Joseph Salmons
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 515746 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Joseph Salmons |
| NOMBRES | Joseph |
| APELLIDO | Salmons |
| FIRMA | SALMONS J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3491-0443 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 70 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 164 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 63 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 6 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1992 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Irregularity and sound change in signed and spoken languages
We explore the role of irregularity in sound change in signed and spoken languages. While all historical phonologists accept some kinds of irregularity in spoken language sound change, a full, rigorous accounting of where and why we find it has been harder to come by. We draw on the foundations of signed language sound change laid by Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos to address this with a focus on irregularity. We begin to develop concrete parallels …
Diachrony and Diachronica
The year 2023 marks volume 40 of Diachronica. To mark the occasion, 40 linguists working on different aspects of language change have contributed to "40@40"providing brief vignettes about the history of the field, current questions, where current debates are strongest, and where we're headed. These contributions will be published across the next few issues of the journal. In this first set of reflections, five authors discuss a range of big pictu…
The History of North American English
Research Article| December 01 2023 1. The History of North American English Sarah Holmstrom; Sarah Holmstrom sarah holmstrom is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the Language Sciences Program. Her research focuses on phonetics and phonology, sound change, and Algonquian languages. Email: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Joseph Salmons Joseph Salmons joseph salmons is the L…
Ernst Frideryk Konrad Koerner
American Speech in Action
Editorial| February 01 2022 American Speech in Action: Policy versus Practice Joseph Salmons Joseph Salmons University of Wisconsin–Madison joseph salmons is the Lester W. J. "Smoky" Seifert Professor of Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He edited Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics from 2002 until 2019. He is the author of A History of German: What the Past Reveals about Today's Language (Oxford,…
Reallocation
In the last 35 years, 'reallocation' has come to be widely used to describe how structural linguistic features in contact settings may remain as part of a new language variety and take on new functions as sociolinguistic variables rather than be lost over time, as is typically expected in koineization contexts. Classic examples involve originally regional differences that come to carry social, grammatical, or stylistic rather than regional meanin…
Sound Change
Understanding sound change through contemporary theory and historical evidence Offers broad linguistic coverage with examples from a wide range of world language families including Germanic, Romance, Mixtec, Tibetan, Hmong, Hebrew, Chinese, Kikuyu, Svan and Menominee Explores sound change from structural, historical, sociolinguistic and acquisitional perspectives Takes a data led approach with worked examples in each chapter Includes questions an…
American Norwegian discourse marking
This paper provides a first picture of discourse marking in American Norwegian, drawing on word order data and native speaker judgments. Like many others since Salmons (1990), we see convergence between the systems of bilinguals, increasing similarities at the expense of differences. Matras (1988) and Fuller (2001) argue that more ‘pragmatically detachable’ material is more easily borrowed, like well / vel vs. you know / vet du. Our results parti…
Peer Review in Linguistics Journals
We present new data on peer review practices in linguistics journals, reporting the results of an online survey of editors. This paper aims to increase understanding of the processes and practices of peer review for everyone involved—editors, authors, reviewers, and readers. Apprehending concretely how peer review happens from beginning to end and how editors think about it should help to demystify the process, especially for graduate students an…
Peer review in linguistics journals
Connecting Structure and Variation in Sound Change
Structured heterogeneity”, a founding concept of variationist sociolinguistics, puts focus on the ordered social differentiation in language. We extend the notion of structured heterogeneity to formal phonological structure, i.e., representations based on contrasts, with implications for phonetic implementation. Phonology establishes parameters for what varies and how. Patterns of stability and variability with respect to a given feature’s relati…
Scandinavian-American English over time
This paper is a historical sociolinguistic study of spoken Scandinavian-American English, its representation over time, and its relationship with contemporary regional speech. We look at four features: 1) ‘stopping’ of interdental fricatives, [t, d] for/θ, ð/, 2) /dʒ/ realized as [j] in popular representations, 3) features borrowed from other immigrant communities to demonstrate ‘foreignness’, and 4) [s] for /z/ in certain environments. From atte…
Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK)
Language Contact. An International Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of current topics in research on language contact. Broadly conceived, it stands out for its international approach to language contact, complementing the theoretical state-of-the-art with examples from traditionally eclipsed areas and languages. Next to a thorough introductory overview of the ground-breaking methodological and theoretical approaches that shaped the discip…
Theorizing Language and Immigration
Book Review| August 01 2019 Theorizing Language and Immigration Language in Immigrant America, by Baran, Dominika, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xv + 372., ISBN 978-1-107-05839-2; $105.00 (pbk $30.99; ebk $24.00) Joseph Salmons Joseph Salmons University of Wisconsin–Madison Joseph Salmons is the Lester W. J. “Smoky” Seifert Professor in Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He edits Diachronica and directs t…
Old English vowels
Old English underwent diachronic change in its vowel inventory between its predecessor West Germanic and Middle English. We provide an analysis of the addition and loss of vowels in Old English from the perspective of modified contrastive specification (Dresher et al. 1994). Three main themes emerge from our analysis: (i) the phonological representation of contrast in the vowels in English has remained remarkably stable for over a thousand years,…
Heritage-language speakers
Migration brings people into situations where languages other than their native tongues are dominant.Their mother tongues often therewith become minority varieties, for young people and later generations what are now called 'heritage languages'.This particular kind of multilingual setting appears to correlate with consistent (but variable) processes of change.In the last few years, heritage-language research has been developing rapidly across sub…
Discourse-pragmatic variation in context
Reviewed by: Discourse-pragmatic variation in context: Eight hundred years of like by Alexandra D’Arcy Joseph Salmons Discourse-pragmatic variation in context: Eight hundred years of like. By Alexandra D’Arcy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017. Pp. xx, 235. ISBN 9789027259523. $143 (Hb). A lot of linguists work now on popular issues, questions about language that will appeal to the general public. In that sense, this slim volume treats a distinctly…
The diachrony of East Asian prosodic templates
Typical words in some East Asian languages, including Chinese, have reduced historically from disyllabic (CV·CV(C)) to monosyllabic (C(C)V(C)) and then open monosyllables (CV). More recently, in some of those languages, many monosyllabic CV forms again appear as disyllabic (CV·CV). The former developments result from a variety of apparently unconnected segmental changes. In the latter, they often reflect morphological innovations, like compoundin…
Unraveling multilingualism in times past
Synchrony and diachrony in Menominee derivational morphology
Joe’s jotting
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The Descent of English
Emonds & Faarlund judge subgrouping by problematic criteria and do not actually employ their stated criteria, while those criteria in fact show English to be West Germanic
Parasitic Gapping in Bilingual Grammar
We report on work with German-English bilinguals, heritage speakers of German, and their licensing of parasitic gaps (a type of multiple gap construction) in English-to-German translation tasks. English allows such constructions variably, while European German does not. While some recent work reports that some heritage speakers have difficulty licensing null elements generally, most of our speakers allow some gaps in German. Structurally, these g…
Anything Goes
Aside from work on grammaticalization and related research, previous approaches to lexical-semantic change typically focus on taxonomies of products of change but do not consider the impetus or process for changes nor how to capture multiple semantic changes. This article undertakes case studies of dope, hot dog, and tweak, taking definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary and Urban Dictionary and then cataloging instances from the Corpus of …
The Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology
This book presents a comprehensive and critical overview of historical phonology as it stands today. Research from every part of the field is examined from a variety of theoretical perspectives and drawing on data from a wide range of languages. The book begins by considering key current research questions, the early history of the field, and the structuralist context for work on sound change. In the second part, chapters examine evidence and met…
Articulation rate across dialect, age, and gender
The understanding of sociolinguistic variation is growing rapidly, but basic gaps still remain. Whether some languages or dialects are spoken faster or slower than others constitutes such a gap. Speech tempo is interconnected with social, physical and psychological markings of speech. This study examines regional variation in articulation rate and its manifestations across speaker age, gender and speaking situations (reading vs. free conversation…
The Phonology of Glottalization in Mixtec
