Internal borders matter

2013

This article investigates several linguistic changes which are ongoing in north-western Catalan using a contemporary corpus. We take advantage of a range of dialectometric methods that allow us to calculate and analyse the linguistic distance between varieties in apparent time from an aggregate perspective. Specifically, we pay attention to the process of structural dialect loss due to linguistic advergence to standard and eastern Catalan in many north-western Catalan dialects located in Catalonia (Spain) and Andorra. We also provide evidence that the dialect leveling taking place in these two areas strongly contrasts with the relative stability of the Catalan dialects on the other side of the Catalan–Aragonese border in Spain, where Catalan is not an official language. These opposite sociolinguistic situations (Catalonia and Andorra have strong language policies to support Catalan, whereas Aragon does not) have triggered a twofold process of vertical advergence between the Catalan spoken in Catalonia and Andorra towards the prestigious varieties, on the one hand; and of horizontal divergence between these dialects and those located in Aragon, on the other hand. This situation has notably strengthened the border differences between Aragon and Catalonia during the last 80 years. This article is one of the first attempts to study the border effects not only between regions belonging to different countries but also between different administrative regions ‘within’ the same country. In addition, we investigate the different roles of urban versus rural areas, providing support for the view that the spatial and hierarchical diffusion patterns are complementary.

Speelman, Dirk; Heylen, Kris & Dirk Geeraerts (eds.), Mixed-Effects Regression Models in Linguistics (Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences), 2018

In this study, we investigate which factors influence the linguistic distance of Catalan dialectal pronunciations from standard Catalan. We use pronunciations from three regions where the northwestern variety of the Catalan language is spoken (Catalonia, Aragon and Andorra). In contrast to Aragon, Catalan has an official status in both Catalonia and Andorra, which likely influences standardization. Because we are interested in the potentially large range of differences that standardization might promote, we examine 357 words in Catalan varieties and in particular their pronunciation distances with respect to the standard. In order to be sensitive to differences among the words, we fitted a generalized additive mixed-effects regression model to this data. This allows us to examine simultaneously the general (i.e. aggregate) patterns in pronunciation distance and to detect those words that diverge substantially from the general pattern. The results revealed higher pronunciation distances from standard Catalan in Aragon than in the other regions. Furthermore, speakers in Catalonia and Andorra, but not in Aragon, showed a clear standardization pattern, with younger speakers having dialectal pronunciations closer to the standard than older speakers. This clearly indicates the presence of a border effect within a single country with respect to word pronunciation distances. Since a great deal of scholarship focuses on single segment changes, we compare our analysis to the analysis of three segment changes that have been discussed in the literature on Catalan. This comparison revealed that the pattern observed at the word pronunciation level was supported by two of the three cases examined. As not all individual cases conform to the general pattern, the aggregate approach is necessary to detect global standardization patterns.

Proceedings from the 46th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, 2014

The notion of linguistic drift, first proposed by Sapir (1921), focuses on inherited or natural tendencies of distinct linguistic varieties. Trudgill, Gordon, Lewis, & MacLagan (2000) furthers this discussion, distinguishing two types of linguistic drift: Drift 1, in which inherited linguistic changes in progress from the parent variety are independently continued in disconnected child varieties, and Drift 2, in which inherited propensities toward linguistic changes from a parent variety are independently realized in disconnected child varieties. We explore linguistic drift by analyzing two Insular Catalan varieties that can be considered child language varieties of a Peninsular Catalan variety. Though we report Insular Catalan evidence for Drift 1 and Drift 2, our discussion focuses on the existence of vitalic Insular phonological and morphological variants that are vestigial and/or archaic (cf. Trudgill 1999) in Peninsular Catalan and therefore are not able to be accounted for by either type of linguistic drift. In order to account for the presence of relic variants in diaspora varieties, linguistic drift must take into account certain social factors. We propose that first-order social networks contribute to relic variant maintenance. Additionally, we emphasize the role of language contact in the unique historical development of Algherese, discussing its implications for linguistic drift theory and referencing previous treatments of language contact as a motivator behind strictly apparent reversals of linguistic drift and as an inhibitor of linguistic innovation.

Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2022

This investigation examines the variable production of alveolar laterals in Barcelonan Spanish as a case study evidencing the effects of language contact between a majority language, Spanish, and minority language, Catalan. The Catalan-Spanish speech community constitutes a rather unique case of majority-minority language contact, particularly within the Spanish-speaking world, as Catalan, though a minority language in Spain, is characterized by such a high degree of linguistic vitality, linguistic capital, and social prestige in the autonomous region of Catalonia, that its status as a minority language is to a degree, questionable. I account for sociophonetic variability in the production of Barcelonan Spanish /l/ by a set of linguistic (phonological context, cognate status) and social factors (gender, age, style, language dominance) that support an analysis of lateral velarization as contact-induced and situate this case of language contact as a natural or otherwise predictable outcome of this community’s sociolinguistic and sociodemographic history, notably concerning changes in immigration patterns, language ideologies, and language use in the last century. Additionally, I highlight how the gradient nature of select sociophonetic variables uniquely conditions nuanced social indexation in the speech community, specifically in the absence of any one singular or discrete, community-wide acoustic variant.

2007

Convergence and divergence in Ibero-Romance across contact situations and beyond (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie), 2021

This paper is a case study aiming to exemplify how long-term diglossic contact between closely related languages can affect linguistic structure. After a brief socio-historical overview focusing on the shifting role and prestige of Valencian and Spanish over the centuries, a selection of phonological, lexical, phraseological, discourse pragmatic and morphosyntactic features are presented and analysed in order to determine whether structural convergence has taken place between these two Ibero-Romance varieties. Apart from the expected use of lexical loans and frequent instances of code switching between the two languages by bilingual speakers, it is shown that the influence of Spanish on colloquial spoken Valencian has affected its linguistic structure in a variety of ways. This includes contact-induced features taken from Spanish, but also contact-induced conservation of older features that have disappeared from other varieties of Catalan. Particular attention is paid to innovations in spoken Valencian that are based on a combination of Catalan and Spanish structural features, sometimes leading to a reduction of structural complexity or opacity.

The 'bloodsucking Jew' was a figure all Poles -Catholics, nationalists, and Communistscould understand and abhor. Following World War II, the image served to bind the Polish imagined community together, following Benedict Anderson's concept. Abhorrence of Jewish bloodsuckers was one of the few emotions that could, under the new conditions that prevailed after the war and given a diversely interpreted concept of patriotism, unite Catholics and nationalists associated with the National Armed Forces (NSZ), the hard-line Home Army, and the Communist People's Guard (GL) resistance militias. It was a novelty that this idea was embraced also by those Communists who combined nationalist rhetoric with a left-wing critique of the capitalism. This process was due to a rapid literalization of the bloodsucker metaphor in this period. This article is a study of the figure of the bloodsuckera metaphoric condensation that appears in three types of anti-Jewish discourse (religious, national and left-wing) in the period of 1945-1946. Concentrating on the language used to formulate accusations against Jews who had survived the Holocaust, the author analyzes the evolution of such language and attempts to link symbolic violence it expresses to actual physical violence. As Hanna Segal's concept of symbolic equation shows, the literalization of comparisons or metaphors in propaganda or hate speech may indicate upcoming physical violence. Before the eruption of violence, its indications appear on a symbolic levelin language whose meaning is suddenly taken literally. Someone with a status of an exploiter is referred to with a seemingly dead metaphor of bloodsucker; when the situation escalates, however, the metaphor regains its living content, and this person is killed as someone who, e.g. as a kidnapper of children really consumes blood. When balance is restored, the memory of the crime regains the status of a dead metaphor.

MÓDULO ARQUITECTURA CUC

This article aims to identify different terms and concepts regarding tall buildings and evaluate the presence and hierarchy these buildings have on a global level. The methodology used considered the global database of tall buildings published by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Six essential regions of the world were analyzed and classified as clusters. Forty-eight buildings were quantitatively described. As a result, thirteen terms and eighteen different concepts were found. The spatial configurations in terms of height and year of construction of each building, defined the population trends in the cities that make up each cluster. This research confirms a significant diversity of criteria for naming buildings in height. Tall buildings occupied by offices predominate in the clusters evaluated. Residential usage is not the most common occupation.

