Download or read book Quantity and Prosodic Asymmetries in Alemannic written by Astrid Kraehenmann and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The comprehensive analysis of the segmental and metrical system of the Swiss German dialect of Thurgovian provides a significant contribution to both phonetic and phonological theory. Based on the author's original fieldwork and experimental investigations, it is the first in-depth study of this area, tracing it back also to its Old High German roots, particularly that of the dialect of Notker. Quantity alternations - notably word-initial long/short consonantal alternations - asymmetric neutralization of phonetic-phonological contrasts, stress and weight are most prominent among the theoretical issues on which Thurgovian phonology is brought to bear.

Download or read book The Decay of a Language written by Silvia Dal Negro and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dal Negro (linguistics, U. del Piemonte Orientale) explores the complex structural changes a language undergoes as it recedes and dies, taking as a case study the German dialect spoken in the Alpine village of Formazza (Piedmont), in the northwest of Italy. Within the sociolinguistic context of progressive language death, she focuses on phenomena of linguistic variation, change, and reduction at the level of morphosyntax. Her study is based on a large body of spoken material collected during three years, and on interviews with informants. She does not provide a subject index. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Download or read book The Dialects of Modern German written by Charles Russ and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique reference volume covers the 18 dialects of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Alsace and Luxembourg. Each section discusses the status of dialect in the region concerned together with the historical and geographical background. Then follows a description of the dialect structure of the region, copiously illustrated with phonological, grammatical and lexical examples in IPA transcription. The phonology, grammar and vocabulary of one typical dialect are presented together with a commentary. All examples are given with English glosses. The volume will be of most interest to Germanists with some knowledge of the linguistics and history of German, wishing to deepen their knowledge of German dialects. General linguists and sociolinguists who wish to know about German dialects will also find it useful. It can serve as an intermediate level textbook for any course on German dialects which builds on a linguistics or history of German course.

Download or read book Swiss German written by Johannes Reese and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Consonant Strength in Upper German Dialects written by Kurt Gustav Goblirsch and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present study examines the problem of fortis and lenis in approximately 150 dialects of southern Germany, Austria, German-speaking Switzerland, Alsace, and the German-speaking minorities in Italy, Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The Upper German dialects are of particular interest from this point of view, because voice and aspiration, the features traditionally associated with strength, are generally absent. Changes related to strength such as lenition, vowel lengthening, simplification of geminates, and sandhi phenomena receive special attention. The findings are put into their appropriate context by comparison to the results of research on the status of strength in standard German and the modern Germanic languages. Although the realization of strength is language-specific and varies according to word-position, it can be equated with consonant length in standard German and Upper German dialects.

Download or read book Complexity Isolation and Variation written by Raffaela Baechler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complexity of grammatical structure has become a center of interest in recent typological and dialectological research. The contributions of the present volume discuss structural complexity from the perspective of language variation and change. Particular attention is paid to the hypothesis that languages and varieties spoken by small, isolated communities tend to display greater complexity than others.

Download or read book The Sociolinguistic State of Alemannic Dialects written by Carl Bodnaruk and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The various dialects of Alemannic, a set of German dialects spoken in South-Western Germany, North-Eastern France, and Switzerland, are spoken by, in general, a decreasing number of people in these regions. However, the amount by which this has decreased varies drastically from region to region. This thesis consists of a study looking at the current usage of the dialects in Germany, a comparison of these statistics with those from France and Switzerland, and an analysis of the possible historical causes for the established disparity. It finds that major events non-linguistic events, primarily political, have caused continuing and self-perpetuating shifts towards standardised languages in France and Germany, and a lack of such events in Switzerland has precluded it from such shifts.

Download or read book German dialects written by Rudolf Ernst Keller and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1961 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Language Variation European Perspectives IV written by Peter Auer and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteen contributions in this volume are based on papers presented at the 6th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 6), which was held at the University of Freiburg, Germany, from June 29 to July 1, 2011. The volume includes plenaries by Sjef Barbiers (‘Where is syntactic variation?’) and Arnulf Deppermann/ Stefan Kleiner & Ralf Knöbl (‘Standard usage’: Towards a realistic conception of spoken standard German). In addition, the editors have selected 16 papers ranging over a wide field of languages/varieties and topics. The languages and varieties covered are Belarusian, British English, Catalan, Dutch, Gaelic, Gallo-Italic, Greek, Italian, Occitan, Rhaeto-Romance, Russian, Scottish English, Swedish, Turkish, and several varieties of German. The majority of the papers deal with phonetic and phonological variation (Caro Reina; Deppermann, Kleiner and Knöbl; Katerbow; Moosmüller and Scheutz; Schützler; Schleef; West; Zeller; Ziegler), but morphological variation (Cornips and Hulk; Dal Negro), morphosyntactic variation (Melissaropoulou, Themistocleous, Tsiplakou and Tsolakidis), and syntactic variation (Barbiers; Håkansson; Rothmayr) are also represented. Additional papers deal with code-switching.

Download or read book Variation in German written by Stephen Barbour and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-05-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the interrelations between language and society in the German-speaking countries. The questions 'what is German and who speaks it?' and 'how does the language vary dependent on social, political and geographical factors?' are addressed and placed in their historical context. This is a comprehensive account of major topics in the contemporary study of German sociolinguistics, and topics covered include the history and development of the German language, German as a minority language, minority languages in German-speaking countries, traditional dialects, variation in contemporary colloquial speech, the influence of English on German, and German in East and West. It draws together much otherwise inaccessible material from a great range of sources. The authors also assess critically research work carried out in German-speaking countries.

