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This thesis is a sociolinguistic investigation into the use of local referent honorific suffixes by speakers of Osaka Japanese (OJ). Its main goal is to add to our understanding of the variation and change in the use of honorification among Japanese speakers, by including a combination of methodologies and frameworks within the scope of one discussion. The analysis covers both local referent honorific suffixes HARU, YARU and YORU, as well as Standard Japanese forms, (RA)RERU and so called special verbs. The main focus, however, is on providing a detailed examination of the local referent honorific suffix HARU. An analysis of the distribution patterns of this honorific allows us to explore (i) ongoing changes in its use across three generations of speakers, and (ii) the indexicality of its meaning in use, including the changing social meanings attached to the form see in the analysis of interactions, distribution and metapragmatic comments. The analysis shows that the use of both local and standard honorifics in informal conversations of OJ users is decreasing significantly among younger speakers. However, it also highlights the different linguistic behaviour of young men and young women in this speech community, and links their use of HARU with local linguistic and cultural ideologies, showing how they may be affecting both perceptions and patterns of use of the form. Additionally, the analysis in this dissertation looks at various levels of linguistic structure, allowing us to explore whether the Osaka honorific system does indeed function as a single system, or whether different forms at different levels of linguistic structure have their own histories and trajectories. The analysis suggests that the honorific resources available to OJ users (both standard and local features) need to be seen as a continuum (cf. Okamoto 1998), rather than separate and distinct systems. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed in the analysis. The quantitative analysis investigates the ongoing changes in the frequency of use of HARU, as well as its distribution according to a range of social and linguistic functions. The qualitative analysis suggests that HARU is socially meaningful for the speakers, performing multiple functions in the interpersonal domain of discourse. Combining the two approaches to study Japanese honorifics in naturally occurring conversations is an attempt at bridging the gap between a number of previous studies.

Previous research about the acquisition of the case-marking systems of ergative languages suggests that children acquire ergative and accusative languages equally easily (Van Valin 1992), depending on the degree to which the case morphology is consistently ergative or accusative and the degree to which adults use the morphology (Pye 1990). However, split-ergative languages incorporate both accusative and ergative systems, some in the midst of a shift away from ergativity, thus providing variable and inconsistent input for children. Yet previous research suggests that children can acquire variable linguistic forms at early stages, reflecting frequencies in which the forms occur in caregiver input (Henry 1998, 2002, Miller 2006, 2007, Westergaard 2009). This study examines the acquisition of split-ergativity in Kurmanji Kurdish, where the direct case is used with both present-tense agents and past-tense patients and the oblique case is used with past-tense agents and present-tense patients. However, recent research suggests the weakening of ergativity in Kurmanji (Dorleijn 1996), resulting in variable use of case-marking. This study examines the acquisition of split-ergativity in Kurmanji when considering the split systems and inconsistent adult input. Data from children (n=12) and caretakers (n=24) include spontaneous speech samples and results from a modified Agent-Patient test (Slobin 1985). Four children from three age groups, 1;6, 2;6, and 3;6, were recorded interacting with caretakers every three months for one hour over a 12-month period. Statistical analyses were conducted focusing on adult patterns (input for children) and children’s production at different ages. Results suggest that Kurmanji may be shifting away from a split-ergative system, with the past tense extending to a double oblique pattern and nouns gradually losing oblique case-marking altogether, resulting in variable case-marking. Data show that children first use ergative case as early as 2;0 and show evidence of repeated use of split-ergative case-marking by 2;6. Even at these early ages, children use similar variability and frequency in case-marking as their caretakers, closer to usage of younger adults versus older adults. Thus children seem to use ergative case-marking early, and when faced with inconsistent input, they ultimately conform to the patterns modeled by the adult community. / text

In 2004, the Institut f??r Deutsche Sprache published the neologism dictionary "Neuer Wortschatz: Neologismen der 90er Jahre im Deutschen", which contains new words that entered the German language during the 1990s (for example "Elchtest" and "Handy"). Based on this dictionary this master's thesis examines to what extent those new words have reached the vocabulary of German speakers in the German language island of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. Moreover, it describes the attitudes of the local speakers of German towards these new words. <br /><br /> First, the term <em>neologism</em> is defined, different types of neologisms are presented and a review of research on German neologisms in general is given. Second, the historical background of the German speakers in Kitchener-Waterloo is described. The focal point of this thesis, however, is on the methodology of the study and on the results of the actual research coming from a data collection amongst German speakers of Kitchener-Waterloo. On the one hand, the focus of the analysis is on the question to what extent this language change in the German language in Europe has reached them. Hence knowledge and usage of the neologisms are examined. On the other hand, the focus is on the attitudes the interviewees have towards these new words. Both aspects are compared to the result of the same study administered to German speakers, who lived during the 1990s in Germany. Hence knowledge and attitudes of the Canadian German speakers can be compared to those of speakers in Germany. <br /><br /> The results show that the participants from Germany knew more neologisms than those from Kitchener Waterloo. Concerning attitudes, both groups showed a slightly positive attitude towards the neologisms with interesting differences regarding certain types of neologisms.

