Existence, location, possession, and copula in Malabar Indo-Portuguese

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.This paper offers a diachronic and a contact-based analysis of existential, locative, possessive, and copulative constructions in Malabar Indo-Portuguese creole (MIP). The existential, locative, and possessive predicates are all expressed with the copulative verb tæ, and nominal and property-denoting predicates can either have the copula tæ or zero copula. I analyze these copulative constructions by establishing their sources in the Portuguese lexifier and Malayalam substrate/adstrate. I show that although the Portuguese verbs ter ‘have’ and estar ‘be’ have paved the way to the semantics of tæ, Malayalam had a strong impact on the morphosyntax and semantics of existential, locative, possessive, and copulative constructions in MIP. This influence is most notable in the case of possessives, which take dative subjects. These findings are compared to the relevant structures in other South Asian languages and show that the existence of locative possession is a strong areal feature of South Asia. I also show that the variability of copula usage in nominal and property-denoting predicates can be explained by variable input from Portuguese and Malayalam copulative constructions. One of the most salient features influenced by Malayalam is the choice of what are etymologically Portuguese nouns instead of adjectives in property-denoting predicates.Peer Reviewe

O sistema verbal dos crioulos indo-portugueses do Malabar

Os crioulos indo-portugueses do Malabar, formados a partir do contacto linguístico entre os colonizadores portugueses e a população nativa da costa do Malabar no séc. XVI, limitam-se hoje em dia a um reduzido número de últimos falantes em Cananor. A presente dissertação visa contribuir para a sua descrição linguística, que até agora conta com a contribuição de Schuchardt (1882, 1883, 1889a, 1889b) e com as análises mais recentes provenientes do trabalho de campo feito por Hugo Cardoso a partir de 2006. Usando como base de dados o corpus oral proveniente do mesmo trabalho de campo e guardado no Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, o objetivo deste estudo é descrever o sistema verbal dos crioulos do Malabar (CM), caracterizando a sua morfologia verbal e a sintaxe do predicado. Como veremos, a morfossintaxe verbal é quase exclusivamente analítica, ou seja, a marcação pré-verbal ou pós-verbal leva os valores de tempo, modo e aspeto associados ao verbo. Além da descrição sincrónica, e adotando uma perspetiva comparativa, as estruturas gramaticais serão analisadas em comparação com o malaiala como língua de substrato/adstrato e com a sua etimologia portuguesa, com o objetivo de identificar a origem das formas e estruturas verbais. Será demonstrado que os CM convergiram em grande escala com o malaiala no que diz respeito a muitas funções gramaticais e à sua estrutura sintática (e.g. a ordem SOV).Abstract: The Indo-Portuguese creoles of the Malabar were formed in a situation of language contact between the Portuguese colonisers and the native community of the Malabar Coast in the 16th century; nowadays, they are limited to a few last speakers in Cannanore. This dissertation aims to contribute to their linguistic description, which until now has benefited from Schuchardt’s work (1882, 1883, 1889a, 1889b) and from recent fieldwork-based descriptions by Hugo Cardoso (since 2006). In this study, we will use the linguistic data from the oral corpus available from the latter fieldwork and kept at the Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa. Our goal is the description of the verbal system of the creoles of the Malabar (CM), which will amount to the characterisation of its verbal morphology and syntax of the predicate. As we shall see, the verbal morphosyntax is almost exclusively analytic, i.e., preverbal and postverbal markers carry temporal, modal and aspectual values associated with the verb. Besides the synchronic description, by adopting a comparative perspective, grammatical structures will be analysed in comparison with the Malayalam substrate/adstrate as well as with their Portuguese etymology, in order to understand the origin(s) of verbal forms and structures. It will be demonstrated that when it comes to grammatical functions and syntactic structure, the CM have converged with Malayalam on a large scale (e.g. in the SOV order)

Mapping Irreality: Storyboards for Eliciting TAM Contexts

In this paper we study temporal-modal distinctions in six Oceanic languages of Vanuatu. We carried out storyboard-based elicitations with several speakers per language to investigate the relation between tense and modality and the role of the realis/irrealis distinction. We found that this distinction plays an important role in all languages, but that some prioritise temporal over modal reference in certain contexts

Analysis of Traffic Indicators Related to University Campus – Case Study at the Faculty of Civil Engineering Rijeka

Prometno-prostorno planiranje je kontinuirani postupak kojeg je potrebno neprestano unaprjeđivati na temelju analize pokazatelja funkcioniranja sustava. Prema saznanju autora, prilikom planiranja prostora Kampusa Sveučilišta u Rijeci, a ni u vremenu korištenja, nisu detaljno analizirani prometni pokazatelji u svrhu osiguranja više razine pristupačnosti prostora te većeg zadovoljstva korisnika. U radu je prikazana analiza rezultata istraživanja provedenog u ožujku 2020. godine na Građevinskom fakultetu u Rijeci među studentima i zaposlenicima Fakulteta putem online ankete. Cilj istraživanja bio je utvrditi prometne navike ciljane skupine ispitanika vezanih uz njihova dnevna putovanja prema Kampusu. Uz opća obilježja ispitanika i osnovne prometne pokazatelje, kao što su stupanj motorizacije i učestalost korištenja javnog gradskog prijevoza, ispitanici su odgovarali i na specifična pitanja vezana uz korištenje prometne infrastrukture za dolazak na Kampus u prosječnom radnom danu i ocjenjivali kvalitetu postojećeg prometnog sustava s aspekta javnog gradskog prijevoza, infrastrukture za parkiranje te pješačkog i biciklističkog prometa. Na temelju prikupljenih odgovora analizirane su prometne navike studenata i zaposlenika Građevinskog fakulteta u Rijeci te su ispitane korelacije obilježja ispitanika i specifičnih prometnih pokazatelja orijentiranih na putovanja prema Kampusu, a koje mogu pomoći u definiranju budućih planova rekonstrukcije i dogradnje prometne infrastrukture.Traffic-spatial planning is a continuous procedure in which it is necessary to constantly improve it based on the analysis of the traffic system indicators. According to the authors, during the planning of the University of Rijeka Campus, and even at the time of use, traffic indicators were not analyzed in detail in order to ensure a higher level of accessibility and greater customer satisfaction. The paper presents an analysis of the results of a survey conducted in March 2020 at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Rijeka among students and employees of the Faculty through an online survey. The aim of the research was to determine the traffic habits of the target group of respondents related to their daily commuting to Campus. In addition to the general characteristics of the respondents and basic traffic indicators, such as the degree of motorization and the frequency of public transport, the respondents answered specific questions related to the use of transport infrastructure for daily commuting to Campus on an average working day, and assessed the quality of the existing transport system, including public city transport, parking infrastructure and pedestrian and bicycle traffic. Based on the received answers, traffic habits of students and employees of the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Rijeka were analyzed and the correlations between the characteristics of the respondents and specific traffic indicators oriented towards commuting to Campus were examined.</p