Download or read book Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages written by Nils Langer and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Purism is an aspect of linguistic study which appeals not only to the scholar but also to the layperson. Somehow, ordinary speakers with many different mother tongues and with no formal training in linguistics share certain beliefs about what language is, how it develops or should develop, whether it has good or bad qualities, etc. The topic of linguistic purism in its many realisations is the subject of this volume of 19 articles selected from the contributions presented at a conference at the University of Bristol in 2003. In particular, the articles deal with the relationship of purism to historical prescriptivism, e.g. the influence of grammarians in the 17th and 18th centuries, to nationhood, e.g. the instrumentalising of purism in the standardisation of Afrikaans or Luxembourgish, to modern society, e.g. the existence of puristic tendencies in computer chatrooms, to folk linguistics, e.g. lay perceptions of different varieties of English, and to academic linguistics, e.g. the presence of puristic notions in the historiography of German or English.

Download or read book The German Language in Switzerland written by Felicity J. Rash and published by Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1998 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a broad survey of issues relating to the German language in Switzerland. The initial focus is on the German-speaking community's relationship with the French, Italian and Romansh language communities. Consideration is then given to the complex issue of diglossia within the germanophone Swiss community, and the maintenance of both the Swiss German dialects and the Swiss German standard language as co-existent codes of equal status. The Swiss German dialects, the Swiss variety of standard German, and the influence of various foreign languages on both of these language forms are described in some detail. Finally, sociolinguistic issues affecting the German language in Switzerland are considered: the connection between social variation and linguistic change; language variation stemming from differences of age, sex and ethnic origin; and linguistic behaviour and phatic communication.

Download or read book Lenition and Vowel Lengthening in the Germanic Languages written by Kurt Goblirsch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The interrelationship between three major quantity changes in the history of the Germanic languages: gemination, lenition, and open syllable lengthening.

Download or read book Modern German Dialects written by Cecil Arthur M. Noble and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1983 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Noble presents a hitherto lacking simplified introduction to the dialects of the modern German language. He reviews their phonology and geography and stresses the essential relationship between the study of contemporary dialects and the study of the history of language. His approach is primarily lautgeographisch but he discusses vocabulary, grammar and the varied methodology of dialectology. His book, which is richly illustrated with maps, tables and diagrams, includes a wide range of written dialect samples. It is primarily intended for students who seek a basic and straightforward, yet detailed introduction providing comparative knowledge of the German, Austrian and Swiss dialects as a whole.

Download or read book Language Contact at the Romance Germanic Language Border written by Jeanine Treffers-Daller and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2002 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current volume brings together sociolinguistic analyses of language contact along the Romance Germanic Language Border, shedding more light on the variable and the universal elements in language contact and shift. It covers the whole range of the border, from French Flanders through South Tirol. Every part of it has been treated by outstanding experts. They describe the current state of the art in 'their' portion of the language border and include information on the legal and/or practical status of the language border and the status and function of all languages concerned. Attitudinal and language planning initiatives as well as the standardisation status of the regionally official and minority languages are discussed. Language borrowing, code switching and other language contact phenomena are analysed in detail.

Download or read book Language and Space written by Peter Auer and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010 with total page 910 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This series of HANDBOOKS OF LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION SCIENCE is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction. For "classic" linguistics there appears to be a need for a review of the state of the art which will provide a reference base for the rapid advances in research undertaken from a variety of theoretical standpoints, while in the more recent branches of communication science the handbooks will give researchers both an verview and orientation. To attain these objectives, the series will aim for a standard comparable to that of the leading handbooks in other disciplines, and to this end will strive for comprehensiveness, theoretical explicitness, reliable documentation of data and findings, and up-to-date methodology. The editors, both of the series and of the individual volumes, and the individual contributors, are committed to this aim. The languages of publication are English, German, and French. The main aim of the series is to provide an appropriate account of the state of the art in the various areas of linguistics and communication science covered by each of the various handbooks; however no inflexible pre-set limits will be imposed on the scope of each volume. The series is open-ended, and can thus take account of further developments in the field. This conception, coupled with the necessity of allowing adequate time for each volume to be prepared with the necessary care, means that there is no set time-table for the publication of the whole series. Each volume will be a self-contained work, complete in itself. The order in which the handbooks are published does not imply any rank ordering, but is determined by the way in which the series is organized; the editor of the whole series enlist a competent editor for each individual volume. Once the principal editor for a volume has been found, he or she then has a completely free hand in the choice of co-editors and contributors. The editors plan each volume independently of the others, being governed only by general formal principles. The series editor only intervene where questions of delineation between individual volumes are concerned. It is felt that this (modus operandi) is best suited to achieving the objectives of the series, namely to give a competent account of the present state of knowledge and of the perception of the problems in the area covered by each volume.

Download or read book Language Variation and Change in the American Midland written by Thomas E. Murray and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the linguistic complexities and critical issues of the Midland dialect area of the USA, and contains a unique data-based set of investigations of the Midlands dialect. The authors demonstrate that the large central part of the United States known colloquially as the Heartland, geo-culturally as the Midwest, and linguistically as the Midland is a very real dialect area, one with regional cohesiveness, social complexity, and psycho-emotional impact. The individual essays problematize historical origins, track linguistic markers of social identity over time and across social spaces, frame dialect issues within the linguistic marketplace, account for extra-linguistic influences on changing patterns of linguistic behaviors, and describe maintenance strategies of non-English languages. This book is an important move forward in the understanding of American English. Sociolinguists, dialectologists, applied linguists, and all those involved in the statistical and qualitative study of language variation will find this volume relevant, timely, and insightful.