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Topic: Genetic linguistics

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	Genetic Epistemology
		GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY attempts to explain knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, on the basis of its history, its sociogenesis, and especially the psychological origins of the notions and operations upon which it is based.
		Genetic epistemology, as we see it, reflects most decidedly this separation of norm and fact, of valuation and description, We believe that, to the contrary, only in the real development of the sciences can we discover the implicit values and norms that guide, inspire and regulate them.
		The fundamental hypothesis of genetic epistemology is that there is a parallelism between the progress made in the logical and rational organisation of knowledge and the corresponding formative psychological processes.
	www.marxists.org /reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/piaget.htm (4839 words)

	Serbo-Croatian language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Genetic linguistics is, generally speaking, concerned mainly with two basic traits: the origin of a language and mutual intelligibility between languages thus defined.
		Genetically, there is not one German language, but at least two: one of them (Plattdeutsch) is, genetically, one language with Dutch — although another point of view would stress the continuity of the transition between High German, Low German and Dutch dialects — see dialect.
		Although most linguists nowadays consider Štokavian, Čakavian, and Kajkavian as three dialects of one common language, there is a basis for considering the three as distinct tongues.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Serbocroatian_language (3056 words)

	ChomskyRationality (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		In the discourse of ‘modern’ linguistics, the question of whether the ‘reality’ of language is mental, material, or social has been evaded by a performative campaign to replace real language with ideal language and to short-circuit mental with material whilst bypassing the social basis of language.
		The immense scope and pervasive presence of language in human activities has animated linguists to regard their science as a central and exemplary one: ‘among all the human sciences, linguistics has been the one science whose scientificity is given as an example with a zealous and insistent unanimity’ (Pennycook, 1994: 23f, citing Derrida, 1974: 281).
		A ‘linguistic theory’ then becomes like a lens that inverts polarities: the irrational becomes rational and vice-versa; the obscure is suddenly ‘obvious’; ‘intuitions’ turn into ‘facts’; ‘introspection’ supplants ‘discovery’, and homework dislodges fieldwork; the linguist parades as the ‘ideal speaker-hearer’; the child is mechanised into a ‘device’; and the meanings of terms flicker and oscillate.
	beaugrande.bizland.com /ChomskyPragmatics.htm (10820 words)

	GENETIC LINGUISTICS & GENETIC CREOLISTICS
		Genetic creolistics is used in the title of this note by analogy to genetic linguistics to suggest that the subject matters of both research areas are similar.
		Genetic linguistics is far from being ahead of genetic creolistics in this respect.
		There are also plenty of linguistic reasons to hope that creolistics can make a contribution to general linguistics, in the same way that one can select any arbitrary set of languages and hope to make a contribution to, for instance, linguistic typology and the study of language shift.
	humanities.uchicago.edu /faculty/mufwene/Response-to-Thomason-2002.html (4761 words)

	WHITHER URALISTICS
		The new conception of genetic relationships between languages, mainly conflating these with contact relationships, and the criticism of the language family tree based thereupon makes determination of the genetic identity of a language impossible and, in fact, meaningless.
		The raison d'être of historical linguistics is to approach by linguistic reconstruction pas language varieties which have really occurred (Häkkinen 1984: 20), that the reconstruction of a protolanguage is an approximation of a real language variety of the past (Haas 1966: 130).
		This is of course true of linguistic reconstruction as well (Haas 1966: 132) and does not disqualify it, nor does it disqualify linguistic paleontology.
	www.geocities.com /Athens/Acropolis/3093/Uralists_Against_History.htm (6603 words)

	sci.lang FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		Linguistics can often supply facts which help people arrive at a recommendation or value judgement, but the recommendation or value judgement is not part of linguistic science itself.
		Recently linguists such as Joseph Greenberg and Vitalij Shevoroshkin have attracted attention both in linguistic circles and in the popular press with claims of larger genetic units, such as Nostratic (comprising Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Dravidian, and Afroasiatic) or Amerind (to include all the languages of the New World except Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut).
		Most linguists regard these hypotheses as having a grossly insufficient empirical foundation, and argue that comparisons at that depth are not possible using available methods of historical linguistics.
	www.faqs.org /faqs/sci-lang-faq (8460 words)

