Synopsis:

The study of epenthesis, or the insertion of a non-etymological segment, has been at the core of phonological theory from the start, and recent approaches extend beyond phonology to include phonetic considerations, as well as morphological, morphosyntactic, and lexical interactions. This volume includes 12 of the many papers presented at the workshop “Epenthesis and Beyond” held at Stony Brook University in 2021, whose goal was to provide a forum for scholars who approach epenthesis and other types of insertion from new perspectives. The articles selected for this volume represent the exciting new approaches to epenthesis that linguists are engaged in. They cover a wide range of research questions, including how different types of insertion within the same language can use different epenthetic segments, and how across languages the same phonetic material can have different phonological interpretations. Topics like feature epenthesis, insertion vs. deletion, vowel predictability, nucleus-less syllables, and epenthetic segment quality, are also explored. Some of the new tools employed by the authors include ultrasound, Information Theory, and textsetting (the study of the way poets map their text onto a metrical grid). The breadth of languages investigated is noteworthy as well: Kru languages (spoken in Western Africa), Anindilyakwa (spoken in Australia), Yuman languages (spoken in the border area between Mexico, California, Arizona), Motu (Oceanic language spoken in Papua New Guinea), Kaqchikel (Mayan language spoken in Guatemala), Arabic, Turkish, Korean, and many others.

Synopsis:

Mandan is a Siouan language of North Dakota, near the geographic center of North America. There are no longer any first-language speakers after the last fluent speaker passed away in 2016. This grammar has been built from archival recordings of Mandan speakers from the 1960s through 2010, plus field work by the author undertaken between 2014 and 2016. The data from these various sources allowed for an in-depth description of the key aspects of the grammar of Mandan with special attention to the language’s complex verbal and nominal morphology. This book also includes an overview of Mandan narrative structure, culminating with an interlinear gloss of a traditional Mandan narrative and its free translation into English. This grammar is written to be used by as general an audience as possible, including Mandan community members, scholars who wish to research Siouan languages, linguistic typologists, historical linguists, and other individuals who aim to conduct research on an indigenous language of North America.

Synopsis:

This collection of fourteen texts in Komnzo offers an insight into the language and culture of the Farem people, their storytelling tradition, oral history, mythology and everyday life. It contains stories from nine narrators, which were transcribed, translated and analysed by the researcher with the help of the Komnzo language committee. All texts are presented in a parallel text version arranged in columns (Komnzo/English) and in an interlinearised and glossed version. The book focuses thematically on landscape, place names and locality. It includes a description and analysis of the way Komnzo speakers conceptualise this semantic domain.

This publication is complemented by a dataset available from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14267762

Synopsis:

This volume explores word-order phenomena across a phylogenetically diverse sample of languages covering a region loosely referred to as the Western Asian Transition Zone, approximately corresponding to western Iran, northern Iraq, eastern Turkey and the Caucasus. The sample includes representatives from four branches of Indo-European (Iranian, Hellenic, Armenian, Indo-Aryan) as well as Turkic, Semitic, Kartvelian, Northwest Caucasian and Northeast Caucasian. Methodologically, we apply a corpus-based approach to word-order, building on two purpose-built and fully accessible data-bases of spoken language corpora, WOWA (Word Order in Western Asia), and HamBam (Hamedan-Bamberg Corpus of Contemporary Spoken Persian). The majority of the languages are historically OV, yet exhibit high rates of post-verbal elements, and these constitute the primary focus of the volume. One of the major findings is the importance of semantic role in determining pre- versus post-verbal placement of clausal constituents: We identify a consistent bias towards post-verbal placement of spatial Goals, which is amplified by increasing areal proximity to the VO languages of the southwestern periphery of the region (Semitic). In the languages in and adjacent to the Caucasus, on the other hand, we find stronger effects of information structure in triggering post-verbal position. Along with contributions on individual languages and varieties, the volume includes an overview chapter outlining the theoretical background and the data sources, summary chapters on sub-regions, as well as contributions from an experimental and psycholinguistic perspective.

