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.

Dialing talk: Fayssal Tayalati en Lieven Danckaert (Université de Lille 3), “Multiple subjects across categories: Evidence from Modern Standard Arabic”

In this talk we focus on a particular type of tough-construction in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), illustrated in (1)-(2). In these examples we see a DP (bracketed), followed by an adjective (underscored) and a deverbal noun. Attached to this last element is a resumptive pronoun (glossed as ‘RP’) which corefers with the bracketed DP.
(1) [hāḏā l-kitābu]i mumtiʿun qirāʾatu-hui
this the-book.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ pleasant.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ read.f.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ-ʀᴘ.ᴍ.sɢ
‘This book is pleasant to read.’ (= predicative reading, root clause)
(2) [[al-ʿimāratu]i [ṣ-ṣaʿbu bayʿu-hāi]] bīʿat ʾaẖīran
the-building.f.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ the-difficult.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ sell.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ-ʀᴘ.f.sɢ was.sold finally
‘[The building which is difficult to sell] was finally sold.’ (= attributive reading, DP)
A key property of these structures concerns the agreement morphology on the adjective. In MSA, attributive and predicative adjectives canonically agree with their head noun or subject. However, as can be deduced from (2), the adjective in tough-constructions does not agree in number, gender or case with the lefthand DP, but rather it appears with ‘default’ nominative masculine singular morphology.
We will propose a unified analysis of (1)-(2), which crucially incorporates the idea that the relevant structures contain two distinct subject positions. First, to account for the observed lack of agreement between the DP and the adjective, we adopt Mohammad’s (1990, 2000) suggestion that the ‘default’ agreement which can be observed in a number of (impersonal) constructions in MSA is due to the presence of a (phonologically null) expletive subject. We take this expletive pronoun to be located in SpecTP, where it agrees with the adjectival predicate. Next, having discarded the hypothesis that the initial DP sits in an A-bar position, we propose that it occurs in Cardinaletti’s (2004) SubjP, i.e. a high subject position which is associated with an ‘aboutness’ reading. Interestingly, there is independent evidence that in MSA (as well as in many other languages) two clause-mate subject positions can be filled simultaneously by non-coreferring XPs: this is the case in the ‘broad subject’ pattern discussed in e.g. Alexopoulou et al. (2004).

Elisabeth Witzenhausen: If not ≠ unless – Exceptive clauses in Continental West Germanic

In this talk, I address the difference between negative conditionals (1a) and exceptive clauses (1b).

(1) I will come and help you …

a) if I don‘t fall into a river

b) unless I fall into a river

It has long been claimed that exceptives and negative conditionals share the same underlying semantic structure, with differences only in the surface structure; however, Geis (1973) and those following him have presented challenges for this view, suggesting rather that the two constructions have different semantics. I present data from Middle Dutch (MD), Middle High German (MHG) and Middle Low German (MLG) that support an analysis of two different semantic structures. In doing so, I discuss some observations regarding conditionals more generally in the modern Germanic languages that are relevant to understanding the historical data from my corpus study. In particular, in MD, MHG and MD, exceptive adverbial clauses appear as subjunctive V2-clauses without any complementizer (2). In the early stages, the preverbal clitic ne is used which expressed sentential negation in Old Saxon (OS) and Old High German (OHG).

(2) dhe scal ome sin wulle loen gheuen he ne hebbe it uerboret mit bosheit

DEM shall him his demanded wage give he NE have.SUBJ it forfeited with mischief

‘who shall give him his demanded wage, unless he has forfeited it with mischief.’

(Westphalian: 1492)

I will provide arguments for analysing MD, MLG and MHG exceptives as peripheral adverbial clauses, while their related OHG and OS structures are central adverbial clauses.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Francis-Ratte (Furman University): “New evidence for the common origin of the Japanese and Korean languages”

Download the abstract here.

