Nikolaus P. Himmelmann

Essentials of language documentation

Language documentation is a rapidly emerging new field in linguistics which is concerned with the methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language. This volume presents in-depth introductions to major aspects of language documentation, including overviews on fieldwork ethics and data processing, guidelines for the basic annotation of digitally-stored multimedia corpora and a discussion on how to build and maintain a language archive. It combines theoretical and practical considerations and makes specific suggestions for the most common problems encountered in language documentation. Key features textbook introduction to Language Documentation considers all common problems

What makes Grammaticalization?: A Look from its Fringes and its Components

The status of grammaticalization has been the subject of many controversial discussions. The contributions to What makes Grammaticalization approach the prevalent phenomenon from the angle of language structure and focus on the interrelation between the levels of phonology, pragmatics (inference), discourse and the lexicon and some of them try to integrate the areal perspective. A wealth of data from Slavonic languages as well as from languages of other genetic and areal affiliation is discussed. The book is of interest to linguists specializing in grammaticalization, lexicalization and morphological typology, to language typologists as well as to functional, historical and cognitive linguists.

The Lack of Zero Anaphora and Incipient Person Marking in Tagalog

It has been widely assumed that Tagalog allows zero anaphora freely for both actors and undergoers in semantically transitive constructions. The data presented here strongly suggest that this assumption is wrong for actors in one of the two basic transitive construction types: undergoer-oriented constructions. In these constructions, the actor argument does not appear to be freely omissible in contexts in which zero anaphora would be pragmatically warranted. This finding has implications for the controversial issue of whether undergoer-oriented construction in Tagalog are syntactically transitive. Furthermore, it suggests that the most common kind of overt actor expressions found in this construction, pronominal clitics, may be analyzed as an early stage in the grammaticization of person marking

Chapter 2 Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis

cooperative. In John Haviland and Jose Antonio Flores Farfan, eds. Bases de la documentación lingüística. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas, pp. 49–89. Spanish translation of Dwyer, Arienne M. 2006. Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis. In Gippert, Jost, Mosel, Ulrike and Nicolaus Himmelmann, eds. Fundamentals of Language Documentation: A Handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 31-66. Preprint.

Symmetrical Voice and Applicative Alternations: Evidence from Totoli

This paper proposes an analysis of the system of voice and applicative alternations in Totoli, a language spoken on Sulawesi in Indonesia. This system appears to be unique among Western Malayo-Polynesian languages (at least the ones reasonably well known to date). Its uniqueness is due to a particularly intricate interplay of (symmetrical) voice and applicative functions marked by a set of affixes that are clearly cognate with voice marking affixes in Philippine-type languages. In trying to tease apart the functions of the different constructions making up the system, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the commonalities and differences between symmetrical voice and applicative alternations. It also discusses variation in the use of voice-related morphology, thus providing a rather rare glimpse into the ongoing change of a western Austronesian voice system.

Chapter 1 Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for?

This chapter defines language documentation as a field of linguistic inquiry and practice in its own right which is primarily concerned with the compilation and preservation of linguistic primary data and interfaces between primary data and various types of analyses based on these data. Furthermore, it argues (in Section 2) that while language endangerment is a major reason for getting involved in language documentation, it is not the only one. Language documentations strengthen the empirical foundations of those branches of linguistics and related disciplines which heavily draw on data of little-known speech communities (e.g. linguistic typology, cognitive anthropology, etc.) in that they significantly improve accountability (verifiability) and economizing research resources. The primary data which constitute the core of a language documentation include audio or video recordings of a communicative event (a narrative, a conversation, etc.), but also the notes taken in an elicitation session, or a genealogy written down by a literate native speaker. These primary data are compiled in a structured corpus and have to be made accessible by various types of annotations and commentary, here summarily referred to as the “apparatus”. Sections 3 and 4 provide further discussion of the components and structure of language documentations. Section 5 concludes with a preview of the remaining chapters of this book.

Shifting from animacy to agentivity

The target article argues for a need to distinguish between covert and overt (ly marked) shifts in animacy and claims that understanding these shifts allows for “a deeper understanding of animacy and its effects on language” (abstract target article). The paper certainly contains a number of interesting observations regarding these shifts, as well as about the relationship between conceptual and grammatical animacy. However, we are not convinced that the kind of animacy shifts discussed in the paper really get us to the core of the role of animacy in grammar. Instead, we argue that animacy-related constraints in grammar reflect the fact that animate beings (and, as we will see, some inanimate ones as well) are potential agents. Hence, such constraints are best understood in terms of semantic-role-related features such as sentience and autonomous motion, i.e. an analysis based on semantic roles. The possibility of such an analysis is also mentioned in the target article (in the last sentence of Section 5), but considered to apply only in a few marginal instances. We would hold, on the contrary, that a semantic-role-based analysis covers the most frequent and typical examples of animacy-related constraints, or at least in those instances where animacy appears to be relevant for the coding of argument structure, of which Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a prime example. Our comments will be restricted to DOM examples, acknowledging that the target article also deals with a few other example types mostly taken from Aristar (1997).

