Gary Holton

Linguistic Phylogenies Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia

Recent arguments connecting Na-Dene languages of North America with Yeniseian languages of Siberia have been used to assert proof for the origin of Native Americans in central or western Asia. We apply phylogenetic methods to test support for this hypothesis against an alternative hypothesis that Yeniseian represents a back-migration to Asia from a Beringian ancestral population. We coded a linguistic dataset of typological features and used neighbor-joining network algorithms and Bayesian model comparison based on Bayes factors to test the fit between the data and the linguistic phylogenies modeling two dispersal hypotheses. Our results support that a Dene-Yeniseian connection more likely represents radiation out of Beringia with back-migration into central Asia than a migration from central or western Asia to North America.

The Historical Relations of the Papuan Languages of Alor and Pantar

The historical relations of the Papuan languages scattered across the islands of the Alor archipelago, Timor, and Kisar in southeast Indonesia have remained largely conjectural. This paper makes a first step toward demonstrating that the languages of Alor and Pantar form a single genealogical group. Applying the comparative method to primary lexical data from twelve languages sampled across the islands of the Alor-Pantar archipelago, we use form-meaning pairings in basic cognate sets to establish regular sound correspondences that support the view that these languages are genetically related. We reconstruct 97 Proto[&mdash]Alor-Pantar vocabulary items and propose an internal subgrouping based on shared innovations. Finally, we compare Alor-Pantar with Papuan languages of Timor and with Trans-New Guinea languages, concluding that there is no lexical evidence supporting the inclusion of Alor-Pantar languages in the Trans-New Guinea family.

Internal classification of the Alor-Pantar language family using computational methods applied to the lexicon

The non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar in eastern Indonesia have been shown to be genetically related using the comparative method, but the identified phonological innovations are typologically common and do not delineate neat subgroups. We apply computational methods to recently collected lexical data and are able to identify subgroups based on the lexicon. Crucially, the lexical data are coded for cognacy based on identified phonological innovations. This methodology can succeed even where phonological innovations themselves fail to identify subgroups, showing that computational methods using lexical data can be a powerful tool supplementing the comparative method.

Conditions on pronominal marking in the Alor-Pantar languages

Abstract We examine the varying role of conditions on grammatical relations marking (namely animacy and volitionality) by looking at different languages of one family, using both existing descriptions and working with specially prepared video stimuli. This enables us to see the degree of variation permitted within closely related languages. We look at four Alor-Pantar languages (Teiwa, Adang, Kamang, and Abui), Papuan languages of eastern Indonesia. The conditions on argument marking are manifested in different ways. Those languages with syntactic alignment index objects with a prefix, those which have semantic alignment index objects and some subjects with a prefix. In 42 video clips we systematically varied animacy and volitionality values for participants in one and two-participant events. These clips were used in fieldwork to elicit descriptions of the events. The data show that animacy of the object is an important factor which favours indexation of the object on the verb in all four languages to varying degrees. Volitionality, on the other hand, is a factor in the semantically aligned languages only. While the presence of a prefix on the verb is semantically motivated in many instances, marking is not directly determined by verbal or participant semantics, and lexical factors must also play a role.

Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field

Abstract This paper is a position statement on reproducible research in linguistics, including data citation and attribution, that represents the collective views of some 41 colleagues. Reproducibility can play a key role in increasing verification and accountability in linguistic research, and is a hallmark of social science research that is currently under-represented in our field. We believe that we need to take time as a discipline to clearly articulate our expectations for how linguistic data are managed, cited, and maintained for long-term access.

Developing collection management tools to create more robust and reliable linguistic data

Lack of adequate descriptive metadata remains a major barrier to accessing and reusing language documentation. A collection management tool could facilitate management of linguistic data from the point of creation to the archive deposit, greatly reducing the archiving backlog and ensuring more robust and reliable data.

Insular Toponymies: Place-naming on Norfolk Island, South Pacific and Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island by Joshua Nash (review)

With this book, Nash (N) provides the first detailed study of Norfolk Island place naming. Norfolk has a storied history in the annals of the Pacific. The island was originally settled in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries by Polynesians, who survived for several generations before abandoning the island or dying out (Anderson and White 2001). This was followed centuries later by two periods of European settlement of the island as a penal colony, 1788–1814 and 1824–1855. Following the closure of the second convict settlement, the island was settled in 1856 by migrants from Pitcairn Island, which itself had been settled in 1790 by the infamous HMS Bounty mutineers. The Pitcairn Islanders brought with them the Pitkern language, an English-lexified creole that developed on Pitcairn in the generations following the mutiny. Some of these migrants soon returned to Pitcairn, where their descendants continue to speak Pitkern. Subsequently, the variety spoken on Norfolk, known as Norf’k, continued to develop independently and was additionally influenced by Australian English. The unique linguistic features of PitkernNorf’k (ISO 639-3 pih) can be traced to (i) the languages spoken by the original mutineers, particularly Edward Young, a speaker of St. Kitts creole (ISO 639-3 aig) and one of only two mutineers to survive the bloodshed of the first few years on Pitcairn (Baker and Huber 2001:186); and (ii) Tahitian, spoken by the 19 Polynesians who accompanied the mutineers. Today, the language is highly endangered, with approximately 800 remaining speakers (Mühlhäusler 2013). As the title suggests, a central thesis of the book is that there is something special or unique about place-naming in island environments, leading N to suggest “the possibility of island toponymy as a sub-discipline of toponymy” (32). In islands, N seeks examples of places that were “linguistically pristine prior to inhabitation” (7). He distinguishes this sense of pristine from that proposed by Ross (1958), who used the term for situations in which toponymic histories are known by all speakers. In contrast, for N, “pristine” includes also toponyms with opaque histories that are nevertheless embedded in the environment, in the sense that they are recognized as endonymic. In proposing an insular toponymy that studies pristine naming, N subscribes to the islands-as-laboratories approach popular among early scholars of the Pacific; however, there is no reason to suspect a one-to-one correspondence between island environments and pristine toponymy. There are many islands on which place-naming is not pristine: witness English naming in the Hawaiian Islands, which is layered over preexisting Hawaiian names. Likewise, there are many examples of pristine place-naming outside of island environments, as evidenced by Athabascan place names across northern Alaska, which show no evidence of a preexisting substrate. Nonetheless, in the particular case of Norfolk, N’s approach is valid, since Norfolk presents a clear case of pristine naming.

East Is Not a 'Big Bird': The Etymology of the Star Altair in the Carolinian Sidereal Compass

We argue that the Micronesian constellation centered on Altair, known in Lamotrek as Mailap, has been mistakenly identified in previous literature with another constellation centered on Sirius, known as Mannap. The latter is literally the ‘Big Bird’ and is well known in parts of Polynesia as well. Confusing this Big Bird with Altair has led to much confusion in the literature on Carolinian navigational arts. We trace the history of how this error arose and why it has persisted over time, and we also suggest an alternate etymology for Mailap.