Synopsis:

This volume brings together corpora that span more than 3,000 years of the history of the Greek language, from Ittzés' chapter on the proto-language to Giouli's chapter on the modern language. The authors take wider or narrower approaches with regard to the form and function of the type of construction that they include in the group of support-verb constructions: while all would agree that English to take initiative is a support-verb construction, opinions differ on English to take wing. The chapters reflect a fascinating diversity of approaches to support-verb constructions, including Natural Language Processing, Comparative Philology, New Testament Exegesis, Coptology, and General Linguistics. The volume is structured along the three interfaces that support-verb constructions sit on, the syntax-lexicon, the syntax-semantics, and the syntax-pragmatics interfaces. We finish with four concrete avenues for further research. Faced with the diversity of approaches and the magnitude of disagreements arising from them when working with as internally diverse a group of constructions as support-verb constructions, we strive for in varietate unitas.

Synopsis:

Armenian is an Indo-European language. Alongside two varieties, there are countless non-standard dialects, many of which were were made extinct because of the Armenian Genocide. This book is an English translation of a monograph originally written in Armenian by Hrachia Adjarian: "Հայ Բարբառագիտութիւն" or "Armenian dialectology." The original monograph consisted of descriptions of 31 non-standard Armenian varieties. The present book is both a translation and commentary on this monograph. The translation includes paradigm tables, sound changes, morpheme segmentation, glossing, and IPA transcriptions.

Synopsis:

This volume features research papers dealing with creolized and partially restructured language varieties in the wider Caribbean region. Initially conceived of as a conference volume drawing on papers presented at the 2017 Summer conference of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, organized by the Universities of Tampere and Turku, Finland, the authors have since expanded the content of their original papers substantially, contributing to the empirical and analytical depth of their submissions. The volume ultimately aims both to validate new contact language research with this regional focus, as well as to stimulate further research on the fascinating language varieties that have developed and continue to thrive in the Caribbean region.

Synopsis:

This volume contains some of the papers there were presented at ACAL 51-52, which was organized virtually at the University of Florida. A couple were accepted for presentation at ACAL 51, which was canceled because of COVID-19. The theme of ACAL 51-52 was African linguistics: pushing the boundaries. There are 18 papers and an introduction: two phonetics papers, five phonology papers, nine syntax papers, one sociolinguistics paper and one typology paper.

Synopsis

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism).

This book is a new edition of http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/259

Synopsis:

Vamale is an endangered South Oceanic > Northern New Caledonian language, spoken by around 180 people on the northeastern coast of Grande Terre. This grammar was written as a PhD dissertation, on the basis of 11 months of fieldwork funded by ELDP. The data consists both of elicitation and relatively free interviews, as well as recordings of ceremonial speeches and casual conversations. ELAR contains open-access archive of all recordings and a dictionary, as well as a FLEx database in which many examples can be found in context. The appendix includes three texts, an oral history account of the 1917 colonial war, a traditional fable, and a longer modern retelling of a legend. The grammar intends to give a general overview of Vamale to a general linguistics audience. Its focus on syntax, and comparison with related languages should particularly interest Oceanists and areal typologists. With a dedicated chapter on the community's history and cultural information throughout the book, this account hopes to show the beauty and wealth of both the Vamale language and culture.

Synopsis:

This book discusses the phonological history of Mataguayan, a language family that includes no less than four distinct languages – Maká, Nivaĉle, Chorote, and Wichí – spoken by ca. 65.000 individuals in the Southern Chaco region in Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia. The book starts by offering a phonological reconstruction of Proto-Mataguayan, with separate chapters dedicated to its consonants, vowels, word-level prosody, and morphophonological alternations. This is followed by an outline of the phonological evolution of each Mataguayan language all the way from Proto-Mataguayan to contemporary lects, with a special attention to the dialectal diversity of Nivaĉle, Chorote, and Wichí. The study concludes with an etymological dictionary of Mataguayan, where known cognate sets are accompanied by comments on phonetic irregularities, semantic shifts, possible cognates in the neighbouring Guaicuruan family, and references to earlier studies.

Synopsis

Due to their flexibility in interpretation, the use of indefinites and other quantificational expressions is highly variable and subject to dynamic processes of language change. The present volume addresses fundamental linguistic questions about language variation and change in Romance quantificational expressions. It focuses on quantificational expressions in language varieties that have not received much attention in the previous literature, such as Old Sardinian, Argentinian Spanish, Palenquero Creole and Cabindan Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, and others. The studies included in this volume offer new data on these processes of variation and advance theoretical discussions about language variation and change.

