Europe: So Many Languages, So Many Cultures

The number of different languages in Europe by far exceeds the number of countries. All European countries have national languages, and in nearly all of them there are minority languages as well, whereas all major languages have dialects. National borders rarely coincide with linguistic borders, but the latter (including dialect borders) mark by their nature also more or less distinct cultural areas. This paper presents a survey of the different language families represented in Europe: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and the four Caucasian language families, each with their sub-branches and individual languages. Some information is given on characteristic structural phenomena and on the status and history of these languages or language families and on some of their extinct predecessors. The paper ends with a short discussion on the language policy and practices of the institutions of the European Union. Europe lacks a language with the status and power comparable to Indonesian in Indonesia. The policy is therefore based on equal status of all national languages and on respect for all languages, including national minority ones. The practice, however, is unavoidably practical: “the more languages, the more English”

The morphological and semantic classification of 'evidentials' and modal verbs in German : the perfect(ive) catalyst

This paper draws a link between the typological phenomenon of the paradigmatically supported evidentiality evoked by perfect and/or perfectivity and the equally epistemic system of modal verbs in German. The assumption is that, if perfect(ivity) is at the bottom of evidentiality in a wide number of unrelated languages, then it will not be an arbitrary fact that systematic epistemic readings occur also for the modal verbs in German, which were preterite presents originally. It will be demonstrated, for one, how exactly modal verbs in Modem German still betray sensitivity to perfect and perfective contexts, and, second, how perfect(ivity) is prone to evincing epistemic meaning. Although the expectation cannot be satisfied due to a lack of respective data from the older stages of German, a research path is sketched narrowing down the linguistic questions to be asked and dating results to be reached

For the annotation of Titlo Diacritic

The paper describes different levels of annotation used in the Corpus of Modern, Middle and Old Georgian Texts. Aiming at building a new, extensive and representative tool for Georgian language the Corpus was compiled under the financial support of the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation and the Ilia State University (AR/266/1-31/13). In particular, the Corpus of Georgian language is envisaged as collecting a substantial amount of data needed for research. The scope and representativeness of texts included as well as free accessibility to it makes the corpus one of the most necessary tools for the study of different texts in Modern, Middle and Old Georgian (see, http://corpora.iliauni.edu.ge/). The corpus consists of different kind of texts, mainly: a) Manuscript- based publications; b) Reprints; c) Previously unpublished manuscripts and; d) Previously published manuscripts and covers Modern, Middle and Old Georgian.The paper presents the research area, the design and structure and applications related to the compilation of the corpus, in particular, different levels of annotation as meta-data, structural mark-up and linguistic annotation at word-level, especially, from the viewpoint of Titlo Diacritic.This paper is structured as follows: Section 1 includes background and research questions; Section 2 presents a methodological approach and briefly summarizes its theoretical prerequisites; Section 3 includes the findings and hypothesis, which refers generally to the differences between the annotation of Modern and Old Georgian texts; and Section 4 presents the answers to the research questions

MA

thesisThe main premise of this thesis is that subject agreement morphology in Tuyuca can be isolated from the rest of the morphology. Subject agreement appears on evidentials, nominalizers, animate classifiers, gerunds, and verb stems requiring an auxiliary. This agreement is instantiated by a pervasive final vowel pattern that codes various values of gender, number, and person features. These final vowels also code the same information on nouns and pronouns. Before arguing for my analysis I provide some preliminary material on Tuyuca. Chapter 1 is a brief discussion of the sociolinguistic context of the language. Chapter 2 discusses issues relevant to Tuyuca data and surveys some of the literature related to Tuyuca; it also discusses some methodological concerns arising from the data and important to the thesis in general. Chapter 3 is a brief sketch of Tuyuca grammar important to agreement. Analysis is done in Chapters 4 and 5. In Chapter 4 I argue, in a descriptive-typological framework, that by isolating agreement a general deverbalizing function can be seen coded in the morpheme /-g-/. This morpheme has predictable interpretations in restricted morphosyntactic environments. It can be interpreted as a progressive or perfective aspect, an animate classifier, a gerund, and a nominalizer. In Chapter 5 I relate the general premise of isolating agreement in Tuyuca to theoretical issues belonging to the Minimalist Program. I show that isolating agreement morphemes from evidentials is, assuming the analysis in Chapter 4, straightforward. This has a practical advantage of making it easier to observe variation between present tense and past tense morphology of the evidentials. I take this as straightforward evidence that tense is fused with evidential. I also give evidence that supports the pro-drop status of Tuyuca, conjecturing that subject agreement is packaged with nominative case. I also argue informally that verbal inflection of tense-evidentials and subject agreement are "extensions" of the verb phrase and relate the predication of VP to some speech time and discourse situation of the verb event, relative to some specific world. This results in a model of functional hierarchy that places Evidential under Tense Phrase. I conjecture that this Evidential position is a predicational one, in contrast to the more accepted notions of Mood[evidential] or Modal[epistemic], which are known to be above Tense Phrase. I provide two detailed models, one with the conventional hierarchy and one with my hierarchy, arguing for the latter--based on general principles of syntactic economy and locality. I also provide a technical analysis of syntactic locality for the morphosyntactic fusion of tenseevidentials in a Distributed Morphology framework

