian languages, as it relates to language stability on the one hand and language change on the other. The study concentrates on *ko structures, which are striking because, in VSO languages, they allow a *ko-marked nominal to precede the verb under certain pragmatic conditions. We propose that *ko-marked nominals are focused, according to a precise semantic definition of focus as a syntactic feature that triggers a semantic object (discourse alternatives). First, we show that this semantic account of focus predicts a range of *ko structures found in verb-initial Polynesian systems, including clefts, equatives, topics, wh-questions and forms with focus-sensitive expressions like ‘only'. We propose that *ko structures allow nominals to surface in the initial focus position in the VSO Polynesian languages: in other words, the initial position is both a strict predicate position as well as a focus position, and the maintenance of this information structure–syntax link is remarkably consistent across space and time; in addition, *ko-marked topics precede predicates, but also contain a focus marking. The rest of the paper turns to Polynesian languages that have shifted to SVO word order. We show that once the link between initial position and predicate/focus is lost, *ko structures are eroded or lost. *ko structures are thus a diagnostic for information structure-related language stability or change, as it is correlated with VSO or SVO word order.

Word classes (‘parts-of-speech’, ‘syntactic categories’, ‘lexical categories’) are the fundamental building blocks of linguistic expressions in all natural human languages. They have been investigated since antiquity and continue to play a central role in modern linguistics. Today an increasingly important role is assigned to the information that is specified in the lexical entry of a word in the lexicon (including, of course, information about its category membership), both in formal and in functional approaches to grammar. Furthermore, there is a growing awareness that the traditional set of word classes is biased towards the better studied European languages and needs to be revised to accommodate unfamiliar word classes in nonEuropean languages.

Within the framework of cognitive linguistics and construction grammar (as in Lakoff 1987; Langacker 2000; Goldberg 1995; and Fried and Östman 2004), it is claimed in this paper that the semantics of psuche (psyche) is motivated by cognitive, cultural, and constructional parameters of meaning. More specifically, it is argued that psyche, as the immaterial nature of a human being, and the seat of emotions and feelings in particular, is understood in terms of image-based metaphors, a cultural model of the self, and a cultural narrative of existence. It is also argued that the frequent occurrence of psyche in a number of collocations and idioms motivates and constrains constructional meaning. At the same time, constructions motivate extended senses of this word, thereby contributing to its polysemy and ultimately to semantic change. The evidence presented within this framework argues against a fixed borderline between lexical and constructional meaning. This view, long and tacitly adopted in lexicographic practice by necessity, is gaining further support within current research in the framework of lexicography (Fillmore 2008; Hanks 2008), corpus linguistics (Fellbaum 2007), lexical semantics (Taylor et al. 2003), language change (Bybee 2006a), and construction grammar (Boas 2008).

Introduction. The relevance of the study is explained by the necessity to preserve Frenchspeaking culture and language on the territory of Canada in the conditions of globalization, the spread of American mass culture and the significant impact of English as a global language. The purpose of the work is to describe and analyze the sociolinguistic particularities of the existence of the French language in the English-speaking competitive environment in Canada.Methodology and sources. During the study, the following sociolinguistic methods were used: descriptive method, comparison method, continuous sampling method, sociolinguistic analysis method, quantitative data processing method, questionnaire survey. The research is based on the material of Сanadian media, legislative acts regulating the state's language policy, data obtained through surveys of Canadian citizens, and 5,234 inscriptions in five Canadian cities which were selected to examine the country's linguistic landscape.Results and discussion. Under Canadian laws, French and English have equal status in parliamentary readings, in public services and in everyday life, as well as in education, radio and television. However, English is the dominant language and has great prestige throughout Canada. All of the evidence collected shows the decisive superiority of English as the primary means of communication in media, advertising and politics. Existing legislation to protect and promote the use of both official languages is not fully enforced, as evidenced by numerous complaints from Canadians to the Commissioner of Official Languages.Conclusion. In Canada, a multi-component exoglossic linguistic situation has developed with two official languages – English and French, which is characterized by the existence of natural bilingualism. Linguistic minorities, such as Anglophones in Quebec and Francophones outside Quebec, may experience linguistic discrimination, creating tensions between residents of the same country. French is significantly influenced by the majority English and immigrant languages that dominate the linguistic landscape of Canadian cities.

