Multilingualism

ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Studia Linguistica Upsaliensia 8 1 2 Multilingualism Proceedings of the 23rd Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics Uppsala University 1 – 3 October 2008 Edited by Anju Saxena & Åke Viberg ACTA UNIVERSITATS UPSALIENSIS UPPSALA 2009 3 © The authors 2009 Grafisk bearbetning: Textgruppen i Uppsala AB Tryck: Edita Västra Aros, Västerås 2009 ISBN 978-91-554-7594-9 ISSN 1652-1366 Electronical version available at: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-110287 Contents General Dorothee Beermann and Pavel Mihaylov TypeCraft – Glossing and databasing for linguists . 11 Karl Erland Gadelii Fusional verb morphology . 22 Elena Gorishneva ONE: Between numeral, indefinite marker and intensifier . 37 Lutz Gunkel & Susan Schlotthauer Attribution in Basque, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish: Morphology vs. Syntax . 51 Shinji Ido An analysis of the formation of the Tajik vowel system . 65 Leonid Kulikov Valency-changing categories in Indo-Aryan and Indo-European: A diachronic typological portrait of Vedic Sanskrit . 75 Anju Saxena, Beáta Megyesi, Éva Csató Johanson & Bengt Dahlqvist Using parallel corpora in teaching & research: The Swedish-Hindi-English & Swedish-Turkish-English parallel corpora . 93 Luying Wang On the Grammaticalization of Mandarin aspect markers . 102 Torbjörn Westerlund The basic case marking of Ngarla, a language of Western Australia . 115 Toshiko Yamaguchi The causative/ inchoative alternation in Icelandic . 127 Multilingualism Elena Buja Sociolinguistic aspects of bilingualism among the Moldovan students studying in Romania . 143 Angela Falk Narrative patterns in monolingual and bilingual life-history conversations . 159 Makiko Fukuda Castilian or Catalan? Linguistic survival strategies of Japanese residents in Catalonia, Spain . 170 Christine Johansson and Christer Geisler The Uppsala Learner English Corpus: A new corpus of Swedish high school students’ writing . 181 5 Indira Y. Junghare Syntactic convergence: Marathi and Dravidian . 191 Katri Karjalainen Using communication strategies to gain fluency, accuracy and complexity in L2 . 200 Sanita Lazdia & Heiko F. Marten The “Linguistic Landscape” method as a tool in research and education of multilingualism: Experiences from a Project in the Baltic States . 212 Harry Lönnroth The multilingual history of an industrial society. The case of Tampere, Finland . 226 Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov Linguistic assimilation and the weakening of ethnic identities in Dagestan . 239 Theodore Markopoulos Medieval Mediterranean as a multilingual area: the Greek perspective . 245 Elena Nikishina Language use in Moscow schools with an ethno-cultural component (based on schools with the Armenian and the Azeri ethno-cultural component) . 258 Stefano Rastelli Lexical Aspect too is learned: data from Italian Learner Corpora . 272 Paula Rossi Language changes and language contacts in a 19th century Maritime College and Commercial College . 283 Misuzu Shimotori Conceptual contrast of dimensional adjectives in Japanese and Swedish: Exploring the mental lexicon by word-association test . 296 Bettina Zeisler Mainstream linguistics for minor(ity) languages? Or: What is it like to speak Ladakhi? . 305 Workshop on Readability and Multilingualism Sofie Johansson Kokkinakis Workshop on Readability and Multilingualism . 323 6 Foreword The 23rd Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (SCL 23) was held at Uppsala University 1–3 October 2008 on behalf of the Nordic Association of Linguists (http://cc.joensuu.fi/linguistics/nal/). The theme of the conference was Multilingualism, which was intended to sub- sume cross-linguistic typological studies, linguistic variation and language change in contact situations as well as studies relating to bilingualism and to second and foreign language learning. In addition, presentations from other areas of linguistics were welcome. The conference featured plenary lectures by two invited speakers: Michael Noonan (University of Wisconsin) What do we mean by the genetic relatedness of languages? Anna Siewierska (Lancaster University) The impersonal-to-passive highway: an instance of bidirectional change In addition to the general sessions, the conference included four workshops: • Language Documentation and Language Description (Conveners: Éva Csató Johanson, Anju Saxena & Åke Viberg) • Language Change in Bilingual Communities. Focus on the Post-Soviet Coun- tries and their Immigrant Communities Elsewhere (Conveners: Nino Amaridze, Anne Tamm, Manana Topadze, Inge Zwitserlood) • New voices – New visions, Swedish Minority Language Policies in Transition (Convener: Leena Huss) • Readability and Multilingualism (Convener: Sofie Johansson Kokkinakis) The workshop entitled Workshop on language