For the many weird and wonderful thespians whom I have had the good fortune to call my friends. (I promise this is not about you.) ACT I PROLOGUE I sit with my wrists cuffed to the table and I think, But that I am forbid / To tell the secrets of my prison-house, / I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul. The guard stands by the door, watching me, like he's waiting for something to happen. Enter Joseph Colborne. He is a graying man now, almost fifty. It's a surprise, every few weeks, to see how much he's aged-and he's aged a little more, every few weeks, for ten years. He sits across from me, folds his hands, and says, "Oliver." "Joe." "Heard the parole hearing went your way. Congratulations." "I'd thank you if I thought you meant it." "You know I don't think you belong in here." "That doesn't mean you think I'm innocent." "No." He sighs, checks his watch-the same one he's worn since we met-as if I'm boring him. "So why are you here?" I ask. "Same fortnightly reason?" His eyebrows make a flat black line. "You would say fucking 'fortnight.'" "You can take the boy out of the theatre, or something like that." He shakes his head, simultaneously amused and annoyed. "Well?" I say. "Well what?" "The gallows does well. But how does it well? It does well to those that do ill," I reply, determined to deserve his annoyance. "Why are you here? You should know by now I'm not going to tell you anything." voice. "It must eat you alive, not knowing. Not knowing who, not knowing how, not knowing why. But you didn't know him." He wears a strange, queasy expression now, as if I've become unspeakably ugly and awful to look at. "You've kept your secrets all this time," he says. "It would drive anyone else crazy. Why do it?" "I wanted to." "Do you still?" My heart feels heavy in my chest. Secrets carry weight, like lead. I lean back. The guard watches impassively, as if we're two strangers talking in another language, our conversation distant and insignificant. I think of the others. Once upon a time, us. We did wicked things, but they were necessary, too-or so it seemed. Looking back, years later, I'm not so sure they were, and now I wonder: Could I explain it all to Colborne, the little twists and turns and final exodos? I study his blank open face, the gray eyes winged now by crow's-feet, but clear and bright as they have always been. "All right," I say. "I'll tell you a story. But you have to understand a few things." Colborne is motionless. "I'm listening." "First, I'll start talking after I get out of here, not before. Second, this can't come back to me or anyone else-no double jeopardy. And last, it's not an apology." I wait for some response from him, a nod or a word, but he only blinks at me, silent and stoic as a sphinx. "Well, Joe?" I say. "Can you live with that?" He gives me a cold sliver of a smile. "Yes, I think I can." SCENE 1 The time: September 1997, my fourth and final year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory. The place: Broadwater, Illinois, a small town of almost no consequence. It had been a warm autumn so far. Enter the players. There were seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us, though we saw no farther than the books in front of our faces. We were always surrounded by books and words and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world bound in leather and vellum. (I blame this in part for what happened.) The Castle library was an airy octagonal room, walled with bookshelves, crowded with sumptuous old furniture, and kept drowsily warm by a monumental fireplace that burned almost constantly, regardless of the temperature outside. The clock on the mantel struck twelve, and we stirred, one by one, like seven statues coming to life. "'Tis now dead midnight," Richard said. He sat in the largest armchair like it was a throne, long legs outstretched, feet propped up on the grate. Three years of playing kings and conquerors had taught him to sit that way in every chair, onstage or off-. "And by eight o'clock tomorrow we must be made immortal." He closed his book with a snap. Meredith, curled like a cat on one end of the sofa (while I sprawled like a dog on the other), toyed with one strand of her long auburn hair as she asked, "Where are you going?" Richard: "Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed-" Filippa: "Spare us." Richard: "Early morning and all that." Alexander: "He says, as if he's concerned." Wren, sitting cross-legged on a cushion by the hearth and oblivious to the others' bickering, said, "Have you all picked your pieces? I can't decide." Me: "What about Isabella? Your Isabella's excellent." Meredith: "Measure's a comedy, you fool. We're auditioning for Caesar." "I don't know why we bother auditioning at all." Alexander-slumped over the table, wallowing in the darkness at the back of the room-reached for the bottle of Scotch at his elbow. He refilled his glass, took one huge gulp, and grimaced at the rest of us. "I could cast