Côté Marie-Hélène

Côté, Marie-Hélène, Remco Knoolhuizen & John Nerbonne, éds (2016) The future of dialects: selected papers from Methods in Dialectology XV. Language Variation 1. Berlin: Language Science Press, 411 p.

Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world.

The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.
 

Site de l'éditeur

Côté, Marie-Hélène & Éric Mathieu, éds (2014) Variation within and across Romance Languages: selected papers from the 41st Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 333. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 426 p.

This volume is a selection of twenty peer-reviewed articles first presented at the 41st annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), held at the University of Ottawa in 2011. They are thematically linked by a broad notion of variation across languages, dialects, speakers, time, linguistic contexts, and communicative situations. Furthermore, the articles address common theoretical and empirical issues from different formal, experimental, or corpus-based perspectives. The languages analyzed belong to the main members of the Romance family, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Ladin, Italian, Sardinian, and Romanian, and a variety of topics across a wide spectrum of linguistic subfields, from phonetics to semantics, as well as historical linguistics, bilingualism and second-language learning, is covered. By illustrating the richness and complementarity of subjects, methods, and theoretical frameworks explored within Romance linguistics, significant contributions are made to both the documentation of Romance languages and to linguistic theory.

Site de l'éditeur