- Department of Linguistics
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905
Israel - +972 2 588 3809 (office)
Eitan Grossman
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Linguistics, Faculty Member
- Loanwords, Language contact & change, Languages and Linguistics, Typology, Historical Linguistics, African languages, Syntax, and 69 morePhonetics, Constructions, Sociolinguistics, Contact Linguistics, Dialectology, Language Variation, Multi- & Bilingualism & Biliteracy, English historical linguistics, Grammaticalization, Usage-based Grammar, History of Linguistics, Semitic languages, Egyptian language, Functional Grammar, Language complexity, Pragmatics, Historical Dialectology, Historical Syntax, Relevance Theory, Historical sociolinguistics, Functional Linguistics, Diachronic Linguistics (Or Historical Linguistics), Synchronic Linguistics (Or Descriptive Linguistics), Grammatical Variation, Panchronic Phonology, Ancient Indo-European Languages, Comparative Linguistics, Language Variation and Change, Language Documentation, Language Typology, Caucasian Languages, Dravidian Linguistics, Kartvelian Morpho-Syntax, Language Change, Phonological Typology, Linguistics, Linguistic Typology, Language contact, Diachronic Syntax, Historical Semantics, Semantics, Bilingualism, Code Switching, Pragmaticalization and Grammaticalization, Converbs, Discourse Analysis, Morphology, Corpus Linguistics, Slavic Languages, Structural Linguistics, Diachronic Typology, Afroasiatic linguistics, Comparative Semitics, Cushitic, Berber, Egyptian, Chadic, Arabic Dialectology, Endangered Languages, Lexical Semantics In Ancient Egyptian, Austronesian Languages, Central Asian Arabic dialects, Quantitative linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Computational Linguistics & NLP, Natural Language Processing, Africa Nilo-Saharan Linguistics, Lexical Semantics, and Semantic Typologyedit
- I'm interested in linguistic typology, historical linguistics, and language description. Current projects mostly focu... moreI'm interested in linguistic typology, historical linguistics, and language description. Current projects mostly focus on the different aspects of the typology of contact-induced change, e.g., adposition borrowing, valency and transitivity in contact, and contact-induced sound change.edit
Many languages exhibit differential object marking (DOM), where only certain types of grammatical objects are marked with morphological cases. Traditionally, it has been claimed that DOM arises as a way to prevent ambiguity by marking... more
Many languages exhibit differential object marking (DOM), where only certain types of grammatical objects are marked with morphological cases. Traditionally, it has been claimed that DOM arises as a way to prevent ambiguity by marking objects that might otherwise be mistaken for subjects (e.g., animate objects). While some recent experimental work supports this account, research on language typology suggests at least one alternative hypothesis. In particular, DOM may instead arise as a way of marking objects that are atypical from the point of view of information structure. According to this account, rather than being marked to avoid ambiguity, objects are marked when they are given (already familiar in the discourse) rather than new. Here, we experimentally investigate this hypothesis using two artificial language learning experiments. We find that information structure impacts participants' object marking, but in an indirect way: atypical information structure leads to a change in word order, which then triggers increased object marking. Interestingly, this staged process of change is compatible with documented cases of DOM emergence. We argue that this process is driven by two cognitive tendencies. First, a tendency to place discourse given information before new information, and
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Many languages exhibit differential object marking (DOM), where only certain types of grammatical objects are marked with morphological case. Traditionally, it has been claimed that DOM arises as a way to prevent ambiguity by marking... more
Many languages exhibit differential object marking (DOM), where only certain types of grammatical objects are marked with morphological case. Traditionally, it has been claimed that DOM arises as a way to prevent ambiguity by marking objects that might otherwise be mistaken for subjects (e.g., animate objects). While some recent experimental work supports this account (Fedzechkina et al., 2012), research on language typology suggests at least one alternative hypothesis. In particular, DOM may instead arise as a way of marking objects that are atypical from the point of view of information structure. According to this account, rather than being marked to avoid ambiguity, objects are marked when they are given (already familiar in the discourse) rather than new. Here, we experimentally investigate this hypothesis using two artificial language learning experiments. We find that information structure impacts participants’ object-marking, but in an indirect way: atypical information structure leads to a change of word order, which then triggers increased object marking. Interestingly, this staged process of change is compatible with documented cases of DOM emergence (Iemmolo, 2013). We argue that this process is driven by two cognitive tendencies. First, a tendency to place discourse given information before new information, and second, a tendency to mark non-canonical word order. Taken together, our findings provide corroborating evidence for the role of information structure in the emergence of DOM systems.
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Many grammaticalization pathways recur across languages. A prominent explanation for this is that the properties of lexical items determine their developmental pathways. However, it is unclear why these pathways do not always occur. In... more
Many grammaticalization pathways recur across languages. A prominent explanation for this is that the properties of lexical items determine their developmental pathways. However, it is unclear why these pathways do not always occur. In this article, we ask why English did not undergo a cross-linguistically common grammaticalization pathway, finish > anterior. We operationalize this question by testing a theory proposed on results regarding a language that did undergo this change, Spanish, on corpus and experimental data. While English finish constructions are associated with some of the distributional properties of Early Spanish finish, speakers do not show evidence of conventionally associating finish constructions with a particular type of inference crucial for the grammaticalization of the Spanish anterior. We propose that the non-conventionality of this inference blocks the grammaticalization of 'finish' constructions, demonstrating that some of the black box of language change currently attributed to chance can be explored empirically.
Research Interests: Diachronic Linguistics (Or Historical Linguistics), Historical Linguistics, Pragmatics, Language Variation and Change, Psycholinguistics, and 8 moreSpanish Linguistics, Grammaticalization, Romance Linguistics, Language Typology, Experimental Psycholinguistics, English language and linguistics, Linguistic Typology, and Historical Pragmatics
This is a brief survey of Nuer (naat̪), a Western Nilotic language spoken in South Sudan and Ethiopia. It is based on fieldwork conducted over the past year. It will be published in a handbook of Ethiopian languages, and at the moment it... more
This is a brief survey of Nuer (naat̪), a Western Nilotic language spoken in South Sudan and Ethiopia. It is based on fieldwork conducted over the past year. It will be published in a handbook of Ethiopian languages, and at the moment it is a very rough draft, so comments are welcome (keeping in mind that it is already well over the word number limit!).
We also have plenty of sound files, so feel free to ask for our data!
We also have plenty of sound files, so feel free to ask for our data!
Research Interests: Languages and Linguistics, Linguistics, Africa Nilo-Saharan Linguistics, African languages, Linguistic Typology, and 4 moreDescriptive Linguistics, Language Documentation, Indigenous Languages, Sociolinguistics, Field Linguistics, African Linguistics, African Languages and linguistics, and Nilotic Languages
A comprehensive study of the functional domain in Egyptian-Coptic, a language attested for over 4000 years. The contributions deal with various aspects of possession, focusing on phrasal and clausal constructions in each stage of the... more
A comprehensive study of the functional domain in Egyptian-Coptic, a language attested for over 4000 years. The contributions deal with various aspects of possession, focusing on phrasal and clausal constructions in each stage of the language, and with a diachronic overview.
