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50-686: The degree to which lexical features of Newfoundland French constitute a distinct dialect is not presently known. It is uncertain how many speakers survive; the dialect could be moribund . There is a provincial advocacy organisation Fédération des Francophones de Terre-Neuve et du Labrador , representing both the Peninsular French and Acadian French communities. Newfoundland French communities include Cap-St-Georges , Petit Jardin , Grand Jardin , De Grau , Ruisseau Rouge , La Pointe à Luc , Trois Cailloux , La Grand’Terre , L’Anse-à-Canards , Maisons-d’Hiver and Lourdes . In addition, there

100-418: A construction-specific property rather than a language-specific property. Many languages show mixed accusative and ergative behaviour (for example: ergative morphology marking the verb arguments, on top of an accusative syntax). Other languages (called " active languages ") have two types of intransitive verbs—some of them ("active verbs") join the subject in the same case as the agent of a transitive verb, and

150-401: A fox in-the woods seen"), Dutch ( Hans vermoedde dat Jan Marie zag leren zwemmen - *"Hans suspected that Jan Marie saw to learn to swim") and Welsh ( Mae 'r gwirio sillafu wedi'i gwblhau - *"Is the checking spelling after its to complete"). In this case, linguists base the typology on the non-analytic tenses (i.e. those sentences in which the verb is not split) or on the position of

200-453: A language with cases , the classification depends on whether the subject (S) of an intransitive verb has the same case as the agent (A) or the patient (P) of a transitive verb. If a language has no cases, but the word order is AVP or PVA, then a classification may reflect whether the subject of an intransitive verb appears on the same side as the agent or the patient of the transitive verb. Bickel (2011) has argued that alignment should be seen as

250-406: A member of this set, while 51% of average languages (19-25) contain at least one member and 69% of large consonant inventories (greater than 25 consonants) contain a member of this set. It is then seen that complex consonants are in proportion to the size of the inventory. Vowels contain a more modest number of phonemes, with the average being 5–6, which 51% of the languages in the survey have. About

300-411: A single dominant order. Though the reason of dominance is sometimes considered an unsolved or unsolvable typological problem, several explanations for the distribution pattern have been proposed. Evolutionary explanations include those by Thomas Givon (1979), who suggests that all languages stem from an SOV language but are evolving into different kinds; and by Derek Bickerton (1981), who argues that

350-521: A third of the languages have larger than average vowel inventories. Most interesting though is the lack of relationship between consonant inventory size and vowel inventory size. Below is a chart showing this lack of predictability between consonant and vowel inventory sizes in relation to each other. Mi%27kmaq people Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include

400-409: Is a chart showing the breakdown of voicing properties among languages in the aforementioned sample. Languages worldwide also vary in the number of sounds they use. These languages can go from very small phonemic inventories ( Rotokas with six consonants and five vowels) to very large inventories ( !Xóõ with 128 consonants and 28 vowels). An interesting phonological observation found with this data

450-575: Is a town named Port Aux Basques on the western side of Newfoundland. There are also nearby Acadian French communities in the Codroy Valley and Stephenville . These francophones speak in the Acadian dialect of French, and not Newfoundland French. France contested ownership of Newfoundland from 1662 until 1713, when it ceded the island to Great Britain as part of the Treaty of Utrecht . During

500-443: Is arguably the primary cause for the differences between Newfoundland and Acadian French. Contact between francophone and anglophone Newfoundlanders had been historically both limited and normally peaceful. In the first half of the twentieth century, the west coast of Newfoundland was roughly evenly distributed with English-speaking and French-speaking families, mostly working within their own linguistic communities. The major exception

550-430: Is by excluding the subject from consideration. It is a well-documented typological feature that languages with a dominant OV order (object before verb), Japanese for example, tend to have postpositions . In contrast, VO languages (verb before object) like English tend to have prepositions as their main adpositional type. Several OV/VO correlations have been uncovered. Several processing explanations were proposed in

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600-425: Is defined by position within a sentence or presence of a preposition. For example, in some languages with bound case markings for nouns, such as Language X, varying degrees of freedom in constituent order are observed. These languages exhibit more flexible word orders, allowing for variations like Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure, as in 'The cat ate the mouse,' and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure, as in 'The mouse

650-475: Is now spoken by only a handful of elderly residents and is considered moribund. Typically, Franco-Newfoundlanders in Newfoundland now speak Acadian French rather than the Newfoundland dialect, though a small number of families still speak a strongly inflected hybrid dialect. Today, 15,000 descendants of French settlers live in the province, and there is a movement to reestablish the Newfoundland dialect as

