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Language death, modality, and functional explanations

Language death, modality, and functional explanations The article is an in-depth review of Petar Kehayov’s monograph The Fate of Mood and Modality in Language Death: Evidence from Minor Finnic (De Gruyter Mouton, 2017). The book investigates the development of mood and modality in four moribund Finnic languages spoken in the Russian Federation: Votic, Ingrian, Central Lude, and Eastern Seto. After a detailed summary of the book, I discuss a number of issues relating to (a) the semantic map used to analyze the modal meanings; (b) the difference between language death-related changes and “regular” language change; and (c) the explanation of the observed patterns in terms of conceptual complexity. On the last point, I suggest that usage frequency may provide a better explanation for some of the observed changes. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Acta Linguistica Hafniensia: International Taylor & Francis

Language death, modality, and functional explanations

Gregersen, Sune
Acta Linguistica Hafniensia: International , Volume 52 (1): 27 – Jan 2, 2020
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Language death, modality, and functional explanations

Abstract

The article is an in-depth review of Petar Kehayov’s monograph The Fate of Mood and Modality in Language Death: Evidence from Minor Finnic (De Gruyter Mouton, 2017). The book investigates the development of mood and modality in four moribund Finnic languages spoken in the Russian Federation: Votic, Ingrian, Central Lude, and Eastern Seto. After a detailed summary of the book, I discuss a number of issues relating to (a) the semantic map used to analyze the modal meanings; (b) the...
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Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ISSN
1949-0763
eISSN
0374-0463
DOI
10.1080/03740463.2020.1743582
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The article is an in-depth review of Petar Kehayov’s monograph The Fate of Mood and Modality in Language Death: Evidence from Minor Finnic (De Gruyter Mouton, 2017). The book investigates the development of mood and modality in four moribund Finnic languages spoken in the Russian Federation: Votic, Ingrian, Central Lude, and Eastern Seto. After a detailed summary of the book, I discuss a number of issues relating to (a) the semantic map used to analyze the modal meanings; (b) the difference between language death-related changes and “regular” language change; and (c) the explanation of the observed patterns in terms of conceptual complexity. On the last point, I suggest that usage frequency may provide a better explanation for some of the observed changes.

Journal

Acta Linguistica Hafniensia: International – Taylor & Francis

Published: Jan 2, 2020

Keywords: Language contact; language attrition; modal verbs; modality’s semantic map; reported speech; Uralic; Russian

References

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  • Syntactic Variation in ‘Need’-Constructions in Estonian Dialects
  • Konditsionalis v vodskom jazyke: formoobrazovanie i morfonologija [The Votic Conditional: Inflection and Morphophonology]
  • Competing Modals: Beyond (Inter)subjectification
  • «Čužaja» reč′ v svete korpusnyx dannyx” [“Reported” Speech in the Light of Corpus Evidence]
  • Modality’s Semantic Map