Für | For Manfred from his Students

Dieses Buch enthält Beiträge von Personen, die ihre Magister- oder Doktorarbeit unter der Betreuung von Manfred Krifka geschrieben haben. Es ist als kleines Abschiedsgeschenk für Manfred Krifka zum Ende seiner Amtszeit als Direktor des Leibniz-Zentrums für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft gedacht. Die Herausgeberin und der Herausgeber haben Beiträge zu sprachwissenschaftlichen und nicht-sprachwissenschaftlichen Themen in einer Vielzahl von Genres gesammelt. Diese Vielfalt spiegelt die Interessen und Forschungsthemen von Manfred Krifka wider. Sie spiegelt auch die Vielfalt der Menschen wider, denen Manfred Krifka geholfen hat

Empirical methods for describing tense, aspect, and mood: The case study of Nafsan

I discuss empirical methods for studying tense, aspect, and mood in language description. By focusing on TAM categories in Nafsan (Vanuatu, Oceanic), I show that corpus work, storyboards with targeted contexts and translation-based questionnaires accompanied by elicitation offer different kinds of evidence that are all necessary for a successful description

The semantics of perfect in Nafsan and implications for typology

This paper offers an analysis of the semantics of the perfect in Nafsan (South Efate) and argues for several implications for the typology of the perfect aspect. I show that all the functions of the perfect in Nafsan can be derived from placing the Topic Time in the posttime of the event in question, equal to Klein (1994) analysis of the English perfect. The main typological implications discussed within this analysis are: a) perfect in a tenseless language can have present, past, and future perfect readings, b) the interpretation of change of state can arise with perfects through aspectual coercion of states, c) duality with negation can arise as a consequence of the aspectual coercion process and not necessarily from the meaning of ‘already’. These three points are taken to argue against the proposed typological category of “iamitive” that unites the meanings of the resultative function of the perfect and ‘already’ (Olsson, 2013)

Garden (MelaTAMP storyboards)

A storyboard for fieldwork semantics eliciting present counterfactual conditional sentences. This storyboard has cultural references to Vanuatu and it was used to elicit linguistic data of the language of South Efate (Nafsan) [erk]. Each storyboard has two versions: one with the text in English and Bislama (Garden.pdf and Garden2.pdf) and the other only with pictures (Garden_notext.pdf and Garden2_notext.pdf). Other files consist of original pictures used in the storyboards and their tex files. The storyboard should be told to the consultant in a contact language, who should then repeat the story in the targeted language using the version without text (see also Strang Burton and Lisa Matthewson. Targeted construction storyboards in semantic fieldwork. In Ryan Bochnak and Lisa Matthewson, editors, Methodologies in Semantic Fieldwork, pages 135–156. Oxford University Press, 2015). The storyboard is also archived in PARADISEC: Ana Krajinovic (collector), Ana Krajinovic (author), 2018; Storyboards, PDF, 2018-09-18. http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/AK1/items/166

What can neutralizing antibodies tell us about the quality of immunity in COVID-19 convalescents and vaccinees?

ABSTRACTDuring the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the lack of standardized measurements of the immune response after vaccination or recovery from COVID-19 resulted in incomparable results and hindered correlation establishment. Prioritizing reliable and standardized methods to monitor pathogen-specific immunity is crucial, not only during the COVID-19 pandemic but also for future outbreaks. During our study of the humoral immune response, we used a SARS-CoV-2 wild-type neutralization assay, ensuring the measurement of the immune response directed to all SARS-CoV-2 antigens in their proper conformation. A head-to-head comparison of the neutralizing antibody (NAb) responses elicited by four vaccines used in Europe during 2021 (BNT162b2, mRNA-1273, ChAdOx nCoV-19, and Ad26.COV2.S) and their comparison to NAb responses in convalescents showed that while the amount was comparable, NAbs induced by natural infection were of higher quality. Namely, NAbs produced by disease were better activators of the complement system than NAbs induced by vaccination. Furthermore, the contribution of spike protein-specific IgGs to the SARS-CoV-2 neutralization was lower in convalescents compared to vaccinees, indicating that those who recovered from COVID-19 were armed with antibodies of additional specificities and/or classes that contributed to virus neutralization. These findings suggest that a higher stringency of public policy measures targeting individuals who have recovered from COVID-19, in comparison to those who have been vaccinated, may not have been fully justified