Language revitalization and engagements in the Amazon : The case of Apurinã

Peer reviewe

Language contact and language change in the Sepik Region of New Guinea: the case of Yalaku

Yalaku is one of the smallest members of the Ndu language family of the Sepik region of New Guinea. Spoken in a hilly area off the Sepik river, Yalaku has been in intensive contact with the unrelated Kwoma for several generations. Comparison between Yalaku and closely related Manambu shows the presence of a number of grammatical patterns borrowed from Kwoma, alongside a number of loanwords. Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea, is known to every speaker of Yalaku, with the two languages in a diglossic relationship. Lexical loans from Tok Pisin are avoided; however, Tok Pisin impact is being felt in the pronunciation patterns by younger speakers, calques, and the presence of two borrowed grammatical forms—the possessive verb and the negator. Cultural and linguistic factors suggest an explanation for this seemingly curious development

Between A

The Yanesha are a Peruvian population who inhabit an environment transitional between the Andes and Amazonia. They present cultural traits characteristic of both regions, including in the language they speak: Yanesha belongs to the Arawak language family (which very likely originated in the Amazon/Orinoco lowlands), but has been strongly influenced by Quechua, the most widespread language family of the Andes. Given their location and cultural make-up, the Yanesha make for an ideal case study for investigating language and population dynamics across the Andes-Amazonia divide. In this study, we analyze data from high and mid-altitude Yanesha villages, both Y chromosome (17 STRs and 16 SNPs diagnostic for assigning haplogroups) and mtDNA data (control region sequences and 3 SNPs and one INDEL diagnostic for assigning haplogroups). We uncover sex-biased genetic trends that probably arose in different stages: first, a male-biased gene flow from Andean regions, genetically consistent with highland Quechua-speakers and probably dating back to Inca expansion; and second, traces of European contact consistent with Y chromosome lineages from Italy and Tyrol, in line with historically documented migrations. Most research in the history, archaeology and linguistics of South America has long been characterized by perceptions of a sharp divide between the Andes and Amazonia; our results serve as a clear case-study confirming demographic flows across that ‘divide’

Linguistic Information in Word Embeddings

International audienceWe study the presence of linguistically motivated information in the word embeddings generated with statistical methods. The nominal aspects of uter/neuter, common/proper, and count/mass in Swedish are selected to represent respectively grammatical, semantic, and mixed types of nominal categories within languages. Our results indicate that typical grammatical and semantic features are easily captured by word embeddings. The classification of semantic features required significantly less neurons than grammatical features in our experiments based on a single layer feed-forward neural network. However, semantic features also generated higher entropy in the classification output despite its high accuracy. Furthermore, the count/mass distinction resulted in difficulties to the model, even though the quantity of neurons was almost tuned to its maximum

The Evolution of Parliamentary Debates in Light of the Evolution of Evidentials: Al Parecer and Por lo Visto in 40 Years of Parliamentary Proceedings from Spain

Previous works [like Cornillie (Epistemic modality and evidentiality in Spanish (semi)auxiliaries. A cognitive-functional approach, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2007)] suggest that Spanish political discourse could be studied on the basis of the description of the different evidential and modal types. The present study extends this synchronic hypothesis and addresses the evolution of the Spanish evidential discourse markers *al parecer* and *por lo visto* in a specific political genre, namely parliamentary debates, to shed some light on the evolution of parliamentary debate itself. To do so, a corpus analysis has been carried out of Spanish parliament debates from the last 39 years (1979–2018). The results show how the use of evidential markers has decreased and the pragmatic functions attached to these markers have progressively specialised in expressing negative/criticism pragmatic functions. The decrease in frequency and their specialisation in criticisms are presented, among other factors, as consequences of the evolution of parliamentary debates in Spain.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Gobierno de Españ

The Distribution of two Indefinite Articles: The Case of Uzbek

von Heusinger K, Klein U. The Distribution of two Indefinite Articles: The Case of Uzbek. In: Ebert C, Hinterwimmer S, eds. Different kinds of specificity across languages. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy. Vol 92. Dordrecht: Springer; 2013: 155-176