No description available.

No description available.

Inaug.-Diss.--Münster. / Bibliography: p. 390-403.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis attempts to analyze the causes and mechanisms of the dissolution of the language ancestral to the modern Slavonic languages. Recent advances in the field of archaeology have cast traditional theories of the Indo-Europeanization of Europe into doubt; specifically, consensus has been growing that the Indo-European languages arrived in Europe several millennia earlier than previously thought, accompanying the introduction of agriculture into Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Balkan peninsula at the end of the Neolithic period. This stands in contrast to the conventional premise that Proto-Indo-European was introduced during the Bronze Age by nomadic tribes from the steppes north of the Caucasus mountains. Acceptance of the former model requires significant adjustment in the chronology of the break-up of Indo-European unity. In addition, it necessitates the adjustment of current theories of the origin and spread of change within a language. We have attempted to address this issue by the proposal of a framework of language evolution incorporating the Utterance-Based Theory of Selection and the Punctuated Equilibrium Model. Both of these models rely on research in the field of sociolinguistics, and stress the role of external factors in the development of languages. Our tentative conclusion was that there exists a concrete and dynamic relationship between catastrophic historical events and episodes of profound change in the structure of a language. The body of this thesis is composed of historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence, which substantiates this claim.

No description available.

Habilitationsschrift--Bonn, 1974. / Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (v. 1, p. [206]-223; v. 2, p. [xiii]-xxx).

Habilitationsschrift--Bonn, 1974. / Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (v. 1, p. [206]-223; v. 2, p. [xiii]-xxx).

Issued also as thesis, Munich, 1956. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 9-20).

After the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina erupted into ethnic conflict and ultimately genocide. Nearly 100,000 people, mainly Bosniaks, died in the Bosnian War. Two decades later, the violence has ended but the conflict is still present in Bosnia; the societal segregation of the 1995 Dayton Accords, intended only as an immediate solution to the violence, still stands. Population and language distribution are evidence of this segregation. Bosnia’s two entities are home to two different ethnic majorities: Serbs in the Republika Srpska and Bosniaks in the Federation of BiH. In an environment so sensitive that the government recently feared that merely releasing statistics on ethnic populations might cause violence, the languages that represent these populations are important indicators of social presence and power. In order to evaluate the presence of the Serbian and Bosnian languages, as well as the English language, in Bosnia, signage on the main streets in the country’s capitals were photographed in great detail. It was hypothesized that linguistic majority would match ethnic majority on both main streets, and that English would appear frequently in advertisements. The number of photographs in which each language appeared was tallied up in order to determine how often the languages are typically used. Analyses of these results demonstrated that the English language is the second-most ubiquitous on both streets, after Bosnian, and the comparatively small presence of the Serbian language on both streets indicated that the linguistic environment in Bosnia is not conducive to peace and reconciliation.