Prof. dr. Nathan Hill & Johann-Mattis List (School of Oriental and African Studies/CNRS):

The reconstruction of proto-Burmish: a case study in the computational implementation of the comparative method

The use of computational methods in comparative linguistics increases ever in popularity. Nonetheless, the fruits of such methods have so far been meagre when compared to the results the traditional comparative method. This paper explores a dataset of Burmish languages as a case study in improving the methodology of computational reconstruction. In particular are aim is not replace or modify the comparative method, but rather to implement the traditional method using computational tools.

Our database comprises 400 concepts and their translational counterparts in a dozen Burmish langauges. Concepts are linked to the Concepticon (List et al. 2016), languages are linked to Glottolog. The primary data comes from Huáng et al. (1992.), as digitized by STEDT (Matisoff 2011), but we supplement this with other sources. We employ an iterative workflow combining the absolute rigor of a computer with the insightful intuitions of trained historical linguists. After providing all of the data with unambiguous phonetic interpretations, including the explicit encoding of underdetermined segments, the computer provides a preliminary alignment and reconstruction. These reconstructions are then adjusted with an eye to the relevant literature on proto-Burmish. The adjustments are made inside of the workflow system so that the algorithm and general methodology will be enhanced and made more robust.

References
Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian (2015): Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology (Available onlie at http://glottolog.org. Accessed on 2016-03-15).
Huáng Bùfán 黄 布 凡 et al. eds. (1992). Zàng-Miǎn yǔzú yǔyán cíhuì 藏缅语族语言词汇. Běijīng: Zhōngyāng mínzú xuéyuàn chūbǎnshè 中央民族学院出版社.
List, Johann-Mattis & Cysouw, Michael & Forkel, Robert (eds.) 2015. Concepticon. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://concepticon.clld.org, Accessed on 2016-03-15.)
Matisoff, James (2011): STEDT. The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus. University of California at Berkeley (available online at: http://stedt.berkeley.edu).

ΔiaLing talk by dr. Ángel Jiménez-Fernández (University of Sevile): Subtraction from Datives and Differential Object Accusatives

Subextraction from Datives and Differential Object Accusatives

Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández

University of Seville

ajimfer@us.es

1. Introduction, the problem and our goal. In current research on the structure of DPs in Differential Object Marking and Dative Clitic Constructions, there has been an explosion of proposals suggesting that the preposition a present in both accusative and dative objects is not a true P in Spanish, but a morphological marker (Demonte 1995; Cuervo 2003; Ormazabal & Romero 2013; Pineda 2013, a.o.). Adopting the idea that this P does not project into a PP but rather occupies the K(ase) head above DP, in this talk I analyse subextraction out of both accusative and dative prepositional DPs in psych constructions in Spanish Wh-questions, as illustrated in (1).

(1) a. ¿De qué edificio dices que no conoces [a ningún vecino]?

‘Of what building do you say that you don’t know any neighbours?

b. ¿De qué partido crees que no les ha gustado [a muchos votantes] la nueva normativa?

‘Of what party do you think many voters didn’t like the new regulations?’

However, the Spanish data are far from clear in that by assuming that a P is opaque for extraction (Abels 2003), the prediction follows that Experiencers introduced by P a should induce island effects, contrary to facts. To solve this problem, in line with Haegeman et al. (2014), I argue that island effects in objects introduced by a in Spanish are multifactorial. I extend their analysis by suggesting that one of the factors mitigating islandhood is the functional character of some prepositions (Riemsdijk 1978), and that the P a in dative and accusative DPs is a functional preposition which heads a Kase Phrase, motivated by the case properties of P. Being endowed with an Edge Feature, this KP is a weak phase which allows subextraction.

Keywords: subextraction, dative clitic constructions, Differential Object Marking, Kase Phrase, phases

Selected References

Bianchi, Valentina and Cristiano Chesi. 2014. “Subject Islands, Reconstruction, and the Flow of the Computation.” Linguistic Inquiry 45 (4): 525–569.

Haegeman, Liliane, Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández and Andrew Radford. 2014. “Deconstructing the Subject Condition in Terms of Cumulative Constraint Violation.” The Linguistic Review 31(1): 73–150.

