Linguistic Typology

I start with some notes on historiography and methodology, connecting certain trends in 20th and 21st century creolistics to outdated (quasi) Darwinian concepts in early 19th-century comparative-historical linguistics. Then I move to linguistics per se, inspecting the ...

This paper presents a comprehensive phonetic and phonological description of Northern Sangtam, an essentially undescribed Tibeto-Burman language of central Nagaland belonging to the Aoic subgroup. It is a noteworthy language from a number of phonological perspectives, not least because its phoneme inventory contains two of the world's rarest phonemes: a pre-stopped bilabial trill, and a doubly-articulated labial-coronal nasal. These unique segments are described in detail, and an attempt is made to determine how they might have developed their phonemic status. The tone system is also of interest, as it demonstrates evidence of debuccalization resulting in the development of a new high tone. Following a systematic description of the syllable and word structure, the tone system, and the segmental phonology, some observed age-related differences in the phoneme inventory are discussed. The paper is linked to an online repository containing the audiovisual data and transcribed word lists of approximately 900 items, based on the recorded utterances of eight speakers.

This is a PDF output of the 2002 publication.  Unfortunately, the IPA has not come across as it should. You may find a 3rd edition of this grammar - with IPA intact - in the Appendix of Scottish Gaelic Speech and Writing (Lamb 2008), also available on this site.

A contribution to D. Kastovsky and Aleksander Szwedek (eds.), Linguistics across Historical and Geographical Boundaries, vol 1:Linguistic Theory and Historical Linguistics.
Mouton de Gruyter , Berlin / New York / Amsterdam  1986, pp.579 -590.

ABSTRACT
TOPICALIZATION IN JAMAICAN AND MARTINICAN CREOLE LANGUAGES
                                      Dr Nicole ARSENEC
Mervyn ALLEYNE (1980) describes topicalization as a construction in Creoles Lexically Based on different European languages. The topic of this paper is a contrastive approach of topicalization in Jamaican Creole (JC) and Martinican Creole (CM) as in the following example:

JC    A    big.  im.  big        « He’s really big. » Alleyne (1980: 103)
CM  se  gwo    i    gwo      « Il est vraiment gros. »
          Cop -big- P3 - big

The objective of this approach is to establish distinctive features of topicalization in Jamaican and Martinican languages. In a synchronic perspective the purpose is to point out similarities between JC and CM topicalization in terms of class of words, complementation, functions, TMA markers, negative morphemes, subordination and paratactic construction.
After a survey of topicalization in Jamaican and Martinican it becomes obvious that this specific construction is more than similar in these two Afro-American languages clearly different from Indo-European languages, English and French.
Widely spread in West-African languages, topicalization like serial verbs, verbal system, personal markers, syllabic structure make up another distinctive feature of an Afro- American family of languages.


                                                RESUME
  LE CLIVAGE DU PREDICAT DANS LES LANGUES CREOLES
                DE LA JAMAIQUE ET DE LA MARTINIQUE
                          Dr Nicole ARSENEC

Mervyn ALLEYNE (1980) observe le clivage du prédicat comme une tournure dans des créoles à bases lexicales différentes. Le sujet de cette étude est une approche contrastive du clivage du prédicat en créole jamaïcain (JC) et en créole martiniquais (CM), comme dans l’exemple suivant :

JC      A  big    im  big      « He’s really big. »  ALLEYNE (1980: 103)
CM    se  gwo    i    gwo    « Il est vraiment gros. »
          Cop -big- P3 - big

Afin de dégager les traits distinctifs du clivage du prédicat dans une perspective synchronique, il s’agit de mettre en évidence ses similitudes en JC et CM : les classes de mots, les compléments, les fonctions, les indices TMA, les morphèmes négatifs, la subordination et la construction paratactique.
Cette approche met en évidence une construction plus que similaire, spécifique aux langues afro-américaines et nettement différente des langues indo-européennes, anglaise et française.
Très répandue dans les langues de l’Afrique de l’Ouest, comme les verbes sériels, le système verbal, les indices de personnes, la structure syllabique, le clivage du prédicat peut être considéré comme un trait distinctif d’une famille de langues afro-américaines.