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Studies of speech processing investigate the relationship between temporal structure in speech stimuli and neural activity. Despite clear evidence that the brain tracks speech at low frequencies (~ 1 Hz), it is not well understood what... more
Studies of speech processing investigate the relationship between temporal structure in speech stimuli and neural activity. Despite clear evidence that the brain tracks speech at low frequencies (~ 1 Hz), it is not well understood what linguistic information gives rise to this rhythm. In this study, we harness linguistic theory to draw attention to Intonation Units (IUs), a fundamental prosodic unit of human language, and characterize their temporal structure as captured in the speech envelope, an acoustic representation relevant to the neural processing of speech. IUs are defined by a specific pattern of syllable delivery, together with resets in pitch and articulatory force. Linguistic studies of spontaneous speech indicate that this prosodic segmentation paces new information in language use across diverse languages. Therefore, IUs provide a universal structural cue for the cognitive dynamics of speech production and comprehension. We study the relation between IUs and periodicities in the speech envelope, applying methods from investigations of neural synchronization. Our sample includes recordings from everyday speech contexts of over 100 speakers and six languages. We find that sequences of IUs form a consistent low-frequency rhythm and constitute a significant periodic cue within the speech envelope. Our findings allow to predict that IUs are utilized by the neural system when tracking speech. The methods we introduce here facilitate testing this prediction in the future (i.e., with physiological data).
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The feature-economy principle is one of the key theoretical notions which have been postulated to account for the structure of phoneme inventories in the world's languages. In this paper, we test the explanatory power of this principle by... more
The feature-economy principle is one of the key theoretical notions which have been postulated to account for the structure of phoneme inventories in the world's languages. In this paper, we test the explanatory power of this principle by conducting a study of the co-occurrence of consonant segments in phonological inventories, based on a sample of 2761 languages. We show that the feature-economy principle is able to account for many important patterns in the structure of the world's phonological inventories; however, there are particular classes of sounds, such as what we term the 'basic consonant inventory' (the core cluster of segments found in the majority of the world's languages), as well as several more peripheral clusters whose organisation follows different principles.
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This introductory chapter presents general information about Modern Hebrew (MH), as the topic of the present volume. It delineates major features of MH in order to contextualize the language in space-in terms of its community of speakers;... more
This introductory chapter presents general information about Modern Hebrew (MH), as the topic of the present volume. It delineates major features of MH in order to contextualize the language in space-in terms of its community of speakers; in time-in relation to its diachronic background and its status as a Semitic language; and in culture-as reflected in various strands of research and the different labels assigned to the language at issue here. To this end, the chapter starts with a short survey of the evolution and current use of MH as reviewed in the other chapters of this introductory part of the book, followed by a brief survey of prescriptive and descriptive research on Modern Hebrew.
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This paper argues that transitivities are language-specific descriptive categories, and the comparison of donor-language transitivity with target-language transitivity reveals fine-grained degrees of loan-verb integration. Based on a... more
This paper argues that transitivities are language-specific descriptive categories, and the comparison of donor-language transitivity with target-language transitivity reveals fine-grained degrees of loan-verb integration. Based on a comparison of Coptic Transitivity and Greek Transitivity, it is shown that Greek-origin loanwords are only partially integrated into the transitivity patterns of Coptic. Specifically, while Greek-origin loan verbs have the same coding properties as native verbs in terms of the A domain, i.e., Differential Subject Marking (DSM), they differ in important respects in terms of the P domain, i.e., Differential Object Marking (DOM) and Differential Object Indexing (DOI). A main result of this study is that language contact – specifically, massive lexical borrowing – can induce significant transitivity splits in a language’s lexicon.
Research Interests: Languages and Linguistics, Contact Linguistics, Greek Language, Coptic Studies, Coptic (Languages And Linguistics), and 6 moreGreek Linguistics, Linguistic Typology, Ancient Egyptian and Coptic, Language contact, Egytptology, Afroasiatic Linguistics, Ancient Near East Literature and History, and Case system and grammatical relations
Review article of Axel Holvoet & Nicole Nau, eds., 2016. Argument Realization in Baltic. (Valency, Argument Realization and Grammatical Relations in Baltic, ) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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In this epilogue, we summarize and reflect on the major threads and arguments from the individual contributions to this volume (§1), and we also briefly outline some challenges and directions for future work on the topic (§2).
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This paper makes a contribution to phonological typology by investigating the distribution of affricate-rich languages in Eurasia. It shows that affricate-rich and affricate-dense languages cluster areally within Eura-sia, and have... more
This paper makes a contribution to phonological typology by investigating the distribution of affricate-rich languages in Eurasia. It shows that affricate-rich and affricate-dense languages cluster areally within Eura-sia, and have area-specific histories. In particular, the affricate-rich areas of western Eurasia—a 'European' area and a Caucasian area—are not the result of contact-induced sound changes or borrowing, while the two affricate-rich areas of eastern Eurasia—the Hindukush area and the eastern Himalayan area—are the result of contact. Specifically, affricate-rich areas depend on the emergence of retroflex affricates. Moreover, languages outside these affricate-rich areas tend to lose retroflex affricates.
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This paper sketches the integration of Greek-origin loan verbs into the valency and transitivity patterns of Coptic (Afroasiatic, Egypt), arguing that transitivities are language-specific descriptive categories, and the comparison of... more
This paper sketches the integration of Greek-origin loan verbs into the valency and transitivity patterns of Coptic (Afroasiatic, Egypt), arguing that transitivities are language-specific descriptive categories, and the comparison of donor-language transitivity with target-language transitivity reveals fine-grained degrees of loan-verb integration. Based on a comparison of Coptic Transitivity and Greek Transitivity, it is shown that Greek-origin loanwords are only partially integrated into the transitivity patterns of Coptic. Specifically, while Greek-origin loan verbs have the same coding properties as native verbs in terms of the A domain, i.e., Differential Subject Marking (dsm), they differ in important respects in terms of the P domain, i.e., Differential Object Marking (dom) and Differential Object Indexing (doi). A main result of this study is that language contact – specifically, massive lexical borrowing – can induce significant transitivity splits in a language's lexicon and grammar. Furthermore, the findings of this study cast doubt on the usefulness of an overarching cross-linguistic category of transitivity.
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The point of departure of this article is the claim that sense-specific vectors provide an advantage over normal vectors due to the polysemy that they presumably represent. This claim is based on performance gains observed in gold... more
The point of departure of this article is the claim that sense-specific vectors provide an advantage over normal vectors due to the polysemy that they presumably represent. This claim is based on performance gains observed in gold standard evaluation tests such as word similarity tasks. We demonstrate that this claim, at least as it is instantiated in prior art, is unfounded in two ways. Furthermore, we provide empirical data and an analytic discussion that may account for the previously reported improved performance. First, we show that ground-truth polysemy degrades performance in word similarity tasks. Therefore word similarity tasks are not suitable as an evaluation test for polysemy representation. Second, random assignment of words to senses is shown to improve performance in the same task. This and additional results point to the conclusion that performance gains as reported in previous work may be an artifact of random sense assignment , which is equivalent to sub-sampling and multiple estimation of word vector representations. Theoretical analysis shows that this may on its own be beneficial for the estimation of word similarity, by reducing the bias in the estimation of the cosine distance.
