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Le Francais Terre-neuvien (Newfoundland French)

2010-06-03T10:36:00.000-07:00

La première tâche d’un dialectologiste c’est de définir le mot dialecte. Il n’y a pas, en effet, de distinction claire et scientifique entre les mots dialecte et langue. La distinction traditionnelle est la suivante: les dialectes d’une seule langue sont réciproquement intelligibles; les langues différentes n’en sont pas. Cette définition est probablement la meilleure que nous avons, mais elle n’est pas toujours valable. Par exemple, ceux qui parlent danois peuvent facilement comprendre le norvégien, mais un locuteur cockney aurait beaucoup de difficulté a comprendre le langage d’un fermier du Kentucky rural, même si tous les deux parlent la langue que nous appelons “l’anglais” (Davis, 1983).

En réalité, très souvent des éléments non-linguistiques, tels que les frontiers politiques, déterminent si deux parlers sont appelés dialectes ou langues. Pour cette raison, Davis (1983) a proposé la définition suivante: si deux personnes disent qu’ils parlent une langue x, ils le parlent.

Quatre éléments contribuent à l’entretient de la variété entre langues et dialectes: la géographie, les limites politiques, l’immigration et la conquête territoriale (Davis, 1983). Tous quatre sont importants dans le cas du français terre-neuvien. Premier, la géographie: parce que Terre-Neuve est une île, elle a toujours été isolée du reste de l’Amerique du Nord. En effet, sa ville capitale, Saint-Jean, est moins loin de l’Ireland que de Toronto. L’isolation des francophones terre-neuviens a été même plus extrême que celle des anglophones de la région, car ils sont beaucoup moins nombreux, ils sont concentrés dans une très petite région de l’île et ils n’ont pas eu d’accès à l’éducation dans leur propre langue. Selon Davis (1983), c’est un axiom de la dialectologie que l’isolation de peuples produit des développements linguistiques différents. Second, les limites politiques: la Conféderation de Terre-Neuve avec le Canada a eu lieu il y a seulement 53 ans, en 1949. Avant ce temps, elle était un pays indépendent avec des plus forts liens avec l’Angleterre qu’avec n’importe quel endroit en Amérique du Nord. Troisième, l’immigration: la majorité des premiers colons de l’île de Terre-Neuve sont venus soit de l’Ireland, soit du sud de l’Angleterre. Evidemment, on trouve aussi une influence française importante, autant qu’une influence Ecossaise. Quatrième, la conquête territoriale: l’île de Terre-Neuve est passée entre les mains des français et des anglais plusieurs fois dans son histoire—alors des noms de lieux francais sont éparpillés avec des noms de lieux anglais partout sur l’île. Les villages français de la péninsule Port-au-Port sont le résultat du traité d’Utrecht, dans lequel les français ont gagné le droit exclusive de pêcher sur la côte ouest de Terre-Neuve (Barter, 1986).

Notre prochaine problème c’est de discuter les relations entre dialectes, surtout en considérant l’idée de dialectes standards et nonstandards. Selon Davis (1983), la distinction entre dialectes standards and nonstandards, comme la distinction entre langues et dialectes, doit être basée sur des facteurs non-linguistiques. Dans chaque société, pour des raisons économiques, politiques et culturelles, un dialecte devient le standard. On peut identifier ce standard en regardant la haute bourgeoisie dans les grands centres culturels. En France, on parle français—le parler de Paris—ou on parle un des dialectes. Selon les linguistes, cette conception de dialectes est une erreur. Le langage de Paris est un dialecte comme tous les autres et il est devenu le dialecte standard pour des raisons purement non-linguistiques.

Les dialectes, en générale, peuvent être distingués l’un de l’autre par leur prononciation, leur lexique, et leur grammaire (Davis, 1983). Je sépare, alors, mon analyse technique du français terre-neuvien en ces trois catégories.

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CITATION INFORMATION:

Siu, Susan C. H. (2002). Le français terre-neuvien (Newfoundland French). Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/francaisterreneuvien.

The Ergative Case Parameter in Georgian

2010-06-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

Georgian is the official language of Georgia, a former Soviet republic situated in the Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. It shares borders with Russia, in the North, and Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Turkey in the East and South. The entire Caucasus area, in and around the Caucasus Mountains, is less than twice the size of the United Kingdom, but a large number of languages are spoken there—a larger number than can be found in almost any other area of the same size, anywhere in the world. There are Indo-European (e.g., Armenian and Ossete), Altaic (e.g., Azerbaidjani), and Semitic languages in addition to the forty or so languages of the Caucasian family, which are spoken almost exclusively in the Caucasus and are not known to be related to any of the world’s other languages (Comrie 1990: 14, Crystal 1997: 307). The Caucasus has, in fact, been famous throughout history for the numbers of languages spoken there. The Arabs referred to the area as the ‘mountain of tongues’” (Comrie 1990: 14).