This paper argues that the mass-count distinction does not represent a fundamental division between the world's languages. We demonstrate that such a distinction, as commonly defined within the linguistic literature, often conflates two facts: the semantic fact, found in all languages, that some words have atomic denotations and some do not, and the morphosyntactic fact, found in languages with contrasting singular-plural morphology, that some nouns have both singular and plural forms while others have only one such form. By comparing English with Mandarin Chinese, we discuss whether this morphosyntactic distinction might correlate with the presence or absence of a rich classifier system (as well as other types of quantification). This potential correlation has greatly influenced how linguists have investigated nominal systems across languages and it has even led some to hypothesize that morphosyntactic subcategories might determine the ways in which a grammar can “count” and “quantify.” We outline some important exceptions to this proposed correlation in languages such as Ch’ol, Mi’gmaq and Western Armenian. The paper concludes by arguing not only that there is no such correlation, but that linguists should rethink how they investigate nominal systems, focusing more on lexical variation (even within a single language) than on parametric variations across languages.

A prominent claim made in the theory of natural morphology is that among morphological processes, affixation is more “natural” than internal stem changes. According to this theory, the criteria for “more natural” include the following: more common in the world's languages; more common within a single language; easier to acquire, and thus acquired earlier; later lost in aphasia; and easier to process in general. This chapter compares explanations traced to grammaticization with explanations based on synchronic processing preferences. It argues that the rarity of stem changes versus affixes in the languages of the world is due to the way each mode of expression develops diachronically and not to a postulated extra processing cost for stem changes. The acquisition difficulty associated with stem changes is due to their low type frequency in the languages in which they have been studied. This chapter describes an experiment in which subjects were taught an artificial language in which stem changes have type frequency comparable to affixes. In this experiment, subjects learned the stem changes as easily as the affixes.

This paper studies the role of global and regional variations in economic activity and policy in developed world in driving portfolio capital flows (PCFs) to emerging markets (EMs). Results suggest that PCFs to EMs depend mainly on economic activity at the global level and monetary policy in America and Asia, positively on the former and negatively on the latters. PCFs are procyclical with respect to global activity, but countercyclical to regional activity. In aggregate, regional variations contribute more than global variations. This implies that economic divergence in the developed world can have significant effects on EMs via PCFs.

Martin Hilpert combines construction grammar and advanced corpus-based methodology into a new way of studying language change. Constructions are generalizations over remembered exemplars of language use. These exemplars are stored with all their formal and functional properties, yielding constructional generalizations that contain many parameters of variation. Over time, as patterns of language use are changing, the generalizations are changing with them. This book illustrates the workings of constructional change with three corpus-based studies that reveal patterns of change at several levels of linguistic structure, ranging from allomorphy to word formation and to syntax. Taken together, the results strongly motivate the use of construction grammar in research on diachronic language change. This new perspective has wide-ranging consequences for the way historical linguists think about language change. It will be of particular interest to linguists working on morpho-syntax, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.