In this paper, I will present a cross-linguistic analysis of the syntax of items signalling temporal distance. Basing on insight form cartography and nanosyntax, I will shown that the mechanism of Phrasal Spell-out (and the Superset Principle) can elegantly explain why in many language 'before' and 'ago' meanings are expressed with the same word. Above all, I will present a previously unnoticed *ABA constraint (cf. Caha 2009; Bobaljik 2012) on lexical spans in the  domain of temporal distance. The *ABA pattern will be crucial to account for possible counterexamples of Haspelmath's (1997) fairly robust descriptive generalization, which states that forms expressing spatial relations of front and back regularly express, respectively, anteriority and posteriority across languages when they are 'shifted' from space to time (namely, before ≈ in front; after ≈ back).

This is the revised version of my seminar presentation at the St. Climent University of Sofia at the seminar on the "Evolution of the grammatical structure in Russian and Bulgarian. A contrastive perspective: corpus analysis and formal grammars'.  (Sofia, 15 October 2018) Several typos and mistakes are fixed.

Surveying the encoding of the semantic roles of recipient, beneficiary, and recipient-beneficiary from a crosslinguistic perspective, the paper has two goals. First, by focusing on the encoding of the dual role of recipient-beneficiary, it tries to show that languages vary in the marking of this role: they either encode it the same way as they encode recipients or beneficiaries; in the case of recipient and beneficiary this variation is excluded. Second, current definitions of the label benefactive will be scrutinized, since this notion is split in a number of languages and the terminology proposed here is empirically more appropriate in some cases.

The present study is aimed at studying the derivational bound morphemes in two endangered languages in Iran, namely Lari and Tati. The class of morphemes under investigation is bound morphemes belonging to a close class of suffixes within the language that changes the grammatical category of the root to which it is attached and represents various word categories like noun, adjective and adverb. By carrying out this study in a descriptive-contrastive analysis framework, it would be possible to identify the unique features of the derivational morphemes in Lari and Tati and compare them with those in Persian. Hence, the features of the derivational dialectal morphemes in Lari and Tati would be followed by their structural analyses the importance of which, inter alia, lies in the necessity of registering dialectal patterns. The gathered data, demonstrated via tables, illustrate a triple categorical division of (1) natural (or real) derivations(Those meaningless affixes in the form of bound morphemes which are attached to the root and form different categories) along with the dialectal conjugation verb patterns in a dichotomous fashion of the major form categories (2) pseudo-verbal derivations(The verbal derivations with independent meanings which are attached to the roots and form complex nouns or adjectives) and finally (3) pseudo-nominal derivations (The nominal morphemes with independent meanings which are attached to the roots and form complex nouns).The findings demonstrated the uniqueness of the derivational patterns of Lari and Tati according to their natural, verbal and nominal identical patterns. Moreover, it was revealed that different kinds of derivational morphemes would be employed in Lari and Tati compared to those in Persian. Although there are common features among these three languages, Lari and Tati benefit from some unique characteristics of their derivational morphemes. [Taherkhani N, Ourang M. A Study of Derivational Morphemes in Lari & Tati as Two Endangered Iranian Languages: An Analytical-Contrastive Examination with Persian. J Am Sci 2013; 9 (11s):38-45]. (ISSN: 1545-1003). http://www.jofamericanscience.org. 8

In this paper I address a typological puzzle concerning complementary distribution of classifiers and plural markers. I discuss a possible interpretation of a particular type of the Polish word 'para' ('pair of') as a classifier. The analysis uses formal semantic plurality framework of Landman (2000).

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.

Academic Reference:

Zuckermann, Ghil'ad & Monaghan, Paul (2012). "Revival linguistics and the new media: Talknology in the service of the Barngarla language reclamation", pp. 119-126 of Foundation for Endangered Languages XVI Conference: Language Endangerment in the 21st Century:Globalisation, Technology & New Media. Auckland, New Zealand.

