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Article Dans Une Revue Yuyanxue Luncong Année : 2012

Extralinguistic Factors, Language Change, and Comparative Reconstructions: Case Studies from South-West China

Résumé

It is generally assumed that the outcomes of language contact by and large depend on extralinguistic factors (e.g. Matras and Sakel 2007: 2). The reverse of this deterministic claim entails that the potential outcomes of a language contact situation may to some extent be inferred from the extralinguistic context of that situation. In this sense, languages native to the multi-ethnic and multilingual "ethnic corridor" of the Sino-Tibetan borderland are, due to the complex and layered history of this area, likely to be among most extreme outcomes of language contact--that is, heavy borrowing and heavy structural interference, penetrating into all subsystems of the recipient language. In this paper, I focus on languages of the ethnic corridor that are spoken by small-size groups with a long history of residence in the area, who are fully bilingual in their native tongue and their respective contact language. I examine local linguistic varieties of (a) well-studied subgroups with written traditions, such as Sinitic and Tibetan; and (b) lesser-researched and phylogenetically more obscure subgroups, such as Qiangic. I argue that common sociolinguistic settings for all considered varieties should lead us to examine the linguistic structures of synchronically and historically lesser-understood varieties aided by insights gained from the study of synchronically and historically better-understood varieties that fall into the same category. This approach allows us to extract falsifiable predictions from complex cases of language contact in the area, to derive testable conclusions about recurrent local processes of language change.
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Dates et versions

hal-00553058 , version 1 (06-01-2011)
hal-00553058 , version 2 (22-06-2011)

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  • HAL Id : hal-00553058 , version 2

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Ekaterina Chirkova. Extralinguistic Factors, Language Change, and Comparative Reconstructions: Case Studies from South-West China. Yuyanxue Luncong, 2012, 45, pp.67-111. ⟨hal-00553058v2⟩
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