219 research outputs found
A corpus-based investigation of fillers in Negidal (Northern Tungusic)
No full textInternational audienceThe Northern Tungusic language Negidal, which is spoken in the Russian Far East by barely a handful of elderly speakers, is a language with a dedicated filler, namely the root uŋun. As shown by an investigation of a corpus of annotated oral recordings comprising over 200 texts of diverse genres (Pakendorf & Aralova 2017), this filler is frequently used: over 880 tokens of uŋun are found in ~76,000 Negidal words, amounting to nearly 12 tokens/1000 words; however, there are large interspeaker differences. About 70% of the occurrences of the filler are used as placeholders for either nouns or verbs, and occasionally even clauses or direct speech. Targets are frequently omitted; when present, it is inflectional, but not derivational, morphology that is mirrored on the placeholder. This mirroring demonstrates that speakers plan the syntactic frame of their utterance well in advance, with differences between less and more proficient speakers. Although the filler is used when speakers have difficulties accessing a word, that is not the only factor triggering its use, as shown by the fact that as a placeholder it often stands in for common lexemes or items that were mentioned in the immediately preceding discourse. The Negidal data add to our knowledge of the as-yet understudied domain of fillers and open up further questions concerning the management of disfluencies in Negidal.</div
The linguistic (pre-)history of Northern Asia
No full textInternational audienceThis talk aims to provide an overview of the prehistoric and historical events that have shaped the languages of Northern Asia. This region is home to eight language families and one isolate (Pakendorf 2020: 670), which are sometimes grouped into two broad categories, the typologically relatively homogenous “Ural-Altaic” languages and the heterogenous group of “Paleosiberian” languages. This latter term is applied to the languages spoken by peoples who are assumed to be the descendants of the original inhabitants of the region, thus representing remnants of the richer linguistic diversity that would have been found in the past (Comrie 1981: 238-239). However, population expansions from the south replaced the earlier inhabitants of Northern Asia during the Holocene (Pugach et al. 2016, Kılınç et al. 2021), and only the speakers of Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages show genetic affinities to the Mesolithic population that resettled Northern Asia after the Last Glacial Maximum (Sikora et al. 2019, Kılınç et al. 2021). Population expansions and migrations not only brought peoples and languages into Northern Asia, but also carried them from Northern Asia to Europe, as in the case of the Uralic languages (Tambets et al. 2018, Grünthal et al. 2022).The region is characterized by extremely harsh climatic conditions, with low temperatures and levels of sunlight and concomitant low primary productivity (Churkina & Running 1998). These severely limit food production, and most of the indigenous peoples of North Asia were nomadic hunters and fishers or reindeer herders, whose small, fragmented communities were dispersed over vast territories. Nevertheless, in spite of the low population density, several cases of contact-induced change have been documented, leading Anderson (2006) to propose Siberia as a linguistic area. Particularly striking are the restructured system of sibling terms in the Turkic language Dolgan following the Tungusic pattern found in Evenki (Stapert 2013: 136-144), and the verbal paradigms that were copied from the Turkic language Sakha into the Lamunkhin dialect of Even, a sister language of Evenki (Pakendorf 2009, 2019).Such structural changes are indicative of long-term bilingualism, and situations of small-scale multilingualism are indeed historically known from the Taimyr Peninsula in the Far North (Khanina & Meyerhof 2018, Khanina 2021), the Lower Kolyma region (Vaxtin 2001: 142-146, Pupynina & Aralova 2021), Chukotka (de Reuse 1994: 306), and the Lower Amur area (Zgusta 2015, Starcev 2014). Close interactions between the indigenous peoples of Northern Asia are also reflected in molecular anthropological studies, which show high levels of admixture in general, and close affinities between Nivkh and the Tungusic-speaking groups of the Lower Amur in particular (Pugach et al. 2016, Jeong et al. 2019). It is thus clear from both linguistic and genetic investigations that language contact will have played an important role in shaping the languages of North Asia.References:Anderson, G.D.S. 2006. Towards a Typology of the Siberian Linguistic Area. In Y. Matras, A. McMahon& N. Vincent (eds.), Linguistic Areas. Convergence in Historical and Typological Perspective.,266–300. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Churkina, Galina & Steven W. Running. 1998. Contrasting Climatic Controls on the EstimatedProductivity of Global Terrestrial Biomes. Ecosystems 1(2). 