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Revival Linguistics and the New Media:
Talknology in the service of the Barngarla Language Reclamation


Ghil‘ad Zuckermann

Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[[email protected]]


Paul Monaghan

Mobile Language Team
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[[email protected]]


Abstract

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (see Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

The study: The Barngarla language (spelled Parnkalla by Schürmann 1844) is a no-longer spoken Thura-Yura Pama-Nyungan Aboriginal language of the Lakes Cultural Region of South Australia. Most recently Zuckermann, Monaghan and the Barngarla community have launched a reclamation of this sleeping beauty in three major rural/urban centres on the Eyre Peninsula, namely Port Lincoln, Whyalla, and Port Augusta. The presence of three Barngarla populations several hours drive apart presents the revival linguist with a need for a sophisticated reclamation involving ‘talknological’ innovations, such as online chatting, newsgroups, photo and resource sharing through a Barngarla wiki. This paper also examines the tensions accompanying the creation of a Barngarla ‘community of practice’ (cf. Wenger 1998) in a post-traditional Aboriginal context. In important ways, the new talknology poses a direct challenge to existing authority structures relating to the everyday management of knowledge, collaboration and participation. We predict that how the broader Barngarla community negotiates these issues will have an important bearing on the ultimate results of the reclamation project.




Revival Linguistics

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

Revival Linguistics complements the established field of documentary linguistics, which records endangered languages before they fall asleep. Revival Linguistics ought to revise the fields of grammaticography (writing grammars) and lexicography (writing dictionaries): Grammars and dictionaries ought to be written for language reclamation, i.e. in a user-friendly way, for communities, not only for linguists. For example, juxtapose Lutheran missionary Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann’s 1844 spelling of the Barngarla word nunyara ‘recovery’, which ignores the English environment, thus resulting in the pronunciation nanYAra rather than NOONyara.

Closely related to contact linguistics, Revival Linguistics changes the field of historical linguistics, e.g. by weakening the Family Tree model, which implies that a language ought to have only one parent. Assisting Aboriginal communities in a realistic, non-purisitic way, without selling them myths, Revival Linguistics promotes efficiency and efficacy in language reclamation.

Certainly Australia has been made the ‘Unlucky Country’ through the historical processes of linguicide (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating). These twin forces were in operation from the early colonial period. In her detailed study of the role missionary language practices in the early years of the South Australian colony, Scrimgeour quotes the following colonial language ideology: ‘Mr Forster afterwards adverted to the present mode of teaching the children in their own language. He, with all respect to the Missionaries, would say, on several grounds, that this was wrong. The natives would be sooner civilized if their language was extinct. The children taught would afterwards mix only with whites, where their own language would be of no use – the use of their language would preserve their prejudices and debasement, and their language was not sufficient to express the ideas of civilized life.  He gave the Missionaries full credit for their talents and zeal, but he thought it would be better to teach the children in English’ (from Report on a public meeting of the South Australian Missionary Society in aid of the German Mission to the Aborigines, Southern Australian, 8 September 1843; Scrimgeour, 2007: 116, italics added).

In the case of glottophagy, Governor George Grey noted: ‘The merchant in London who lays on a vessel for a certain port, regards the affair as a mere mercantile speculation, but could he trace out the results he effects in their remotest ramifications, he would stand astonished at the changes he produces.  With the wizard wand of commerce, he touches a lone and trackless forest, and at his bidding, cities arise, and the hum and dust of trade collect – away are swept ancient races; antique laws and customs moulder into oblivion.  The strong-holds of murder and superstition are cleansed, and the Gospel is preached amongst ignorant and savage men. The ruder languages disappear successively, and the tongue of England alone is heard around’ (Grey 1841: 200-201, italics added). Grey was a strong supporter of Aboriginal languages, encouraging Schürmann’s work documenting the Adelaide language (Kaurna) and Barngarla at Port Lincoln (see below).

With globalization, homogenization and Coca-colonization there will be more and more groups all over the world added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples. Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve their wellbeing. There are various ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival: for example, social justice, diversity and employability, respectively.