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Preview only (section 1)
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The present article takes a quantitative approach to investigating contact-induced change, using typological parameters established for the purposes of cross-linguistic comparison. Specifically, it examines the likelihood that a... more
The present article takes a quantitative approach to investigating contact-induced change, using typological parameters established for the purposes of cross-linguistic comparison. Specifically, it examines the likelihood that a socio-politically dominant language, Greek (Indo-European), influenced the morphological structure of a socio-politically subordinate indigenous language, Coptic (Afroasiatic). Based on the high prefixing score of Coptic and the much lower prefixing score of Greek, it is concluded that it is highly unlikely that Greek had any significant or direct influence on the strong prefixing preference of Coptic.
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This article shows that a hitherto unattested construction type – namely, adverbial subordinator prefixes – is in fact attested in several languages. While Dryer’s (2013) 659-language convenience sample does not turn up any clear example... more
This article shows that a hitherto unattested construction type – namely, adverbial subordinator prefixes – is in fact attested in several languages. While Dryer’s (2013) 659-language convenience sample does not turn up any clear example of such a construction, we argue that this is in part due to arbitrary coding choices that a priori exclude potential constructions of this type. In order to document the existence of adverbial subordinator prefixes, we present three languages with different genealogical and areal affiliations (Japhug, Cree, and Coptic), each of which shows solid synchronic evidence for what appears to be a universally dispreferred feature. Furthermore, we propose a diachronic account for the paucity of documented adverbial subordinator prefixes, according to which cross-linguistic distributions of structural features make rare the source constructions from which adverbial subordinator prefixes can grammaticalize. However, there are nonetheless grammaticalization pathways, some of which seem to involve rare types of change, which can lead to the development of such prefixes.
Research Interests: Diachronic Linguistics (Or Historical Linguistics), Historical Linguistics, Typology, Coptic Studies, Coptic (Languages And Linguistics), and 8 moreGrammaticalization, Universals, Theoretical Linguistics, Sino-Tibetan Linguistics, Algonquian languages, Language Typology, Linguistic Typology, and Ancient Egyptian language
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This is the publication of a very small text in the badly-documented Early Bohairic dialect of Coptic. It was written ages ago, and languished in publication limbo until this year. I no longer really work on this stuff, so if you have... more
This is the publication of a very small text in the badly-documented Early Bohairic dialect of Coptic. It was written ages ago, and languished in publication limbo until this year. I no longer really work on this stuff, so if you have questions, it might be best to ask Alain Delattre.
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This paper explores a particular aspect of the semantics of adposition borrowing, focusing on the extent to which polysemy networks associated with model language adpositions are copied in the target language. We make use of the... more
This paper explores a particular aspect of the semantics of adposition borrowing, focusing on the extent to which polysemy networks associated with model language adpositions are copied in the target language. We make use of the distinction between comparative concepts and descriptive categories (Haspelmath 2010) to describe the integration of loanwords in a target language, in this case Greek-origin adpositions in Coptic. Taking the Greek-origin adposition κατά (katá) in Coptic as a case study, we show that entire polysemy networks are not borrowed. Rather, only some sections – not necessarily contiguous on a semantic map – of polysemy networks are borrowed. We conclude that this points to the possibility that loanwords are borrowed in individual constructions.
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This paper explores a particular aspect of the semantics of adposition borrowing, focusing on the extent to which polysemy networks associated with model language adpositions are copied in the target language. We make use of the... more
This paper explores a particular aspect of the semantics of adposition borrowing, focusing on the extent to which polysemy networks associated with model language adpositions are copied in the target language. We make use of the distinction between comparative concepts and descriptive categories (Haspelmath 2010) to describe the integration of loanwords in a target language, in this case Greek-origin adpositions in Coptic. Taking the Greek-origin adposition κατά (katá) in Coptic as a case study, we show that entire polysemy networks are not borrowed. Rather, only some sections – not necessarily contiguous on a semantic map – of polysemy networks are borrowed. We conclude that this points to the possibility that loanwords are borrowed in individual constructions.
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This article evaluates three proposed laws of semantic change. Our claim is that in order to validate a putative law of semantic change, the effect should be observed in the genuine condition but absent or reduced in a suitably matched... more
This article evaluates three proposed laws of semantic change. Our claim is that in order to validate a putative law of semantic change, the effect should be observed in the genuine condition but absent or reduced in a suitably matched control condition , in which no change can possibly have taken place. Our analysis shows that the effects reported in recent literature must be substantially revised: (i) the proposed negative correlation between meaning change and word frequency is shown to be largely an artefact of the models of word representation used; (ii) the proposed negative correlation between meaning change and pro-totypicality is shown to be much weaker than what has been claimed in prior art; and (iii) the proposed positive correlation between meaning change and polysemy is largely an artefact of word frequency. These empirical observations are corroborated by analytical proofs that show that count representations introduce an inherent dependence on word frequency, and thus word frequency cannot be evaluated as an independent factor with these representations .
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Coptic, the latest phase of the Ancient Egyptian language, existed from beginning to end in a multilingual space. The indigenous Egyptian language had been in contact with Greek – and other languages – from the first millennium BCE, as... more
Coptic, the latest phase of the Ancient Egyptian language, existed from beginning to end in a multilingual space. The indigenous Egyptian language had been in contact with Greek – and other languages – from the first millennium BCE, as well as Arabic, since the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 CE. In effect, this is the earliest and best-attested situation of stable language contact in the ancient world. It is also a rich source for studies on lexical borrowing, since about 5000 loanwords from Greek and some 500 from Arabic form part of the lexicon of Coptic at various stages. These loanwords are documented in a wide variety of genres and registers, from the language of theology to that of science and everyday life. The focus of the volume is mainly lexical borrowing from Greek into Coptic, but other aspects will be treated as well, e.g., the sociolinguistic situation of Greek and Coptic, Coptic loanwords in Greek, Arabic loanwords in Coptic, and pre-Coptic evidence for lexical borrowing. A special focus will be on the sociolinguistic and functional aspects of lexical borrowing in Coptic.
Research Interests: Languages and Linguistics, Contact Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Greek Language, Language Variation and Change, and 10 moreCoptic Studies, Coptic (Languages And Linguistics), Linguistics, Greek Linguistics, African languages, Linguistic Typology, Language contact, Languages in Contact, Loanwords, and African Languages and linguistics
This article addresses the problem of crosslinguistic rarity by mapping the types of diachronic factors that contribute to the rarity of a particular feature. It is proposed that a number of different diachronic factors may play a role,... more
This article addresses the problem of crosslinguistic rarity by mapping the types of diachronic factors that contribute to the rarity of a particular feature. It is proposed that a number of different diachronic factors may play a role, such as the rarity of source constructions, the rarity of particular types of change, the number of stages necessary for a particular feature to develop, and the number of pathways that can lead to a particular feature. This article looks at a rarissimum of person marking, namely, a zero-marked feminine 2nd singular person index in the Sahidic dialect of Coptic (Afroasiatic; Egypt). It is argued that such markers are rare because they presuppose rare input structures, and most processes of change would lead away from – rather than to – zero-marked 2SG. Furthermore, this study identifies a diachronic process in which a PART of a morpheme is reinterpreted as a segmentable morpheme (in this case, a person index), thereby leading to the loss of a zero person marker. This is the converse of the well-known " Watkins' Law " , in which a segmentable person marker is reinterpreted as part of a base.
