| Popis: |
Beginning with the biblical account of the Tower of Babel, social narratives of language history have relied on two crucial declaratives. The first regards the nature of language itself—specifically, that as a means of communal interaction as well as semantic communication, language is, ontologically, social as well as structural. The second regards the import of how languages and sociolinguistic contexts relate to one other. Their relations may be understood to be causative, resultative, or mimetic, but, given the first declarative, they cannot be merely coincidental, since that would mean that they are not (as the narrative requires) fundamental to a language’s ontology. Put another way, from the perspective of language as a social semiotic, explanations of language change are as socially encoded and motivated as are the changes themselves. |