Vowel change across three age groups of speakers in three regional varieties of American English
Good Old Immigrants of Yesteryear,” Who Didn't Learn English
One myth about language and immigration in North America is that nineteenth-century immigrants typically became bilingual almost immediately after arriving, yet little systematic data has been presented for this view. We present quantitative and qualitative evidence about Germans in Wisconsin, where, into the twentieth century, many immigrants and their descendants remained monolingual, decades after immigration had ceased. Even those who claimed…
Vowel Duration in Three American English Dialects
The article reports on an acoustic investigation into the duration of five American English vowels, those found in hid, head, had, hayed, and hide. We compare duration across three major dialect areas: the Inland North, Midlands, and South. The results show systematic differences across all vowels studied, with the longest durations in the South and the shortest in the Inland North, with the Midlands in an intermediate but distinct position. More…
German Substrate Effects in Wisconsin English
A once predominantly German-speaking community in Watertown, Wisconsin,shows distinct phonetic and phonological traces of that immigrant heritage in the speech of its English-speaking monolinguals. Acoustic and perceptual studies suggest that speakers do not produce all the expected cues for English fi nal laryngeal distinctions, nor do they exploit those cues to the same degree as a set of control speakers. This instance, for which the language …
Cross-generational vowel change in American English
This study examines cross-generational changes in the vowel systems in central Ohio, southeastern Wisconsin and western North Carolina. Speech samples from 239 speakers, males and females, were divided into three age groups: grandparents (66-91 years old), parents (35-51) and children (8-12). Acoustic analysis of vowel dynamics (i.e., formant movement) was undertaken to explore variation in the amount of spectral change for each vowel. A robust s…
Revised Perceptions
This article documents the developing awareness of and positive attitudes toward regional English used in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin and also exemplifies some key regional markers in each variety. Findings demonstrate how this awareness and affinity has taken shape through historical processes. These processes have affected the structure of variation in that features once considered ethnic markers are now recognized as regional feat…
Mixtec Prenasalization as Hypervoicing
American Speech in Action
Editorial| February 01 2022 American Speech in Action: Policy versus Practice Joseph Salmons Joseph Salmons University of Wisconsin–Madison joseph salmons is the Lester W. J. "Smoky" Seifert Professor of Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He edited Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics from 2002 until 2019. He is the author of A History of German: What the Past Reveals about Today's Language (Oxford,…
Making Linguistics Matter
Linguists in the United States are acutely aware of the need to engage the public about their work in new and better ways. We describe here our effort to take up that challenge in Wisconsin by building a set of outreach projects that connect with communities throughout the state and that focus on issues of importance to particular audiences. Through these projects, we have become convinced that outreach, teaching, and research - treated separatel…
Language Contact and New Dialect Formation
When viewing language and dialect contact through the lens of the social settings of variation and acquisition, it becomes apparent that the types and degrees of conservatism in colonial dialects of German are tightly tied to the varieties learned and the patterns of acquisition in the community. Working within the framework of recent theories on stability in language contact and new dialect (koine) formation, the authors explore what the basic s…
Prosodic prominence effects on vowels in chain shifts
This study examines synchronic variation in vowels in an effort to advance our understanding of the “transmission problem” in language change, in particular, the cross-generational perseverance of vowel shifts. Seeking a connection to patterns and directions of shifts in vowel systems over time, we examine the role of a largely neglected parameter of structured heterogeneity: prosodic prominence. Experimental data from two Midwestern dialects of …
Linguistic Marginalities
People living in the United States but unable to speak English are often portrayed as "marginal" and "isolated"—socially, economically, and geographically. Such narratives present the learning of English as central to "becoming American" and widely claim that earlier immigrants quickly acquired English. This paper counters such stereotypes. Wilkerson and Salmons present a case study of the extent to which one group of monolingual immigrants lived…
Reallocation
In the last 35 years, 'reallocation' has come to be widely used to describe how structural linguistic features in contact settings may remain as part of a new language variety and take on new functions as sociolinguistic variables rather than be lost over time, as is typically expected in koineization contexts. Classic examples involve originally regional differences that come to carry social, grammatical, or stylistic rather than regional meanin…
