DOCSLIB.ORG

The Emergence of Linguistic Competence in Multi-Language Contexts

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Emergence of Linguistic Competence in Multi-Language Contexts The emergence of linguistic competence in multi-language contexts 10th-11th April, NIAS Program Thursday 09:00-09:15 Welcome and prof. dr. Paul .M.G. Emmelkamp, Rector of the NIAS announcements Enoch O. Aboh and Liliane Haegeman (University of Amsterdam and Gent University) 09:15-10:00 Salikoko S. Mufwene (The University of Chicago) Primary Linguistic Data, the Feature Pool, and “Language Acquisition” as a Misnomer I will extrapolate my (2001) notion of FEATURE POOL to “language acquisition” in a non-contact setting. Capitalizing on differences between IDIOLECTS, I submit that all languages as communal constructs avail heterogeneous feature pools which generate COMPETITION, on which the language learner acts as a SELECTION agent, favoring some variants over other alternatives under the pressure of various ECOLOGICAL FACTORS. Thus, the language learner constructs his/her personal system that enables him/her to interpret other speakers successfully and to produce utterances that are intelligible to them, but he/she does not acquire a pre-existing system. Otherwise, which one out of so many idiolects? Besides, from a complexity theory perspective, these are all moving targets that are reshaped over and over again by current interactions. Then, what does PARAMETER-SETTING mean? Is it a gradual or saltatory process? How does it handle intra-systemic typological variation? How can creolistics help address these questions and more? 10:00-10:45 Umberto Ansaldo (University of Hong Kong) Metatypy and language genesis In this talk I first review the notion of metatypy originally developed to account for the dynamics of typological congruence typically observed in linguistic areas. I discuss the acquisitional rationale underlying the concept of metatypy as interactions between L1 and L2 in terms of shift and erosion. I then move to the genesis of Sri Lanka Malay and argue that this language developed through a process of metatypy involving three different languages. Based on this I suggest that typological convergence is a significant process in the formation of new grammars, in linguistic areas as well as creole-like settings. 10:45-11:00 Coffee/Tea break 11:00-11:45 Stef Slembrouck (Ghent University) Category-defying linguistic hybridity. Are we in need of a position “beyond” language as more traditionally understood? Contemporary conditions of globalization-related multilingualism and migration-affected language use have drawn our attention to linguistic phenomena which tend to be understood in terms of ‘switching’, ‘mixing’ and ‘shifting’ – e.g. Pennycook’s notion of metrolingualism. In recent decades, similar problems of categorization have been raised by the contemporary transformed relationships between varieties of one and the same language – e.g. “tussentaal”, “estuary English”, etc. Called into question are the categories of “a language” and a “language variety”, as the tendencies of hybridity have both been characterized by regularities which (viewed from one angle) warrant a claim to variety status, while also displaying degrees of variability and apparent internal inconsistency which raise the question whether the observed regularities are perhaps not better understood in terms quite different from the traditional notion of a “language variety”. My own background is in interactional and discourse analysis. There one generally appears not too worried by the language theoretical implications of hybridity, as the key concern is with understanding its socio-cultural determinants and the communicative efficacies enabled by it (mostly understood – admittedly, often one-sidedly understood - in terms of language/identity). However, the unattended observation remains that category-defying descriptions beg the existence of categories thus positioned, if only for the purposes of making the descriptive point of hybridity itself. In addition, the question of “what is (a) language?” is hardly addressed at all, let alone that a new or alternative conceptualization is being proposed. In my paper, I want to concentrate on competing perspectives and avenues of explanation for coming to terms with the contemporary challenges posed by hybrid forms of language use. Are we irrevocably reaching a point where we are saying that it is no longer necessary to define language, as the idea of separately identifiable languages and language varieties appears to evaporate and runs the risk of becoming irrelevant to a project of understanding the role of language use in social interaction in the contemporary world? If that is the conclusion, where is our object of enquiry? What alternatives, if any, can be proposed? 