700-425: Is seen in most languages or is probable in most languages. Universals, both absolute and statistical can be unrestricted, meaning that they apply to most or all languages without any additional conditions. Conversely, both absolute and statistical universals can be restricted or implicational, meaning that a characteristic will be true on the condition of something else (if Y characteristic is true, then X characteristic

750-513: Is suggested more recently that the left-right orientation is limited to role-marking connectives ( adpositions and subordinators ), stemming directly from the semantic mapping of the sentence. Since the true correlation pairs in the above table either involve such a connective or, arguably, follow from the canonical order, orientation predicts them without making problematic claims. Another common classification distinguishes nominative–accusative alignment patterns and ergative–absolutive ones. In

800-452: Is that the larger a consonant inventory a language has, the more likely it is to contain a sound from a defined set of complex consonants (clicks, glottalized consonants, doubly articulated labial-velar stops, lateral fricatives and affricates, uvular and pharyngeal consonants, and dental or alveolar non-sibilant fricatives). Of this list, only about 26% of languages in a survey of over 600 with small inventories (less than 19 consonants) contain

850-399: Is true). An example of an implicational hierarchy is that dual pronouns are only found in languages with plural pronouns while singular pronouns (or unspecified in terms of number) are found in all languages. The implicational hierarchy is thus singular < plural < dual (etc.). Qualitative typology develops cross-linguistically viable notions or types that provide a framework for

900-748: The French Academy , some characteristics of French in Newfoundland can be kept in mind: Linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology ) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages. Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain

950-699: The Magdalen Islands to colonize Cape Saint-George , the Codroy Valley and Stephenville called "l'Anse-aux-Sauvages" (the Cove of Savages) beginning in the 19th century. Until the middle of the 20th century, fishermen from Brittany who spoke Breton as their mother tongue, but were educated in French through the Jules Ferry schools, came to establish themselves on the Port-au-Port peninsula; this

1000-458: The Seven Years' War , France (and Spain) vied for control of Newfoundland and the valuable fisheries off its shores. Fighting ceased in 1763, with French fishing rights to the western coast enshrined in the Treaty of Paris . This period saw an influx of Breton , Norman and Basque fishermen to the region, though most of the activity was seasonal, and French settlement before the late 1800s

1050-475: The 1930s onward. Since 1949, when Newfoundland became a Canadian province, the use of French on the island has continued to decline. The presence of French was ignored by both governments, similarly to the Mi'kmaq populations, with there being no official position on the matter, but with the de facto policy of assimilation. As a result of the absence of francophone education and religious teaching, Newfoundland French

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1100-511: The 1961 conference on language universals at Dobbs Ferry . Speakers included Roman Jakobson , Charles F. Hockett , and Joseph Greenberg who proposed forty-five different types of linguistic universals based on his data sets from thirty languages. Greenberg's findings were mostly known from the nineteenth-century grammarians, but his systematic presentation of them would serve as a model for modern typology. Winfred P. Lehmann introduced Greenbergian typological theory to Indo-European studies in

1150-579: The 1970s. During the twentieth century, typology based on missionary linguistics became centered around SIL International , which today hosts its catalogue of living languages, Ethnologue , as an online database. The Greenbergian or universalist approach is accounted for by the World Atlas of Language Structures , among others. Typology is also done within the frameworks of functional grammar including Functional Discourse Grammar , Role and Reference Grammar , and Systemic Functional Linguistics . During

1200-598: The 1980s and 1990s for the above correlations. They suggest that the brain finds it easier to parse syntactic patterns that are either right or left branching , but not mixed. The most widely held such explanation is John A. Hawkins ' parsing efficiency theory, which argues that language is a non-innate adaptation to innate cognitive mechanisms. Typological tendencies are considered as being based on language users' preference for grammars that are organized efficiently, and on their avoidance of word orderings that cause processing difficulty. Hawkins's processing theory predicts

1250-666: The Difference in Human Linguistic Structure and Its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind’ (posthumous 1836). In 1818, August Wilhelm Schlegel made a classification of the world's languages into three types: (i) languages lacking grammatical structure, e.g. Chinese; (ii) agglutinative languages, e.g. Turkish; and (iii) inflectional languages, which can be synthetic like Latin and Ancient Greek, or analytic like French. This idea

1300-454: The English niece and knees . According to a worldwide sample of 637 languages, 62% have the voicing contrast in stops but only 35% have this in fricatives. In the vast majority of those cases, the absence of voicing contrast occurs because there is a lack of voiced fricatives and because all languages have some form of plosive (occlusive) , but there are languages with no fricatives. Below