Connecting Structure and Variation in Sound Change
Structured heterogeneity”, a founding concept of variationist sociolinguistics, puts focus on the ordered social differentiation in language. We extend the notion of structured heterogeneity to formal phonological structure, i.e., representations based on contrasts, with implications for phonetic implementation. Phonology establishes parameters for what varies and how. Patterns of stability and variability with respect to a given feature’s relati…
Old English vowels
Old English underwent diachronic change in its vowel inventory between its predecessor West Germanic and Middle English. We provide an analysis of the addition and loss of vowels in Old English from the perspective of modified contrastive specification (Dresher et al. 1994). Three main themes emerge from our analysis: (i) the phonological representation of contrast in the vowels in English has remained remarkably stable for over a thousand years,…
Synchrony and diachrony in Menominee derivational morphology
The Wisconsin Englishes Project and Wɪsco
For purposes of professional advancement in college and university departments, academics are required to engage in research, teaching, and service. Researchers often find it easier to segregate their research from teaching and those of us at certain kinds of institutions may neglect service because of its perceived diminished value compared in particular to research. At other institutions, research can be overlooked in favor of teaching and serv…
The phonology of the Proto-Indo-European root structure constraints
The phonology of the Proto-Indo-European root structure constraints
The Structure of the Lexicon
Data from language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and diachronic studies have all shown that the lexicon has a clear internal structure, which includes relationships among lexical items based on phonetic and phonological characteristics, semantic features, morphology, and frequency of use. In the absence, however, of direct evidence from grammar, such lexical structure has even recently been deemed irrelevant to linguistic theory. In this paper,…
Gothic PL- ~ FL- Variation as Lexical Diffusion
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Umlaut and Plurality in Old High German
This article examines the interplay between umlaut and plurality in Old High German as well as the modern language, a diachronic problem central to the theoretical literature on 'Natural Morphology' (NM). The NM analysis of these relations is revised on a variety of theoretical and emplrical counts. This examination results first in a reformulation of iconicity and markedness in the NM morphological typology, namely that umlaut+affix plurals are …
Blocking Environments in Old High German Umlaut
L'A. examine un des problemes irresolus de la phonologie historique des langues germaniques. Ce probleme est l'effet d'inhibition de l'umlaut exerce par certains groupes de consonnes en vieux-haut-allemand
Aspiration and laryngeal representation in Germanic
The phonetic gesture of stop consonant aspiration, which is predictable in a Germanic language such as English, has been described traditionally as ranging from a ‘puff of air’ upon release of closure (Heffner 1950) to the segmental occurrence of a following voiceless glottal approximant /h/ (Trager & Smith 1951). Within the generative phonology paradigm, however, aspiration has been construed as a featural property rather than as an independent …
The Current Status of Research on German Dialects in North America
The Phonology of Glottalization in Mixtec
Mixtec Prenasalization as Hypervoicing
Beard, Robert. Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology
Prosodic Templates in Sound Change
Prosodic Morphology and Phonology have extended the prosodic hierarchy to solve recalcitrant problems in a number of areas and, more recently, work on phonological acquisition has determined that a prosodic template is a basic organizing unit for the acquisition of features and generalizations across the lexicon. While synchronic phonological theory in general has long exploited such higher prosodic entities, little has been done along these line…
Nostratic
The “Nostratic” hypothesis — positing a common linguistic ancestor for a wide range of language families including Indo-European, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic — has produced one of the most enduring and often intense controversies in linguistics. Overwhelmingly, though, both supporters of the hypothesis and those who reject it have not dealt directly with one another’s arguments. This volume brings together selected representatives of both sides, as …
The evolution of a Bilingual Discourse Marking System
Previous studies (Clyne, 1972, 1987; Salmons, 1990) have shown that German dialects in long-term contact with English have both borrowed key English discourse markers ( well, you know, and so on) and lost much of the native discourse- marking system of German (most notably the “modal particles”). For the study of language- contact change, discourse markers are particularly interesting, first as items in a sense on the boundary between ordinary le…
Zur historischen Phonetik und Phonologie des Umlauts im Deutschen