	BOOKS NOTED IN THE SSILA NEWSLETTER (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		The Rise and Fall of Languages (1997), which put forward a cyclic model of linguistic evolution in which stable “equilibrium states” characterized by extensive borrowing are periodically “punctuated” by the rapid expansion a a particular language or language group, resulting in the familiar family-tree types of relationships.
		Its editors and authors aim to explain and identify the relationship between areal diffusion and the genetic development of languages, and to discover the means of distinguishing what may cause one language to share the characteristics of another.
		Linguistic Change and Reconstruction Methodology (Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), the proceedings of the Workshop on Linguistic Change and Reconstruction Methodology held at Stanford Univ. in 1987.
	linguistics.buffalo.edu /ssila/books/allbook.htm (6442 words)

	Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 4, no. 20 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		As we mentioned in Grace 1999, some linguists may be interested in genetic relationships only for their implications for such work.
		In fact, one would naturally expect linguists to insist that such questions do fall within the domain of their discipline, and that no one without proper linguistic credentials could speak with authority on such questions.
		QUESTION: Well, in spite of their "unwanted stepchild" status in linguistics, genetic linguistic relationships have nevertheless long been valued as one important line of evidence for the reconstruction of culture history, and interest in them by non-linguists is likely to continue.
	www2.hawaii.edu /~grace/elniv20.html (2980 words)

	Butterflies and Wheels Article
		Analogies between historical linguistics and biology are often made, and they are more than often rather unhelpful, but here a somewhat fitting analogy would be an attempt to place porcine parvovirus, or rather the symptoms of porcine parvovirus, on the same line with the prehistorical ancestors of pigs in an account of pig evolution.
		Historical linguistics proper is not an empirical science in the sense that physics is - in which repeatable spatiotemporal occurrences are studied - but a discipline which strives to provide a picture of the past as plausible as possible, one in which the interpretations of the researcher play a vital role.
		Linguistic pseudoscience, invariably striving to paint a picture as glorious as possible of the past of whatever nation you belong to, has always existed, and always will - but during the last ten years in Finland and Estonia, it seems to have made a sustained push to the mainstream.
	www.butterfliesandwheels.com /articleprint.php?num=77 (3923 words)

	[No title]
		But the only thing that the linguist can come back with is a synchronic grammar, or to keep to my metaphor, a "snapshot" of the language at the particular point in time that the study was done.
		If she compares this with a "snapshot" of another language, it may be possible to say that there are similarities between the languages, but without any historical depth to the languages it is impossible to say whether these similarities are the result of related languages diverging or different languages converging.
		So in my usage, anyone who is doing historical linguistics is doing comparative linguistics (even if only working with one language since this still involves the comparison of different stages of the language) and I suppose that it is theoretically possible to do comparative linguistics without doing historical linguistics, but what would be the point.
	oi.uchicago.edu /OI/ANE/ANE-DIGEST/1998/v1998.n325 (2848 words)

	John Benjamins: Book details for Historical and Comparative Linguistics [CILT 6] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		A new introduction dealing mainly with a semiotic basis of change, and a final chapter on aspects of explanation, particularly in historical and human disciplines, have been added and minor changes have been made in the bulk of the text.
		Linguistic Reconstruction: A synthesis of various linguistic and cultural notions 5.
		Linguistic reconstruction: A synthesis of various linguistic and cultural notions
	www.benjamins.com /cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=CILT_6 (219 words)