the whole bastarding thing right now." "How?" I asked. "I never know where I'll end up." "That's because they always cast you last," Richard said, "as whatever happens to be left over." "Tsk-tsk," Meredith said. "Are we Richard tonight or are we Dick?" "Ignore him, Oliver," James said. He sat by himself in the farthest corner, loath to look up from his notebook. He had always been the most serious student in our year, which (probably) explained why he was also the best actor and (certainly) why no one resented him for it. "There." Alexander had unfolded a wad of ten-dollar bills from his pocket and was counting them out on the table. "That's fifty dollars." "For what?" Meredith said. "You want a lap dance?" "Why, are you practicing for after graduation?" "Bite me." "Ask nicely." "Fifty dollars for what?" I said, keen to interrupt. Meredith and Alexander had by far the foulest mouths among the seven of us, and took a perverse kind of pride in out-cussing each other. If we let them, they'd go at it all night. Alexander tapped the stack of tens with one long finger. "I bet fifty dollars I can call the cast list right now and not be wrong." Five of us exchanged curious glances; Wren was still frowning into the fireplace. "All right, let's hear it," Filippa said, with a wan little sigh, as though her curiosity had gotten the better of her. Alexander pushed his unruly black curls back from his face and said, "Well, obviously Richard will be Caesar." "Because we all secretly want to kill him?" James asked. Richard arched one dark eyebrow. "Et tu, Bruté?" "Sic semper tyrannis," James said, and drew the tip of his pen across his throat like a dagger. Thus always to tyrants. Alexander gestured from one of them to the other. "Exactly," he said. "James will be Brutus because he's always the good guy, and I'll be Cassius because I'm always the bad guy. Richard and Wren can't be married because that would be gross, so she'll be Portia, Meredith will be Calpurnia, and Pip, you'll end up in drag again." Filippa, more difficult to cast than Meredith (the femme fatale) or Wren (the ingénue), was obliged to cross-dress whenever we ran out of good female parts-a common occurrence in the Shakespearean theatre. "Kill me," she said. "Wait," I said, effectively proving Richard's hypothesis that I was a permanent leftover in the casting process, "where does that leave me?" Alexander studied me with narrowed eyes, running his tongue across his teeth. "Probably as Octavius," he decided. "They won't make you Antony-no offense, but you're just not conspicuous enough. It'll be that insufferable third-year, what's his name?" Filippa: "Richard the Second?" Richard: "Hilarious. No, Colin Hyland." "Spectacular." I looked down at the text of Pericles I was scanning, for what felt like the hundredth time. Only half as talented as any of the rest of them, I seemed doomed to always play supporting roles in someone else's story. Far too many times I had asked myself whether art was imitating life or if it was the other way around. Alexander: "Fifty bucks, on that exact casting. Any takers?" Meredith: "No." Alexander: "Why not?" Filippa: "Because that's precisely what'll happen." Richard chuckled and climbed out of his chair. "One can only hope." He started toward the door and leaned over to pinch James's cheek on his way out. "Goodnight, sweet prince-" James smacked Richard's hand away with his notebook, then made a show of disappearing behind it again. Meredith echoed Richard's laugh and said, "Thou art as hot a Jack in thy mood as any in Italy!" "A plague o' both your houses," James muttered. Meredith stretched-with a small, suggestive groan-and pushed herself off the couch. "Coming to bed?" Richard asked. "Yes. Alexander's made all this work seem rather pointless." She left her books scattered on the low table in front of the fire, her empty wineglass with them, a crescent of lipstick clinging to the rim. "Goodnight," she said, to the room at large. "Godspeed." They disappeared down the hall together. I rubbed my eyes, which were beginning to burn from the effort of reading for hours on end. Wren tossed her book backward over her head, and I started as it landed beside me on the couch. Wren: "To hell with it." Alexander: "That's the spirit." Wren: "I'll just do Isabella." Filippa: "Just go to bed." Wren stood slowly, blinking the vestigial light of the fire out of her eyes. "I'll probably lie awake all night reciting lines," she said. "Want to come out for a smoke?" Alexander had finished his whiskey (again) and was rolling a spliff on the table. "Might help you relax." "No, thank you," she said, drifting out into the hall. "Goodnight." "Suit yourself." Alexander pushed his chair back, spliff poking out of one corner of his mouth. "Oliver?" "If I help you smoke that I'll wake up with no voice tomorrow." "Pip?" She nudged her glasses up into her hair and coughed softly, testing her throat. "God, you're a terrible influence," she said. "Fine." He...