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There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language
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Vladimir Pericliev
Published/Copyright:
July 27, 2005
Abstract
In the target article, Trudgill assumes, based on the inspection of some Austronesian/Polynesian languages, that large community size favours medium-sized phonological inventories, whereas small community size favours either small phonological inventories or large inventories, and he then undertakes to explain these “facts”. A crosslinguistic empirical test, however, reveals conclusively that such assumptions are invalid and therefore Trudgill's explanation is fallacious in explaining a phenomenon that does not exist.
Keywords: phoneme inventories; social structure
:
Published Online: 2005-07-27
Published in Print: 2004-10-20
© Walter de Gruyter
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- 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
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- 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)