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Linguists have identified a number of types of recurrent semantic change, and have proposed a number of explanations, usually based on specific lexical items. This paper takes a different approach, by using a distributional semantic model... more
Linguists have identified a number of types of recurrent semantic change, and have proposed a number of explanations, usually based on specific lexical items. This paper takes a different approach, by using a distributional semantic model to identify and quantify semantic change across an entire lexicon in a completely bottom-up fashion, and by examining which distributional properties of words are causal factors in semantic change. Several independent contributing factors are identified. First, the degree of prototypicality of a word within its semantic cluster correlated inversely with its likelihood of change (the " Diachronic Prototypicality Effect "). Second, the word class assignment of a word correlates with its rate of change: verbs change more than nouns, and nouns change more than adjectives (the " Diachronic Word Class Effect "), which we propose may be the diachronic result of an independently established synchronic psycholinguistic effect (the " Verb Mutability Effect "). Third, we found that mere token frequency does not play a significant role in the likelihood of a word's meaning to change. A regression analysis shows that these effects complement each other, and together, cover a significant amount of the variance in the data.
Linguists have identified a number of types of recurrent semantic change, and have proposed a number of explanations, usually based on specific lexical items. This paper takes a different approach, by using a distributional semantic model... more
Linguists have identified a number of types of recurrent semantic change, and have proposed a number of explanations, usually based on specific lexical items. This paper takes a different approach, by using a distributional semantic model to identify and quantify semantic change across an entire lexicon in a completely bottom-up fashion, and by examining which distributional properties of words are causal factors in semantic change. Several independent contributing factors are identified. First, the degree of prototypicality of a word within its semantic cluster correlated inversely with its likelihood of change (the " Diachronic Prototypicality Effect "). Second, the word class assignment of a word correlates with its rate of change: verbs change more than nouns, and nouns change more than adjectives (the " Diachronic Word Class Effect "), which we propose may be the diachronic result of an independently established synchronic psycholinguistic effect (the " Verb Mutability Effect "). Third, we found that mere token frequency does not play a significant role in the likelihood of a word's meaning to change. A regression analysis shows that these effects complement each other, and together, cover a significant amount of the variance in the data.
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This post proposes a new glossing convention (+) for bound morphemes for which the linguist does not want to commit regarding their status as clitics or affixes.
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In this article, we use an automated bottom-up approach to identify semantic categories in an entire corpus. We conduct an experiment using a word vector model to represent the meaning of words. The word vectors are then clustered, giving... more
In this article, we use an automated bottom-up approach to identify semantic categories in an entire corpus. We conduct an experiment using a word vector model to represent the meaning of words. The word vectors are then clustered, giving a bottom-up representation of semantic categories. Our main finding is that the likelihood of changes in a word’s meaning correlates with its position within its cluster.
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Research Interests: Historical Linguistics, Language Variation and Change, Cognitive Semantics, Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, and 14 moreCognitive Linguistics, Lexical Semantics, Cognitive Lexical Semantics, Computational Linguistics & NLP, Historical linguistics, history of English, language variation and change, Semantic Computing, Semantic Change Historical Linguistics Diachronic Study, Usage-Based Linguistics, Distributional Semantics, Semantic change, Regularity in semantic change, Corpora and Computational Linguistics, Computational Historical Linguistics, and Semantic Clustering
Language change is a central concern for any linguistic theory. For one thing, it is often assumed that language change is explanatory, in that it provides a reasonable answer to what Haspelmath (2014: 504) has dubbed ‘Greenberg’s... more
Language change is a central concern for any linguistic theory. For one thing, it is often assumed that language change is explanatory, in that it provides a reasonable answer to what Haspelmath (2014: 504) has dubbed ‘Greenberg’s Problem’: why are languages the way they are? A short version of the Greenbergian answer is: ‘Because they became that way through processes of language change.’ However, this sort of answer throws into focus the fact that language change is not only a potential explanation for language structures. Rather, it is a set of problems that itself calls for explanation. In fact, this could be called ‘Greenberg’s Second Question’: why do languages change the way they do? In this article, we explore some ways in which the field of experimental pragmatics might shed light on the second question, by providing a set of methods that could investigate existing hypotheses about language change by developing falsifiable predictions to be evaluated in experimental settings. And on the other hand, these hypotheses can provide new research questions and data for experimentalists to work on, beyond the rather restricted set of questions that experimental pragmatics has confronted to date.
Research Interests: Diachronic Linguistics (Or Historical Linguistics), Historical Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Pragmatics, Language Variation and Change, and 7 moreTypology, Grammaticalization, Linguistics, Linguistic Typology, Experimental Pragmatics, Scalar Implicatures, and Pragmaticalization and Grammaticalization
In this paper, we argue that an expanded conception of the distinction between speaker-oriented and subject-oriented inferences is crucial for understanding the motivations and mechanisms of semantic change in grammaticalization and... more
In this paper, we argue that an expanded conception of the distinction between speaker-oriented and subject-oriented inferences is crucial for understanding the motivations and mechanisms of semantic change in grammaticalization and subjectification, on the one hand, and for clarifying the links between semantic change and reductive formal changes. Speaker-oriented inferences have significant consequences, leading to the relaxation of selectional restrictions on a construction. In turn, the relaxation of selectional restrictions can create conditions in which the type- and token-frequency of a construction can rise considerably. Furthermore, changes in the selectional restrictions on a construction can themselves catalyze semantic change by coercing listeners into new form-function pairings. This framework is applied to the grammaticalization of allative futures, a typological comparative concept developed in order to compare structurally diverse future tenses. A small typological study allows us to reconsider some problematic pathways of grammaticalization and to suggest some alternative analyses. Following the typological discussion, a detailed diachronic case study of a verbless allative future in Ancient Egyptian is presented.
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In the final stages of preparation, publication next year!
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The goal of this article is to provide the non-Egyptological reader with some background information about the Egyptian-Coptic language, focusing on its genealogical affiliations and diachrony, as well as the types of texts in which the... more
The goal of this article is to provide the non-Egyptological reader with some background information about the Egyptian-Coptic language, focusing on its genealogical affiliations and diachrony, as well as the types of texts in which the language is attested. For a typologically-oriented overview of some central
aspects of Egyptian- Coptic language structures, see Haspelmath (this volume).
aspects of Egyptian- Coptic language structures, see Haspelmath (this volume).
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This paper presents a hitherto unnoticed fact about the coding of grammatical relations in Coptic: while postverbal core arguments must be overtly case-marked, preverbal core arguments are never case- marked. This feature extends the ‘no... more
This paper presents a hitherto unnoticed fact about the coding of grammatical relations in Coptic: while postverbal core arguments must be overtly case-marked, preverbal core arguments are never case- marked. This feature extends the ‘no case before the verb in northeasten Africa’ generalization (König 2008, 2009) to the eastern Mediterranean, and adds Egyptian-Coptic to Berber as Afroasiatic ‘no case before the verb’ languages.
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In this article, we propose a system for transliterating Coptic, akin to those systems used for transliterating Greek, Russian, or Arabic. It is intended to serve as a standard for linguists interested in making Coptic data more... more
In this article, we propose a system for transliterating Coptic, akin to those systems used for transliterating Greek, Russian, or Arabic. It is intended to serve as a standard for linguists interested in making Coptic data more accessible to non-specialists. We also discuss some questions that may arise, and provide several fully transliterated and glossed Coptic examples.