Zuckermann (2012) has enthusiastically called for Native Tongue Title and linguistic human rights, suggesting that the Australian government ought to compensate Indigenous people not only for the loss of land but equally importantly for the loss of language. Zuckermann has suggested to the Australian government to define Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vernaculars as official languages.

Furthermore, it is predicted that in the future the very insights offered by Revival Linguistics will themselves become part of Indigenous Intellectual Property, when Slovenes and Estonians come to Australia and New Zealand to ask Aboriginal Australians and Maori to assist them in their own European language resurrection.

There is an urgent need to produce perspicacious LINGUISTIC and socio-linguistic insights relevant to language reclamation. Otherwise, linguists or language workers would not be able to offer, if asked by Indigenous people, efficient and efficacious advice. There are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would help revivalists and First Nations leaders to work more efficiently; for example, to focus more on basic vocabulary and verbal conjugations than on sounds and word order – see Zuckermann (2009: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Hybridity_versus_Revivability.pdf.

Revival linguistics would assist revivalists to be more realistic and to abandon discouraging slogans such as "Give us authenticity or give us death!" The following are among the basic principles that the revival linguist encourages in Aboriginal communities:

i. If your language falls asleep: stop, revive, survive!
ii. If you revive a language, embrace the hybridity of the emerging tongue; and
iii. If your language is healthy, assist others in linguistic need.

One day we may invent devices to “inject” a language into our brains. But until then, any attempt to reclaim a hibernating language will result in a hybrid that combines components from the revivalists' and documenters' mother tongues and, of course, the target language. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld: "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

The Study


Figure 1: Map of Traditional Aboriginal Country after Norman Tindale (adapted from Hercus 1999)

The Barngarla language reclamation project has arisen through partnerships between the University of Adelaide (Linguistics and the Mobile Language Team) and the Barngarla people. Although still in its infancy, consultations began in September 2011, a number of very significant steps have been made towards reclaiming this ‘sleeping beauty’. Without doubt, the key challenge has been to develop a strategy for the reclamation of the language simultaneously and without favour in three major regional centres. In ways that will be elaborated below, this multi-sited, regional or peripheral reclamation makes demands that are very different to those often found in metropolitan reclamation contexts (e.g. Kaurna, cf. Amery...

Nous allons examiner le concept et des exemples de langues agglutinantes, qui sont un bon terrain pour observer comment les régularités et les bizarreries surgissent. La partie C-1 donne des indications sur le concept d'agglutination et son histoire. La partie C-2 donne 5 exemples. La partie C-3 propose une conclusion.

This contribution aims at investigating the translation problems that arise when translating between an endocentric and an exocentric language, paying particular attention to the case of Norwegian (endocentric) and Italian (exocentric). Due to their typological differences, the density of information is distributed differently between the two linguistic systems: Norwegian presents a higher lexical and informational weight in the verb, meanwhile in Italian a higher informational weight can be identified in the nominal arguments. Drawing on previous studies on Scandinavian languages and Italian (Korzen 2017, 2018; Jansen 2002b, 2003) this article focusses on the challenges encountered by translators when translating verbs from an endocentric to an exocentric language on the basis of the abovementioned typological differences. The analysis of the examples taken from the translation of a Norwegian novel sheds light on the complex cognitive operations involved in the translation process, providing practical insights on the didactic of Norwegian as a foreign language through the investigation of translation praxis and techniques.

Using data from Matsigenka (Arawakan, Peru), this talk argues that the concept of 'path' used in the analysis of directionals and other path-denoting grammatical elements should be decomposed into two components: path geometry and path viewpoint. It is argued that the relationship between path viewpoint and path geometry strongly resembles that between Topic Time and Situation Time in aspectual categories, allowing us to see directionals as the spatio-temporal analogues of aspects.

