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37614 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1431 of 1881

  • 1 - Developing countries and the concept of development

  • Adam Szirmai, Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands
  • Book:
    Socio-Economic Development
    Published online:
    12 September 2018
    Print publication:
    18 June 2015, pp 1-40

  • Summary

    This introductory chapter focuses on the concept of development. The low standard of living of the mass of the population in developing countries is singled out as the key issue in development. The development of per capita income over time and the factors that influence economic development or stagnation are important topics in this book. However, the interplay between economic and non-economic factors is of great importance for our understanding of the dynamics of socio-economic development. Economic development cannot be explained by economic factors only, and the concept of development includes more than mere changes in economic indicators.

    After a discussion of problems of involvement and detachment in the study of development issues in sections 1.1 and 1.2, we examine the concept of development in sections 1.3 to 1.5. Indicators of growth and development are presented in section 1. 6. Section 1.7 highlights the differences between developing countries and the variety of development experiences. Section 1.8 examines global income inequality and poverty and highlights the increasing inequality in the international economic order. Section 1.9 addresses the question what developing countries have in common in spite of all their differences. The final section 1.10 provides a first introduction to the framework of proximate and ultimate causality which will be further developed in subsequent chapters.

    Approaches to development

    In discussions of development issues, two general approaches can be distinguished (see Myint, 1980):

  • The fight against poverty: This approach focuses on the problems of widespread poverty, hunger and misery in developing countries and on the question of what can be done in order to realise improvements of the situation in the short term.

  • The analysis of long-term economic and social development: This approach concentrates on comparing developments in different countries, regions and historical periods in order to gain a better understanding of the factors that have long-term effects on the dynamics of socio-economic development.

  • 3 - Growth and stagnation: theories and experiences

  • Adam Szirmai, Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands
  • Book:
    Socio-Economic Development
    Published online:
    12 September 2018
    Print publication:
    18 June 2015, pp 73-130

  • Summary

    As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 of this book, there has been long-run divergence in the world economy. In the fifteenth century disparities in per capita incomes between countries and regions were small. Since then some economies have moved ahead and others have fallen far behind. After 1820, capital accumulation and technological change accelerated. The rate at which income levels diverged increased, resulting in the wide global disparities of the present international economic order. We have also noted that the ranking of countries was not immutable. Former British colonies such as the USA, Canada and New Zealand or Asian economies such as Japan, Singapore and Korea grew so rapidly that they moved far up the income ladder. Other countries such as Argentina, the Ottoman empire or the Russian Federation slipped downward. For a better understanding of development, we are interested in why some countries or societies forge ahead in given periods, while others stagnate or fall behind (Abramovitz, 1989b). We are especially interested in the conditions under which growth and catch-up can be realised in developing countries of today. Sections 3.1–3.6 of this chapter offer a brief introduction to theories of growth and stagnation. Section 3.7 presents theoretically relevant empirical information on long-run economic trends in developing countries.

    What are the sources of growth and development?

    The key challenge to our theoretical and empirical understanding of development is to understand why some developing countries experience accelerated growth, catch-up and socio-economic development while others become mired in stagnation. Let us start with the question of what are the immediate or proximate sources of economic growth. In simplified form, these are summarised in Box 3.1.

  • 5 - Analogical change

  • Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico
  • Book:
    Language Change
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    28 May 2015, pp 93-116

  • Summary

    Analogy

    The term “analogy” as used in linguistics has a specific and a general meaning. In historical linguistics it usually applies to morphological change, more specifically, change within morphological paradigms; that is what this chapter is about. The broader use of the term applies in syntax and refers to a process by which innovative expressions are based on existing expressions rather than on rules, a point we return to in Chapter 8.

    This chapter is concerned with changes in morphological form (rather than meaning, which we get to in the next two chapters). The definition of morphological analogy I will use is the following: the re-making of a word based on similarity to other existing words in the language. In the preceding chapter we saw that sound change introduces alternations and irregularities into morphological paradigms. Analogical changes are often a response to these alternations, either working to eliminate them or, less often, to extend them to new lexical items.

    Analogical change is rarely lexically regular the way sound change often is. That is, while sound change tends to affect all the lexical items that have the appropriate phonetic conditions for the change, analogical change clearly works one item at a time and most commonly does not affect all lexical items or paradigms that have the requisite conditions.

  • 7 - Common paths of grammaticalization

  • Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico
  • Book:
    Language Change
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    28 May 2015, pp 139-160

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Grammaticalization is interesting enough as a language-specific phenomenon but it becomes all the more important and interesting with the discovery that very similar paths of semantic change can be documented in unrelated languages. Indeed, large-scale crosslinguistic studies of grammaticalization reveal that for each gram type there are only a few possible lexical sources (Bybee et al. 1994; Heine et al. 1991b; Heine and Kuteva 2002). In Chapter 6 we saw that future grams can develop from verbs or constructions with meanings of volition or obligation, from constructions signaling movement towards a goal, and in a few cases from temporal adverbs, such as Tok Pisin baimbai. These four sources account for the vast majority of future grams whose sources are known.