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This volume comprises ten studies on the grammar of Ancient Egyptian. Some of these studies are based on papers presented at a workshop on New Directions in Egyptian Syntax (12-14 May, 2011, Liège).
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The goal of this paper is to describe the gradual emergence of an innovative future construction in the extant Late Egyptian and Demotic textual material and to discuss the grammaticalization of this construction down to Coptic, where it... more
The goal of this paper is to describe the gradual emergence of an innovative future construction in the extant Late Egyptian and Demotic textual material and to discuss the grammaticalization of this construction down to Coptic, where it became a regular future form known as the “First Future” or “Future I”. We propose that, during the grammaticalization process, the selectional restrictions of the construction are relaxed due to the spread of speaker-oriented inferences. As a consequence, new types of subject and predicates can appear and innovative grammatical meanings associated with future time reference, e.g., prediction, become increasingly entrenched. In a final section, we briefly comment on the future cycles in Ancient Egyptian and propose that the comparative notion of allative future is not only useful for comparing specific patterns across languages, but also within a single language with a lengthy attested history.
Research Interests: Diachronic Linguistics (Or Historical Linguistics), Historical Linguistics, Pragmatics, Language Variation and Change, Morphosyntax, and 7 moreCoptic (Languages And Linguistics), Grammaticalization, Language Change, Language Typology, Linguistic Typology, Ancient Egyptian and Coptic, and Ancient Egyptian language
This paper looks at the so-called 'impersonal second person' in spoken Hebrew, based on a corpus of interviews conducted with citizens who have served in combat units of the Israeli Defense Forces. The paper argues that the discourse... more
This paper looks at the so-called 'impersonal second person' in spoken Hebrew, based on a corpus of interviews conducted with citizens who have served in combat units of the Israeli Defense Forces. The paper argues that the discourse function of the second person is to navigate personal accountability and agency by proceduralizing events in which the speaker has taken part.
Research Interests:
"Lexical Semantics in Ancient Egyptian" edited by E. Grossman, St. Polis & J. Winand Eitan Grossman, Stéphane Polis & Jean Winand (eds.), Lexical Semantics in Ancient Egyptian, Lingua Aegyptia Studia Monographica 9, Hamburg 2012:... more
"Lexical Semantics in Ancient Egyptian" edited by E. Grossman,
St. Polis & J. Winand
Eitan Grossman, Stéphane Polis & Jean Winand (eds.),
Lexical Semantics in Ancient Egyptian,
Lingua Aegyptia Studia Monographica 9,
Hamburg 2012: Widmaier Verlag,
hardcover (cloth), vi, 490 pages,
ISSN: 0946-8641,
ISBN: 978-3-943955-09-5,
€ 69 (subscribers' price/pre-order price: € 59).
All prices include German VAT (7 %).
This volume is the first to be devoted specifically to the study of lexical
semantics in Ancient Egyptian. While much research has been dedicated
to a wide range of grammatical issues in past decades, lexical semantics
has rarely been treated in a systematic fashion. The papers collected here
treat a range of semantic phenomena, from the lexical semantics of spatial
expressions, to the problems of analyzing polyfunctionality and even to the
semantics of the Egyptian writing system. The scope of these issues goes
well beyond the individual 'word' or lexical item, as a number of papers
address the semantics of syntactic constructions. Some authors call into
question the distinction between lexicon and grammar, or analyze the
lexical semantics of items usually considered 'grammatical' or 'function'
words, such as discourse particles. This volume also spans a number
of theoretical frameworks and methodologies that have not been
prominent in Egyptian linguistics and philology, such as
typologically-oriented semantic maps and other visual tools.
The papers in this volume do not aim to define the 'state of the art,' but
rather seek to stimulate the study of meaning in Ancient Egyptian, to
point to innovative avenues for future research, and to engage in a
broader dialogue between Egyptian linguistics and philology, on the
one hand, and the research frameworks and agendas of general
linguistics, on the other.
- Lingua Aegyptia Studia Monographica 9 is in press and will be
published at the same time as LingAeg 19 (September 2012).
- A special price is offered for advance orders and for subscribers
of LingAeg (see above).
- Postage charges are variable depending on weight anddestination.
- Each subscriber of LingAeg who orders StudMon volumes before
the publication of LingAeg 19 will receive all books together without
paying extra p&p.
For orders and further information please contact the publisher:
[email protected]
CONTENTS
- Eitan Grossman & Stéphane Polis,
"Lexical semantics in Ancient Egyptian. An introduction"...(1-15)
- Orly Goldwasser & Colette Grinevald,
"What are 'Determinatives' good for?"...(17-53)
- Eliese-Sophia Lincke & Frank Kammerzell,
"Egyptian classifiers at the interface of lexical semantics and
pragmatics"...
(55-112)
- Eliese-Sophia Lincke & Silvia Kutscher,
"Motivated sign formation in Hieroglyphic Egyptian and German Sign
Language (DGS). Towards a typology of iconic signs in visual linguistic
systems"...(113-140)
- Rune Nyord,
"Prototype structures and conceptual metaphor. Cognitive Approaches to
Lexical Semantics in Ancient Egyptian"...(141-174)
- Eitan Grossman & Stéphane Polis,
"Navigating polyfunctionality in the lexicon. Semantic maps and Ancient
Egyptian lexical semantics"...(175-225)
- Elsa Oréal,
"Discourse markers between grammar and lexicon. Two Ancient Egyptian
cases for (de)grammaticalization?"...(227-245)
- Camilla Di Biase-Dyson,
"A diachronic approach to the syntax and semantics of Egyptian
spatio-temporal expressions with HA-t 'front'. Implications for
cognition and metaphor"...(247-292)
- Daniel Werning,
"Ancient Egyptian Prepositions for the Expression of Spatial Relations
and their Translations. A typological approach"...(293-346)
- Matthias Müller,
"Spatial frames of reference in Egyptian. Diachronic evidence for Left/Right
patterns"...(347-378)
- Joachim Friedrich Quack,
"To clothe or to wipe. On the semantics of the verb nms"...(379-386)
- Pascal Vernus,
"Le verbe gm(j): essai de sémantique lexicale"...(387-438)
- Alessandro Stella,
"Le verbe de perception nw(A) en égyptien ancien. Étude de sémantique
lexicale"...(439-458)
- Jean Winand,
"Le verbe et les variations d'actance. Les constructions réversibles
(= Études valentielles, 2)"...(459-486)
St. Polis & J. Winand
Eitan Grossman, Stéphane Polis & Jean Winand (eds.),
Lexical Semantics in Ancient Egyptian,
Lingua Aegyptia Studia Monographica 9,
Hamburg 2012: Widmaier Verlag,
hardcover (cloth), vi, 490 pages,
ISSN: 0946-8641,
ISBN: 978-3-943955-09-5,
€ 69 (subscribers' price/pre-order price: € 59).
All prices include German VAT (7 %).