What about typology is useful for language documentation

Before addressing the question in the title, it will be useful to briefly clarify what is meant by “language documentation”, as this term is currently used in two senses. In its broader use, it encompasses both the collection and initial processing of linguistic data as well as their analysis in the formats of a (descriptive) grammar and a dictionary. In its narrower sense, it focuses on data collection and processing, processing being concerned with transcription and translation as well as with making the data available for researchers and other interested parties, including the speech community. In actual practice, the collection and initial processing of linguistic data and their descriptive analysis are inseparable activities. The proper and useful representation of linguistic data requires descriptive analysis (transcription, translation). And, vice versa, descriptive analysis needs data, the quality of the analysis depending to a substantial degree on the quality of the data. However, it is useful to keep these two activities separate CONCEPTUALLY, as they differ in their methods and their primary outcomes: a corpus of annotated primary data on the one hand, and a grammar-cum-dictionary on the other. More technically (Himmelmann 2012), language documentation is concerned with the collection of raw data, i.e., (audiovisual) recordings, and their representation as primary data, i.e., as transcripts with translations. Fieldnotes are a type of primary data delinked from raw data ( = native speaker replies in an elicitation session). Language description, on the other hand, is concerned with deriving structural data from primary data, i.e., descriptive generalizations across a corpus of primary data. The conceptual independence of documentation and description has practical ramifications. Thus, the emergence in the last two decades of language

Secondary predicates in Eastern European languages and beyond, edited by Christoph Schroeder, Gerd Hentschel & Winfried Boeder

Secondary predication covers such adjuncts as the depictive raw in He ate the meat raw, the resultative blue in She painted the door blue, and circumstantials such as empty in Empty I can carry it. All these adjuncts are participantoriented in that they add a second predication with regard to one of the participants involved in the main predication, in contrast with event-oriented adjuncts such as the adverbial quickly in He ate the meat quickly which modifies the event expressed by the main predication. While reasonably clear in prototypical examples such as the ones just given, the distinction between participantand event-orientation is often difficult to draw, and languages abound with constructions which straddle the line between the two, as amply illustrated and discussed in Himmelmann & Schultze-Berndt 2005 and the volume under review. This present volume derives from the conference “Descriptive and Theoretical Problems of Secondary Predicates with Emphasis on Middle and Eastern European Languages”, held in Oldenburg, Germany, in December 2005. It consists of twenty chapters, six in German and fourteen in English, devoted to a broad range of languages and constructions. The bulk of the languages are Slavic, but Finno-Ugric, Baltic, Turkic, Caucasian and Balkan languages, German and English, as well as the more distant Moroccan Arabic and Classical Aztec are also covered. With regard to constructions, the contributions occasionally go well beyond the realm of the monoclausal ones just sketched to include multiclausal constructions involving non-finite participial or converbal ones such as Having unusually long arms, he can reach the ceiling (also known as “strong free adjuncts” in the semantics literature). The chapters are in alphabetical order, with the authors mainly from Germany, but also from Slavic-speaking countries, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, and Lithuania, often specializing in the respective philologies. We will review them by way of a rough tripartite arrangement, starting off with chapters primarily offering general overviews of secondary predicate constructions in one or several languages, then turning to contributions which focus on one or several more specific, formally defined construction types, and ending with such chapters whose primary concern is with matters of theory, including typological generalizations.

Notes on Tagalog nominalism

Dan Kaufman’s brilliant paper articulates the nominalist hypothesis in very clear and up-to-date terms. For the first time, it provides the outlines of a formalized account of this hypothesis which shows the underlying coherence of a range of widely known and much studied morphosyntactic features of Tagalog. My two comments come from a very sympathetic reader interested in further clarifying and strengthening the analysis rather than debunking it. The first comment will deal with the nature of the syntactic flexibility of content words in Tagalog (relating in particular to Kaufman’s section 3.1). The second one pertains to explanations for the ungrammaticality of genitive predicates in Tagalog (relating mostly to Kaufman’s sections 3.2 and 4.1).