11:45-12:30 Thomas Roeper (University of Massachusetts) There are no Methods, only Theories First we will ask the question: what are methods? The broad answer will be: there are no methods, only theories. That is, every experimental shift in pragmatics or organization has theoretical issues hidden in it which we should strive to articulate. In fact the modern interest in pragmatics reveals many perspectives that apply directly to the pragmatic logic of experimental scenarios. An example will be the role of partition in how a context is conceived of and its relation to the set of actions, characters, and objects presented in a scenario. A second example is the role of filler sentences. How exactly are they supposed to affect the answers we anticipate? The second half of the talk will be devoted to an effort to articulate a set of principles that lie within the techniques that Jill deVilliers and I have developed. In studying how children acquire long-distance movement. The importance of having two narrative themes, with different pragmatic momentum, where only the least likely is favored by the grammar of critical sentences, will be presented with a discussion of critical examples and the process of scenario-building. 12:30-14:00 LUNCH 14:00-14:45 Fred Weerman (University of Amsterdam) Variation and age effects On the one hand the huge variation found in language variants has undermined the ideal of the good-old GB parameters of the 1980s. On the other hand the age effects that have also been found suggest that what these parameters were supposed to explain is real. I will discuss some examples that motivate that children’s sensitivity to form differences in very early stages allows them to recognize not only entirely language-specific patterns, but as a consequence also possible abstract features behind these patterns as soon as this sensitivity interacts with the computational system. If the sensitivity becomes weaker as an age effect, so will the possibility to trigger the abstract features, leading to different sorts of variation. 14:45-15:30 Liisa Buelens and Tijs D'Hulster (Ghent University) The Flemish External Possessor – On the edge of acceptability In addition to the (internal) nominal ways of expressing possession in Standard Dutch, certain Flemish spoken varieties have a structure similar to the doubling construction (1a), in which the possessor is external to the pronoun-possessee complex (1b). 1. a ‘t moest lukken dat [Emma haar velo] toen juste kapot was. it had-to happen that Emma her bicycle then just broken was b ‘t moest lukken dat [Emma] toen juste [haar velo] kapot was. it had-to happen that Emma then just her bicycle broken was ‘It so happened that Emma’s bicycle was broken just then’ In a magnitude estimation norming test we studied the acceptability of this External Possessor pattern in tussentaal in West-Flanders and Antwerp (i.e. in the spoken variety in between Standard Dutch and dialect). The results show that this pattern is not as restricted to West Flanders as we had initially expected and that there is more variability in its acceptability scores than with the internal possessor patterns. The data suggests patterns of inter speaker variation that are not determined by dialect region. 15:30-15:45 Coffee/Tea break 15:45-16:30 Alison Henry (University of Ulster) Acquiring language from variable input: the acquisition of negative concord in Belfast English This paper reports on a study of 8 children acquiring English in Belfast, where they are exposed to input containing both standard English forms and structures from the local dialect. We report that when exposed to variable forms, children in general acquire both forms, but they do not emerge together; sometimes the standard form is acquired first and sometimes the local form. In particular we will focus on the acquisition of negation, where children acquiring English in Belfast, whose input contains variable use of negative concord, for an extended period use only the standard English forms without negative concord before later also using negative concord forms. Negative concord forms emerge comparatively late, and interestingly they appear no earlier than the ‘intrusive’ negative concord forms which are reported to be used by L1 learners of English (such as Adam (Brown 1973) even when their input does not include negative concord. We suggest that features such as negative concord arise at a natural point in the acquisition of English, but are rapidly lost by learners not acquiring a negative concord variety, while they are retained in those whose input contains negative concord. 