Volume 05, Spring 1979
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- ItemOpen AccessExplicit and implicit communicative strategies in children's narratives*(University of Calgary, 1979-05) Southerland, Ronald HThe present study represents an interim report on ongoing research into the nature of the social differentiation of English in Calgary. The data discussed here were gathered in interviews in Victoria School, an elementary and junior high school in a working and lower class district of Calgary. While an ultimate aim of the broader investigation will be the establishment of some correlation between socio-economic status of speaker and language use, this paper will not address such problems.
- ItemOpen AccessCauses of rapid phonological change: the case of Atsina and its relatives(University of Calgary, 1979-05) Pentland, David HThe cause of change has always been one of the great unanswered questions of linguistics. It is easy enough to describe the effects of a particular change, but the theories that have been advanced to account for the change's arising in the first place range from the laughable to the merely inadequate. Istvan Fodor (1965) suggests a distinction between internal and external factors. Internal causes of change are the "inherent laws" of a language which cause it to change in a particular way. Fodor observes (15) that the nature of such laws has not been elucidated; nor can it be -- the question is circular: Language X has changed in a certain manner because it was the inherent tendency of that language to do so. Among the external factors examined by Fodor are the effects of history, culture, society, geography, neighbouring peoples, and the national character. Some of these are undoubtedly major conditioners of phonological and other linguistic change, but others are merely coincidental and unrelated to linguistic developments.
- ItemOpen AccessTowards a reanalysis of Oceanic possessives(University of Calgary, 1979-05) MacDonald, Lorna AThe Oceanic languages, which constitute a major subgroup of the Austronesian language family, consist of over 400 languages spoken in Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia. Although the exact subgrouping of Oceanic is uncertain, Pawley (1972) provides support for an Eastern Oceanic subgroup, which consists of languages from the Southeast Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides and Banks Islands, Polynesia, and Fiji, as well as Rotuman and Gilbertese (Pawley 1972:7).
- ItemOpen AccessThat's something that I wouldn't want to have to account for, is a sentence like this one*(University of Calgary, 1979-05) Jehn, Richard DouglasThe grammar of focus phenomena in English has come under intensive investigation in recent years and this research has provided much in the way of explanation for structures which had previously been little understood, e.g. cleft constructions, topicalization, etc. There is, however, at least one type of focus construction which seems to pattern like pseudo-cleft sentences, but which has been neglected in the literature. This paper outlines the most apparent aspects of the syntactic and semantic behaviour of the construction in question and presents a tentative proposal for its incorporation into the grammar of English following the framework of the revised extended standard theory (Chomsky 1975, 1977a; Chomsky and Lasnik 1977).
- ItemOpen AccessParticle -sya in Russian: mystery, or defunct grammatical relation?*(University of Calgary, 1979-05) Hitch, Douglas AIn this paper, through the framework of Relational Grammar (RG), I indicate how the appearance of the Russian particle -sya is syntactically predictable in a much broader range of instances than has been generally thought. Due to limitations of space, the discussions here are too brief to give a thorough accounting of every instance of -sya. However, I believe that the processes and principles outlined here can be applied to all instances successfully.
- ItemOpen AccessClassifiers and subject prefix alternation in Athapaskan(University of Calgary, 1979-05) Henry, DaveThe basic sentence structure in Athapaskan is subject-object-verb, as illustrated in Hare. The verb is inflected for aspect and subject agreement. If the object of a transitive verb is not stated as an independent NP and the subject is third person, the verb is also inflected for object agreement. Because the subject is third person the object is expressed by the 'obviative' or 'fourth person.
- ItemOpen AccessLoss and restoration of word final vowels in Spanish(University of Calgary, 1979-05) Anderson, James MThe process of apocope in Medieval Spanish offers a glimpse into the interaction of structural and sociological constraints on linguistic behavior. Of the word final unstressed vowels /e/, /o/ and /a/, the twelfth and thirteenth century Spanish /e/, and less often /o/ were effaced exposing new consonants and consonant clusters. Written documentation of the period clearly indicates the loss of the vowel in environments where Modern Spanish has sustained the loss and in others where it has not, cf. Latin panem > Old Spanish pan, Modern Spanish pan. and Latin noctem > Old Spanish noch (in texts), Modern Spanish noche. By the fifteenth century, apocoped vowels were restored except after dental consonants, i.e., /l, r, s, n, ć (>θ), d/. The loss and subsequent restoration of these vowels appears to reflect syntagmatic, sociological and paradigmatic aspects of language function. To what extent can these factors be isolated, and their relative influence examined?
- ItemOpen AccessCalgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 5, Spring 1979(University of Calgary, 1979-05) O'Grady, William D.This issue is the fifth in the series of working papers published by LOGOS, the Student Linguistics Society at the University of Calgary. The series provides a vehicle for faculty members and students to publish current research. These papers represent research in progress and are not to be considered final statements by the authors. The appearance of these articles in the current issue does not preclude their publication in altered form elsewhere.