Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic

Front Cover
Éva Ágnes Csató, Bo Isaksson, Carina Jahani
Psychology Press, 2005 - 373 pages
This book is the first of its kind in the field of Iranian, Semitic and Turkic contact linguistics, and provides a summary of the present results of this dynamic field of research. The authors are outstanding scholars engaged in the study of language varieties spoken in 'convergence areas' in which speakers are multilingual in languages of at least two but sometimes three language families. Many of the contributions present new data collected in fieldwork. The geographic area covered is Western and Central Asia where varieties of Iranian, Semitic and Turkic languages have entered into many different types of contact. The intricate linguistic contact situations demonstrate highly interesting convergence phenomena.
 

Contents

IV
3
V
33
VI
35
VII
65
VIII
79
IX
97
X
111
XI
125
XXIII
201
XXIV
203
XXVI
213
XXVII
225
XXIX
239
XXXI
269
XXXIII
283
XXXV
293

XII
127
XIII
133
XIV
139
XV
159
XVII
171
XIX
179
XXI
189
XXXVII
303
XXXIX
315
XLI
333
XLIII
345
XLIV
347
XLVI
363
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Page 158 - What seems to have happened in these informal varieties is a gradual adaptation of grammatical differences to the point that only morphophonemic differences (differences of lexical shape) remain.
Page 158 - The constant code-switching required by the daily interaction routine has had some far reaching effects on local grammatical systems. When considered alone, to be sure, each local variety seems distinct. A historical linguist would readily identify particular texts as from a deviant dialect of Kannada, Marathi or Urdu. What would be missed is that sentence-by-sentence comparison of natural conversation texts in all three main local varieties reveals an extraordinary degree of translatability from...
Page 158 - The sentences . . . are lexically distinct in almost every respect, yet they have identical grammatical categories and identical constituent structures ... It is possible to translate one sentence into the other by simple morph for morph substitution.

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