Spain's Minoritized Languages In Brief Sociolinguistic Perspective,
2010
University of Miami
Spain's Minoritized Languages In Brief Sociolinguistic Perspective, Andrew Lynch
Andrew Lynch
Since 1978, when Article 3 of the democractic Constitution officialized the ‘other languages of Spain in their respective Autonomous Communities’ and guaranteed them ‘special respect and protection’, Basque, Galician, and Catalan have undergone a significant process of institutional expansion. Laws of linguistic normalization passed in the respective Autonomous Communities during the early 1980s thrust each of these languages into public life, concomitantly disconfiguring their diglossic relationship to Castilian, a vestige of Franco’s staunch one language-one nation ideology. Today one could affirm that the theoretical premise of bilingualism and diglossia (Fishman) —whereby one language serves public, formal functions and another is …
Redefining Nairobi's Streets: Study Of Slang, Marginalization, And Identity,
2010
Washington University in St. Louis
Redefining Nairobi's Streets: Study Of Slang, Marginalization, And Identity, Mungai Mutonya
Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective
This study attempts an analysis of a restructured Swahili variety spoken by Nairobi's street community: Kinoki. Adapting tools of sociolinguistic inquiry and focusing on Kinoki's divergence from the dominant urban slang, Sheng, the study discusses attitudes toward divergent terms referencing the street community, street activities, and law enforcement officials. Results indicate that street children, unlike their school-going peers living in the city's low-income neighborhoods, redefine pejoratives that devalue and stigmatize street people and their lifestyle. Instead, Kinoki empowers the marginalized community to construct a positive identity, to ameliorate representations of street lifestyle, and to redefine neologisms that reference in-group ( …
Avatime Noun Classes,
2010
Macalester College
Avatime Noun Classes, Ronny C. Watkins
Linguistics Honors Projects
Like many African languages, particularly Bantu languages, the Ghanaian language of Avatime organizes its nouns into a class system. Noun classes use affixes to indicate semantic category. For example, many languages with noun classes have a class for ‘people’ nouns, such as ‘child’ and ‘stranger.’ Previous research on Avatime has postulated between seven and nine classes. The current study is based on original field work done in the village of Vane in Ghana. The new data show that Avatime has seven noun classes, distinguished by singular and plural prefixes, definite article suffixes, and semantic similarities.
Applicative Constructions In Shipibo-Konibo (Panoan),
2010
Chapman University
Applicative Constructions In Shipibo-Konibo (Panoan), Pilar Valenzuela
World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research
This article provides a detailed, typologically informed treatment of applicative constructions in Shipibo-Konibo, a Panoan language from Peruvian Amazonia. Shipibo-Konibo has three applicative suffixes: affective (i.e., benefactive or malefactive), dedicated malefactive, and associative. These applicative types are rather common cross-linguistically and hence the language cannot be said to be particularly rich either in terms of number or kinds of applicative constructions. Nevertheless, the Shipibo-Konibo system exhibits certain points of special interest such as the interplay between transitivity and the different applicative construction types, which include a restriction on the dedicated malefactive to combine with transitive verbs only, and the almost …
On The Perceptual Robustness Of Preaspirated Stops [Poster],
2010
University of Nevada, Reno
On The Perceptual Robustness Of Preaspirated Stops [Poster], Ian D. Clayton
Ian D. Clayton
Some phonological patterns are rare crosslinguistically, others commonplace. Rare patterns must be (a) seldom innovated or (b) diachronically unstable. For instance, preaspirated stops occur in < 1% of languages, while postaspirated stops occur in almost 29% (Maddieson 1984). Prevailing explanations have considered only (b), attributing preaspiration’s scarcity to a presumed but unverified perceptual inferiority to postaspiration. Preaspirated stops are hard to hear, it is claimed, thus diachronically unstable (Silverman 2003, Bladon 1986). This study concludes from both experimental and typological evidence that preaspirated stops are better characterized as infrequently innovated but diachronically stable, consistent with Greenberg’s (1978) State-Process model.