	[No title]
		Survey of the languages of the world with major attention to topics such as universals, linguistic typology, areal linguistics, genetic relationship, sub-grouping, decipherment, ethnohistory.
		Theory and techniques of comparative linguistics; proof of 'genetic' relationship between languages; procedures for sub-grouping; internal reconstruction; use of lexicostatistics.
		Methods of descriptive linguistics by application at all levels of structure to one of the lesser-known languages.
	www.wisc.edu /pubs/home/archives/grad00/letsci/linguiC.html (780 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		The task of historical Hebrew linguistics is to trace the development of features in the current language state to their origins either in a past stage of the language, or to an external source.
		Yet genetic relationship entails a systematic correspondence in all linguistic subsystems, such that a daughter language is a changed later form of its single parent language (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 11).
		Their approach to the study of genetic relationship, and to the study of non-genetic language development, is based theoretically on the social fact of normal transmission rather than merely on the linguistic facts themselves (1988: 9-12).
	www.people.cornell.edu /pages/dls38/thesis5.html (3972 words)

	elnser4 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		Grace, George W. On the scientific status of genetic classification in linguistics.
		Emergent grammar and the A Priori Grammar Postulate.
		Currents in Pacific linguistics: papers on Austronesian languages and ethnolinguistics in honour of George W. Grace.
	www2.hawaii.edu /~grace/elnser4.html (1550 words)

	Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics: graduate bibliography
		A classic; the second part is dedicated to historical linguistics and though outdated is still important.
		Some of the best work in historical linguistics is published either in general linguistics journals or in the journals dedicated to specific languages or language groups.
		These are periodicals specialized in the history of linguistics; other articles in the subject appear in periodicals about linguistics or about the history of ideas.
	www.clp.ox.ac.uk /pages/grad_reading.html (2226 words)

	W Rothwell: Arrivals and Departures: the Adoption of French Terminology into Middle English
		The term was doubtless brought over to England as part of the linguistic baggage of the Conqueror and has remained in use ever since, extending its semantic field as the needs of society developed and passing into Middle English in the fourteenth century (AND sub custume), with the compound 'custom-house' appearing late in the fifteenth.
		The linguistic terminology used here would need to be accurately defined and its validity as applied to the situation of medieval England convincingly illustrated by documentary proof on a large scale before any credence could be attached to such claims.
		The term 'creolization', whatever definitions of it may be given in the manuals of linguistics, suggests the corruption of a highly developed language of civilization by close contact with a less sophisticated one used by a more primitive people.
	www.anglo-norman.net /articles/arrivals.xml (8085 words)

	[No title]
		Subject: ane Historical linguistics and "genetic" relationships There seems to be a good deal of confusion about what historical linguistics is and isn't.
		Now in historical linguistics it is possible to "prove" certain facts (subject, as in all fields that contain the word "historical," to the limits of the accuracy of the historical data).
		Although we don't see any genetic relationship with say Elamite or Hurrian [Arpachshad?] and Sumerian, to the Afro-Asiatic speakers, their exotic nature, by comparison with their own language, may have made them all seem to be related "ancient native languages", much as we have difficulty today distinguishing between ancient ancient Australian, and ancient Australian immigrants.
	oi.uchicago.edu /OI/ANE/ANE-DIGEST/1998/v1998.n324 (3985 words)

	SULAIR: Reference Guide for Pidgin and Creole Languages
		Interest in the field has grown along with the growing recognition of the cultural significance of these languages, and P/C material has mushroomed, including books, theses, articles, conference proceedings, and working papers, as well as sound recordings and religious and secular writing in Creole languages.
		Covers history; linguistic, social, and political significance; and structure and relationships of Pidgin and Creole languages.
		One is the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (MFICHE 552 MTXT).
	www-sul.stanford.edu /depts/ssrg/pidgins/pidgin.html (2296 words)

	Sarah Thomason's Short Bio (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		After receiving my Ph.D. in 1968, I taught Slavic linguistics at Yale (1968-1971) and then general linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh (1972-1998); I've been at the University of Michigan since 1999 and am now (since 2001) the William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics.
		I've served on various Linguistic Society of America committees (as a member of the Executive Committee 2001-2003) and taught at three summer Linguistic Institutes (as the Collitz Professor in 1999).
		I was chair of the Linguistics and Language Sciences section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1996 and the section Secretary in 2001-2005, and I was president of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas in 2000.
	www-personal.umich.edu /~thomason/cv/st-bio.html (249 words)

