
Daniel Bunčić
Phone: +49 221 470-3355
Address: Universität zu Köln
Slavisches Institut
Weyertal 137
50931 Köln
Address: Universität zu Köln
Slavisches Institut
Weyertal 137
50931 Köln
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Books by Daniel Bunčić
This collective monograph, which includes contributions from eleven specialists in different philological areas, for the first time develops a coherent typological model on the basis of sociolinguistic and graphematic criteria to describe and classify these and many other linguistic situations in which two or more writing systems are used simultaneously for one and the same language.
Papers by Daniel Bunčić
This collective monograph, which includes contributions from eleven specialists in different philological areas, for the first time develops a coherent typological model on the basis of sociolinguistic and graphematic criteria to describe and classify these and many other linguistic situations in which two or more writing systems are used simultaneously for one and the same language.
However, the late Beatrice Primus (2004) presented an analysis of the modern Latin alphabet in which letters are grouped according to graphic features in such a way that these groups correspond to groups of sounds. For example, she showed that letters for obstruents tend to have ascenders or descenders (p, t, k, b, d, g, q, f, j, h), whereas letters for sonorants are largely constrained to the x-height (a, e, i, o, u, m, n, r; Primus 2004: 252–253; Primus & Wagner 2014: 41–43). Consequently, syllables tend to have a vertically concave ≍ shape (e.g. but, tank, peg, track, etc.; for words like take, see Evertz 2018 for the correspondence between graphemic syllables and phonemic syllables). Such regularities are a consequence of ‘natural’ development of the Latin alphabet over the centuries (Primus 2007).
Similar regularities have also been shown for Greek (Primus & Wagner 2014: 43), Arabic, and Tifinagh (ibid. 48–57) but not for Cyrillic. The history of Cyrillic – with its letters derived from two sources, Greek and Glagolitic, Peter I’s alphabet reform of 1708, and the conservative Soviet typography – is complicated and relatively short, so that it is not at all clear whether grapho-phonic correspondences at the level of features can already have developed.
In this talk I present a featural analysis of Cyrillic which shows that:
a) the ‘standard’ Russian print alphabet (whose letters are remarkably uniform, as Kempgen 1993 has shown) is indeed much less featural than the Latin alphabet;
b) Cyrillic cursives as well as the recent Bulgarian variant of Cyrillic (cf. Kempgen 2015) exhibit an astonishing number of correspondences at the level of graphetic and phonetic features.
This demonstrates that the development of the Cyrillic alphabet unequivocally goes in the direction of a ‘featural’ alphabet.
Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67(3). 547–619.
Jabłońska, Patrycja. 2008. Silverstein’s hierarchy and Polish argument structure. In Marc Richards & Andrej Malchukov (eds.), Scales, 221–245. Leipzig: Universität Leipzig, Institut für Linguistik.
Kibort, Anna. 2008. Impersonals in Polish: An LFG perspective. Transactions of the Philological Society 106(2). 246–289.
Primus, Beatrice. 2011. Animacy and telicity: Semantic constraints on impersonal passives. Lingua 121(1). 80–99.
Rivero, Marìa Luisa & Milena Milojević Sheppard. 2001. On impersonal se / sie in Slavic. In Gerhild Zybatow, Uwe Junghanns, Grit Mehlhorn & Luka Szucsich (eds.), Current issues in formal Slavic linguistics, 137–147. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Siewierska, Anna. 1988. The passive in Slavic. In Masayoshi Shibatani (ed.), Passive and voice, 243–289. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In Pieter Muysken & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), Features and projections, 163–232. Dordrecht: Foris.
In my talk it will become clear that none of these concepts is quite correct. What hap-pened a quarter of a century ago is a good example of the influence ideologies can have on language as a medium of communication itself. In the Serbo-Croatian case, ideology affects all levels of linguistic expression (the writing system, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and the lexicon). Apart from that, ideol¬o¬gies also determine such socio¬linguistic parameters as the status and area of application of standard varieties. Conse¬quent¬ly, ideologies changing over time bring about language change.
Most of the phenomena observed are caused by political ideas and language policies which I summarize under the cover term of ‘the ideology of separateness’. However, this ideology is opposed both by an ideology of togeth¬er¬ness and by a general inclination to maximize the potential audience of communication in a language. A question to be addressed in this context is whether such ideologies are really something external to lan¬guage or in how far they coincide with such ‘natural’ sociolinguistic requirements of a standard language as the “separatist function” and the “unifying function” proposed by Garvin & Mathiot (1960).
References
Auburger, Leopold. 1999. Die kroatische Sprache und der Serbokroatismus. Ulm/Donau.
Garvin, Paul L. & Madeleine Mathiot. 1960. The urbanization of the Guaraní language: A problem in language and culture. In: Men and cultures: Selected papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Philadelphia, September 1 9 1956. Ed. Anthony F. C. Wallace. Philadelphia. 783 790. [Reprinted in: Readings in the sociology of language. Ed. Joshua A. Fishman. The Hague, Paris 1968. 365 374.]
Katičić, Radoslav. 1997. Undoing a “unified language”: Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian. In: Undoing and redoing corpus planning. Ed. Michael Clyne. Berlin, New York. 165 191.
Gröschel, Bernhard. 2009. Das Serbokroatische zwischen Linguistik und Politik. Mit einer Bibliographie zum postjugoslavischen Sprachenstreit. München.
Kordić, Snježana. 2004. Pro und kontra: „Serbokroatisch“ heute. In: Slavistische Linguistik 2002: Referate des XXVIII. Konstanzer Slavistischen Arbeitstreffens, Bochum, 10. 9.−12. 9. 2002. Ed. Marion Krause, Christian Sappok. München. 97 148.
Rehder, Peter (ed.). ³1998. Einführung in die slavischen Sprachen (mit einer Einführung in die Balkan¬philo-logie). Darmstadt.
Thomas, Paul-Louis. 1994. Serbo-croate, serbe, croate…, bosniaque, monténégrin: Une, deux…, trois, quatre langues? Revue des études slaves 66:1. 237 259.
Der Umfang dieses Buches mit seinen 33 Lektionen kann in seiner Gesamtheit in einem über sechs Semesterwochenstunden laufenden Einführungsmodul behandelt werden und hat sich in einem solchen Kontext gut bewährt. Für kompaktere Einführungsveranstaltungen ist eine Auswahl aus den Lektionen des Buches möglich (Vorschläge für 2 SWS und 4 SWS auf S. xx), so dass die übrigen Lektionstexte ggf. eine einführende Lektüregrundlage für thematische Pro- und Hauptseminare darstellen können.
Durch seine klare Gliederung eignet sich dieses Buch auch als Kompendium zum Nachschlagen für das gesamte Studium.