    The consequence of these facts is that in all languages at all times the same mechanisms of change are operating on very similar lexical and grammatical material and thus producing similar results. This is not to say that grammaticalization is exactly the same across languages. Poplack 2011 compares the grammaticalization over two centuries of the movement futures in French, Portuguese, and Spanish and demonstrates that not only are the rates of change different, but the contextual factors that influence the use of the movement future are different across these languages. What this means in terms of the universality of grammaticalization paths is that the conceptual sources are similar (they are probably never exactly the same), and the mechanisms of change such as bleaching and inference are very similar across languages, but in each language there will be some specific conditions that push the long-term development more in some contexts than in others. These language-specific factors may be the existence of other, competing forms, the attachment of social meaning to one variant or another, or particular patterns of usage that skew distributions. Despite these language-specific factors, broad patterns of change that are similar across unrelated languages can still be identified.

  • 1 - The study of language change

  • Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico
  • Book:
    Language Change
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    28 May 2015, pp 1-14

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This book examines the topic of how and why languages change. This field of study has traditionally been called “historical linguistics” and under that label the history of particular languages has been studied, and methods for the comparison of languages and reconstruction of their family relations have been developed. While this book covers many of the traditional topics in historical linguistics, I have chosen to focus on the topic of how and why languages change because linguistic researchers see now more than ever before that language change is not a phenomenon of the distant past, but is just as evident currently in ongoing changes as it is when we look back into documents that show older stages of languages. Moreover, it has become clear that language change helps us explain the features of language structure because it provides a window onto how those structures come into being and evolve. Thus we identify explanations for the characteristics that language has by examining how language changes.

    What we will see as we progress through the types of language change is that change is built into the way language is used. The mental processes that are in play when speakers and listeners communicate are the main causes of change. This helps us explain another very important fact: all languages change in the same ways. Since language users the world over have the same mental processes to work with and they use communication for the same or very similar ends, the changes that come about in languages from Alaska to Zambia fit into the same categories as changes found in English and French.

  • 11 - Sources of language change: internal and external factors

  • Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico
  • Book:
    Language Change
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    28 May 2015, pp 237-264

  • Summary

    In this final chapter, we take a look at the possible sources or causes of linguistic change. Of course, we have discussed the causes of change throughout the book, but in this chapter we address the issue of causes more directly and more generally. In broad outline, we consider factors internal to language as causes of change in contrast to external causes, in particular the influence of other languages. In this way, Section 11.1 on internal sources contrasts with Sections 11.2 and 11.3, which deal with situations of languages in contact. In Section 11.1 we will look briefly at some theoretical approaches that address issues of diachronic change, in particular Naturalness Theory in Section 11.1.1 and generative theories in Section 11.1.2. In Section 11.1.3 we consider briefly whether child language is a plausible source of linguistic change. After the sections on language contact, in Section 11.4 we consider the idea that language is a complex adaptive system, in which dynamic factors inherent in the speaker, listener, and context produce change.

    Internal sources: language use

    This section will first review the approach presented in the previous chapters, drawing together some common mechanisms and general patterns that have been identified across the different types of change. The approach taken here recognizes the role of language use in creating and propagating change and conforms to usage-based theory so we will call it the usage-based approach. Next, the discussion turns to other proposals, in particular that coming from Naturalness Theory, which proposes that language structures change to become more natural or less marked. Finally, we consider the generative approach, which hypothesizes that language change occurs in the language acquisition process.

  • 8 - Syntactic change: the development and change of constructions

  • Joan Bybee, University of New Mexico
  • Book:
    Language Change
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    28 May 2015, pp 161-187

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Syntactic change will be treated here as consisting of changes in syntactic constructions, including the creation of new constructions and changes in constructions once they come into existence. The term construction will be used here both in its very traditional use, where one speaks of “the passive construction” or a “relative clause construction” and also in the way it is currently used in syntactic analysis by linguists such as Goldberg, for whom a construction is a form–meaning relation (Goldberg 1995, 2006). For Goldberg, words and morphemes as well as phrases and syntactic patterns are form–meaning mappings, but in this chapter, we will consider syntactic patterns that are conventionalized. Such patterns have slots or positions within them that can be filled by a range of different words or morphemes and are thus schematic. So, for example, a prepositional phrase is a construction consisting of a preposition and an NP object. Both positions are schematic in the sense that many different items can occur in each slot. The preposition slot, say in English, is schematic since any preposition can occur in it. The NP slot is even more schematic because the range of possible NPs in English is enormous. Viewing a construction as a form–meaning mapping means that we take constructions to convey an overall meaning that goes beyond just the meaning taken from the words and morphemes that comprise them.

    The phenomena treated under syntactic change are intertwined with grammaticalization in two ways. First, many constructions have specific grammatical morphemes in them and they have developed by the process of grammaticalization. Thus, all the prepositions found in English (in, to, of, behind, below, after, and so on) have undergone grammaticalization giving rise to new preposition constructions. When a unit or set of units changes category, we can speak of syntactic change. For instance, if a verb in construction with another verb becomes an auxiliary, not only has grammaticalization taken place, but syntactic change has also occurred. Second, the creation of new constructions is driven by some of the same processes that drive grammaticalization: chunking, category expansion, generalization, and inferencing. Thus many of the themes of this chapter are familiar from the last two chapters.

Page 1431 of 1881