Events

Upcoming events

Event Information:

  • Tue
    10
    Dec
    2019

    DiaLing-BantUGent: Double Lecture by Lorenzo Maselli (Pisa) and Hilde Gunnink (Ghent)

    1:00 pmCamelot Room (Blandijnberg 2, 3rd floor)

    Lorenzo Maselli (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa): "The importance of integrated articulatory and acoustic analysis for consonant identification: Some preliminary data from Ethiosemitic and Jukunoid".

    Abstract:
    While it is generally believed that the first step towards the phonological description of a language is the study of minimal pairs and allophonic variation, it is also true that the exact identification of what sounds we deal with in natural languages requires some level of acoustic analysis. There is a variety of spectral phenomena which serve as reliable cues to the phonetic properties of sounds, but a lot of important distinctions are left untouched. A fairly well-known example is that of voicing in English: while VOT is a generally reliable cue for stops, low frequency energy (the so-called “voicing bar”) is a less clear marker for fricatives, although the opposition is arguably just as salient throughout the phonology (Abramson & Whalen 2017). I will take into account some less common from African languages as cases in point. Amharic ejectives are traditionally considered “weak” (i.e. less acoustically salient than, for example, Tigrinya ones; cf. Kingston 1985), but preliminary data from L2 acquisition points in the direction of some categorical restructuring in the absence of clearer articulatory evidence. Likewise, while there is a long-standing notion that functional load plays little phonological role (King 1967), it was recently claimed that “peripheral phonemes” seem to behave in a fairly different way than more common ones (Babel 2017). Even salient oppositions may require different phonological treatment on the basis of, e.g., morphological variation, as is the case for Italian /m/ vs /n/. The exact determination of what sounds take part in an alternation could benefit from more detailed production analysis. An example will be drawn from Win Lau, a poorly described Jukunoid language of Nigeria, where [+back] spread can yield an as yet phonetically undescribed uvular or epiglottal consonant before back vowels. From this angle, closer interaction between articulatory, perceptual and acoustic evidence seems to be desirable, even for field research.

    References
    Abramson, A. S., Whalen, D. H. (2017) “Voice Onset Time (VOT) at 50: Theoretical and Practical Issues in Measuring Voicing Distinctions”, Journal of Phonetics 63, 75–86
    Babel, A. M. (2017) “Aspirates and ejectives in Quechua-influenced Spanish”, Spanish in Context 14, n. 2, 159-185
    King, R. D. (1967) “Functional load and sound change”, Language 43, n. 4, 831-842
    Kingston, J. (1985) “The Phonetics and Phonology of the Timing of Oral and Glottal Events”, PhD dissertation, Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley

     

    Hilde Gunnink (UGent): "Contact between Bantu and Khoisan languages in southern Africa: morphological borrowing in Yeyi".

    Abstract: In southern Africa, there has been long-standing language contact between between Khoisan languages, some of which have been spoken since time immemorial, and Bantu languages, who arrived in the region in the last two millenia. The Bantu language that has been influenced most extensively by Khoisan contact is Yeyi, spoken in northwestern Botswana and northeastern Namibia. This Bantu language has acquired a large number of clicks, crosslinguistically highly uncommon phonemes that only occur natively in Khoisan languages and are therefore a clear indicator of language contact. In this paper, I investigate the extent of Khoisan influence in the morphology of Yeyi, showing that Yeyi has acquired certain bound affixes from neighbouring Khoisan languages. Such morphological borrowing is relatively uncommon in languages, and suggests that contact between Yeyi and Khoisan must have been fairly intensive, and, unlike many other Bantu-Khoisan contact situation in the subcontinent, may have involved a certain degree of proficiency in Khoisan languages on the part of the Yeyi speech community. As such the contact-induced changes attested in Yeyi can be used to shed light on the contact situation in which they arose, and provide a clearer picture of Bantu-Khoisan interactions.

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Past events

Event Information:

  • Tue
    28
    Jun
    2016

    The Determinants of Diachronic Stability

    Het Pand

    That human languages are constantly evolving is an undeniable fact. By now, theories have become very apt at dealing with linguistic variation and change. But the reality is that populations are in constant flux, socially and linguistically. Much of what used to be considered “internally caused change” might perhaps more appropriately have to be considered as contact-induced on the level of contact between varieties of a single diasystem. This realization turns the faithful stable transmission of linguistic features where it does occur into an urgent explanandum. Different linguistic subfields have responded to this in different ways, and many questions still need to be addressed.

    • Within the field of typology, the question of diachronically and cross-linguistically more stable traits of languages has been put on the agenda mainly by the work of Johanna Nichols (Nichols 1992).
    • From a markedness point of view, inflectional classes apparently needlessly complicate morphological systems and lead to the expectation that they should be diachronically unstable (e.g. Wurzel 1989). The fact that this is empirically not confirmed is in need of explanation (e.g. Lass 1990).
    • While there is no question that language contact may induce change (e.g. Thomason & Kaufman 1988), it has only more recently been noted that there may also be linguistic stability in spite of language contact, and that it may, in some cases, even be contact-induced (e.g. Trudgill 2011, Braunmüller et al. eds. 2014).
    • A further question that has not yet satisfyingly been answered is why, given the same or similar input conditions in different languages, some linguistic changes never happen, or, once initiated, stall (e.g. Weinreich, Labov & Herzog 1968, Labov 1994; 2001).
    • More recently, the related question of whether there can be such a thing as stable variation in language, and how it interacts with language change has been added to the research agenda (e.g. Wallenberg 2013, Fruehwald & Wallenberg in prep).
    • It is unclear what the influence of type and token frequency is on keeping certain properties diachronically stable. On the one hand, research on grammaticalization has indicated that highly frequent items are more likely to grammaticalize, and therefore, low frequency of usage might be expected to favour stability. On the other hand, highly frequent elements often resist analogical change, so in this sense, ‘low frequency items’ are expected to be more prone to change.
    • Finally, the role of extra-linguistic factors such as normative pressure in keeping linguistic phenomena constant should be studied more systematically, and with an eye on interaction with the language internal factors mentioned above.

     

    The workshop takes place on 28 June 2016, the day before the start of DiGS 18. Its goal is to bring together researchers from different areas of linguistics to discuss the determinants of diachronic stability from their individual perspectives, with the aim of fostering dialogue between them.

    Keynote speakers:

    • Sheila Watts (Cambridge)
    • Joel C. Wallenberg (Newcastle)
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