The article discusses the premises of the systemic typology of Gennadij Prokop'evič Mel'nikov in comparison with the precepts of the sociolinguistic typology of Peter Trudgill. The author, in particular, looks into the correlation of linguistic patterning and societal structures as presented in the two theories, and offers a detailed synopsis of the societal factors and their valuables (external determinants) used in the respective disciplines. Detailed discussion of the societal factors as presented in the systemic and social typologies is offered. Major differences between their classifications in Mel'nikov and Trudgill are substantiated. Finally, based on the postulates of Mel'nikov's typology, the paper dwells on the concept of internal determinant or, the communicative scope which optimizes all the levels of language system, while co-varying types of social structures with types of linguistic patterning. * I would like to thank Peter Trudgill for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper as well as the participants in a session, entitled The Life, Growth and Death of Languages, at the International Congress of Linguists, 21-27 July 2013, Geneva, for their insightful queries. Needless to say, all the shortcomings in the proposed discussion are mine.
This article critically assesses probabilistic predictions on the theory of contact-induced grammaticalization of the comitative-instrumental polysemy in those Slavic languages which have had a history of long and intense interaction with either German or Italian. Having provided extensive dialectal data, I argue instead that there are no grounds for positing a direct correlation between the introduction of the comitative preposition to instrumental in “high-contact” Slavic languages and the history of language contact with German or Italian. I propose to distinguish between the grammaticalization of the comitative-instrumental polysemy due to analytic simplification and the grammaticalization of the instrumental-comitative polysemy due to synthetic simplification. The comitative marking for instrumentals in Slavic is likely to develop in places of prolonged multilingual contacts, not necessarily with German or Italian. Under these conditions one can predict the development of convergent analytic features in closely related or even areally contingent languages (dialects), as is the case of the Circum-Baltic area.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.