Seit mehr als 60 Jahren dominiert in der historisch-phonologischen Umlaut-Landschaft EIN Aufsatz, eine vierseitige Skizze des althochdeutschen Umlauts von W. Freeman Twaddell. Keller (1978: 160) nennt diese Theorie 'one of the finest achievements of American linguists'. Ähnliche Lobsprüche findet man mehrmals in der Literatur und der Artikel bleibt bis heute noch DER Eckpfeiler der Umlaut-Debatte (s. Krygier 1997, Schulte 1998). In den letzten pa…
Joe’s Jottings
Legacy Specification in the Laryngeal Phonology of Dutch
Dutch consonant cluster assimilations have come to play a central role in the debate over whether laryngeal features are restrictedly privative (single-valued) or must be encoded as binary (marking both positive and negative values). It has been argued, in particular, that the negative specification [–voice] is necessary in order to capture the difference in directionality of assimilation between stop-final and fricative-final clusters in Dutch a…
Laryngeal enhancement in early Germanic
This paper builds on growing evidence that aspirated or fortis obstruents in languages like English and German are laryngeally marked, but that phonetic voicing in the (unmarked) unaspirated or lenis series is contextually determined. Employing the laryngeal feature set proposed by Halle & Stevens (1971), as incorporated into the ‘dimensional theory’ of laryngeal representation (Avery & Idsardi 2001, forthcoming), we develop an explicit account o…
The Conundrum of Old Norse Umlaut
This paper pursues an “ingenerate” or phonetically based account of i-umlaut as it unfolded in North Germanic. We focus on a famous problem relating to umlaut distributions in i-stem nouns: In the long stems of that class (gestr ‘guest’, from earlier *gastiz), where umlaut is arguably less motivated phonetically, it is generally reflected throughout the paradigms, but in short stems (staðr ‘place’, from earlier *staðir), where it is more expected…
German Substrate Effects in Wisconsin English
A once predominantly German-speaking community in Watertown, Wisconsin,shows distinct phonetic and phonological traces of that immigrant heritage in the speech of its English-speaking monolinguals. Acoustic and perceptual studies suggest that speakers do not produce all the expected cues for English fi nal laryngeal distinctions, nor do they exploit those cues to the same degree as a set of control speakers. This instance, for which the language …
Fundamental Regularities in the Second Consonant Shift
Recent studies, by us and others, have argued that the Second Consonant Shift began medially after stressed short vowels, triggered by a segmental interpretation of aspiration in interaction with Germanic syllable weight requirements. The most striking empirical support came from the dialect of Wermelskirchen, where shift of fortis stops is attested only following short vowels. But is Wermelskirchen an isolated dialect or part of a general patter…
On the typology of final laryngeal neutralization
1. Introduction This commentary outlines a typology of final laryngeal neutralization under the assumptions of ‘laryngeal realism’, an approach to feature representation which distinguishes structurally the two-way contrasts of ‘voice’ languages (Dutch, Polish, Spanish) from those of ‘aspiration’ languages (German, Somali, Washo). The typology in turn opens the door to a fresh test for what has emerged as a central debate about Evolutionary Phono…
Prosodic prominence effects on vowels in chain shifts
This study examines synchronic variation in vowels in an effort to advance our understanding of the “transmission problem” in language change, in particular, the cross-generational perseverance of vowel shifts. Seeking a connection to patterns and directions of shifts in vowel systems over time, we examine the role of a largely neglected parameter of structured heterogeneity: prosodic prominence. Experimental data from two Midwestern dialects of …
Historical Linguistics 2005
This volume contains 22 revised papers originally presented at the 17th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, held August 2005 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. The papers cover a broad range of languages, including well-studied languages of Europe but also Aramaic, Zoque and Uto-Aztecan, Japanese and Korean, Afrikaans, and the Pilbara languages of Australia. The theoretical approaches taken are equally diverse, often bringing together as…
Domains and directionality in the evolution of German final fortition
Laryngeal realism (Honeybone 2005) holds that thoroughly voiced stops in a language like Dutch will be represented phonologically with the feature [voice], leaving the voiceless unaspirated stops laryngeally neutral, whereas the typically aspirated stops of a language like German are marked with the feature [spread glottis], rendering the passively voiced stops in this language neutral. These two languages also merge laryngeal oppositions in fina…
Vowel Duration in Three American English Dialects
The article reports on an acoustic investigation into the duration of five American English vowels, those found in hid, head, had, hayed, and hide. We compare duration across three major dialect areas: the Inland North, Midlands, and South. The results show systematic differences across all vowels studied, with the longest durations in the South and the shortest in the Inland North, with the Midlands in an intermediate but distinct position. More…
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