There is some debate among linguists as to whether the so-called “Caucasian languages,” spoken by approximately eight million people, actually form a single family of related languages; the classification may be more geographical than linguistic. There has not been enough work done on these languages, yet, to know for certain (Crystal 1997: 307). Therefore, many linguistics choose to speak of them in terms of four distinct groups that do not necessarily belong to a single larger family. These are (1) the North-West Caucasian (or Abkhazo-Adyghian) group; (2) the North Central Caucasian group; (3) the North-East Caucasian group (which includes nearly a million Chechen speakers); and (4) the Southern Caucasian (or Kartvelian) group, which is made up mostly of the various dialects of Georgian and represents more than half of the speakers of Caucasian languages, at least four million (Comrie 1990: 14, Katzner 1975: 125, Crystal 1997: 307).

The Georgians call themselves Kartvelebi (Katzner 1975: 125), and their language is the only language of the Caucasian family to have a long-standing literary tradition (Katzner 1975: 21, Crystal 1997: 307); its unique written form was invented in the fifth century A.D. (Crystal 1997: 307). It is very interesting phonetically, having large numbers of consonant clusters, as in the names of the Georgian cities Tbilisi and Mcxeta.

Perhaps the most famous—or rather infamous—Georgian, outside of Georgia, is Joseph Stalin, whose birth name was Dzhugashvili. Georgian surnames frequently end in –idze, -adze, -veli, or –vili (Aronson 1990: 37, Katzner 1975: 125); other typical examples are the names of the famous Georgian writers Galaktion Tabidze, Ilia Čavčavadze, Šota Rustaveli, and Nikoloz Baratašvili. Another interesting point about Georgian is that its words for ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are the opposite of those in nearly every other language in the world: ‘dad’ is mama and ‘mom’ is deda.

In terms of syntax, Georgian is fairly free in its word order. However, the verb generally comes at the end of the sentence (there are plenty of exceptions to this, as will be seen in the data below), the subject normally comes before both direct and indirect objects, and interrogative words and phrases, as well as negatives, must come immediately before the verb (Aronson 1990: 47)

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CITATION INFORMATION:

Siu, Susan C. H. (2005). The Ergative Case Parameter in Georgian. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/ergativecaseinGeorgian.

Classifiers in Signed and Spoken Languages: Typology and Universals

2010-06-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

The primary purpose of this paper is to compare classifier constructions in a variety of signed and spoken languages, focusing on the similarities and differences between the modalities. Classifiers are morphemes used in a variety of constructions to semantically categorize nouns in many of the world’s languages, including all signed languages, nearly all the languages of Asia (Jones 1970: 1) and many spoken languages of Australia/Papua New Guinea and the Americas. The goal is to determine which characteristics of these constructions are universal and which are modality-specific; some universals of spoken language, for instance, may be attributable to constraints brought about by the linearity of the surface structure of speech, while some universals of signed languages may be due to the limitations of the visual/perceptual system or the constraints imposed by the anatomy and physiology of the hand.

Little or no research conducted to date has controlled for the requirements of the speech modality in searching for universals of human language, since language and speech are often assumed to be the same thing. And few linguists know enough about anatomy, physiology, or kinesiology to be able to proceed far in terms of the functional limitations of the gestural/visual modality (Wilbur 1987: 27-28).

Sequentiality is generally less important in signed languages, which have the capacity to make use of three-dimensional space, than in spoken languages. This forces us to question whether language is stored in the brain in the form of one-dimensional (linear) algorithms or whether it has a spatial structure that is only converted into linear strings of words when expressed through the modality of speech? Did sign come before speech, or did speech come before sign? Or is language truly modality-neutral? And how could human language have evolved from pre-existing systems of animal cognition and communication? Chomsky (2005) claims that the primary “purpose” of language is cognition and that communication is secondary; if this is the case, what does it mean for the study of universals?

Since most work on language universals has been carried out with little or no reference to signed languages, these languages can serve as a unique test (Wilbur 1987: 9) of the validity of those universals that have so far been identified and provide us with valuable guidance in deciding on directions for future research.

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CITATION INFORMATION:
Siu, Susan C. H. (2006). Classifiers in Signed and Spoken Languages: Typology and Universals. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/classifiersinsignedandspoken.