This volume is the first to be devoted specifically to the study of lexical
semantics in Ancient Egyptian. While much research has been dedicated
to a wide range of grammatical issues in past decades, lexical semantics
has rarely been treated in a systematic fashion. The papers collected here
treat a range of semantic phenomena, from the lexical semantics of spatial
expressions, to the problems of analyzing polyfunctionality and even to the
semantics of the Egyptian writing system. The scope of these issues goes
well beyond the individual 'word' or lexical item, as a number of papers
address the semantics of syntactic constructions. Some authors call into
question the distinction between lexicon and grammar, or analyze the
lexical semantics of items usually considered 'grammatical' or 'function'
words, such as discourse particles. This volume also spans a number
of theoretical frameworks and methodologies that have not been
prominent in Egyptian linguistics and philology, such as
typologically-oriented semantic maps and other visual tools.
The papers in this volume do not aim to define the 'state of the art,' but
rather seek to stimulate the study of meaning in Ancient Egyptian, to
point to innovative avenues for future research, and to engage in a
broader dialogue between Egyptian linguistics and philology, on the
one hand, and the research frameworks and agendas of general
linguistics, on the other.
- Lingua Aegyptia Studia Monographica 9 is in press and will be
published at the same time as LingAeg 19 (September 2012).
- A special price is offered for advance orders and for subscribers
of LingAeg (see above).
- Postage charges are variable depending on weight anddestination.
- Each subscriber of LingAeg who orders StudMon volumes before
the publication of LingAeg 19 will receive all books together without
paying extra p&p.
For orders and further information please contact the publisher:
[email protected]
CONTENTS
- Eitan Grossman & Stéphane Polis,
"Lexical semantics in Ancient Egyptian. An introduction"...(1-15)
- Orly Goldwasser & Colette Grinevald,
"What are 'Determinatives' good for?"...(17-53)
- Eliese-Sophia Lincke & Frank Kammerzell,
"Egyptian classifiers at the interface of lexical semantics and
pragmatics"...
(55-112)
- Eliese-Sophia Lincke & Silvia Kutscher,
"Motivated sign formation in Hieroglyphic Egyptian and German Sign
Language (DGS). Towards a typology of iconic signs in visual linguistic
systems"...(113-140)
- Rune Nyord,
"Prototype structures and conceptual metaphor. Cognitive Approaches to
Lexical Semantics in Ancient Egyptian"...(141-174)
- Eitan Grossman & Stéphane Polis,
"Navigating polyfunctionality in the lexicon. Semantic maps and Ancient
Egyptian lexical semantics"...(175-225)
- Elsa Oréal,
"Discourse markers between grammar and lexicon. Two Ancient Egyptian
cases for (de)grammaticalization?"...(227-245)
- Camilla Di Biase-Dyson,
"A diachronic approach to the syntax and semantics of Egyptian
spatio-temporal expressions with HA-t 'front'. Implications for
cognition and metaphor"...(247-292)
- Daniel Werning,
"Ancient Egyptian Prepositions for the Expression of Spatial Relations
and their Translations. A typological approach"...(293-346)
- Matthias Müller,
"Spatial frames of reference in Egyptian. Diachronic evidence for Left/Right
patterns"...(347-378)
- Joachim Friedrich Quack,
"To clothe or to wipe. On the semantics of the verb nms"...(379-386)
- Pascal Vernus,
"Le verbe gm(j): essai de sémantique lexicale"...(387-438)
- Alessandro Stella,
"Le verbe de perception nw(A) en égyptien ancien. Étude de sémantique
lexicale"...(439-458)
- Jean Winand,
"Le verbe et les variations d'actance. Les constructions réversibles
(= Études valentielles, 2)"...(459-486)
Research Interests:
In lexical semantic descriptions of Ancient Egyptian, there is a tendency to search for a single basic meaning, even if the element in question has a wide range of meanings or functions. The actual functions of these elements — as they... more
In lexical semantic descriptions of Ancient Egyptian, there is a tendency to search for a single basic meaning, even if the element in question has a wide range of meanings or functions. The actual functions of these elements — as they occur in texts — are usually explained as contextual or combinatory, derived from the interaction of the basic meaning with environmental cues
or triggers. While there are certainly lexical items for which this is appropriate, there are nonetheless other ways of describing polyfunctionality, a generic term for situations in which multiple functions (or meanings or senses) are associated with a single signifier. The goal of the present article is to
demonstrate that other kinds of analyses are possible, and can be equally interesting and useful for describing the facts of Ancient Egyptian and for relating them to cross-linguistic research. Moreover we show that Ancient Egyptian linguistic data allow us to test — corroborate, extend, or revise —
hypotheses that have been proposed in the typological literature. The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 raises the problem of polyfunctionality and possible approaches to this pervasive linguistic phenomenon; Part 2 presents the (classical) semantic map model developed by typologists in order to account for the cross-linguistically recurrent relationships between two or more meanings of single linguistic forms; Part 3 examines the applicability and usefulness of this model in Ancient Egyptian with two small-scale case studies dealing with specific semantic areas ([a] instrument-companion and [b] allative). In each case, the semantic map provides a principled method for the analysis of polyfunctionality in both synchrony and diachrony.
or triggers. While there are certainly lexical items for which this is appropriate, there are nonetheless other ways of describing polyfunctionality, a generic term for situations in which multiple functions (or meanings or senses) are associated with a single signifier. The goal of the present article is to
demonstrate that other kinds of analyses are possible, and can be equally interesting and useful for describing the facts of Ancient Egyptian and for relating them to cross-linguistic research. Moreover we show that Ancient Egyptian linguistic data allow us to test — corroborate, extend, or revise —
hypotheses that have been proposed in the typological literature. The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 raises the problem of polyfunctionality and possible approaches to this pervasive linguistic phenomenon; Part 2 presents the (classical) semantic map model developed by typologists in order to account for the cross-linguistically recurrent relationships between two or more meanings of single linguistic forms; Part 3 examines the applicability and usefulness of this model in Ancient Egyptian with two small-scale case studies dealing with specific semantic areas ([a] instrument-companion and [b] allative). In each case, the semantic map provides a principled method for the analysis of polyfunctionality in both synchrony and diachrony.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Bible Translation, Functionalism, Coptic (Languages And Linguistics), Lexical Semantics, Comparative Semitics, and 10 moreAfrican languages, Cognitive Lexical Semantics, Ancient Egyptian language, Arabic Dialectology, African Linguistics, Berber, Chadic, Egyptian, Cushitic, and Afroasiatic linguistics
In lexical semantic descriptions of Ancient Egyptian, there is a tendency to search for a single basic meaning or Grundbedeutung, even if the element in question has a wide range of meanings or func- tions. The actual functions of these... more
In lexical semantic descriptions of Ancient Egyptian, there is a tendency to search for a single basic meaning or Grundbedeutung, even if the element in question has a wide range of meanings or func- tions. The actual functions of these elements — as they occur in texts — are usually explained as contextual or combinatory, derived from the interaction of the basic meaning with environmental cues or triggers. While there are certainly lexical items for which this is appropriate, there are nonetheless other ways of describing polyfunctionality, a generic term for situations in which multiple functions (or meanings or senses) are associated with a single signifier. The goal of the present article is to demonstrate that other kinds of analyses are possible, and can be equally interesting and useful for describing the facts of Ancient Egyptian and for relating them to cross-linguistic research. Moreover we show that Ancient Egyptian linguistic data allow us to test — corroborate, extend, or revise — hypotheses that have been proposed in the typological literature. The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 raises the problem of polyfunctionality and possible approaches to this pervasive linguistic phenomenon; Part 2 presents the (classical) semantic map model developed by typologists in order to account for the cross-linguistically recurrent relationships between two or more meanings of single linguistic forms; Part 3 examines the applicability and usefulness of this model in Ancient Egyptian with two small-scale case studies dealing with specific semantic areas ([a] instrument-companion and [b] allative). In each case, the semantic map provides a principled method for the analysis of polyfunctionality in both synchrony and diachrony.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This article proposes that a verb called 'temporalis' in Coptic linguistics is in fact a perfective converb. It also gives a brief account of Nitrian Bohairic, arguing for its validity as a corpus for linguistic research.
