Marisa Brook |
Assistant Professor | ||
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The explanatory power of language play In our case study, Emily Blamire and I find quantitative evidence for the notion that language-play is as rule-governed as anything else in language is (Brook and Blamire 2023 in Language). To account for this, we propose that language play can only be successful if it is at once novel and comprehensible. The tension between these ensures that language play deviates but only so far from the norms of the variety. Future directions for this project: processing of language play and gradience of acceptibility; the pragmatics of choosing a completely novel variant over existing ones; whether language play reveals possible directions of near-future language change; to what extent language play accounts for the fact that languages change in the first place. Chain-shifts in the morphosyntax A conventionally-defined variable may be part of a larger domino effect (Brook 2018 in Language Variation and Change). Equally, but in the opposite direction, it may contain meaningful internal layers of change (Brook 2020 in Linguistics Vanguard). While these findings do not invalidate existing work, they do suggest room for gentle refinement of the traditional variable context to allow for more gradience. More importantly, they point to further questions. Can we quantify linguistic relatedness? How do we reconcile it with the (powerful, crucial) forces of social meaning in linguistic change? Sointula: Language-shift in diachronic perspective Mirva Johnson and I are combining legacy recordings, census data, and new interviews to reconstruct the entire linguistic history of the literally insular town of Sointula, British Columbia, Canada, as it has shifted from being a self-contained Finnish-speaking enclave to adopting English in recent decades. The town has attracted metalinguistic attention for supposedly having a distinctive local "lilt" - what does this correspond to, linguistically speaking? Where are there substrate traces of Finnish phonologically speaking (vowels, consonants, intonation)? Which younger speakers might sound a little bit Finnish relative to other towns in the region in spite of never having spoken the language? | |||