16:30-17:15 Susan Pintzuk (University of York) Language change as grammar competition for bilingual speakers In this talk I demonstrate that some instances of language change involve competition between linguistic variants that do not coexist in stable varieties of languages. For example, in the history of English, the language changed from OV to VO, with individual authors using both variants in the same text. While the choice of OV versus VO in any particular context is governed by factors such as weight/complexity and information structure, I show that the change from OV to VO over time is independent of these influences. Since the difference between OV and VO languages is generally analyzed as a difference in the setting of a UG parameter or feature (e.g.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Alex Francois
    Alex François LACITO-CNRS, Paris ParallelParallel meanings,meanings, divergentdivergent formsforms inin thethe northnorth VanuatuVanuatu SprachbundSprachbund Diffusion or genetic inheritance? 28 September 2007 — ALT7, Paris ArealAreal studiesstudies andand languagelanguage familiesfamilies Linguistic areas “A linguistic area is generally taken to be a geographically delimited area including languages from two or more language families, sharing significant traits.” [Dixon 2001] “The central feature of a linguistic area is the existence of structural similarities shared among languages of a geographical area, where usually some of the languages are genetically unrelated or at least are not all close relatives.” [Campbell 2006] ‣ Most areal studies involve distinct language families: Balkans, Mesoamerica, Ethiopia, SE Asia, India, Siberia... ‣ Another type: Contact situations involving languages which are genetically closely related. e.g. Heeringa et al. 2000 for Germanic lgs; Chappell 2001 for Sinitic lgs… Structural similarities < common ancestor or diffusion? ‣ This case study: the 17 languages of north Vanuatu. 2 Torres Is. Banks Is. Maewo Santo Ambae Pentecost Malekula Efate Tanna Hiw The 17 languages of north Vanuatu Lo- Toga Löyöp Lehali Volow Mwotlap Lemerig Close genetic relationship Mota Austronesian > Oceanic Veraa > North-Central Vanuatu [Clark 1985] Mwesen > North Vanuatu [François 2005] Vurës Sustained language contact and plurilingualism through trade, exogamy, shared cultural events… [Vienne 1984] Nume Little mutual intelligibility
    [Show full text]
  • In Antoinette SCHAPPER, Ed., Contact and Substrate in the Languages of Wallacea PART 1
    Contact and substrate in the languages of Wallacea: Introduction Antoinette SCHAPPER KITLV & University of Cologne 1. What is Wallacea?1 The term “Wallacea” originally refers to a zoogeographical area located between the ancient continents of Sundaland (the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and Bali) and Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) (Dickerson 1928). Wallacea includes Sulawesi, Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, Sumba, Timor, Halmahera, Buru, Seram, and many smaller islands of eastern Indonesia and independent Timor-Leste (Map 1). What characterises this region is its diverse biota drawn from both the Southeast Asian and Australian areas. This volume uses the term Wallacea to refer to a linguistic area (Schapper 2015). In linguistic terms as in biogeography, Wallacea constitutes a transition zone, a region in which we observe the progression attenuation of the Southeast Asian linguistic type to that of a Melanesian linguistic type (Gil 2015). Centred further to the east than Biological Wallacea, Linguistic Wallacea takes in the Papuan and Austronesian languages in the region of eastern Nusantara including the Minor Sundic Islands east of Lombok, Timor-Leste, Maluku, the Bird’s Head and Neck of New Guinea, and Cenderawasih Bay (Map 2). Map 1. Biological Wallacea Map 2. Linguistic Wallacea 1 My editing and research for this issue has been supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research VENI project “The evolution of the lexicon. Explorations in lexical stability, semantic shift and borrowing in a Papuan language family” and by the Volkswagen Stiftung DoBeS project “Aru languages documentation”. Many thanks to Asako Shiohara and Yanti for giving me the opportunity to work with them on editing this NUSA special issue.