206–215.Comrie, B. 1981. The Languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Grünthal, Riho et al. 2022. Drastic demographic events triggered the Uralic spread. Diachronica. JohnBenjamins 39(4). 490–524.Jeong, Choongwon, et al. 2019. The genetic history of admixture across inner Eurasia. Nature Ecology& Evolution. Nature Publishing Group 3(6). 966–976.Khanina, Olesya. 2021. Languages and ideologies at the Lower Yenisei (Siberia): Reconstructing pastmultilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism 25(4). 1059– 1080.Khanina, Olesya & Miriam Meyerhoff. 2018. A case-study in historical sociolinguistics beyond Europe:reconstructing patterns of multilingualism of a language community in Siberia. Journal ofHistorical Sociolinguistics 4(2). 221–251.Kılınç, Gülşah Merve, et al. 2021. Human population dynamics and Yersinia pestis in ancientnortheast Asia. Science Advances. American Association for the Advancement of Science 7(2).eabc4587.Pakendorf, Brigitte. 2009. Intensive Contact and the Copying of Paradigms: An Ėven Dialect inContact with Sakha (Yakut). Journal of Language Contact Varia 2. 85–110.Pakendorf, Brigitte. 2019. Direct copying of inflectional paradigms: Evidence from Lamunkhin Even.Language 95(3). e364–e380.Pakendorf, Brigitte. 2020. Contact and Siberian languages. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), The Handbook ofLanguage Contact, 2nd edition, 669–688. Malden, Mass. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Pugach, Irina, et al. 2016. The Complex Admixture History and Recent Southern Origins of SiberianPopulations. Molecular Biology and Evolution 33(7). 1777–1795.Pupynina, Maria & Natalia Aralova. 2021. Lower Kolyma multilingualism: Historical setting andsociolinguistic trends. International Journal of Bilingualism 25(4). 1081– 1101.Reuse, W.J. de. 1994. Siberian Yupik Eskimo: The Language and Its Contacts with Chukchi. (Ed.) W.R.Miller. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.Sikora, Martin, et al. 2019. The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene.Nature 570(7760). 182–188.Stapert, Eugénie. 2013. Contact-induced change in Dolgan: An investigation into the role of linguisticdata for the reconstruction of a people’s (pre)history (LOT Dissertation Series 336). Utrecht:LOT.Starcev, Anatolij Fedorovič. 2014. Problema etnogeneza i etničeskoj istorii negidal’cev [Problems ofthe ethnogenesis and ethnic history of the Negidals]. In Anatolij Fedorovič Starcev, DmitrijViktorovič Jančev & V.L. Larin (eds.), Istorija i kul’tura negidal’cev: istoriko-etnografičeskieočerki [The history and culture of the Negidals: Historical and ethnographic sketches], 22–41.Vladivostok: Dal’nauka.Tambets, Kristiina, et al. 2018. Genes reveal traces of common recent demographic history for mostof the Uralic-speaking populations. Genome Biology 19(1). 139.Vaxtin, N.B. 2001. Jazyki narodov severa v XX veke. Očerki jazykovogo sdviga. [The languages of thepeoples of the north in the 20th century. Sketches of language shift.]. St Petersburg:Evropejskij Universitet v Sankt-Peterburge.Zgusta, Richard. 2015. The Peoples of Northeast Asia through Time. Precolonial Ethnic and CulturalProcesses along the Coast between Hokkaido and the Bering Strait. Leiden, Boston: Brill
The linguistic (pre-)history of Northern Asia
No full textInternational audienceThis talk aims to provide an overview of the prehistoric and historical events that have shaped the languages of Northern Asia. This region is home to eight language families and one isolate (Pakendorf 2020: 670), which are sometimes grouped into two broad categories, the typologically relatively homogenous “Ural-Altaic” languages and the heterogenous group of “Paleosiberian” languages. This latter term is applied to the languages spoken by peoples who are assumed to be the descendants of the original inhabitants of the region, thus representing remnants of the richer linguistic diversity that would have been found in the past (Comrie 1981: 238-239). However, population expansions from the south replaced the earlier inhabitants of Northern Asia during the Holocene (Pugach et al. 2016, Kılınç et al. 2021), and only the speakers of Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages show genetic affinities to the Mesolithic population that resettled Northern Asia after the Last Glacial Maximum (Sikora et al. 2019, Kılınç et al. 2021). Population expansions and migrations not only brought peoples and languages into Northern Asia, but also carried them from Northern Asia to Europe, as in the case of the Uralic languages (Tambets et al. 2018, Grünthal et al. 2022).The region is characterized by extremely harsh climatic conditions, with low temperatures and levels of sunlight and concomitant low primary productivity (Churkina & Running 1998). These severely limit food production, and most of the indigenous peoples of North Asia were nomadic hunters and fishers or reindeer herders, whose small, fragmented