The Changing Languages of Europe
Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva
Abstract
The main goal of this book is to demonstrate that the languages and dialects of Europe are becoming increasingly alike. This unifying process — that goes at least as far back as the Roman empire — is accelerating and affects every one of Europe’s 150 or so languages, including those of different families such as Basque and Finnish. The changes are by no means restricted to lexical borrowing, but involve every grammatical aspect of the language. They are usually so minute that neither native speakers nor trained linguists notice them. But they accumulate and give rise to new grammatical structu ... More
The main goal of this book is to demonstrate that the languages and dialects of Europe are becoming increasingly alike. This unifying process — that goes at least as far back as the Roman empire — is accelerating and affects every one of Europe’s 150 or so languages, including those of different families such as Basque and Finnish. The changes are by no means restricted to lexical borrowing, but involve every grammatical aspect of the language. They are usually so minute that neither native speakers nor trained linguists notice them. But they accumulate and give rise to new grammatical structures that lead, in turn, to new patterns of areal relationship. The book describes linguistic transfer from one language to another in terms of grammatical replication, using grammaticalization theory as a framework. The linguistic domains covered in more detail are definite and indefinite articles, possession, case marking, and the relationship between questions and subordination.
Keywords:
articles,
borrowing,
case marking,
grammaticalization,
replication,
linguistic change,
possession,
subordination,
transfer
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2006 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199297337 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2007 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199297337.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Bernd Heine, author
University of Cologne
Tania Kuteva, author
University of Dusseldorf
Author Webpage
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