Complement clauses and complementation systems: a cross-linguistic study of grammatical organization

The dissertation provides a cross-linguistic investigation into the grammatical structure of complement clauses and the organization of complementation systems. Based on a balanced sample of 100 widely dispersed languages, the major goals of the present work are to set the two landmark typological reference articles on complementation (Noonan 1985|2007, Dixon 2006) onto a broad empirical basis and to explore hitherto understudied phenomena in the constitution of complementation systems. In particular, the traditional focus on object complement clauses is shifted to complements in ‘subject’ function, and the dissertation is the first to analyse systematically the cross-linguistic productivity, morphosyntactic coding, syntagmatic arrangement and diachronic rise of complements in S- and A-function, as compared to their corresponding object clauses. On a methodological plane, it combines a multivariate approach to clause-linkage with recent statistical techniques of data mining (e.g. HCFA, cluster analyses, NeighborNet, MDS) in order to measure (dis)similarities in the cross-linguistic organization of complementation constructions. This comprises, for example, a precise gauging of the degree to which the internal structure of complements is ‘desententialized’ (Lehmann 1988) and made NP-like, of the ways in which this correlates with the possible external functions and positions of the complement in the main clause, and of the ways in which these distributional patterns in complementation systems reflect the historical origins and lexical diffusion of the relevant constructions. Above all, the dissertation problematizes the conceptual and terminological foundations for the typological study of complementation, which, despite decades of intensive research, remain challenging to establish in a cross-linguistically satisfactory way

Morpheme Boundaries and Structural Change: Affixes Running Amok

Diachronic morphosyntacticians of all theoretical persuasions agree that there is a tendency for more lexical linguistic material to develop more functional characteristics over time, a process generally known as grammaticalization. While most previous work on grammaticalization has been conducted in surface-oriented functionalist frameworks, this dissertation aims to illuminate the deeper structural properties of a sub-set of these phenomena, diachronic affixation, as well as its much rarer opposite, de-affixation, a phenomenon in which previously bound material becomes a syntactically independent form. This approach differs from previous generative approaches to this problem in utilising a non-lexicalist, piece-based, syntactic approach to morphology, Distributed Morphology (DM), according to which both words and phrases are built by the same generative system. Besides providing a schematic typology for the structural properties of affix-genesis and highlighting the theoretical advantage of DM, this dissertation has four main theoretical points. First, it makes explicit predictions about the locus of newly affixed material. Second, it argues, that affix-exodus is no less natural a change than affix-genesis. Third, it explores the similarities between affix-exodus and two other varieties of linguistic change: morphological re-cuttings and the disintegration of complex heads. Finally, it demonstrates that similar phenomena can also occur within a word. This is predicted by a theoretical framework with the properties of DM specified above. In addition to its specific contribution to work on diachronic morphosyntax, this dissertation has implications for morphology, morphosyntax, and historical linguistics more broadly, and argues that no additional diachronic-specific component is needed in the grammar

Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL)

The Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL) was founded in 2014 at Indiana University by Dr. Öner Özçelik, the residing director of the Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR). As the nation’s sole U.S. Department of Education funded Language Resource Center focusing on the languages of the Central Asian Region, CeLCAR’s main mission is to strengthen and improve the nation’s capacity for teaching and learning Central Asian languages through teacher training, research, materials development projects, and dissemination. As part of this mission, CeLCAR has an ultimate goal to unify and fortify the Central Asian language learning community by facilitating networking between linguists and language educators, encouraging research projects that will inform language instruction, and provide opportunities for professionals in the field to both showcase their work and receive feedback from their peers. Thus ConCALL was established to be the first international academic conference to bring together linguists and language educators in the languages of the Central Asian region, including both the Altaic and Eastern Indo-European languages spoken in the region, to focus on research into how these specific languages are represented formally, as well as acquired by second/foreign language learners, and also to present research driven teaching methods. Languages served by ConCALL include, but are not limited to: Azerbaijani, Dari, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Lokaabharan, Mari, Mongolian, Pamiri, Pashto, Persian, Russian, Shughnani, Tajiki, Tibetan, Tofalar, Tungusic, Turkish, Tuvan, Uyghur, Uzbek, Wakhi and more!The Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics held at Indiana University on 16-17 May 1014 was made possible through the generosity of our sponsors: Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR), Ostrom Grant Programs, IU's College of Arts and Humanities Center (CAHI), Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center (IAUNRC), IU's School of Global and International Studies (SGIS), IU's College of Arts and Sciences, Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies (SRIFIAS), IU's Department of Central Eurasian Studies (CEUS), and IU's Department of Linguistics