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.

Simon Aerts (BOF): “A synchronic and diachronic systemic functional 'three-dimensional' approach to tense and aspect in the writings of Caesar and Gregory of Tours”

Koen Bostoen (ERC Consolidator Grant): “The First Bantu Speakers South of the Rainforest: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Human Migration, Language Spread, Climate Change and Early Farming in Late Holocene Central Africa”

Abstracts:

A synchronic and diachronic systemic functional 'three-dimensional' approach to tense and aspect in the writings of Caesar and Gregory of Tours

Simon Aerts (Universiteit Gent)

My research deals with the verbal categories of (relative) tense & aspect in a corpus of Latin historiographical texts: the writings of Caesar (first century BC) and Gregory of Tours (sixth century AD). The framework is a Systemic Functional model (with cognitive and other influences), especially in Bache's (2008) version. The texts are divided in narrative episodes and marked for discours mode (Smith 2003), and then subjected to a close reading on three levels of meaning, or metafunctions: ideational/representational (e.g. temporal deixis, grammatical aspect in the sense of terminativity), textual/presentational (e.g. foreground-background, discours cohesion, anticipation) and interpersonal (e.g. internal/external perspective, focalization). It is an important aspect of my investigation to see texts (and verb tenses) as having a metafunctionally diverse meaning potential, of which some meanings are emphasized or excluded by, for instance, the context. Accordingly, Latin examples are never given without the broader context.

By means of this close reading, the texts are annotated for multiple variables in a new database, of which the correlation with the use of the narrative tenses will be statistically computed. In this way, I hope to contribute to the discussion on Latin tense and aspect as the basic meaning of the infectum and perfectum stems, by conducting a modern and comprehensive research. It is, however, important not to take a stance in the debate from the start, as many linguists seem to have done in the past.

The investigation also includes a diachronic element: the language of Caesar is compared to the that of Gregory of Tours, in order to provide an interesting starting point for studies of Romance languages. This excursion is, however, planned for a later phase of my project.

 The First Bantu Speakers South of the Rainforest: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Human Migration, Language Spread, Climate Change and Early Farming in Late Holocene Central Africa

Koen Bostoen (Universiteit Gent)

The Bantu Expansion is not only the principal linguistic, cultural and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. It has also become one of the most controversial issues in African History. Several generations of linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, palaeoenvironmentalists, geneticists and many more have tried to answer the question of how the relatively young Bantu language family (ca. 5000 years) could spread over disproportionally large parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa, but have almost always done so from a discipline-specific base.

The prevailing synthesis is a model in which the Bantu language dispersal is conceived as resulting from a single migratory macro-event driven by agriculture. However, many basic questions about the movement and subsistence of ancestral Bantu speakers are still completely open and can only be addressed through genuine interdisciplinary collaboration as proposed here. Through this project, researchers with outstanding expertise in Central African archaeology, archaeobotany and historical linguistics will form a unique cross-disciplinary team to carry out together evidence-based frontier research on the first Bantu-speaking settlements south of the equatorial rainforest.

Archaeological fieldwork will be undertaken in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo and Angola that are as yet still unexplored by archaeologists in order to determine the timing, location and archaeological signature of the earliest Bantu-speaking settlers in that region and to establish how they interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers. To get a better idea of their subsistence, diet and natural habitat, special attention will be paid to archaeobotanical and palaeoenvironmental proxies, whose study is still in its infancy within Central African archaeological contexts. Historical linguistic research will be pushed beyond the boundaries of vocabulary-based phylogenetics that currently prevails in Bantu classification studies and open up new pathways in the field of lexical reconstruction, especially with regard to the subsistence and land use strategies of ancestral Bantu speakers. Through external interuniversity collaboration with expert teams archaeozoological, palaeoenvironmental and genetic data as well as phylogenetic modelling will be brought into the cross-disciplinary approach.

In this way, scholars working on different datasets will collaborate directly and tackle together challenging research questions in order to acquire a new transversal view on the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in Late Holocene Central Africa and to transform the current thinking on the Bantu Expansion.