communities were dispersed over vast territories. Nevertheless, in spite of the low population density, several cases of contact-induced change have been documented, leading Anderson (2006) to propose Siberia as a linguistic area. Particularly striking are the restructured system of sibling terms in the Turkic language Dolgan following the Tungusic pattern found in Evenki (Stapert 2013: 136-144), and the verbal paradigms that were copied from the Turkic language Sakha into the Lamunkhin dialect of Even, a sister language of Evenki (Pakendorf 2009, 2019).Such structural changes are indicative of long-term bilingualism, and situations of small-scale multilingualism are indeed historically known from the Taimyr Peninsula in the Far North (Khanina & Meyerhof 2018, Khanina 2021), the Lower Kolyma region (Vaxtin 2001: 142-146, Pupynina & Aralova 2021), Chukotka (de Reuse 1994: 306), and the Lower Amur area (Zgusta 2015, Starcev 2014). Close interactions between the indigenous peoples of Northern Asia are also reflected in molecular anthropological studies, which show high levels of admixture in general, and close affinities between Nivkh and the Tungusic-speaking groups of the Lower Amur in particular (Pugach et al. 2016, Jeong et al. 2019). It is thus clear from both linguistic and genetic investigations that language contact will have played an important role in shaping the languages of North Asia.References:Anderson, G.D.S. 2006. Towards a Typology of the Siberian Linguistic Area. In Y. Matras, A. McMahon& N. Vincent (eds.), Linguistic Areas. Convergence in Historical and Typological Perspective.,266–300. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Churkina, Galina & Steven W. Running. 1998. Contrasting Climatic Controls on the EstimatedProductivity of Global Terrestrial Biomes. Ecosystems 1(2). 206–215.Comrie, B. 1981. The Languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Grünthal, Riho et al. 2022. Drastic demographic events triggered the Uralic spread. Diachronica. JohnBenjamins 39(4). 490–524.Jeong, Choongwon, et al. 2019. The genetic history of admixture across inner Eurasia. Nature Ecology& Evolution. Nature Publishing Group 3(6). 966–976.Khanina, Olesya. 2021. Languages and ideologies at the Lower Yenisei (Siberia): Reconstructing pastmultilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism 25(4). 1059– 1080.Khanina, Olesya & Miriam Meyerhoff. 2018. A case-study in historical sociolinguistics beyond Europe:reconstructing patterns of multilingualism of a language community in Siberia. Journal ofHistorical Sociolinguistics 4(2). 221–251.Kılınç, Gülşah Merve, et al. 2021. Human population dynamics and Yersinia pestis in ancientnortheast Asia. Science Advances. American Association for the Advancement of Science 7(2).eabc4587.Pakendorf, Brigitte. 2009. Intensive Contact and the Copying of Paradigms: An Ėven Dialect inContact with Sakha (Yakut). Journal of Language Contact Varia 2. 85–110.Pakendorf, Brigitte. 2019. Direct copying of inflectional paradigms: Evidence from Lamunkhin Even.Language 95(3). e364–e380.Pakendorf, Brigitte. 2020. Contact and Siberian languages. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), The Handbook ofLanguage Contact, 2nd edition, 669–688. Malden, Mass. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Pugach, Irina, et al. 2016. The Complex Admixture History and Recent Southern Origins of SiberianPopulations. Molecular Biology and Evolution 33(7). 1777–1795.Pupynina, Maria & Natalia Aralova. 2021. Lower Kolyma multilingualism: Historical setting andsociolinguistic trends. International Journal of Bilingualism 25(4). 1081– 1101.Reuse, W.J. de. 1994. Siberian Yupik Eskimo: The Language and Its Contacts with Chukchi. (Ed.) W.R.Miller. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.Sikora, Martin, et al. 2019. The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene.Nature 570(7760). 182–188.Stapert, Eugénie. 2013. Contact-induced change in Dolgan: An investigation into the role of linguisticdata for the reconstruction of a people’s (pre)history (LOT Dissertation Series 336). Utrecht:LOT.Starcev, Anatolij Fedorovič. 2014. Problema etnogeneza i etničeskoj istorii negidal’cev [Problems ofthe ethnogenesis and ethnic history of the Negidals]. In Anatolij Fedorovič Starcev, DmitrijViktorovič Jančev & V.L. Larin (eds.), Istorija i kul’tura negidal’cev: istoriko-etnografičeskieočerki [The history and culture of the Negidals: Historical and ethnographic sketches], 22–41.Vladivostok: Dal’nauka.Tambets, Kristiina, et al. 2018. Genes reveal traces of common recent demographic history for mostof the Uralic-speaking populations. Genome Biology 19(1). 139.Vaxtin, N.B. 2001. Jazyki narodov severa v XX veke. Očerki jazykovogo sdviga. [The languages of thepeoples of the north in the 20th century. Sketches of language shift.]. St Petersburg:Evropejskij Universitet v Sankt-Peterburge.Zgusta, Richard. 2015. The Peoples of Northeast Asia through Time. Precolonial Ethnic and CulturalProcesses along the Coast between Hokkaido and the Bering Strait. Leiden, Boston: Brill