    [Show full text]
  • AN ANALYSIS of the VITALITY of the WELSH LANGUAGE Daniel M
    VOLUME 9 | SPRING 2020 AN ANALYSIS OF THE VITALITY OF THE WELSH LANGUAGE Daniel M. Packer & Romain Rivaux Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters Abstract and English, and the becoming of English as the global language are threatening the vitality of Welsh. This paper discusses the vitality of the Welsh language. English is one major causation for the reduction of Welsh Literature Review speakers in Wales over the past two centuries. Welsh Phonemic Mutation and Syntax Analyses phonetic mutation, which is a cross-linguistic irregularity, has become undesirable, and is thus becoming a linguistic An analysis of the linguistics of the Welsh language feature of the past. Metatypy between English and substantiates the claim that cross-linguistic irregularities Welsh has begun to influence the morphosyntactic and are affecting the vitality. A brief insight into two phonemic features of Welsh. In an effort to revitalize irregularities, which can be credited with playing a role in Welsh, the Welsh government implemented a new the diminishing vitality of Welsh, shows that consonant language policy and plan (LPP) titled “Cymraeg 2050.” mutations and verb topicalization are linguistic features A proposed differential equation model could be used that deviate from English in such a way that society to forecast the success of Cymraeg 2050 by assuming appears to be rendered demotivated with respect to Welsh different social-status values for English and Welsh. language acquisition. Finally, the nine factors developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Cross-linguistically within the Celtic languages, (UNESCO) and the four factors of the Language consonant mutation is regular, but with respect to Endangerment Index (LEI) are calculated to determine English, consonant mutation is an irregularity.
    [Show full text]
  • A History of Metatypy in the Bel Languages
    A HISTORY OF METATYPY IN THE BEL LANGUAGES Malcolm Ross The Australian National University 1. Introduction The title of this paper invites two definitions: of ‘metatypy’ and of ‘Bel languages’. Metatypy, as its etymology suggests, denotes a change in (morphosyntactic) type which occurs when speakers are bilingual and restructure the morphosyntactic constructions of one of their languages on the model of constructions from their other language (Ross 2006, 2007a). The Bel languages are a small eight-member group of Oceanic Austronesian languages. Figure 1 shows a Bel genealogy, based on shared phonological and morphological innovations which are very unlikely to have been transmitted by contact (Ross 2007b). One of the Bel languages is Takia, which I have described in various publications, principally Ross (1994) and Ross (2002). The Bel family is part of a larger Oceanic group, the Ngero-Vitiaz network, and the map in Figure 2 shows the locations both of the Bel languages and of other Ngero-Vitiaz languages referred to in this paper (Ross 1988:160-183). The case study of contact-induced change which is briefly described here has arisen out of one of the central concerns of my work, reconstructing the history of Austronesian and Papuan languages. In previous work I have compared Takia with its Karkar Island neighbour, Waskia, a member of the Madang subfamily of the Trans New Guinea family of Papuan languages,1 to show that much of the grammar of Takia can be explained as the outcome of metatypy on the model of a Madang language (Ross 1987, 1996, 2003, 2007a).
    [Show full text]
  • Language Complexity and Interlinguistic Difficulty
    Language complexity and interlinguistic difficulty Eva Lindström Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University [email protected] Abstract This paper explores the related but distinct issues of linguistic complexity and difficulty, as from the viewpoint of an adult learner. Language complexity is seen as an objective property of a system, which could in principle be computed mathematically, while difficulty is grounded in the particular person who experiences the difficulty, involving factors such as the linguistic categories present and the nature of their marking in the learner’s own language. This reasoning will be illustrated with one non- Austronesian language, Kuot, and its three Austronesian neighbours, Nalik, Notsi and Madak, of north-central New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. 1. Background Kuot is spoken in the linguistically most diverse region on earth: the country of Papua New Guinea has 5 million inhabitants and around 800 languages. In the islands and on the coast of the main island of New Guinea there are over 100 languages belonging to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family, a relative new-comer to the region at about 3,500 years ago. Remaining languages are subsumed under the label “Papuan”, which, however, is a negatively defined category, implying only that these languages are non-Austronesian and spoken in this region. They dominate in the interior of New Guinea, and around 25 such languages are scattered across northern Island Melanesia. They are assumed, in the main, to derive from languages spoken by the first settlers of the region who arrived more than 40,000 years ago (and presumably in some subsequent waves; Spriggs, 1997).