documentation and description of lesser-known languages started as a pre-conference workshop 30 September. This volume includes studies covering a wide spectrum of approaches to linguistics. For the sake of simplicity, the papers from the general sessions have been divided into two sections. A general section and a section called multilingualism which includes both studies concerned with multilingualism as a social and political phenomenon as well as studies concerned with bilingualism and second language acquisition from a developmental perspective. Several of the contributions to the general section are concerned with language typology and areal linguistics which are closely related to the general theme of multilingualism. The volume ends with a special section devoted to one of the workshops: Readability and Multilingualism. 7 In February this year, we were reached by the news of the unexpected death of our colleague and friend Michael Noonan. Mickey will be remembered for his wide-ranging interests in all things linguistic, for his great sense of humour and for being such an eminently likeable person. We miss him deeply. Uppsala in September 2009 Anju Saxena & Åke Viberg 8 General 9 10 TypeCraft – Glossing and Databasing for Linguists Dorothee Beermann and Pavel Mihaylov Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway Ontotext Lab, Sirma Group, Sofia, Bulgaria 1 Introduction In a manuscript from 1987, William Labov questions the relation between quantitative and qualitative methods in linguistics: “…, the number, variety and complexity of linguistic relations are very great, and it is not likely that a large proportion can be investigated by quantitative means. At present, we do not know the correct balance between the two modes of analysis: how far we can go with unsupported qualitative analysis based on introspection, before the proposals must be confirmed by quantitative studies based on observa- tion and experiment.” William Labov 1987 In this paper we will address Labov’s question indirectly by looking at the role that interlinear glossed text plays in linguistic publications. We then will intro- duce an online ‘glosser’ and knowledge sharing tool called TypeCraft, which al- lows to generate, preserve and distribute linguistic data in a neat way. In a short online article on ‘Description in Linguistic Theory’ Magnus (1995) states that surface grammar is not a thing, but a methodology. Here we will argue that symbolic rewriting, and, as such, interlinear glossing, leads to a representation that we (at least on one interpretation of the term) can call a surface grammar. Glossing, as it is used today, however, needs to change drastically to generate what one truly can call a linguistic representation.1 One reason is that standardization is still at its beginning, 2 more fundamentally, however, it is simply unclear what it really would mean for the individual researcher to represent linguistic material in such a way that it serves not only in his own research, but equally is usable as an independent resource for linguists in general. 1 See also Lehmann (1999) for a similar view. 2 But for work towards standardization within a typological context, see for example work in Canonical Typology by Corbett and The Surrey Morphological Group (http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/). 11 In this paper we will to focus on the role of glossing in the publication of linguistic research. We will discuss ways in which linguists can generate and ad- minister their own linguistic resources as part of a collaborative effort which has the goal to make multi-lingual in-depth annotated text-based natural language examples public. 2 Background Information The role that digital tools play in all fields of modern linguistics can not be un- derestimated. This is partially due to the success of computational linguistics. Crucially however this reflects developments in IT and in particular the success of the World Wide Web which has created new standards also for linguistic research. Through the INTERNET our perception of ‘data’ and publication of linguistic results has changed drastically only in a matter of a few years. Yet, the situation Labov described in 1987 still captures the situation within de- scriptive and theoretical linguistics, since also today little agreement has been reached about the role that empirical data should play in research. Although several multi-lingual databases3 are open for linguistic research, it is often not easy to find a way to access data relevant to ones own research. This might be because it proves to be too costly to find the data that represents the paradigms that one is interested in, or data access requires a person experienced in the use of online databases. Not surprisingly so, linguistic examples

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