Gerd Carling

Die Funktionen der lokalen Kasus im Tocharischen

This volume deals with the use of the local cases in Tocharian A and Tocharian B, Indo-European languages of the Tarim Basin, Eastern Central Asia, of the 6th to 9th centuries AD. Tocharian is basically inflectional-agglutinative, and this ten-dency is dominant in the case system. This study concentrates on the local cases expressing location and direction (i.e. oblique, allative, perlative, and locative) in case constructions and adpositional phrases expressing local and temporal relations. A theoretical discussion of the nature of the local cases and a possible evolution of their functions from Proto-Tocharian to Tocharian A and Tocharian B concludes this study.

Motivated language change : processes involved in the growth and conventionalization of onomatopoeia and sound symbolism.

This paper takes its basis in onomatopoeia and sound symbolism and investigates the processes of language change that create these phenomena. Data have mainly been taken from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family in which the origin of onomatopoeic expressions, as well as sound symbolic clusters, or phonaesthemes, can be traced historically to Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European. Two main types of motivated connections between expression and content are distinguished: iconic and indexical. Iconic connections basically embrace onomatopoeic expression, in which there is an attempt towards creating a likeness between the sound created by the content and the linguistic form of the expression. These types of motivated expressions behave differently from the indexical, even though the boundaries to some extent are floating. Phonaesthemes are regarded as predominantly indexically motivated and analysed synchronically in the Germanic languages, in which there is considerable agreement on the meaning connected to some of them, e.g. fl-, gl-, bl- which are connected to light and similar semantic associations. Other phonaesthemes, such as fj-, are restricted to individual languages only. The all-Germanic phonaesthemes are traced back historically as well as into reconstructed stages of the proto-language, and the origin of words and groups of words are taken into consideration. The later phonaesthemes, occurring in individual languages only, are traced back historically, taking older sources and first occurrences into consideration. The study shows that a number of different mechanisms of change, both on the form and the meaning side, are involved when sound symbolic clusters grow in a language. This shows that the general principles of change are disrupted or distorted by synchronically operative linguistic mechanisms, involving iconicity and indexicality. Finally, motivated language change is compared to other similar changes such as analogical change, and the consequences for the classification of various types of iconicity are discussed.

The De-Iconization and Rebuilding of Iconicity in Spatial Deixis

This paper investigates iconicity as a possible driving force behind the rebuilding of deictic systems and forms in individual languages. A comparison of a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European deictic system (based mainly on Beekes, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction, 1995) compared with the systems of attested Indo-European languages makes it clear that both systems and forms have undergone change, may it be through sound change, analogy, and/or semantic change. Based on the assumptions by Ultan (Universals of Human Language 2, Phonology, 1978), Woodworth (1991), Traunmüller (Tongues and Texts Unlimited. Studies in Honour of Tore Jansson on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Anniversary, 1994), and Johansson and Zlatev (Motivations for Sound Symbolism in Spatial Deixis: A Typological Study of 101 languages. The Public Journal of Semiotics, 2013), iconicity obviously plays a role in the synchronic systems of spatial deixis, which in turn indicates the iconicity has played a role on the process of change, both of the forms themselves and the systems as such. Data from 13 contemporary and 17 historical languages, belonging to 12 Indo-European branches was used. Vowels and consonants were divided into voiceless sounds as being more proximal, and voiced sounds being more distal (see the explanation below). The voiced sounds were divided according to the frequency of their f2, with [i] and voiced palatal consonants as more proximal and [u] as more distal (Ohala, Sound Symbolism, 1994). Results were divided into motivated (fulfilling the expected relation between deictic form and sound value), non-motivated (arbitrary), and reversed-motivated (the reverse of motivated). Five strategies of rebuilding deictic systems and forms were identified. None of the languages investigated have used a system identical to the Proto-Indo-European reconstructed system. Mostly internal material from the Proto-Indo-European deictic system was used in the forms of the systems of the daughter languages. Generally, a statistically significant motivated support was found: 70.2% of the forms of the languages used were identified as motivated, 9.2–10.4% were non-motivated and 19.4–20.7% reversed-motivated. Due to the different strategies of rebuilding systems and forms, generative explanations for the motivated support should be excluded. Hence, iconicity seemed to be reintroduced after the decay, by means of language change, of a former (motivated) deictic system. Therefore, it turned out as a very likely conclusion that iconicity has been and is involved in the rebuilding of deictic material, relating to the systems as such.

Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics (DiACL)—A database for ancient language typology

Feature stability, time and tempo of change, and the role of genealogy versus areality in creating linguistic diversity are important issues in current computational research on linguistic typology. This paper presents a database initiative, DiACL Typology, which aims to provide a resource for addressing these questions with specific of the extended Indo-European language area of Eurasia, the region with the best documented linguistic history. The database is pre-prepared for statistical and phylogenetic analyses and contains both linguistic typological data from languages spanning over four millennia, and linguistic metadata concerning geographic location, time period, and reliability of sources. The typological data has been organized according to a hierarchical model of increasing granularity in order to create datasets that are complete and representative.