    [Show full text]
  • The Internal History of the Alor-Pantar Language Family Gary Holton & Laura C
    Chapter 2 The internal history of the Alor-Pantar language family Gary Holton & Laura C. Robinson This chapter demonstrates that the languages of Alor and Pantar share acommon origin by applying the comparative method to primary lexical data from twelve languages sampled across the islands of the Alor-Pantar archipelago. More than one hundred proto-Alor-Pantar lexical items are reconstructed. An internal sub- grouping based on shared phonological innovations is proposed and is compared to that derived using computational phylogenetic methods. It is argued that the Alor-Pantar group originally came from the region of the Pantar Strait. 1 Introduction In this chapter we review the reconstruction of proto-Alor-Pantar (pAP) based on the comparative method. We then examine the internal relationships of the Alor-Pantar family and discuss several approaches to subgrouping. In the liter- ature, the Alor-Pantar languages are usually considered to belong to the larger Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) group, which includes the Papuan languages of neigh- boring Timor and Kisar. The Alor-Pantar languages form a well-defined sub- group within TAP and share a common history independent of the Timor lan- guages. The relationship between Alor-Pantar and the Timor languages is dis- cussed in the following chapter; the wider historical relationships with languages beyond Timor-Alor-Pantar are discussed in chapter 4. The AP languages form one of only two large pockets of non-Austronesian lan- guages in East Nusantara outside New Guinea (the other being North Halmahera, to which AP languages are not related—see chapter 4). In contrast to neighbor- ing Timor, all but one of the two dozen or so indigenous languages of the Alor- Holton, Gary & Laura C.
    [Show full text]
  • Omission of Object Verbal Markers in Amele: Difference in Data Between Haia and Huar Dialects
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Prometheus-Academic Collections Omission of object verbal markers in Amele: Difference in data between Haia and Huar dialects Masahiko NOSE (Shiga University) [email protected] 1. Introduction Amele is a Trans-New Guinea language, spoken in the suburban area of Madang, Papua New Guinea. Amele consists of four dialects, Haia (the most prestigious); Amele; Huar; and Jagahala (Figure 1). This study concerns the grammatical differences between the Haia and Huar dialects of Amele. Previously, Roberts (1987) described the grammar of Amele, mainly based on the Haia dialect. The author visited an Amele village named Sein1, where the Huar Figure 1. Amele speaking area dialect is spoken, and began fieldwork in 2006. The author found that the grammar of Huar differs slightly from the Haia dialect. These phonological and morphological differences have been previously noted by Roberts (1987:10) and Capell (1969:103). However, these differences are not described in detail, and moreover, the area in which Amele is spoken is not large (approximately within an area of 20–30 km), and its speakers are a few (5300 speakers, according to SIL (1987)2). This study examines structures in the Haia and Huar dialects and summarizes the resulting data. Section 2 outlines the basic structures of Amele, and section 3 discusses the sentence examples (in particular, transitive sentences) of the two dialects. In section 4, this study tries to explain their differences. Section 5 is the conclusion. 2. Basic overview of Amele This section introduces the basic grammatical structure of Amele.
