Negation in Low Katu

In Low Katu (or Western Katu; ISO 639-3: kuf) there are five common words used to mark negation: kah, məʔ, jɨəʔ, ˀɛh and ˀɔːʔ. This variety in negators hints at differential syntactic or semantic uses. In this paper I illustrate the syntactic properties of these negators and, where possible, describe what semantic or pragmatic backgrounds they might have. I do this by comparing negative sentences from Katu folk tales and stories and investigating how they behave with respect to the typology of negation. Understanding the negation of Low Katu can unveil aspects on the scarcely researched syntactic behavior of this language, for instance on the position of verbs. This paper is intended to be the groundwork for further, more corpus-based research on negation or other grammatical aspects of Low Katu

Historical Ethnolinguistic Notes on Proto-Austroasiatic and Proto-Vietic Vocabulary in Vietnamese

This study provides updated numbers of and historical ethnolinguistic observations on Austroasiatic and Vietic etyma in Vietnamese. Lexical data from two dozen Vietic lects were assembled, half from the Mon-Khmer Etymological Database (MKED hereafter) and half from various other published and unpublished sources. Based on Ferlus’s preliminary reconstructions of Proto-Vietic (by Ferlus 2007 in the MKED), and data from Austroasiatic, Proto-Tai, and Old and Middle Chinese, approximately 800 items have been evaluated as viable reconstructions. However, of these, nearly 100 are Chinese loanwords of differing periods, and several are early Tai loanwords. The remaining nearly 700 items are native, including about 200 Proto-Austroasiatic etyma, with a few dozen local Austroasiatic words, and over 460 items specific to Vietic. Statistics have been gathered for cultural domains of the reconstructed vocabulary. A combination of etymological sources, semantic domains, and ethnohistorical data (i.e. archaeology, historical texts, and ethnographic information) allow for hypotheses about the ethnolinguistic circumstances of the early Vietic speech community and language contact situations. Many of the cultural domains are readily identified as part of a Neolithic lifestyle (i.e. words related to the natural environment, generic actions, etc.). Some, on the other hand, demonstrate social stratification (e.g. words related to economic practices) and developed agricultural practices (e.g. a large set of terms related to rice production). Others shed light on regional spread of cultural practices (e.g. betel-nut chewing and tooth-blackening) and intergroup contact (e.g. with Sinitic and Tai). Questions related to the spread of metallurgy and metal implements strongly support the influence of Chinese in metal terms and implements

The Biolinguistic Instantiation: Form to Meaning in Brain/Syllable Interactions

We propose, in this chapter, a language model anchored in the relation between immanence and manifestation based on points of view. Within this realm, the biolinguistic instantiation implies both biosemiotic Interpretability and evolutionary symbolism. Furthermore, being one of the five points of views (representation, analysis, catalysis, instantiation, and formantization), it is the principled topology of the thematic/schematic relation between structure and world. We exemplify in this case, the empirical background of syllables and consonant clusters (phonesthemes). From our findings, we seek hypothetically to investigate the instantiation of dual stream dynamics (dorsal/ventral) as the projection (internal structure) of symbolic rules we have observed on the external structure: mirror/deletion and buckling models of onset/codas, on the one hand, and agentive features such as [+/− source], on the other hand; these rules are supposed to form lexicon’s storage and computation. Our heuristic basis will be the relevance of the mirror neuron system for both dual stream model (HicKok/Poeppel) and frame/content theory (McNeilage). Emphasis will be put on universal/typological implications of instantiation in Berber and English

New Advances in Formosan Linguistics

The present volume is a festschrift in honour of Lillian M. Huang, who, in a very few years, became a leading figure in Formosan linguistics after she obtained her PhD degree in 1987. Over the past twenty-eight years, she has been involved in important groundwork, in both academia and indigenous language policies in Taiwan, as we will show below (sections 3 and 4). She has been engaged in the development of both through her pre-eminent role in projects relating to typological studies on Formosan languages in the early 1990s, and on language teaching materials and proficiency tests since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Lillian may retire in a few years. Before she does, we thought it would be most appropriate to honour her by putting together papers by a number of scholars and students who have benefitted from or have been in contact with her in one way or another (e.g. through collaborative work, teaching, supervising, advising etc.). The idea of such a volume was conceived by Elizabeth Zeitoun in the autumn of 2009. Further plans were initially worked out with Stacy F. Teng, soon joined by Joy J. Wu. The three editors have been close to Lillian since the early and mid 1990s. Of the three, Zeitoun, who has been working with her on diverse projects for over twenty years, is her closest collaborator on the academic level. Both Wu and Teng were Lillian’s MA supervisees. Through her fieldwork courses, she introduced Wu to Amis and Teng to Puyuma, languages on which they are still working. The title of the present volume, New advances in Formosan linguistics, reflects our pursuit of publishing cutting-edge, provocative, and thoughtful papers that explore new directions and perspectives on Formosan languages and linguistics. It is worth noticing that this is the first collected volume on Formosan languages that has not issued from a workshop or a conference—the papers included in this volume are thus varied in terms of topic coverage—and the first that specifically deals with (and covers nearly all) the Formosan languages, a grouping understood in its broader context, that is, including Yami, a Batanic (Philippine) language spoken on Orchid Island under the political jurisdiction of Taiwan. (Note: first three paragraphs of foreward)