I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

• The History of Languages

  2012. Tore Janson.

  Bok

  This is an introduction to the history of languages, from the distant past to a glimpse at what languages may be like in the distant future. It looks at how languages arise, change, and ultimately vanish, and what lies behind their different destinies. What happens to languages, he argues, has to do with what happens to the people who use them, and what happens to people, individually and collectively, is affected by the languages they speak.

  The book opens by examining what the languages are the hunter-gatherers might have spoken and the changes to language that took place when agriculture made settled communities possible. It then looks at the effects of the invention of writing, the formation of empires, the spread of religions, and the recent dominance of world powers, and shows how these relate to great changes in the use of languages. Tore Janson discusses the appearance of new languages, the reasons why some languages spread and others die, considers whether similar cyclical processes are found at different times and places, and examines the causes of internal changes in languages and dialects.

  The book ranges widely among the world's languages and mixes thematic chapters on general processes of change with accounts of specific languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Greek, and English.                   

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• Vocative and the grammar of calls

  2013. Tore Janson. Vocative!, 219-234

  Kapitel

  Vocative forms appear in calls, which constitute a type of utterances; other types are statements, questions, and commands. Grammatical descriptions usually focus on sentences, the grammatical form of statements. This paper presents a sketch of the grammar of calls. The basic form of a call is a noun phrase denoting a person. Calls may include special marking to show the utterance type. There may be markers outside the noun phrase (utterance marking) or marking within the noun phrase (noun phrase marking). Some languages have one of the types and some have both. The types typically do not interfere but occur independently of each other. Utterance marking consists of special intonation or of an optional vocalic particle. Noun phrase marking may consist of suppletion, contraction or apocope of the noun, or of addition of an affix. The noun then has a special vocative form. In languages with obligatory case marking, noun marking of calls and marking of case may interfere in complex ways.

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• Språken före historien

  2019. Tore Janson.

  Bok

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