    [Show full text]
  • Baring the Bones: the Lexico-Semantic Association of Bone with Strength In
    Linguistic Typology 2021; aop Antoinette Schapper* Baring the bones: the lexico-semantic association of bone with strength in Melanesia and the study of colexification https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2021-2082 Received March 22, 2021; accepted March 3, 2021; published online July 27, 2021 Abstract: In this article I demonstrate that there is a pervasive lexico-semantic association BONES ARE STRENGTH in the languages of Melanesia, but that its linguistic expression is highly varied; languages are scattered along a lexical-to-clausal cline in their expression of the association between bone and strength, with a large number of language-specific idioms based on the association to be observed in Melanesia. I argue that the striking areality of this lexico-semantic association is readily missed in top-down approaches to lexical semantic typology that rely, for instance, on databases of word lists, or on narrow search domains limited to the meanings of simplex lexemes. Keywords: colexification; comparability of languages; Melanesian linguistic area 1 Introduction Over the last 60 years or more, typologists have made great strides in understanding the diversity and uniformity of the world’s languages. For many variables within the This paper was written up under the auspices of a Brill Fellowship at the Scalinger Institute of the Leiden University Library. Research funding came from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research VENI project “The evolution of the lexicon. Explorations in lexical stability, semantic shift and borrowing in a Papuan language family”, the Volkswagen Stiftung DoBeS project “Aru languages documentation”, the INALCO-funded projet scientifique blanc “Merging meanings in Melanesia”, the Australian Research Council project (ARC, DP180100893) “Waves of words”, and the European Research Council “OUTOFPAPUA” project (grant agreement no.
    [Show full text]
  • Retained Inflectional Morphology in Pidgins: 1 a Typological Study
    Retained inflectional morphology in pidgins: 1 A typological study Sarah J. Roberts and Joan Bresnan Stanford University 1. Introduction One oft-cited characteristic of pidgins is a lack of inflectional morphology. According to Romaine (1988:24), the process of language reduction which underlies pidginization strips everything from the lexifying language “but the bare essentials necessary for communication,” eliminating redundant and non-essential categories such as grammatical gender and agreement, while employing word order conventions to express syntactic relations. As Holm (2000:127) notes, some have even claimed that pidgins and creoles are “languages without any inflectional morphology whatsoever.” Most specialists rightly reject such a sweeping and inaccurate generalization, but pidgin and creole inflections are still generally treated as isolated exceptions to general patterns of language reduction. Some regard them as the residue that sneaked past the restructuring process of pidginization because of idiosyncratic factors (McWhorter 2005:64), while others view their existence in creoles as evidence against the view that creole genesis involves the kind of “break in transmission” that occurs in pidginization (see DeGraff 2001:232, 2003:399 with respect to Haitian Creole French). As it turns out, inflections are not uncommon at all in pidgins. In an earlier study on pidgin morphology, Bakker (2003) found that pidgins have even richer inflection than creoles though much of this may be due to the fact that most creoles are lexified by European languages. About half the pidgins surveyed in that paper have some form of inflectional morphology. But the following generalization does hold for all pidgins (as well as creoles): No pidgin has more inflectional morphology than its respective lexifier(s), and most (if not all) pidgins have comparatively fewer inflections.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Inclusory Pronouns in Mande: the Emergence of a Typological Rarum
    Inclusory pronouns in Mande: The emergence of a typological rarum Maria Khachaturyan Folia Linguistica 2019; 53(1): 87–123 https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2019-2005 NB: this is a pre-review version, please contact the author for the final version Abstract This paper reviews inclusory constructions and pronouns in the Mande language family and proposes a diachronic account of their development. Inclusory constructions, which are found in several Mande languages, are a type of conjunction strategy where the whole set of participants – the superset – and a subset of participants are expressed, as in Dan-Gwetaa yāā Gbȁtȍ ‘Gbato and I’, lit. ‘we Gbato’. In a number of Southern and Southwestern Mande languages, inclusory constructions are typologically unique, as they feature a separate series of inclusory pronouns, which are used exclusively in this construction. The paper argues that these inclusory pronouns are a Southwestern Mande innovation, which spread to other Mande languages through contact. Keywords: coordination, comitative, inclusory construction, language contact, typological rara 1. Introduction The inclusory construction, or IC (Lichtenberk 2000, Haspelmath 2004:25-26), is a type of conjunction strategy, along with coordinative and comitative constructions. The crucial property of an IC is that one of its constituents has the same reference as the entire construction. This constituent, the superset, is typically an inclusory pronominal, IP, as in (1) from Dan-Gweetaa. (1) Dan-Gweetaa, Mande (Vydrin 2010:165) [yāā Gbȁtȍ] yá nū. we P.N. we.AUX come ‘Gbato and I, we have come (lit.: we [including] Gbato, we have come)’. 1 The example above contains an inclusory construction yāā Gbȁtȍ, where Gbȁtȍ is a proper name and yāā ‘we’ is an inclusory pronoun.
