Evidentiality in Uzbek and Kazakh

The purpose of this work is to describe and account for the broad range of phenomena referred to as “evidentiality” in two Turkic languages: Uzbek and Kazakh. Much previous work on the Turkic languages treats evidentiality as a distinct verbal category. However, morphemes that express evidential meaning also often express other meanings such as dubitativity and admirativity, or may even express rhetorical questions. This work follows Friedman (1978; 1981; 1988) and others in considering these meanings to be the result of an evidential-like strategy: the expression of non-confirmativity. In Uzbek and Kazakh, as well as in many other Eurasian languages, the past tense is the locus of evidential meaning. There are three items in the Uzbek and Kazakh past tense paradigm, and these differ in terms of markedness for confirmativity: one is marked as confirmative, one as non-confirmative, and one is unmarked for confirmativity. The unmarked item, often referred to as the perfect, exists in a copular form. As a copular form, it expresses marked non-confirmativity. When this copular form (in Uzbek: ekan, in Kazakh: eken) is employed to express non-confirmativity, this non-confirmativity is manifested either as non-firsthand information source or as admirativity. By employing the non-confirmative analysis, we are able to account for the broad range of phenomena considered “evidential” without resorting to postulating an evidential category. Rather, in Uzbek and Kazakh, evidential meaning is merely one effect of the expression of non-confirmativity, which is a subtype of the categories of status or modality. xv NOTES ON ORTHOGRAPHY AND PHONOLOGY For the purpose of readabil

A MT System from Turkmen to Turkish employing finite state and statistical methods

In this work, we present a MT system from Turkmen to Turkish. Our system exploits the similarity of the languages by using a modified version of direct translation method. However, the complex inflectional and derivational morphology of the Turkic languages necessitate special treatment for word-by-word translation model. We also employ morphology-aware multi-word processing and statistical disambiguation processes in our system. We believe that this approach is valid for most of the Turkic languages and the architecture implemented using FSTs can be easily extended to those languages

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

Aspects of Information Structure in Kazakh : the Dynamic Syntax Approach

The Kazakh language is an under-researched Turkic language spoken in the Central Asian state of Kazakhstan and some neighbouring countries. While the grammar of this language is fairly well described, its information structural characteristics have not been examined in detail in the literature to date. This thesis aims to start filling this research gap by providing detailed descriptions of: the relation between information structure and word order; topic markers; and a pragmatically significant particle. Original, contextualised language examples are used to reject previous limited and rigid understanding of the relation between information structure and word order in Kazakh. It is shown that the information structural configurations of a Kazakh sentence are far more diverse than had been assumed. This conclusion is not only a revelation in its own right, but can also serve as a foundation for further research on the information structure of Kazakh, and other under-researched Turkic languages. This thesis also provides the first detailed descriptions of the three Kazakh topic markers. Numerous examples of their uses are presented in order to demonstrate the differences in these markers’ distribution and meaning. Several grammaticalisation processes related to these topic markers are revealed; it is proposed that these processes are currently at different stages of progress. Pragmatically significant particle ğoj is examined in detail for the first time: its distribution and meaning are illustrated with contextualised examples from various sources. It is posited that there are two syntactically diverse variants of this item which do, however, share the same existential semantics. The theoretical framework of Dynamic Syntax is employed throughout the thesis to underpin the first formal analyses of the phenomena under discussion

UniMorph 4.0:Universal Morphology

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements made on several fronts over the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 67 new languages, including 30 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g. missing gender and macron information. We have also amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet