4 search hits
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An experimental investigation into sound symbolism as it relates to Mandarin Chinese
(1994)
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Randy J. LaPolla
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Parallel grammaticalizations in Tibeto-Burman : evidence of Sapir's 'Drift'
(1994)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- In chapters seven and eight of his book Language, Sapir talked about what he called ‘drift’, the changes that a language undergoes through time [...]. Dialects of a language are formed when that language is broken into different segments that no longer move along the same exact drift. Even so, the general drift of a language has its deep and its shallow currents; those features that distinguish closely related dialects will be of the rapid, shallow currents, while the deeper, slower currents may remain consistent between the dialects for millennia. It is this latter type that Sapir felt is ‘fundamental to the genius of the language’ (p. 172), and he said that ‘The momentum of the more fundamental, the pre-dialectal, drift is often such that languages long disconnected will pass through the same or strikingly similar phases’ (p. 172).
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Variable finals in proto-Sino-Tibetan
(1994)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- This paper concentrates on variable finals, and argues that just as we find a certain amount of both rule-governed and non-rule governed variation in modern languages, in reconstructing Proto-Sino-Tibetan we should recognize the possibility of these types of variation.
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On the change to verb-medial word order in proto-Chinese : evidence from Tibeto-Burman
(1994)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- In attempting to reconstruct the morphosyntax of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, one of the most basic questions to be answered is what was the unmarked word order of the proto-language? Chinese, Bai, and Karen are verb-medial languages, while all of the Tibeto-Burman languages except for Bai and Karen have verb-final word order. lf these languages are all related, as we can assume from lexical correspondences, then either Chinese, Bai and Karen changed from verb-final to verb-medial word order, or the other Tibeto-Burman languages changed trom verb-medial to verb-final order. How we answer the question of which languages changed their word would then give us the answer to the question of word order in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
