Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages

Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages
Author: Nils Langer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2011-12-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110901358

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.

Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages

Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages
Author: Nils Langer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2005
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9783110183375

The text is a product of a conference held at the University of Bristol in April 2003.

Linguistic Purism in Action

Linguistic Purism in Action
Author: Nils Langer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2013-02-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110881101

The auxiliary do (tun) is one of the most-discussed constructions in West Germanic. In German, there is a striking opposition between modern standard German, where the construction is virtually ungrammatical and considered to be "sub-standard" by most speakers, whilst, as this book shows, the construction is attested in all modern dialects as well as historic stages since 1350. In answering why auxiliary tun is ungrammatical in modern standard German, it is shown that the stigmatization of tun was caused by prescriptive grammarians in the 16th-18th century. Furthermore it is shown that the stigmatization of tun as "bad" German occurred in clearly discernible stages, from bad poetry (1550-1680), to bad written German (1680-1740) and finally to "bad" German in general (after 1740), thus providing evidence that the history of the standardization of German needs to take into account direct metalinguistic comments from prescriptive grammarians. The effectiveness of linguistic purism is also shown by evidence from two other constructions, namely polynegation and double perfect.

The German-Speaking World

The German-Speaking World
Author: Patrick Stevenson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1134792859

This accessible textbook offers students the opportunity to explore for themselves a wide range of sociolinguistic issues relating to the German language and its role in societies around the world. It is written for undergraduate students who have a sound practical knowledge of German but who have little or no knowledge of linguistics or sociolinguistics. It combines text with practical exercises and discussion questions to stimulate readers to think for themselves and to tackle specific problems. In Part One Patrick Stevenson invites readers to investigate and reflect on issues about the status and function of the German language in relation to its speakers and to speakers of other languages with which it comes into contact. In Part Two the focus shifts to the forms and functions of individual features of the language. This involves, for example, identifying features of regional speech forms, analysing similarities and differences between written and spoken German, or looking at the 'social meaning' underlying different forms of address. Part Three explores the relationship between the German language and the nature of 'Germanness'. It concentrates on people's attitudes towards the language, the ways in which it is changing, and their views on what it represents for them.

Metalinguistic Perspectives on Germanic Languages

Metalinguistic Perspectives on Germanic Languages
Author: Gijsbert Rutten
Publisher: Historical Sociolinguistics
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Germanic languages
ISBN: 9783034318532

In what ways has language been central to constructing, challenging and reconfiguring social and political boundaries? This volume focuses on how language functions as a marker of identity, drawing on case studies across Europe.

The Golden Mean of Languages

The Golden Mean of Languages
Author: Alisa van de Haar
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2019-09-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004408592

In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French has been studied mainly from monolingual perspectives tracing the development towards modern Dutch or French. Van de Haar shows that the discussions on these languages were rooted in multilingual environments, in particular in French schools, Calvinist churches, printing houses, and chambers of rhetoric. The proposals that were formulated there to forge Dutch and French into useful forms were not directed solely at uniformization but were much more diverse.

Exploring the German Language

Exploring the German Language
Author: Sally Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2008-08-14
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1139472275

If we want to understand how German speakers think about themselves and the world in which they live, then a useful place to begin is by looking at the language they use. This fully revised and updated edition provides a systematic approach to the study of the German language and an introduction to the social aspects of the language, including its dialects, its history and the uses of the language today. No previous knowledge of linguistics is assumed, and each chapter is accompanied by a series of practical exercises. This edition includes a brand new section on gender, purism and German unification, fresh examples for analysis and an updated chapter on the geography of Germany today. The book will help students not only to find new ways of exploring the German language, but also of thinking and talking about German-speaking cultures.

Women in the History of Linguistics

Women in the History of Linguistics
Author: Professor of French Philology and Linguistics Wendy Ayres-Bennett
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 673
Release: 2021-01-07
Genre: Linguistics
ISBN: 0198754957

This volume offers a ground-breaking investigation into women's contribution to the description, analysis, and codification of languages across a wide range of linguistic and cultural traditions. The chapters explore a variety of spheres of activity, from the production of dictionaries and grammars to language teaching methods and language policy.

Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics
Author: Stefanowitsch, Anatol
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2020
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961102244

Corpora are used widely in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations, morphology, grammar, text and metaphor), surveying the range of issues studied in corpus linguistics while at the same time showing how they fit into the methodology outlined in the first part.

Linguistic Purism

Linguistic Purism
Author: Olivia Walsh
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2016-08-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027266735

This book represents the first in-depth, comparative investigation of linguistic purism in modern French. It investigates the relative prevalence of purist ideology in France and Quebec. Both experience influence from English and have similar language legislation, but they differ in their social, political and economic history. Three different levels of society are examined (official, group and individual), allowing a comparison of the ‘voice from above’ and the ‘voice from below’. This is a key element in recent discussions of language planning but is rarely provided in studies of French. The study is also the first to apply to empirical data Thomas’s widely cited theoretical framework for describing linguistic purism (1991), and has evaluated and refined this, enhancing the theoretical underpinnings of the field. The book will be of interest not only to French scholars and sociolinguists, but also to scholars of language planning, language policy and language ideologies in all languages.