Our ability to completely and repeatedly map natural environments at a global scale have increased significantly over the past decade. These advances are from delivery of a range of on-line global satellite image archives and global-scale processing capabilities, along with improved spatial and temporal resolution satellite imagery. The ability to accurately train and validate these global scale-mapping programs from what we will call “reference data sets” is challenging due to a lack of coordinated financial and personnel resourcing, and standardized methods to collate reference datasets at global spatial extents. Here, we present an expert-driven approach for generating training and validation data on a global scale, with the view to mapping the world’s coral reefs. Global reefs were first stratified into approximate biogeographic regions, then per region reference data sets were compiled that include existing point data or maps at various levels of accuracy. These reference data sets were compiled from new field surveys, literature review of published surveys, and from individually sourced contributions from the coral reef monitoring and management agencies. Reference data were overlaid on high spatial resolution satellite image mosaics (3.7 m × 3.7 m pixels; Planet Dove) for each region. Additionally, thirty to forty satellite image tiles; 20 km × 20 km) were selected for which reference data and/or expert knowledge was available and which covered a representative range of habitats. The satellite image tiles were segmented into interpretable groups of pixels which were manually labeled with a mapping category via expert interpretation. The labeled segments were used to generate points to train the mapping models, and to validate or assess accuracy. The workflow for desktop reference data creation that we present expands and up-scales traditional approaches of expert-driven interpretation for both manual habitat mapping and map training/validation. We apply the reference data creation methods in the context of global coral reef mapping, though our approach is broadly applicable to any environment. Transparent processes for training and validation are critical for usability as big data provide more opportunities for managers and scientists to use global mapping products for science and conservation of vulnerable and rapidly changing ecosystems.

People from different places use different words for things, even everyday things such as carbonated beverages (e.g. soda, coke, pop) or bread roll-based sandwiches (e.g. hoagie, grinder, sub). Regional variation in vocabulary is one of the foci of dialectology, a subfield of linguistics that examines the geographic distribution of specific words, along with distributions of different pronunciations and grammatical constructions. This Element will provide readers with a basic understanding of traditional dialectological study and will demonstrate through examples (audio, text, maps) how Linguistic Atlas Project research has changed and expanded over time. Readers will be introduced to the key concepts of dialectology with a focus on the North American Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) and its materials. This Element will also discuss today's LAP with reference to third-wave sociolinguistics, outlining the ways in which the LAP has changed over time to meet the needs and goals of contemporary sociolinguistic study.

<div> <p>Climate variability is the primary influence on climate extremes and affected by natural forcing from solar irradiance and volcanic eruptions. Global warming impacts climate variability, but there is contradictory and incomplete evidence on the spatio-temporal patterns. Strong volcanic eruptions have been suggested to reduce temperatures less in warmer climate states. However, the underlying question of state-dependent effect of natural forcing on local and global variability remains open. Moreover, there are uncertainties about the role of natural forcing in the mismatch between simulated and reconstructed local, long-term variability. <span> </span></p> </div><div> <p>Using a 12-member GCM ensemble with targeted boundary conditions, we present naturally-forced and equilibrium, millennium-length simulations for the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the Pre-Industrial (PI). We quantify the local and global climate response to solar and volcanic forcing in the LGM and PI, and contrast variability from forced and control simulations on annual-to-multicentennial scales. We differentiate various contributions from the atmosphere, oceans, and particularly that of sea ice using a 2D energy balance model (EBM). Spectral analysis of simulated temperatures shows that global variability is predominately determined by natural forcing. Local mean spectra are more characteristic for the mean climate state and reveal a decrease in local variability with warming. The global and local response to natural forcing is robust against changes in the mean climate. Particularly, the spatial patterns of the surface climate's response to volcanic eruptions widely agree across states. Weak local differences resulted primarily from sea ice dynamics. The sea ice contribution is the strongest on interannual scales. It remains significant on decadal scales and longer, providing a key mechanism of long-term variability. We validate the simulated variability against observational and paleoclimate data. The variance obtained from proxies is increasingly larger on longer timescales compared to that from simulated time series. The inclusion of natural forcing reduces the model-data mismatch on decadal-to-multicentennial scales and, thus, provides a more accurate representation of climate variability. </p> </div><div> <p>Consideration of natural forcing is therefore paramount for model-data comparison and future projections. The robust temperature response suggests that findings on the ability of models to simulate past variability should translate to future climates, and can thus help constrain variability.<span> </span></p> </div>