A Measure of Aggregate Syntactic Distance
We compare vectors containing counts of trigrams of part-of-speech (POS) tags in order to obtain an aggregate measure of syntax difference. Since lexical syntactic categories reflect more abstract syntax as well, we argue that this procedure reflects more than just the basic syntactic categories. We tag the material automatically and analyze the frequency vectors for POS trigrams using a permutation test. A test analysis of a 305,000 word corpus containing the English of Finnish emigrants to Australia is promising in that the procedure proposed works well in distinguishing two different groups (adult vs. child emigrants) and also in highlighting syntactic deviations between the two groups.
Borrowing: the synchrony of integration
The notion of loanword assimilation is operationalized in a number of d~flerent ways, focusing on both linguistic and social aspects. The indices of integration thus constructed are applied to a set of lexical data elicited from Puerto Ricatz children and adults from East Harlem, New York. The results of this survey are analyzed statistically using the method of principal components. We interpret the output in terms of the social and linguistic trajectory of words during the borrowing and integration process. Of particular importance are the relatively close relationship between increase in usage frequencies and the processes of phonological ititegration, the transient nature of inconsistencies in gender assignment, and the fates of competing lexical items for a single referent. The lexical stock of languages may contain a considerable proportion of words borrowed from one or more other languages. The historical record, together with methods of historical and comparative linguistics, can help us infer which words were borrowed, from what language, and approximately when. On the synchronic level, however, making such inferences can be more difficult, particularly because there is no unequivocal way of deciding when a lexical item from one language, used during discourse in another language, whether by a single speaker, or repeatedly in a community, should be considered a loanword. It may constitute all or part of a code-switch, which is a phenomenon quite distinct from borrowing. It may be a manifestation of incomplete acquisition of one of a bilingual's two languages. It might be a momentary lapse of the type often classified as 'interference'. Or we might want to characterize it as still another kind of result of language contact. It has been claimed that 'from synchronic examination [i.e. without comparative or etymological evidence] no loans are discoverable or describable' (Fries and Pike 1949; see also Haugen 1950a; Weinreich
Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor During the ‘Invention of Tribalism’ in Zimbabwe
There is evidence from across the disciplines that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms. This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics were an important factor in this process. The South African linguist Clement Doke was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona. His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organization the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name Shona. While vocabulary from Ndau was to be incorporated, words from the Korekore group in the north were to be discouraged, and Kalanga in the West was allowed to be subsumed under Ndebele. Writing about sixty years later, Ranger focusses more closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but he also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans. It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation. Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification, and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities, and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa, and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethnolinguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation. To a significant degree, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.