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Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads
No full textWelcome to Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads (LTC), a new journal dedicated to the crossroads where linguistic typology meets its neighboring fields.
A crossroads is not only and necessarily a place where a choice must be made: this is the point of view of the traveler, wondering which way to go. If we take a bird’s-eye view and observe the crossroads from above, we see much more than choices. A Crossroads is the place where different directions, and different travelers, meet or follow each other. Thanks to the crossroads, it is possible to change and exchange, and the very concept of ‘step forward’ opens itself to diagonals and curves. The crossroads is where future is imagined and innovation occurs, thanks to the reciprocal influence of intersecting perspectives.
Crossroads means meeting, exchanging, converging, choosing, diverging, changing, and possibly making the difference.
This journal aims to take the point of view of the crossroads, capturing the moment when linguistic typology intersects other fields, changing and exchanging methods, theories and data, in the belief that a closer look at the crossroads may reveal converging paths and new directions to go
Data on grammatical gender and numeral classifiers
No full textThis material contains the dataset from the gitlab repository of the following article. Please cite the article when using the data.
Sinnemäki, Kaius. 2019. On the distribution and complexity of gender and numeral classifiers. In Di Garbo, Francesca, Bernhard Wälchli & Bruno Olsson (eds.), Grammatical Gender and Linguistic Complexity, Volume II: World-wide Comparative Studies (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 27), 133–200. Berlin: Language Science Press
The dynamics of gender complexity
No full textIn this chapter we view grammatical gender as a category type that emerges, evolves
and disappears in languages as a result of diachronic processes and whose complex-
ity grows and diminishes through time (§1–§2). Traditional approaches to gram-
matical gender focus on two properties that already presuppose a high degree of
maturity of gender systems: noun classes and agreement. Here we conceive of gen-
der rather as a category type with a semantic core of animacy and/or sex reflecting
classes of referents, which have a propensity to turn into classes of noun lexemes.
When growing and retracting, gender characteristically follows the animacy or in-
dividuation hierarchy. However, this hierarchical patterning breaks down when
animacy leaks into the inanimate domain led astray by many different associative
pathways, which is why lexical organization according to noun classes has to be
invoked to maintain some sort of order (§3). Gender manifests itself in the form of
marking on noun-associated words, often within the local domain of noun phrases.
Here we put gender marking into the wider context of nominal morphology (non-
lexical markers within the noun phrase), which often originate in independent use
in headless noun phrases and are extended to headed noun phrases only in a sub-
sequent development (§4). As more mature manifestations of gender get organized
in the form of noun classes, they typically follow certain pathways of develop-
ment that can be subsumed under the formula “From X to Y” (§5–§6). Agreement
is fuzzy as its prototypical non-noun targets gradually develop by way of decate-
gorialization from nouns, and controllers and targets are not always simple words,
but can be complex (consist of syntactic formal groups) and controllers can be en-
tirely contextual (§7). Gender should not be considered in isolation as it is – more
often than not – parasitic on other grammatical category types, notably number,
case, and person, with which it cumulates and which contribute to its high degree
of complexity (§8). Number is particularly tightly intertwined with gender in plu-
ralia tantum and other phenomena related to lexical plurality (§9). As gender is
organized in form of systems, its diachronic evolution cannot be captured in terms
of individual diachronic processes. When gender systems evolve, there is virtually
always co-evolution of connected events. Hence the study of system evolution is
indispensable for understanding the complexity of gender (§10). However, the evo-
lution of gender also displays characteristic areal and genealogical patterns and is
sensitive to external factors of language ecology (§11)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Gender and its interaction with number and evaluative morphology : An intra- and intergenealogical typological survey of Africa
No full textThis dissertation investigates interactions between gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology in a sample of 100 African languages, and provides a method for assessing the role that these interactions play in the grammatical complexity of gender systems. The dissertation is organised around three research foci. First, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and number along the following dimensions: exponence, syncretism, indexation, correlations in type of marking, and gender assignment. The study provides evidence for the possibility that nominal features are organised in a relevance hierarchy. In addition, the study shows that animacy and lexical plurality play a crucial role in the distribution of special patterns of plural indexation. The study also shows that pervasive indexation systems in the language sample always involve both gender and number. Finally, the study shows how gender assignment can be used as a means for encoding variation in the countability properties of nouns and noun phrases. Second, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and evaluative morphology in the languages of the sample. Two types of interactions are found. The study shows that the distribution of the two types depends on three factors: the type of gender system, the number of gender distinctions and the possibility of assigning a noun to more than one gender. Third, the dissertation investigates the role that interactions of gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology play in the absolute complexity of gender. The study proposes a metric for gender complexity and uses this metric to compute complexity scores for the languages of the sample. The results suggest that the gender systems of the language sample lean toward high complexity, that genealogically related languages have the same or similar complexity scores, and that the distribution of the outliers can often be understood as the result of language contact
Torres Cacoullos, Rena and Catherine E. Travis. 2018. Bilingualism in the community. Code-switching and grammars in contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
No full textEvaluative morphology and noun classification : a cross-linguistic study of Africa
No full textThis paper aims at illustrating how, in languages with grammatical gender, this feature of noun morphology interacts with evaluative morphology. This is done on the basis of a sample of sixty-two African languages. The paper shows that interactions among gender and evaluative morphology are quite regular in the African languages. Two major types of interactions are found depending on whether a language hasa rich or a limited number of noun classes. The geographic diffusion and diachronic stability of these interactions are discussed. The correlation between gender and evaluation in the African languages has promising implications for our understanding of the two grammatical domains and fostersfurther research questions as to how common the relationships between these domains are cross-linguistically, and why they emerge in the first place.</p
Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown & Greville G. Corbett. Morphological Complexity (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 153). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017
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