	IE Lexicostat: Bibliography (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		The validity and usefulness of lexicostatistical approaches have been tested through both computer simulation (Sankoff 1969, Embleton 1986) and through application to such language families as Austronesian (Dyen 1965) and Indoeuropean (Dyen, Kruskal and Black 1992, referred to on these pages as the monograph).
		Lexicostatistics in genetic linguistics: Proceedings of the Yale Conference, April 3-4, 1971.
		Lexicostatistics in genetic linguistics: Proceedings of the Montreal Conference, Centre de Recherches Mathematiques Université de Montreal, May 19-20, 1973.
	www.ntu.edu.au /education/langs/ielex/BIBLIOG.html (1326 words)

	Browse Current Calls and Conferences - Linguistic Subfield
		Bulgarian "Islands" on the Linguistic Map of the Balkans
		Hispanic Linguistics Symposium & Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as First and Second Languages
		Linguistic Society of New Zealand Annual Conference 2005 (LSNZ 05)
	www.ling.ed.ac.uk /linguist/callconf/browse-current-LF-Conf.html (2549 words)

	Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics
		Ten years of research back up the bold new theory advanced by authors Thomason and Kaufman, who rescue the study of contact-induced language change from the neglect it has suffered in recent decades.
		The authors establish an important new framework for the historical analysis of all degrees of contact-induced language change.
		Sarah Grey Thomason is Professor of Linguistics and Terrence Kaufman is Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh.
	www.ucpress.edu /books/pages/2338.html (166 words)

	William Croft - Publications (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		Genetic linguistics: essays on theory and method, by Joseph H. Greenberg.
		Form, meaning and speakers in the evolution of language (Commentary on Kirby et al., From UG to universals: linguistic adaptation through iterated learning).
		Linguistic selection: an utterance-based evolutionary theory of language.
	lings.ln.man.ac.uk /info/staff/WAC/WACpubs.html (1265 words)

	Amazon.com: Books: Principles of Historical Linguistics (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		Historical Linguistics (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics) by Theodora Bynon
		Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics by Sarah G. Thomason
		This book provides an understanding of the principles of historical linguistics and the related fields of comparative linguistics and linguistic reconstruction.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/3110129620?v=glance (413 words)

	STEDT Bibliography
		Matisoff, J. The bulging monosyllable, or the mora the merrier: echo-vowel adverbialization in Lahu.
		Arlington: Summer Institute of Linguistics and Univ. of Texas.
		Linguistics of the Sino-Tibetan Area: the state of the art.
	stedt.berkeley.edu /html/bibliography.html (2028 words)

	Amazon.ca: Books: Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		Thomason and Kaufman are at times simplistic in their discussion of social factors as the primary determinant of language change outcomes, and the linguistic factors they accept as important in determining the outcome of language-contact should not be taken without a grain of salt.
		On the whole, however, this book is a clear, insightful and complex discussion of the mechanics of language-contact (incidentally, it is much better than Thomason's later book on the same subject, Language Contact: An Introduction).
		This is the most important book about language contact and historical linguistics ever.
	www.amazon.ca /exec/obidos/ASIN/0520078934 (331 words)

	yourDictionary.com • Advisory Council of Experts
		The distinguished members of the Council help ensure the integrity of their respective areas of linguistic specialization, as well as provide indispensable guidance in the development, acquisition, and maintenance of the dictionaries under their purview.
		The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History (with M. Posnansky).
		Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology.
	www.yourdictionary.com /about/experts.html (1024 words)

	LinguistList Conference Calls (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)
		This conference, organized by the linguistics department at Cornell University, has two central objectives: (1) to highlight the complex interconnections of language and poverty for a general audience, and (2) to promote exchange among scholars of languag...
		Papers are invited on all aspects of the history of linguistics.
		Sociolinguistics, linguistics and the teaching of languages in multilingual and multidialectal contexts / Les apports de la sociolinguistique et de la linguistique descriptive à l'enseignement des langues dans des contextes plurilingues et pluridialectaux...
	linguistik.phil.uni-passau.de /~schneide/linguistlist.php (3839 words)

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