This paper is borne to present a book issued on 2015: "La pluralizzazione verbale. Evoluzione e tendenza all'interno di un'analisi tipologica: il caso toscano. The book speaks about the evolution of verbal technique to vehiculate number. The first chapter introduces the argument under a typological point of wiew whit samples from different not genetically related tongues of the world. The second chapter is a comparative study of the synchronic verbal structure in Italian and the dialects of Tuscany. The last part develops the topic of the former chapters under the diachronic perspective, from Indoeuropean to Tuscana dialects. The present writing tries to verify the book conclusions on a short sketch on dialect of Chiusi, a city of South-East Tuscany. So we shall see a spiral movement from synthesis to analysis and vice versa in the morphological technique over the course of the centuries.

Autor poddaje analizie trzy ważne parametry stosowane w typologii częściowej języków oraz dokonuje próby konfrontacji języka hiszpańskiego z językiem polskim w świetle tychże parametrów. Język hiszpański, który uchodzi za umiarkowanie analityczny, wykazuje tylko nieznacznie silniejsze tendencje nominalne niż bardziej syntetyczny język polski. Ponadto język hiszpański wydaje się umiarkowanie ekonomiczny na polu leksykalnym oraz umiarkowanie redundantny na płaszczyźnie składniowej w porównaniu z językiem polskim. Nie ulega jednak wątpliwości, że obydwa języki (tak samo jak inne języki romańskie czy słowiańskie) będą językami środka, pośród całości języków świata, a różnice typologiczne między nimi okażą się niewielkie
w porównaniu z cechami typologicznymi języków egzotycznych.

Nessun momento storico è stato così fortemente dipendente dalla comunicazione come il nostro. Molte professioni, anche nuove, sono coinvolte direttamente in questo processo o si basano su abilità comunicative (il docente, l’avvocato, il magistrato, il politico, il medico, il giornalista, il pubblicitario, l’autore, per citarne alcune), in molte altre saper comunicare efficacemente garantisce opportunità maggiori a supporto della propria professionalità (il manager, il bancario, l’architetto, l’imprenditore, il funzionario della PA, l’artista, e così via).
Il lettore di questo libro, in un percorso che si snoda per 10 capitoli, si troverà ad approfondire la conoscenza dello strumento che sta alla base della comunicazione, la lingua. Partendo dalle unità (i suoni, le parole, le frasi della lingua) studiate tradizionalmente nell’analisi linguistica, verrà poi portato a comprendere il funzionamento della lingua nella comunicazione e potrà impossessarsi degli strumenti per capire e produrre testi efficaci e per muoversi con scioltezza nell’universo comunicativo. Il percorso include anche una ricca considerazione della comunicazione non verbale (gesti, sguardi, posture). Esercizi e rinvii bibliografici consentono di esercitarsi e di studiare ulteriormente in autonomia.

This paper aims at investigating the semantics of nominal reduplication cross-linguistically. Nominal reduplication is treated as an iconic morphological device expressing functions that have something to do with plurality. Nevertheless, in the languages of the world, other types of functions are attested as well, which seem to pivot around different notions like conceptual similarity, heterogeneity, combinations of them, or even possession. Based on a large-scale cross-linguistic analysis, we provide a typology of nominal reduplication considering the range of semantic functions and the type of reduplicative patterns. We argue that the attested variation clearly points to a common semantic core underlying the various functions, and this core can be identified in some modification of the degree and type of referentiality. Finally, the attested tendencies and correlations may shed new light on the role of iconicity in explaining the connection between reduplicated nouns and their functions.

This paper aims to study the Basic Locative Constructions (BLCs) in Cantonese and Shanghainese by using a standardized picture elicitation method. Results show that BLCs in both Cantonese and Shanghainese adopt 4 strategies: locative copular, locative inversion, postural verbs and resultative complements. The latter two strategies are less frequently used, if not unacceptable, in Mandarin BLCs. The results suggest that the position of Southern Sinitic languages differs quite substantially from Mandarin in spatial typology. Moreover, locative inversion and resultative complements are strategies previously unaccounted for in existing typological frameworks. This experimental work endeavours to further our understanding of Sinitic typology and the typology of spatial language in general.