Jiménez-Fernández, Ángel L. 2009. “On the Composite Nature of Subject Islands: A Phase-Based Approach.” SKY Journal of Linguistics 22: 91–138.

Ormazabal, Javier and Juan Romero. 2013. “Differential Object Marking, Case and Agreement.” Borealis 2 (2): 221–239.

Pineda, A. 2013. “Double Object Constructions in Spanish (and Catalan) Revisited.” In Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen, Luisa Meroni and Manuela Pinto (eds.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2011, 193–216. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Riemsdijk, Henk C. van. 1978. A Case Study in Syntactic Markedness: The Binding Nature of Prepositional Phrases. Lisse: The Peter de Ridder Press.

ΔiaLing presentation by dr. Roland Pooth (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History): “Proto-Indo-European alignment: reasons for a change”. 

Download the abstract here.

Tim Denecker: Linguistic and Cultural Education in Western Christianity (c.380–735): A study of the content, form, and sociocultural insertion of Latin language manuals

My postdoctoral research project aims to improve our understanding of the linguistic and cultural foundations for education in Late Antique and Early Medieval Western Christianity. In order to do so, it focuses on the corpus of Latin language manuals (grammatical, lexicographical and orthographical works) produced during the period between the manuals of Augustine (c.380) and Bede (d. 735). The project is based on the hypothesis that manuals play a key role in shaping a body of general and propaedeutic knowledge for a particular historical period, and that the language manuals at hand can accordingly be approached as major sources in assessing the status and level of linguistic and cultural knowledge in Late Antique and Early Medieval Western Christianity. More specifically, my research project investigates (1) the conceptual basis and structure of the language manuals in their relation to earlier (pagan and Christian) representatives in the tradition; (2) the formal organization of the linguistic and cultural knowledge the manuals transmit, from the perspective of special language studies (Fachtexte/Fachsprachen); and (3) the manuals’ insertion in their sociocultural context: whom do they teach and in which linguistic and sociocultural circumstances? From the perspective of historical sociolinguistics, the project looks in particular at the attitudes the manuals exhibit towards (a) the evolution of ‘Classical’ to ‘Late’ Latin, and (b) the bi- and multilingual settings in which they were conceived and used. In my presentation, I will deal in some more detail with my corpus, method and research questions, and illustrate all this by means of some first results.

 

Dr. Filip De Decker: A Morphosyntactic and Semantic Analysis of the Augment Use and Absence in the Oldest Greek Literary Texts (1300-400 BC)

A Morphosyntactic and Semantic Analysis of the Augment Use and Absence in the Oldest Greek Literary Texts (1300-400 BC)
Dr Filip De Decker

In Classical Philology and Indo-European linguistics, the term augment is used to refer to the prefix *e that is added to past tense forms of the indicative and is only attested in Indo-Iranian (stretching back until the 2 nd Millennium BC), Greek, Armenian (attested as of the 5 th century AD) and Phrygian (extinct language dating back to the 7 th century BC). In Classical Greek prose (5 th and 4 th century BC), this prefix is mandatory: lúomen means “we loosen” and elúomen “we loosened”, but in the earliest Greek texts this marker was more often absent than not: it is almost completely missing in the Mycenaean prose tablets (13 th century BC) and the forms without augment are decidedly more numerous in epic Greek (written down beginning
of the 8 th century BC). For many scholars, the augment use in poetry is only metrically motivated, whereas other studies have focused on morphologic, syntactic and semantic factors, but an overall study has not been performed and most studies have been limited to Homer. My project intends to fill this void. In this presentation, I give an overview of previous scholarship, present preliminary findings (facts and figures, and rules and constraints
governing the augment use) on the augment in epic Greek (Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns) and will analyse some examples. After the Greek of epic, my research will proceed to the elegy and lyric poetry, inscriptions (prose inscriptions until the 5 th century BC and verse inscriptions), non-Attic prose (Herodotos) and the choral passages in Greek tragedy. In a final stage, a selection from the Alexandrinian and Imperial epicists will be analysed.