    [Show full text]
  • A History of Metatypy in the Bel Languages Malcolm Ross the Australian National University [email protected]
    Draft paper for the Symposium Language Contact and the Dynamics of Language: Theory and Implications, Leipzig, 10-13 May 2007 A history of metatypy in the Bel languages Malcolm Ross The Australian National University [email protected] April 30, 2007 1 Introduction The title of this paper invites two definitions: of ‘metatypy’ and of ‘Bel languages’. Metatypy, as its etymology suggests, denotes a change in (morphosyntactic) type which occurs when speakers are bilingual and restructure the morphosyntactic constructions of one of their languages on the model of constructions from their other language (Ross 2006, 2007a). The Bel languages are a small eight-member group of Oceanic Austronesian languages. Figure 1 shows a Bel genealogy, based on shared phonological and morphological innovations which are very unlikely to have been transmitted by contact (Ross 2007b). One of the Bel languages is Takia, which I have described in various publications, principally Ross (1994) and Ross (2002). The Bel family is part of a larger Oceanic group, the Ngero-Vitiaz network, and the map in Figure 2 shows the locations both of the Bel languages and of other Ngero-Vitiaz languages referred to in this paper. The case study of contact-induced change which is briefly described here has arisen out of one of the central concerns of my work, reconstructing the history of Austronesian and Papuan languages. In previous work I have compared Takia with its Karkar Island neighbour, Waskia, a member of the Madang subfamily of the Trans New Guinea family of Papuan languages,1 to show that much of the grammar of Takia can be explained as the outcome of metatypy on the model of a Madang language (Ross 1987, 1996, 2003, 2007a).
    [Show full text]
  • Tai Kadai Languages of India: a Probe Into the Seventh Language Family
    Tai Kadai languages of India: A probe into the Seventh Language Family Anvita Abbi Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi India is represented by six language families, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman in the mainland India and two, Asutronesian, (the Angan group, i.e. Jarawa- Onge) (Blevins 2008) and Great Andamanese (Abbi 2006, 2008) in the Andaman Islands. Each of these language families is historically and typologically distinct from each other. The Northeast of India is marked by intense linguistic diversity and functional multilingualism as it houses speakers from the Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer languages. In addition, there are endangered languages of the Tai Kadai group such as Khamyang, Phake, Turung, Aiton, Nora-an extinct language, and nearly extinct language Tai- Ahom. The linguistic structures of the languages belonging to the Tai Kadai are very distinct from those of the Tibeto-Burman, although contact with Burmese and Indo-Aryan language such as Assamese cannot be ruled out. The current paper draws out attention to the distinctive features of the Tai-Kadai group of languages spoken in India as well as those which are the result of areal pressures. Some of the typologically distinct markers for the Tai languages seem to be contour tone system, isolating morphology, SVO word order (Das 2014), lack of distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, presence of associative plurals, presence of enclitics, and words indicating tense, aspect, and mood attached at the end of the verb phrase, i.e. adjunct to the complements. This presentation is an attempt to draw examples from various Tai Kadai languages but particularly from Tai Khamti and Tai Ahom languages to present a case for a distinct language family from the rest of the six language families of India both genealogically and typologically.
    [Show full text]