Research Interests:
This is a re-edition of a Coptic legal text, with grammatical commentary.
Research Interests:
This paper is a study of a verb form that specifically marks a protasis in conditional constructions in non-literary Coptic.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Diachronic Linguistics (Or Historical Linguistics), Historical Linguistics, Dialectology, Bible Translation, Grammaticalization, and 9 moreComparative Semitics, Arabic Dialectology, Diachronic Syntax, Berber, Chadic, Egyptian, Cushitic, Pragmaticalization and Grammaticalization, and Afroasiatic linguistics
Research Interests:
This paper is an account of the grammaticalization of prohibitives and related constructions in Ancient Egyptian and Coptic. The first third of the paper deals with diachronic typology, its goals and methods, and concludes with a... more
This paper is an account of the grammaticalization of prohibitives and related constructions in Ancient Egyptian and Coptic. The first third of the paper deals with diachronic typology, its goals and methods, and concludes with a discussion of grammaticalization from a usage-based perspective.
The goals of this talk are (a) to discuss the distinction between comparative concepts and descriptive categories, which was developed for language typology by Martin Haspelmath (most recently, Haspelmath 2010); (b) to suggest that this... more
The goals of this talk are (a) to discuss the distinction between comparative concepts and descriptive categories, which was developed for language typology by Martin Haspelmath (most recently, Haspelmath 2010); (b) to suggest that this distinction is useful – and perhaps necessary – any time that languages are compared, including in language contact research and historical linguistics. (c) to show that this distinction is useful – and perhaps necessary – even for descriptive linguists who aren’t engaged in cross-linguistic comparison or research on universals.
Research Interests:
Given a worldwide preference for suffixes over prefixes, why do some languages nonetheless have a macro-preference for prefixes? In this talk, we show that Ancient Egyptian-Coptic (Afroasiatic) shows a long-term diachronic macro-change... more
Given a worldwide preference for suffixes over prefixes, why do some languages nonetheless have a macro-preference for prefixes? In this talk, we show that Ancient Egyptian-Coptic (Afroasiatic) shows a long-term diachronic macro-change from mixed suffixing-prefixing to an overwhel¬ming preference for prefixing. We argue that each of the micro-changes implicated in this macro-change are better understood in terms of regular changes at the level of individual constructions, via, e.g., grammaticalization, rather than in terms of a broad Sapirian ‘drift.’ Crucially, it is the particular constellation of structural features of the language at a particular moment in time, together with regular mechanisms of language change, that give rise to the cross-linguistically unusual ‘macro-preference’ of the language.
Research Interests:
Talk given at a workshop on Transitivity and Valency in Contact: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (convened by Susanne Michaelis (MPI LEipzig) and the author) at the 47th Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. The talk has two... more
Talk given at a workshop on Transitivity and Valency in Contact: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (convened by Susanne Michaelis (MPI LEipzig) and the author) at the 47th Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea.
The talk has two main goals: one, to sketch the integration of Greek loan verbs into Coptic valency and transitivity patterns; and two, to argue that using the comparative concept/descriptive category distinction is useful for fine-grained studies of transitivities in contact.
The talk has two main goals: one, to sketch the integration of Greek loan verbs into Coptic valency and transitivity patterns; and two, to argue that using the comparative concept/descriptive category distinction is useful for fine-grained studies of transitivities in contact.
Research Interests:
In this paper, David Gil (MPI Leipzig) and I describe allative futures without verbs of motion in a number of Malayic (Austronesian) varieties. These - and similar - constructions are interesting for the grammaticalization of future... more
In this paper, David Gil (MPI Leipzig) and I describe allative futures without verbs of motion in a number of Malayic (Austronesian) varieties. These - and similar - constructions are interesting for the grammaticalization of future tenses, because they show that verbs of motion are not necessary for future tenses to grammaticalize from allative constructions. Moreover, unlike more familiar allative futures, the Malayic constructions do not involve simplification of a biclausal structure into a monoclausal one.
Research Interests:
This is handout for a talk given in a workshop on information structure in Ancient Egyptian-Coptic, held at Humboldt University (Berlin), 24-25 June 2014. The handout provides a sketch of the constructions associated with... more
This is handout for a talk given in a workshop on information structure in Ancient Egyptian-Coptic, held at Humboldt University (Berlin), 24-25 June 2014. The handout provides a sketch of the constructions associated with predicate-centered focus in Coptic.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
IThe emergence and grammaticalization of an Allative Future in Old Egyptian.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
A study of the semantic map of allativity, focusing on Ancient Egyptian. The main point of the talk was to introduce semantic maps as a tool for studying polysemy, but this talk also generated quite a lot of other talks and papers so far.
Introductory talk at the conference 'Identifying and Describing Lexical Borrowing' at Liège University. The paper explores the notion of 'integration' in a framework much indebted to the work of Yaron Matras.
The nature of verb borrowing in Coptic has been pretty hotly contested. This paper proposes a diachronic solution, based on patterns of synchronic variation within the Coptic dialects. This paper was much influenced by Wichmann and... more
The nature of verb borrowing in Coptic has been pretty hotly contested. This paper proposes a diachronic solution, based on patterns of synchronic variation within the Coptic dialects. This paper was much influenced by Wichmann and Wohlgemuth's 2008 paper on the typology of verb borrowing.
This talk is the second in a series of presentations dealing with much-neglected problems of diachrony in Coptic. Based on the full range of data from the Coptic dialects, it traces the grammaticalization of an emerging periphrastic... more
This talk is the second in a series of presentations dealing with much-neglected problems of diachrony in Coptic. Based on the full range of data from the Coptic dialects, it traces the grammaticalization of an emerging periphrastic perfect tense. It also argues for a functional explanation for the grammaticalization of perfects out of "finish" source constructions. This talk was eventually published in Lingua Aegyptia 17.
This paper was my first attempt to make use of the full range of the Coptic dialects in order to address problems of grammaticalization. It proposes that there are two distinct paths of grammaticalization of prohibitive constructions in... more
This paper was my first attempt to make use of the full range of the Coptic dialects in order to address problems of grammaticalization. It proposes that there are two distinct paths of grammaticalization of prohibitive constructions in Coptic, one based on a cross-linguistically common strategy (negation + light verb), the other based on the negation of existence, followed by a verbal lexeme. This strategy turns out to be attested in earlier phases of Egyptian as well as in Ge'ez. However, it hasn't especially been noticed in typological studies of prohibitive constructions.
