Sabbatical Report

The goal of my Spring 1996 sabbatical leave was to bring international content into the courses in the Parkland College Literature Program. I undertook the following projects: To design an international studies concentration for students in the Liberal Arts Program To review and read extensively in the literature of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East To develop a course in non-western world literature which would meet the nonwestern humanities requirement for the LAS degree To prepare bibliographic materials and identify world literature selections to use as supplementary texts in existing literature course

The Internet as a global speech community. Towards plurilingualisms and English Lingua Franca

Abstract - Languages have traditionally been associated with specific ethnic groups confined to defined geographical areas and sometimes to certain discourse contexts or domains of use (e.g. French for diplomacy). Increasingly, telecommunication and most recently internet has meant that languages are no longer tied to particular geographical territories but may be found in various non-territorial dimensions. This has created a fluid, constantly changing global speech community in which different languages co-exist and interact in myriad ways and to varying degrees depending on the speakers’ backgrounds. Within this complex scenario, not only does English become in effect translocal language (ELF; Lingua Francas; Plurilingualism; Global Language Networks; Translanguaging.Pennycook 2007, Blommaert 2010) but English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) variations gain in influence, very possibly replacing traditional native-speaker varieties as the international standard (Seidlhofer 2011, Christiansen 2015), they will increasingly reflect the plurilingual reality in which speakers typically have at their disposal a repertoire of different languages. English, we can predict, will thus become in itself a microcosm of the wider linguistic situation especially on media such as the internet. In this paper, we will look at how far internet is leading to greater plurilingualism on the part of individuals and at how far ELF variations are emerging to reflect the multifarious linguistic backgrounds of members of the internet-based global speech community. To do this, we will analyse data from a variety of recent sources, comprising both big data (Pimienta et al 2010; Ronen et al. 2014) and specific case studies from samples of different typologies of websites (e.g. railway companies)

The Internet as a Global Speech Community: Towards Plurilingualisms and English Lingua Franca

Languages have traditionally been associated with specific ethnic groups confined to defined geographical areas and sometimes to certain discourse contexts or domains of use (e.g. French for diplomacy). Increasingly, telecommunication and most recently internet has meant that languages are no longer tied to particular geographical territories but may be found in various non-territorial dimensions. This has created a fluid, constantly changing global speech community in which different languages co-exist and interact in myriad ways and to varying degrees depending on the speakers’ backgrounds. Within this complex scenario, not only does English become in effect translocal language (Pennycook 2007, Blommaert 2010) but English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) variations gain in influence, very possibly replacing traditional native-speaker varieties as the international standard (Seidlhofer 2011, Christiansen 2015). Thus, they will increasingly reflect the plurilingual reality in which speakers typically have at their disposal a repertoire of different languages. English, we can predict, will thus become in itself a microcosm of the wider linguistic situation especially on media such as the internet. In this paper, we will look at how far internet is leading to greater plurilingualism on the part of individuals and at how far ELF variations are emerging to reflect the multifarious linguistic backgrounds of members of the internet-based global speech community. To do this, we will analyse data from a variety of recent sources, comprising both big data (Pimienta et al 2010; Ronen et al. 2014) and specific case studies from samples of different typologies of websites (e.g. railway companies)

Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization.

Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as "Seshat: Global History Databank." We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history

Issues in Austronesian Historical Linguistics

This is a collection of five select articles on Austronesian historical linguistics from the 13-ICAL (International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics) in Taipei in 2015. The papers include "Mora, Vowel Length, and Diachrony: the Case of Arta, a Philippine Negrito Language" by Yukinori Kimoto, "Re-evaluating the Position of Iraya among Philippine Languages" by Lawrence A. Reid, "Reconstructing Proto Kenyah Pronouns and the Development of a True Five Number System" by Alexander D. Smith, "Linguistic Evidence for Prehistory: Oceanic Examples" by Malcolm Ross and "Classifying Old Rapa: Linguistic Evidence for Contact Networks in Southeast Polynesia" by Mary Walworth

Founder effect in tupian languages

Since Mayr (1954, 1963), it has been observed that territorial expansions may cause founder effects, reducing the genetic variability of the founder population. A similar effect has been reported within linguistic typology, as the phonemic inventory size of a language is reduced due to territorial dispersal of its speakers. Atkinson (2011) analyzes global present-day phoneme inventory size as a reflection of a serial found effect caused by human exodus out of Africa during the Paleolithic period: the further a language is from eastern-southern Africa, the smaller its phonemic inventory is. Recent studies have shown that this founder effect may interact with other factors such as population size and language contact and isolation. In the present study, we analyze the phonemic effects of the dispersal of Tupi-Guarani people. Taking the basins of Madeira and Guaporé rivers to be the birthplace of Proto-Tupi (RODRIGUES, 1964), we investigated whether physical distance from Madeira- Guaporé is related with phonemic clines within Tupi-Guarani languages located in the southwest region of South America. We also analyzed whether population size is a significant factor, but it did not interact with phonemic inventory size. A variance test, however, showed that languages in the Madeira-Guaporé region present, among themselves, more vocalic variation than southwest Tupi-Guarani languages. This result is compatible with a founder effect. Contrasting with Tupi languages spoken in Madeira-Guaporé, southwest Tupi-Guarani languages are quite harmonious with respect to vowels, presenting two symmetrical series of nasal and oral vowels. This result and the general discursion we present here converse with studies on reconstruction of Proto Tupian languages, and with investigations on the mental representation of vowels and consonants (NESPOR et al., 2003). If vowels are markers of structural relations, we predict that there is more structural cohesion (less parametric variation) among Southwest Tupi-Guarani than among Tupi languages at Madeira-Guaporé

Quantitative Historical Analysis Uncovers a Single Dimension of Complexity that Structures Global Variation in Human Social Organization

Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as “Seshat: Global History Databank.” We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history

Use It or Lose It!: Results of a Use Study of the Print Sources in an Academic Library reference collection.

Describes a use study of a reference collection, which found that 7.1 percent of total volumes in the reference collection were used over the course of the fall semester

Long-term barriers to economic development

What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world’s technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that the intergenerational transmission of human traits, particularly culturally trans- mitted traits, has led to divergence between populations over the course of history. In turn, this divergence has introduced barriers to the diffusion of technologies across societies. We provide measures of historical and genealogical distances between populations, and document how such distances, relative to the world’s technological frontier, act as barriers to the diffusion of devel- opment and of specific innovations. We provide an interpretation of these results in the context of an emerging literature seeking to understand variation in economic development as the result of factors rooted deep in history