Events

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.

Dialect contact, spatial variation, and language change in the morphology of the Basque auxiliary verb (Aaron Ecay, Ghent University)

In this talk, I will focus on two loci of morphological variation among Basque dialects. Basque verbs agree with arguments in the absolutive, ergative, and dative cases; both loci of variation considered in this talk concern the distribution of these morphemes in the auxiliary verb “izan” (to be/to have).

The first locus of variation is called “Differential Object Marking” (DOM). In DOM, what would in non-DOM dialects (including the standard) be an absolutive-marked (direct) object

is marked with dative case and agreement is marked on the verb using a dative-agreement

suffix rather than an absolutive-agreement prefix. The second variable is Dative Displacement (DD), which refers to the use of an absolutive-agreement prefix to mark agreement with a dative (indirect) object. From a the point of view of verbal morphology, then, DD and DOM are exact inverses of each other (they do differ in the effect they have in other morphosyntactic domains such as case-marking).

The talk explores the spatial distribution of varaints of DOM and DD through data from the “Morfologia del verbo auxiliar vasco” dialect atlas. Based on similarity to a Spanish

morphological phenomenon (also called DOM), Basque DOM has usually been analyzed as a

borrowing from that language. The data confirms this analysis and further indicates that there

are two areas in which DOM has been borrowed, apparently independently, into Basque – one

in the West and one in the Southeast.

DD has perhaps a less regular spatial distribution: in addition to a large area of DD dialects in the central northern area (i.e. the province of Lapurdi), it has been noticed in several other seemingly unconnected localities as well. Analysis of the data reveals that these latter occurrences are associated with contact between DOM and non-DOM dialects. In addition to offering an explanation of the distribution of DD, this observation lends support to the

hypothesis that linguistic innovation is (or can be) triggered when learners are faced with

inconsistent or variable input in situations of language contact.

I will also discuss how data on diatopic variation can inform morphosyntactic analysis. Forms that might appear problematic (or at least in need of a specific theoretical explanation) in “syntopic” data can turn out to be an epiphenomenon of variation and change. Finally, Basque displays a variety of morphological patterns beyond those discussed in the bulk of the talk. The data in Basque dialect atlases is a rich source of fine-grained detail on the behavior of these patterns in space and (to some degree) in time. I will briefly point out other areas of the data that (potentially) interact with DD and DOM, and which might give rise to other interesting discoveries.

(download the abstract)