This talk argues that a verb form called 'temporalis' in Coptic linguistics is in fact a perfective converb. It was published three years after the article was submitted, and I probably would have done it a bit differently today. However,... more
This talk argues that a verb form called 'temporalis' in Coptic linguistics is in fact a perfective converb. It was published three years after the article was submitted, and I probably would have done it a bit differently today. However, the results still stand pretty well.
This talk was yet another look at the semantic map of allativity, this time focusing on the highly polyfunctional preposition l- in Biblical Hebrew.
This talk argues for the importance of a typological perspective in language contact studies. It was given to a class of ca. 40 students from both generative and non-generative linguistics departments. This is just the handout.
Workshop at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Linguistics Department. Invited speakers include Vladimir Plungian and Ekaterina Rakhilina. Organized by Eitan Grossman and Lea Sawicki.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Workshop of the Societas Linguistica Europaea 46 (Split), organized with Giorgio Iemmolo, Stéphane Polis, and Petros Karatsareas. A volume is currently in preparation.
Research Interests:
Workshop on the functional domain of possession in Ancient Egyptian, attested for over 4000 years. Thematic volume to be published in 2015.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
2010, University of Leipzig, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Hebrew University. Organized with Tonio Sebastian Richter and Martin Haspelmath.
2011, Cambridge University. Organized with Esther-Miriam Wagner. A volume came out of this, published by De Gruyter Mouton (but I didn't end up co-editing the volume).
University of Liège, 2011. Organized with Stéphane Polis and Jean Winand. A thematic volume is currently in preparation, and should be published mid-2014.
A workshop on lexical semantics in Ancient Egyptian-Coptic, at the University of Liège in 2009, organized with Stéphane Polis and Jean Winand. A thematic volume came out of it.
Research Interests:
Many grammaticalization pathways recur across languages. A prominent explanation for this is that the properties of lexical items determine their developmental pathways. However, it is unclear why these pathways do not always occur. In... more
Many grammaticalization pathways recur across languages. A prominent explanation for this is that the properties of lexical items determine their developmental pathways. However, it is unclear why these pathways do not always occur. In this article, we ask why English did not undergo a cross-linguistically common grammaticalization pathway, finish > anterior. We operationalize this question by testing a theory proposed on results regarding a language that did undergo this change, Spanish, on corpus and experimental data. While English finish constructions are associated with some of the distributional properties of Early Spanish finish, speakers do not show evidence of conventionally associating finish constructions with a particular type of inference crucial for the grammaticalization of the Spanish anterior. We propose that the non-conventionality of this inference blocks the grammaticalization of 'finish' constructions, demonstrating that some of the black box of language change currently attributed to chance can be explored empirically.
Research Interests:
This paper investigates universal and areal structures in the lexicon as manifested by colexification patterns in the semantic domains of perception and cognition, based on data from both small and large datasets. Using several methods,... more
This paper investigates universal and areal structures in the lexicon as manifested by colexification patterns in the semantic domains of perception and cognition, based on data from both small and large datasets. Using several methods, including weighted semantic maps, formal concept lattices, correlation analysis, and dimensionality reduction, we identify colexification patterns in the domains in question and evaluate the extent to which these patterns are specific to particular areas. This paper contributes to the methodology of investigating areal patterns in the lexicon, and identifies a number of cross-linguistic regularities and of area-specific properties in the structuring of lexicons.
Research Interests:
These are our slides from the SLE meeting in Leipzig.
Research Interests:
This is the abstract of a few talks that were given in 2013 and never published, for funny historical reasons. Basically, after having worked for months on a typology of antiapplicatives, or constructions in which the P of a transitive... more
This is the abstract of a few talks that were given in 2013 and never published, for funny historical reasons. Basically, after having worked for months on a typology of antiapplicatives, or constructions in which the P of a transitive clause is demoted, I became aware of Katarzyna Janic's PhD on antipassives in languages with accusative coding, and left off working on this. There is a draft version of a longer paper, and I would be happy to provide it to anyone interested.
Research Interests:
This article shows that a hitherto unattested construction type – namely, adverbial subordinator prefixes – is in fact attested in several languages. While Dryer's 659-language convenience sample does not turn up any clear example of such... more
This article shows that a hitherto unattested construction type – namely, adverbial subordinator prefixes – is in fact attested in several languages. While Dryer's 659-language convenience sample does not turn up any clear example of such a construction, we argue that this is in part due to arbitrary coding choices that a priori exclude potential constructions of this type. In order to document the existence of adverbial subordinator prefixes, we present a number of languages with different genealogical and areal affiliations, each of which shows solid synchronic evidence for what appears to be a universally dispreferred feature. Furthermore, we identify some diachronic pathways through which adverbial subordinator prefixes grammaticalize.
Research Interests:
Linguists have identified a number of types of recurrent semantic change, and have proposed a number of explanations, usually based on specific lexical items. This paper takes a different approach, by using a distributional semantic model... more
Linguists have identified a number of types of recurrent semantic change, and have proposed a number of explanations, usually based on specific lexical items. This paper takes a different approach, by using a distributional semantic model to identify and quantify semantic change across an entire lexicon in a completely bottom-up fashion, and by examining which distributional properties of words are causal factors in semantic change. Several independent contributing factors are identified. First, the degree of prototypicality of a word within its semantic cluster correlated inversely with its likelihood of change (the " Diachronic Prototypicality Effect "). Second, the word class assignment of a word correlates with its rate of change: verbs change more than nouns, and nouns change more than adjectives (the " Diachronic Word Class Effect "), which we propose may be the diachronic result of an independently established synchronic psycholinguistic effect (the " Verb Mutability Effect "). Third, we found that mere token frequency does not play a significant role in the likelihood of a word's meaning to change. A regression analysis shows that these effects complement each other, and together, cover a significant amount of the variance in the data.
Research Interests:
Slides of our talk presented at Descriptive grammars and typology (Helsinki, 27–29 March2019).
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The feature-economy principle is one of the key theoretical notions which have been postulated to account for the structure of phoneme inventories in the world's languages. In this paper, we test the explanatory power of this principle by... more
The feature-economy principle is one of the key theoretical notions which have been postulated to account for the structure of phoneme inventories in the world's languages. In this paper, we test the explanatory power of this principle by conducting a study of the co-occurrence of consonant segments in phonological inventories, based on a sample of 2761 languages. We show that the feature-economy principle is able to account for many important patterns in the structure of the world's phonological inventories; however, there are particular classes of sounds, such as what we term the ‘basic consonant inventory’ (the core cluster of segments found in the majority of the world's languages), as well as several more peripheral clusters whose organisation follows different principles.
Research Interests:
Phonological segment borrowing is a process through which languages acquire new contrastive speech sounds as the result of borrowing new words from other languages. Despite the fact that phonological segment borrowing is documented in... more
Phonological segment borrowing is a process through which languages acquire new contrastive speech sounds as the result of borrowing new words from other languages. Despite the fact that phonological segment borrowing is documented in many of the world's languages, to date there has been no large-scale quantitative study of the phenomenon. In this paper, we present SEGBO, a novel cross-linguistic database of borrowed phonological segments. We describe our data aggregation pipeline and the resulting language sample. We also present two short case studies based on the database. The first deals with the impact of large colonial languages on the sound systems of the world's languages; the second deals with universals of borrowing in the domain of rhotic consonants.