Synopsis:

This book provides an extended introduction to the scripture translations of Biraban, an Awabakal man, and the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld. It examines Threlkeld’s linguistic field work in Raiatea prior to coming to New South Wales. It places the translations he undertook in the context of Australian missionary linguistics and the rapid advance of the settler frontier, for which he was a key eyewitness. It analyses the motivation and collaboration between Biraban and Threlkeld in the light of discoveries of new manuscripts, including that of the Gospel of St Matthew, as well as Threlkeld’s personal diary, neither of which have previously been analysed. The review includes a linguistic and ethnographic analysis of the complete corpus of Biraban and Threlkeld’s collaboration. It includes a complete list of the Threlkeld manuscripts and the many printed editions, including those available online. For historical purposes, it includes a copy of the unique standalone edition of the Gospel of Saint Luke, presented by the editor, James Fraser, to the British and Foreign Bible Society. The original is now in Cambridge University Library. It also includes a full digitisation of Threlkeld’s autograph manuscript, illuminated by Annie Layard, in Auckland City Library.

Synopsis:

Dan Everett is a renowned linguist with an unparalleled breadth of contributions, ranging from fieldwork to linguistic theory, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of linguistics. Born on the U.S. Mexican border, Daniel Everett faced much adversity growing up and was sent as a missionary to convert the Pirahã in the Amazonian jungle, a group of people who speak a language that no outsider had been able to become proficient in. Although no Pirahã person was successfully converted, Everett successfully learned and studied Pirahã, as well as multiple other languages in the Americas. Ever steadfast in pursuing data-driven language science, Everett debunked generativist claims about syntactic recursion, for which he was repeatedly attacked. In addition to conducting fieldwork with many understudied languages and revolutionizing linguistics, Everett has published multiple works for the general public: "Don’t sleep, there are snakes, Language: The cultural tool, and how language began". This book is a collection of 15 articles that are related to Everett’s work over the years, released after a tribute event for Dan Everett that was held at MIT on June 8th 2023.

Synopsis:

In 1826, as nationalism first began percolating through the Habsburg lands, Jan Herkel published a Latin-language Slavic grammar. Herkel, a lawyer and amateur linguist, came from the northern counties the Kingdom of Hungary which now form the Slovak Republic. Though he was inspired by a romantic love of his native language, Herkel imagined a single "Slavic language," divided into various "dialects." He proposed a single grammar for the whole Slavic world, attempting to encompass and yet restrain the diversity of orthography, morphology, phonology, and so forth found across Slavic varieties. Herkel was also the coiner of the term "panslavism", which he used to describe his efforts. This book provides the first English translation of Herkel's noteworthy grammar, with short notes. The book also contains a preface and explanatory essays by co-translators Raf Van Rooy and Alexander Maxwell. The preface introduces the topic of the book. Maxwell then gives a biography of Herkel, discusses linguistic nationalism in Slavic northern Hungary, and the legacy of panslavism. Van Rooy explores Herkel's key notion of the "genius" of the Slavic language as the legacy of early modern linguistic thought.

Synopsis:

This book presents a new methodology for the study of historical varieties, particularly a language’s early history. Using the German language’s first attestations as a case study, it offers an alternative to structuralist approaches to historical syntax, with their emphasis on delineating the shapes and mechanisms of early grammars. This focus has prompted Germanists to treat the data from the eighth- and ninth-century corpus with suspicion in that its texts are either poetic or translational. That is, if the unquestioned object of inquiry is a historical cognitive grammar, one ought to isolate – and perhaps discount entirely – data that are the product of confounding factors, like a poetic meter or a Latin source text. Otherwise, these competence-obscuring examples risk undermining scholars’ understanding of a genuine early German grammar.

Rather than this “deficit approach,” the current volume proposes that scholars treat each early attestation as an artifact of “literization,” the process through which people transform their exclusively oral varieties into a written variety. Each historical text features a scriptus, that is, an ad hoc, idiosyncratic, and localized literization created by a person (or team of people) for a particular purpose. The challenge of understanding texts in this way lies in the fact that there is little to no direct evidence pointing to the specific identities of early medieval literizers, their motivations, and the nature of the multiple spoken competencies that fed into their scripti.