1350-469: The French language of education in the province. However, schoolchildren in the province are currently being introduced to either standard Quebec French , or to a heavily Acadian-influenced variety thereof. According to Patrice Brasseur's articles "Les Représentations linguistiques des francophones de la péninsule de Port-au-Port" (2007) and "Quelques aspects de la situation linguistique dans la communauté franco-terreneuvienne" (1995) as well as according to

1400-547: The above table but also makes predictions for non-correlation pairs including the order of adjective, demonstrative and numeral in respect with the noun. This theory was based on corpus research and lacks support in psycholinguistic studies. Some languages exhibit regular "inefficient" patterning. These include the VO languages Chinese , with the adpositional phrase before the verb, and Finnish , which has postpositions. But there are few other profoundly exceptional languages. It

1450-486: The actual daily use of the language. The daily spoken language of Sophocles or Cicero might have exhibited a different or much more regular syntax than their written legacy indicates. The below table indicates the distribution of the dominant word order pattern of over 5,000 individual languages and 366 language families. SOV is the most common type in both although much more clearly in the data of language families including isolates . 'NODOM' represents languages without

1500-547: The auxiliary. German is thus SVO in main clauses and Welsh is VSO (and preposition phrases would go after the infinitive). Many typologists classify both German and Dutch as V2 languages, as the verb invariantly occurs as the second element of a full clause. Some languages allow varying degrees of freedom in their constituent order, posing a problem for their classification within the subject–verb–object schema. Languages with bound case markings for nouns, for example, tend to have more flexible word orders than languages where case

1550-437: The basic order of subject , verb , and direct object in sentences: These labels usually appear abbreviated as "SVO" and so forth, and may be called "typologies" of the languages to which they apply. The most commonly attested word orders are SOV and SVO while the least common orders are those that are object initial with OVS being the least common with only four attested instances. In the 1980s, linguists began to question

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1600-512: The cat ate.' To define a basic constituent order type in this case, one generally looks at frequency of different types in declarative affirmative main clauses in pragmatically neutral contexts, preferably with only old referents. Thus, for instance, Russian is widely considered an SVO language, as this is the most frequent constituent order under such conditions—all sorts of variations are possible, though, and occur in texts. In many inflected languages, such as Russian, Latin, and Greek, departures from

1650-466: The default word-orders are permissible but usually imply a shift in focus, an emphasis on the final element, or some special context. In the poetry of these languages, the word order may also shift freely to meet metrical demands. Additionally, freedom of word order may vary within the same language—for example, formal, literary, or archaizing varieties may have different, stricter, or more lenient constituent-order structures than an informal spoken variety of

1700-503: The description and comparison of languages. The main subfields of linguistic typology include the empirical fields of syntactic, phonological and lexical typology. Additionally, theoretical typology aims to explain the empirical findings, especially statistical tendencies or implicational hierarchies. Syntactic typology studies a vast array of grammatical phenomena from the languages of the world. Two well-known issues include dominant order and left-right symmetry. One set of types reflects

1750-563: The early years of the twenty-first century, however, the existence of linguistic universals became questioned by linguists proposing evolutionary typology. Quantitative typology deals with the distribution and co-occurrence of structural patterns in the languages of the world. Major types of non-chance distribution include: Linguistic universals are patterns that can be seen cross-linguistically. Universals can either be absolute, meaning that every documented language exhibits this characteristic, or statistical, meaning that this characteristic

1800-591: The heart of an American, Canadian, British and Newfoundlander anglophone economic centre. Families were grateful for the economic opportunities brought by the base, but transmission of French across generations dropped-off dramatically. The absence of French-language education and the mandatory attendance of all children in English-speaking schools, as well as both radio and television programs in English, caused more recent generations to fail to master more complicated grammar and subject matter in French. English

1850-619: The importance of lesser-known languages in gaining insight into human language. Speculations of the existence of a (logical) general or universal grammar underlying all languages were published in the Middle Ages, especially by the Modistae school. At the time, Latin was the model language of linguistics, although transcribing Irish and Icelandic into the Latin alphabet was found problematic. The cross-linguistic dimension of linguistics

1900-543: The original language was SVO, which supports simpler grammar employing word order instead of case markers to differentiate between clausal roles. Universalist explanations include a model by Russell Tomlin (1986) based on three functional principles: (i) animate before inanimate; (ii) theme before comment; and (iii) verb-object bonding. The three-way model roughly predicts the real hierarchy (see table above) assuming no statistical difference between SOV and SVO, and, also, no statistical difference between VOS and OVS. By contrast,

