The language contact inventories

下面51due教员组为大家整理一篇优秀的代写范文- The language contact & phoneme inventories，供大家参考学习。这篇文章讲述的是语言接触在语言的复杂性和多样性方面起着重要的作用，与周围语言的长期接触导致借用词来完成语段。因此，音位目录迅速增加。此外，简化可能会导致音位对比的损失：目录越小，学习就越容易，洋泾浜语往往有小音位目录。

The language contact & phoneme inventories

Language contact plays a great role in the complexity of languages as well as its diversity.The long-term contacts with neighboring languages results in borrowing words to complete the segments. As a result, phoneme inventories are rapidly increasing.Moreover, simplification may lead to loss of phonological contrasts: the smaller the inventory, the easier it is to learn and  pidgin languages tend to have small phoneme inventories.So, long-term contact involving child bilingualism may produce large inventories through borrowing, and adult language contact may produce smaller inventories through imperfect learning, pidginization, and simplification.Low degrees of language contact may lead to languages with small inventories, because the memory load difficulties caused by confusability and word length will not be relevant, since post-critical threshold learning is not involved.

Child v.s Adult speakers

 On the one hand, long-term language contact involving child-language acquisition, high degrees of language contact may lead to larger phoneme inventories due to  borrowing from neighboring languages.Situations involving adult language contact, on the other hand, are likely to support medium-sized phoneme inventories, i.e., inventories which are not so large as to be difficult for adolescents and adults to remember and acquire, but not so small as to cause confusability of constituents and high word length.

Small communities to keep large inventories?

Because the ability of small communities is helpful for small communities to keep continued adherence to norms from one generation to another due to their stable structure of language systems. We should distinguish between isolated communities which do, however, have neighbors, such as the San and the Yele, and isolated communities which do not, such as the Hawai’ians. Small communities which have neighbors, but which wish to remain as isolated as possible, may elaborate systems in order to make them more opaque to these neighbors. Migrations carried settlers to ever more remote parts of the Pacific, was accompanied by ever smaller phoneme inventories.Therefore, the ability of small communities,stable structure and migrations make contributions to keep large inventories of small communities and borrow many words into their phoneme inventory.

large communities & small inventories?

Because  it is difficult for adolescents and adults to remember and acquire. As noted above, tthe smaller the inventory, the easier it is to learn.The memory load difficulties caused by confusability and word length will not be relevant, since post-critical threshold learning is not involved. In addition, the large communities have a stable structure and hope to keep from borrowing from others . As a result. large communities would keep small inventories. 

Other factor

Besides language contacts, “ the size of phoneme inventory also depends on the population size. There is a robust connection between them”(Hay& Bauer, 2007,p.707). The more people speak in one kind of languages, the bigger its phoneme inventory is likely. For example, China with the population of about 1.4 billion puts Mandarin as its authorized language. But there are many dialects in China due to its vast area.So there is a positive correlation between the size of phoneme inventory. The small population one country has, the small phoneme inventory it creates.

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