From three genders to two: the sociolinguistics of gender shift in the Jämtlandic dialect of Sweden

Abstract The influence of standard language varieties on rural dialects is an important factor involved in dialect loss, which is widespread in Europe. In this study, we look at how the three-gender system in the Jämtlandic dialect of Sweden is changing under pressure from the two-gender system of Standard Swedish. The Jämtlandic dialect is an understudied Swedish dialect and an interesting object of study, in part because of the social and economic changes that have occurred over the past century. We performed a survey using profiled stimuli to elicit indefinite articles, definite articles and anaphoric pronouns for 36 target nouns. An analysis was conducted on the traditionalness of gender agreement in the material. We consider linguistic features (traditional gender and type of agreement), as well as sociological features (age, gender, education, geographical location, socioeconomic status, and language attitudes). The results show that most participants maintain the traditional three-gender system to a large degree. Age is the most significant predictor of traditionalness. While the youngest participants show the highest variability in gender assignment, they still retain the three-gender system to some degree. In addition, participants to whom the dialect is very important tend to use more traditional agreement.

Language : the role of culture and environment in proto-vocabularies

This book, which presents a cognitive-semiotic theory of cultural evolution, including that taking place in historical time, analyses various cognitive-semiotic artefacts and abilities. It claims that what makes human beings human is fundamentally the semiotic and cultural skills by means of which they endow their Lifeworld with meaning. The properties that have made human beings special among animals living in the terrestrial biosphere do not derive entirely from their biological-genetic evolution, but also stem from their interaction with the environment, in its culturally interpreted form, the Lifeworld. This, in turn, becomes possible thanks to the human ability to learn from other thinking beings, and to transfer experiences, knowledge, meaning, and perspectives to new generations. (Less)

5 Conclusion: Support for an Autonomous Model

This conclusion chapter of the book focuses on phonology, lexical stress/pitch accent and derivational/adaptional morphology. Other areas of interest are gender, animacy, thematic status, allophonic variation and patters and variation of code-mixing and syntax. Several patterns of Scandoromani, both in phonology, morphology and syntax indicate a great deal of autonomy from the matrix language, in which all speakers are native speakers. In one respect Scandoromani is different from some other mixed languages: of the two component languages, Scandinavian and Romani, only Scandinavian (the matrix/grammaticising language) is fully known to the speakers. Early data from Scandoromani indicate an early switch towards a Scandinavian-adapted inflectional system, making it likely that the general structure of the language and the basic patterns of mixing did, indeed, come about within a limited period of time.Keywords: animacy; gender; lexical stress; mixed languages; morphology; Scandoromani

2 The Sounds of a Mixed Language

This chapter presents an overview of the Swedish Romani sound system. It examines segmental features: vowel and consonant inventories; as well as word level prosody: lexical stress, the quantity distinction, and lexical pitch accents. Since the core of the sound system has been adapted from Swedish, a comparison with Swedish underlies the synchronic description of the language in the chapter. It focuses on two segmental features for more detailed analysis: (i) an aspiration feature in the voiceless stops /ph th kh/ and in the voiced stop /gh/ that is not present in Swedish: the aspirated voiceless stops go back to Romani, whilst the /gh/ represents an innovation; (ii) a series of voiceless post-alveolar fricatives: Swedish has a similar series. The chapter pays special attention as well to a third feature of the language: the conspicuous occurrence of variation in pronunciation at all levels of phonology.Keywords: consonant inventories; Swedish Romani sound system; voiceless post-alveolar fricatives; voiceless stops; vowel

Appendix I Vocabulary

This appendix brings together the lexical sources of Scandoromani (Swedish and Norwegian), which can be regarded as reliable: they have been collected by native speakers accompanied by a scholar. There are a number of discrepancies in ortography between the sources, as well as a huge variation in form and meaning for individual lexical items. Furthermore, the sources differ as to how much additional information that they give for lexical entries. For this reason, it has been an almost impossible task to harmonize and create consistency in the vocabulary. The policy has been as follows: the ortography of the sources has been kept at all occasions. For items that occur in several sources, only LDj is given in the head, followed by information about occurrences in other sources. If there is a slight variation in form/meaning, this variation is listed towards the end of the entry.Keywords: lexical sources; Scandoromani; vocabulary

1 Scandoromani: Language and Speakers

The dialect Scandoromani is a remnant of the language spoken by the first Romani immigrants to the Nordic countries. It belongs to the northwest continuum of Romani dialects: a group that also embraces the Sinte/Manouche dialects spoken in Germany, France, Netherlands, Hungary, Bohemia, Slovakia, Russia, and northern Italy, and the Finnish Kale dialect. Even though Scandoromani is fairly well documented, at least its vocabulary, the historical paucity of sources is problematic. Early documentation is mostly limited to word lists, often of poor quality, mostly compiled by lay persons and often in prison: e.g., by prison chaplains or prison guards talking with sentenced convicts. The ways in which Scandoromani is most frequently used, in particular, the broken form might, at first glance, resemble an in-group lexicon rather than a language. Scandoromani is normally taken to be a mixed language of a type known as intertwined.Keywords: in-group lexicon; mixed language; Romani immigrants; Scandoromani