1950-458: The processing efficiency theory of John A. Hawkins (1994) suggests that constituents are ordered from shortest to longest in VO languages, and from longest to shortest in OV languages, giving rise to the attested distribution. This approach relies on the notion that OV languages have heavy subjects, and VO languages have heavy objects, which is disputed. A second major way of syntactic categorization

2000-482: The relevance of geographical distribution of different values for various features of linguistic structure. They may have wanted to discover whether a particular grammatical structure found in one language is likewise found in another language in the same geographic location. Some languages split verbs into an auxiliary and an infinitive or participle and put the subject and/or object between them. For instance, German ( Ich habe einen Fuchs im Wald gesehen - *"I have

2050-492: The rest ("stative verbs") join the subject in the same case as the patient . Yet other languages behave ergatively only in some contexts (this " split ergativity " is often based on the grammatical person of the arguments or on the tense/aspect of the verb). For example, only some verbs in Georgian behave this way, and, as a rule, only while using the perfective (aorist). Linguistic typology also seeks to identify patterns in

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2100-451: The same language. On the other hand, when there is no clear preference under the described conditions, the language is considered to have "flexible constituent order" (a type unto itself). An additional problem is that in languages without living speech communities, such as Latin , Ancient Greek , and Old Church Slavonic , linguists have only written evidence, perhaps written in a poetic, formalizing, or archaic style that mischaracterizes

2150-485: The structure and distribution of sound systems among the world's languages. This is accomplished by surveying and analyzing the relative frequencies of different phonological properties. Exemplary relative frequencies are given below for certain speech sounds formed by obstructing airflow (obstruents) . These relative frequencies show that contrastive voicing commonly occurs with plosives , as in English neat and need , but occurs much more rarely among fricatives , such as

2200-444: The universal tendencies. Linguistic typology is contrasted with genealogical linguistics on the grounds that typology groups languages or their grammatical features based on formal similarities rather than historic descendence. The issue of genealogical relation is however relevant to typology because modern data sets aim to be representative and unbiased. Samples are collected evenly from different language families , emphasizing

2250-826: The world by Europeans gave rise to 'missionary linguistics' producing first-hand word lists and grammatical descriptions of exotic languages. Such work is accounted for in the ‘Catalogue of the Languages of the Populations We Know’, 1800, by the Spanish Jesuit Lorenzo Hervás . Johann Christoph Adelung collected the first large language sample with the Lord's prayer in almost five hundred languages (posthumous 1817). More developed nineteenth-century comparative works include Franz Bopp 's 'Conjugation System' (1816) and Wilhelm von Humboldt 's ‘On

2300-434: Was becoming the only language of the educated. Patrice Brasseur, a French linguist, has made numerous visits to the island. In speaking with remaining elderly Newfoundland francophones, he has found that French-speaking children were often punished for speaking French at school. Marriages between francophone and anglophone Catholics also became a contributing factor in assimilation, with intermarriages becoming more common from

2350-642: Was established in the Renaissance period. For example, Grammaticae quadrilinguis partitiones (1544) by Johannes Drosaeus compared French and the three ‘holy languages’, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The approach was expanded by the Port-Royal Grammar (1660) of Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot , who added Spanish, Italian, German and Arabic. Nicolas Beauzée 's 1767 book includes examples of English, Swedish, Lappish , Irish, Welsh , Basque , Quechua , and Chinese. The conquest and conversion of

2400-474: Was forbidden. Despite British disapproval, the clandestine settlement continued, though without the benefit of schools and essential services. As a result, literacy among Francophones was uncommon in the twentieth century. In 1904 ownership of the region was transferred from France to the Colony of Newfoundland . In addition to French immigration from Europe, Acadian immigrants arrived from Cape Breton Island and

2450-419: Was later developed by others including August Schleicher , Heymann Steinthal , Franz Misteli, Franz Nicolaus Finck , and Max Müller . The word 'typology' was proposed by Georg von der Gabelentz in his Sprachwissenschaft (1891). Louis Hjelmslev proposed typology as a large-scale empirical-analytical endeavour of comparing grammatical features to uncover the essence of language. Such a project began from

2500-586: Was the Catholic Church, wherein the priests were nearly always monolingually English-speaking. This strongly encouraged bilingualism in the francophone community and laid the seeds for assimilation. In 1940, the establishment of the American air force base at Stephenville began French Newfoundland’s decline. Newfoundland French and Acadian French speakers who had lived and worked their entire lives in relative francophone isolation now found themselves at

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