The main aim of this thesis is to begin to extend phonetic distance measurements to the domain of intonation. Existing studies of segmental phonetic distance have strong associations with historical linguistic questions. I begin with this context and demonstrate problems with the use of feature systems in these segmental measures. Then I attempt to draw strands from the disparate fields of quantitative historical linguistics and intonation together. The intonation of Belfast and Glasgow English provides a central case study for this. Previous work suggests that both varieties display nuclear rises on statements, yet they have never been formally compared. This thesis presents two main hypotheses on the source of these statement rises: the Alignment hypothesis and the Transfer hypothesis. The Alignment hypothesis posits that statement rises were originally more typical statement falls but have changed into rises over time through gradual phonetic change to the location of the pitch peak. The Transfer hypothesis considers that statement rises have come about through pragmatic transfer of rises onto a statement context, either from question rises or continuation rises. I evaluate these hypotheses using the primary parameters of alignment and scaling as phonetic distance measurements. The main data set consists of data from 3 Belfast English and 3 Glasgow English speakers in a Sentence reading task and Map task. The results crucially indicate that the origin of the statement rises in Belfast and Glasgow English respectively may be different. The Glasgow statement nuclear tones show support for the Alignment hypothesis, while the Belfast nuclear tones fit best with the Transfer hypothesis. The fundamental differences between Glasgow and Belfast are the earlier alignment of the peak (H) in Glasgow and the presence of a final low (L) tonal target in Glasgow and a final high (H) target in Belfast. The scaling of the final H in Belfast statements suggests that the transfer may be from continuation rather than from question rises. I then present a proposal for an overall measure of intonational distance, showing problems with parameter weighting, comparing like with like, and distinguishing between chance resemblance and genuine historical connections. The thesis concludes with an assessment of the benefits that intonational analysis could bring to improving segmental phonetic distance measures.

Languages and species both evolve by a process of repeated divergences, which can be described with the branching of a phylogenetic tree or phylogeny. Taking advantage of this fact, it is possible to study language change using computational tree building techniques developed for evolutionary biology. Mathematical approaches to the construction of phylogenies fall into two major categories: character based and distance based methods. Character based methods were used in prior work in the application of phylogenetic methods to the Indo-European family of languages by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. Discussion of the limitations of character-based models leads to a similar presentation of distance based models. We present an adaptation of these methods to linguistic data, and the phylogenies generated by applying these methods to several modern Germanic languages and Spanish. We conclude that distance based for phylogenies are useful for historical linguistic reconstruction, and that it would be useful to extend existing tree drawing methods to better model the evolutionary effects of language contact.

This paper considers the problem of language change. Linguists must explain not only how languages are learned but also how and why they have evolved along certain trajectories and not others. While the language learning problem has focused on the behavior of individuals and how they acquire a particular grammar from a class of grammars ${cal G}$, here we consider a population of such learners and investigate the emergent, global population characteristics of linguistic communities over several generations. We argue that language change follows logically from specific assumptions about grammatical theories and learning paradigms. In particular, we are able to transform parameterized theories and memoryless acquisition algorithms into grammatical dynamical systems, whose evolution depicts a population's evolving linguistic composition. We investigate the linguistic and computational consequences of this model, showing that the formalization allows one to ask questions about diachronic that one otherwise could not ask, such as the effect of varying initial conditions on the resulting diachronic trajectories. From a more programmatic perspective, we give an example of how the dynamical system model for language change can serve as a way to distinguish among alternative grammatical theories, introducing a formal diachronic adequacy criterion for linguistic theories.

Formalizing linguists' intuitions of language change as a dynamical system, we quantify the time course of language change including sudden vs. gradual changes in languages. We apply the computer model to the historical loss of Verb Second from Old French to modern French, showing that otherwise adequate grammatical theories can fail our new evolutionary criterion.

The paper presents work in progress on the interaction between information structure and word order in Old High German based on data from the Tatian translation (9th century). <br>The examination of the position of the finite verb in correspondence with the pragmatic status of discourse referents reveals an overall tendency for verb-initial order in thetic/all-focus sentences, whereas in categorical/topic-comment sentences verb-second placement with an initial topic constituent is preferred. <br>This conclusion provides support for the hypothesis stated in Donhauser & Hinterhölzl (2003) that the finite verb form in Early Germanic serves to distinguish the information-structural domains of Topic and Focus. <br>Finally, the investigation sheds light on the process of language change that led to the overall spread of verb-second in main clauses of modern German.

This dissertation investigates subject expression patterns in Dominican Spanish (DS). In this variety, the null subject constructions associated with Non-Caribbean Spanish co-exist with the widespread use of overt subjects, which are found in specific constructions that are either rare or unattested in other Spanish varieties. Interestingly, these structures co-exist in the Dominican grammar with the null subject constructions associated with Non-Caribbean Spanish. While subject expression has been studied in a number of Spanish dialects within the generative and the variationist paradigms, monolingual Dominican Spanish, to the best of my knowledge, has not been investigated in previous variationist work. This study covers this gap by examining a large corpus of spontaneous speech (N=6005) gathered in the capital city of Santo Domingo and a rural area in the northwestern Cibao region. Furthermore, in line with the cohesive approach to syntactic variation developed in recent work (Adger and Smith 2005), theoretical implications are drawn from quantitative results. The results obtained in this study show that null and overt subject patterns in DS are regulated by the same constraints that have been found relevant in previous variationist work, i.e. discourse-related factor groups and Person (Otheguy, Zentella and Livert, 2007). These results depart from previous work in that evidence for language change in progress has been found in subject position patterns, rather than in null and overt subject distribution. When this phenomenon is examined, urban, young, high-middle class and female speakers arise as the social groups leading grammatical restructuring. Quantitative and qualitative evidence is taken into account for testing previous syntactic-theoretical proposals on DS. Taking the cartographic approach to syntactic structure (Rizzi 1997) as a point of departure, it will proposed that multiple specifier positions are available within the TP and CP fields to host strong and weak subjects. This proposal, in turn, makes it possible to account for the Null Subject Parameter profile displayed by synchronic DS without resorting to competing grammars in the minds of the speakers.