In order to conceptualize early medieval German and the syntactic variation it exhibits as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, this book details the linguistic resources that were available to the literizer and are, happily, accessible to the modern researcher. First, there is Latin. Though illiterate in their own multilectal vernacular in the sense that no German scriptus existed until they developed it, literizers were educated in this highly literized language and the classical metalinguistic discourse, known as grammatica, that was associated with it. Second, there are the linguistic patterns of elaborated orality, that is, the varieties that are characteristic of public life and the oral tradition in exclusively oral communities. Though the patterns of a peculiarly German elaborated orality are lost to history, those of other traditions and cultures are attested and should also inform how scholars conceive of a multilectal early German.

Synopsis:

A substantial proportion of what is discoverable about the structure of many Aboriginal languages spoken on the vast Australian continent before their decimation through colonial invasion is contained in nineteenth-century grammars. Many were written by fervent young missionaries who traversed the globe intent on describing the languages spoken by “heathens”, whom they hoped to convert to Christianity. Some of these documents, written before Australian or international academic institutions expressed any interest in Aboriginal languages, are the sole record of some of the hundreds of languages spoken by the first Australians, and many are the most comprehensive. These grammars resulted from prolonged engagement and exchange across a cultural and linguistic divide that is atypical of other early encounters between colonised and colonisers in Australia. Although the Aboriginal contributors to the grammars are frequently unacknowledged and unnamed, their agency is incontrovertible.

This history of the early description of Australian Aboriginal languages traces a developing understanding and ability to describe Australian morphosyntax. Focus on grammatical structures that challenged the classically trained missionary-grammarians – the description of the case systems, ergativity, bound pronouns, and processes of clause subordination – identifies the provenance of analyses, development of descriptive techniques, and paths of intellectual descent. The corpus of early grammatical description written between 1834 and 1910 is identified in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 discusses the philological methodology of retrieving data from these grammars. Chapters 3–10 consider the grammars in an order determined both by chronology and by the region in which the languages were spoken, since colonial borders regulated the development of the three schools of descriptive practice that are found to have developed in the pre-academic era of Australian linguistic description.

Synopsis:

This volume results from the workshop "Discourse obligates – How and why discourse limits the way we express what we express" at the 44th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society in Tübingen, Germany. The workshop brought - and this book brings - together information-structural and information-theoretic perspectives on optional variation between linguistic encodings. Previously, linguistic phenomena like linearization, the choice between syntactic constructions or the distribution of ellipsis have been investigated from an information-structural or information-theoretic perspective, but the relationship between these approaches remains underexplored.

The goal of this book is to look more in detail into how information structure and information theory contribute to explaining linguistic variation, to what extent they explain different encoding choices and whether they interact in doing so. Using experimental and corpus-based methods, the contributions investigate this on different languages, historical stages and levels of linguistic analysis.

Synopsis:

Many theories hold that language change, at least on a local level, is driven by a need for improvement. The present volume explores to what extent this assumption holds true, and whether there is a particular type of language change that we dub language change for the worse, i.e., change with a worsening effect that cannot be explained away as a side-effect of improvement in some other area of the linguistic system. The chapters of the volume, written by leading junior and senior scholars, combine expertise in diachronic and historical linguistics, typology, and formal modelling. They focus on different aspects of grammar (phonology, morphosyntax, semantics) in a variety of language families (Germanic, Romance, Austronesian, Bantu, Jê-Kaingang, Wu Chinese, Greek, Albanian, Altaic, Indo-Aryan, and languages of the Caucasus). The volume contributes to ongoing theoretical debates and discussions between linguists with different theoretical orientations.

Synopsis:

This volume brings together studies on morphosyntactic and phonological constituency from a host of languages across the Americas. The study expands on previous multivariate typological work on phonological domains by simultaneously coding the results of morphosyntactic constituency tests. The descriptions are geared towards developing a typology of constituency and linguistic levels in both morphosyntactic and phonological domains. The multivariate approach adopted in this volume deconstructs constituency tests and phonological domains into cross-linguistically comparable variables applying and extending autotypology method to the domain of constituent structure. Current methodologies for establishing constituents have been criticized for containing an in-built selection bias, where the results and interpretation of tests are chosen or sampled in such a fashion that specific analyses are prejudged to be correct or false in a non-rigorous fashion. The papers of this volume develop novel methodology for reporting and coding constituency variables for language description and comparison that seeks to reign in selection bias allowing theories concerning the relationship between morphosyntactic and phonological constituent structure to be more severely tested.