Routledge dictionary of language and linguistics - Developers

Dictionary of language and linguistics 796
structures. The more members of an individual network are involved in relations outside
the larger network, the more ‘tightly woven’ the networks become. Furthermore,
networks become all the more ‘multiplex’ as more and more diverse relations are based
within the individual networks (e.g. when co-workers, who also happen to be friends.
meet regularly for outside activities or live in the same neighborhood).
In such networks social cohesion develops and culture- and group-specific systems of
values, shared knowledge, shared attitudes, as well as patterns of behavior are
established, which in turn manifest themselves linguistically. This concept is therefore of
central importance for empirical studies of linguistic behavior and for studies of the
processes of linguistic change: precisely those interactional relations that are responsible
for (groupspecific) conformity in behavior (though which do not necessarily correlate
with a particular special class or ethnic group) are used as a starting point to determine
group divisions. ( also sociolinguistics)
References
Boissevain, J. 1974. Friends of friends: networks, manipulators, and coalitions. London.
——1987. Social network. In U.Ammon et al. (eds), Soziolinguistik/Sociolinguistics: an
international handbook of the science of language and society. Berlin. 164–9.
Milroy, L. 1980. Language and social networks. Oxford.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1940. On social structure. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
70. 1–12.
neurolinguistics
Interdisciplinary field concerned with the study of language processing and
representation of language in the brain. Closely allied with psycholinguistics, cognitive
linguistics, and a subdiscipline of neuropsychology, neurolinguistics studies
disturbances in language comprehension and/or production associated with known central
nervous system pathologies ( articulation disorder, developmental language
disorder, language disorder, aphasia) or designs experiments, such as those involving
dichotic listening, to test various processing models. Electrophysiological data, imaging,
and ‘on-line’ measurement of memory phenomena are increasingly useful to research in
this field.
References
Arbib, M., D.Caplan, and J.Marshall (eds) 1982. Neural models of language processes. New York.
Bouton, C.P. 1991. Neurolinguistics: historical and theoretical perspectives. New York.
Caplan, D. 1987. Neurolinguistics and linguistic aphasiology. Cambridge.