Fillers in the world's languages: A refined typology
No full textInternational audienceInterest in placeholders and related items in the languages of the world has burgeoned in recent years, both from a descriptive and a theoretical perspective. A particular focus of the recent literature has been on the pragmatic extensions of placeholders, demonstrating that these are not merely used in situations of disfluency to substitute for words that momentarily elude the speaker, but are frequently used intentionally to avoid terms for reasons of politeness, "conspirational" motivations, or rhetorical purposes.Fillers -a term that subsumes both placeholders and hesitatives -are crosslinguistically widespread, even though dedicated studies of such items are notably lacking for the languages of Africa. The distinction between placeholders and hesitatives is one of referentiality and morphosyntactic integration: placeholders are both referential and morphosyntactically integrated while hesitatives are neither. We distinguish five different types in our extended typology: 1) specific placeholders that substitute for a particular part of speech, 2) general placeholders that are not restricted to a particular part of speech, 3) general hesitatives such as the cross-linguistically common "pause vowels", 4) specific hesitatives found in some Austronesian languages that are not referential or integrated, but are specific to particular delayed constituents, and 5) versatile fillers that can fulfill both placeholder and hesitative functions.The in-depth studies of individual languages collected in this volume highlight the fact that it is not always straightforward to distinguish particular instances of a filler from those of its source form nor to distinguish hesitative from placeholder uses of versatile fillers, that placeholders are frequently not followed by an overt target, and that filler use can vary greatly among speakers.</div
Genetic perspectives on the origin of clicks in Bantu languages from southwestern Zambia
No full textFillers: Hesitatives and placeholders
No full textInternational audienceFillers are non-silent linguistic devices used in disfluencies to gain time while searching for words. In addition, they are frequently used intentionally to avoid words for reasons of politeness, ‘conspirational’ motivations, or rhetorical purposes. Two syntactically distinct types of conventionalized fillers can be distinguished: placeholders and hesitatives (also called hesitators). Placeholders are referential and morphosyntactically integrated, while hesitatives are neither. Strikingly, even though fillers are cross-linguistically widespread, dedicated studies of such items in particular languages are still largely lacking. This collective volume comprises in-depth descriptions of conventionalized fillers in a substantial variety of languages from Eurasia, Papunesia, Australia, and the Americas, hoping to stimulate typological research on fillers, both hesitatives and placeholders. The book aims to contribute to a better visibility of the topic among general linguists, to make data and analyses accessible that will be useful for further typological studies on the topic, and to provide models for descriptive linguists. The introductory chapter discusses issues emerging from the previous literature and offers a new typology of fillers. It also highlights the major findings of the eleven remaining chapters. Each of these contains a detailed and typologically informed analysis of fillers in one or several underdescribed languages, based on corpora of natural speech and focusing on lexical fillers rather than on phenomena below the word-level (phonetic lengthening, truncation) or above the word-level (such as idioms and discourse markers like ‘you know’, or rhetorical questions like ‘what’s the word for that?’). The chapters cover a large amount of diversity, both in terms of languages and with respect to the type of filler. They focus on (i) the criteria for identification of the various types of fillers and the terminology used, keeping in mind that the domain is still largely under construction, (ii) a detailed analysis in terms of morphosyntactic distribution and, if possible, (iii) frequency in speech, and (iv) some reflection on the diachronic development of these disfluency markers
Phlorest phylogeny derived from De Filippo et al. 2012 'Bringing together linguistic and genetic evidence to test the Bantu expansion'
No full text<p>Cite the source of the dataset as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>De Filippo, C., Bostoen, K., Stoneking, M., & Pakendorf, B. (2012). Bringing together linguistic and genetic evidence to test the Bantu expansion. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279(1741), 3256–3263. doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.0318</p>
</blockquote>
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