Linguistic and social typology: The Austronesian migrations and phoneme inventories
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Peter Trudgill
Abstract
There is a challenging issue for linguistic typology which involves the relationships which might exist between societal type and aspects of linguistic structure. Linguistic-typological studies have provided us with insights into the range of structures available in human languages, but we do not yet have explanations for why, of all the possible structures available, particular languages select particular structures and not others. A legitimate sociolinguistic viewpoint would be that some social explanations may be available. The sociolinguistic factors suggested as being relevant are language contact versus isolation, and community size and network structure. This paper deals with this thesis from the point of view of Austronesian phonology, with particular reference to Polynesian phoneme inventories.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Linguistic and social typology: The Austronesian migrations and phoneme inventories
- Language contact, phonemic inventories, and the Athapaskan language family
- Consonant inventories as an areal feature of the New Guinea-Pacific region: Testing Trudgill's hypotheses
- Acquiring phonology is not acquiring inventories but contrasts: The loss of Turkic and Korean primary long vowels
- Phoneme inventories, language contact, and grammatical complexity: A critique of Trudgill
- There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language
- On the complexity of simplification
- Yan Huang, Anaphora: A Cross-linguistic Study
- Nicholas Evans & Hans-Jürgen Sasse, Problems of Polysynthesis
- Walter Bisang, Aspects of Typology and Universals
- Contents of Linguistic Typology Volume 8 (2004)
Articles in the same Issue
- Linguistic and social typology: The Austronesian migrations and phoneme inventories
- Language contact, phonemic inventories, and the Athapaskan language family
- Consonant inventories as an areal feature of the New Guinea-Pacific region: Testing Trudgill's hypotheses
- Acquiring phonology is not acquiring inventories but contrasts: The loss of Turkic and Korean primary long vowels
- Phoneme inventories, language contact, and grammatical complexity: A critique of Trudgill
- There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language
- On the complexity of simplification
- Yan Huang, Anaphora: A Cross-linguistic Study
- Nicholas Evans & Hans-Jürgen Sasse, Problems of Polysynthesis
- Walter Bisang, Aspects of Typology and Universals
- Contents of Linguistic Typology Volume 8 (2004)
