Paul Widmer

Migration events splitting speaker communities and establishing novel contact situations are among the major drivers of language variation and change. While the precise processes that lead to change cannot usually be determined for past events with any certainty, the study of minority and heritage language usage in apparent time may provide insight into the contribution of the linguistic behavior underlying the dynamics. We capitalize on this and compare parts of speech usage in Pear Story renarrations across Gheg Albanian speakers of three generations in Germanspeaking environments, applying methods from information theory. The results suggest that the changing conventions in parts of speech usage across generations and places of residence can be attributed to changing linguistic behavior within the speaker community in the migration setting. These findings highlight the impact of changing sonnenhauser, ismajli and widmer 10.1163/22105832-bja10027 | Language Dynamics and Change (2023) 1-26 sociocultural embedding and the roles of vertical and horizontal transmission in language change.

In many cases of apparent contact-induced change the contribution of genealogical correlation in the language sample and its interaction with processes such as matter and pattern replication are difficult to specify. In order to get a better sense of the relevance of shared ancestry, we quantify the change in similarity since the late Middle Ages in a sample of Romance and Germanic languages with data from a selected grammatical domain (expression of reflexivity). We compare their dynamics to patterns of change of similarity in two contact zones in Europe, namely the British Isles (Dedio et al. 2019) and the Balkans. Concerning the genealogical signal, the results indicate a maintenance and gain of similarity in Romance as opposed to a loss of similarity in Germanic. This hints at the importance of the inherited states, the time since the split from the common ancestor, and subsequent developments. We presume that these factors are likely to be at the origin of the maintenance and increase in similarity observed for the sampled Romance varieties. While this result cannot be generalised beyond the specific case study presented here, the basic approach will contribute to a better understanding of how contact, genealogy and culture interact in shaping the dynamics of linguistic similarity.

In this paper we introduce an extended version of the Vedic Treebank (vtb, Hellwig et al. 2020) which comes along with revisited and extended annotation guidelines. In order to assess the quality of our annotations as well as the usability and limits of the guidelines we performed an inter-annotator agreement test. The results show that agreement between annotators is hampered by various factors, most prominently by
insufficient understanding of the content because of the cultural and temporal gap and incomplete knowledge of Vedic grammar. An in-depth discussion of disagreeing annotations demonstrates that the setup of the workflow, too, has a major influence on inter-annotator agreement. We suggest some measures that can help increase the transparency and annotation consistency according to current knowledge of the language when annotating Vedic Sanskrit, or ancient language varieties in general.

We discuss a potential case of borrowing in this paper: Breton a-'of', 'from' marking of (internal) verbal arguments, unique in Insular Celtic languages, and reminiscent of Gallo-Romance de/du-(and en-) arguments. Looking at potential Gallo-Romance parallels of three Middle Breton constructions analyzed in some detail (a with indefinite mass nominals in direct object position, a-marking of internal arguments under the scope of negation, a [allomorphs an(ez)-/ahan-] with personal pronouns for internal arguments, subjects (mainly of predicative constructions) and as expletive subjects of existential constructions), we demonstrate that even if there are some semantic parallels and one strong structural overlap (a and de under the scope of negation), the amount of divergences in morphology, syntax and semantics and the only partially fitting relative chronology of the different constructions do not allow to conclude with certainty that language-contact is an explanation of the Breton facts, which might have come into being also because of internal change (bound to restructuring of the prono-minal system in Breton). More research is necessary to complete our knowledge of a-marking in Middle Breton and Modern Breton varieties and on the precise history of French en, in order to decide for one or the other explanation.

Convergence by loss is a concept that is often adduced to characterize the Balkans as a linguistic area and to substantiate the areality of particular linguistic features, developments and varieties. Time and again, it has been pointed out that however useful this concept may be for certain purposes, e.g., when descriptively stating differences between historical stages of one specific variety, it is problematic for others, in particular for comparing languages and assessing areality. In addition to implying the undisputed existence of categorial distinctions, applying this concept indiscriminately obscures the fact that its manifestations may differ substantially across features and languages. Furthermore, focusing on “loss” impedes insight into both more general and more specific processes. On the examples of case and infinitive in the standard norms of Albanian and Macedonian this article acts on these intuitions and elaborates a finer-grained approach that avoids the assumption of generally applicable categorial distinctions and the ignoring of differences below seemingly identical surface phenomena. By the decomposition of linguistic units into their constitutive morphosyntactic features it becomes possible to sketch the interaction of morphosyntactic exponents in expressing characteristic functions, such as the selection of grammatical relations or the licensing of constituency. This provides a solid empirical basis for comparing morphosyntactic patterns across languages in synchronic and diachronic respects and may be operationalized for assessing the areality of particular developments.

This paper introduces the first treebank of Vedic Sanskrit, a morphologically rich ancient Indian language that is of central importance for linguistic and historical research. The selection of the 4,000 sentences contained in this treebank reflects the development of metrical and prose texts over a period of 600 years. We discuss how these sentences are annotated in the Universal Dependencies scheme and which syntactic constructions required special attention. In addition, we describe a syntactic labeler based on neural networks that supports the initial annotation of the treebank, and whose evaluation can be helpful for setting up a full syntactic parser of Vedic Sanskrit.

Approaches to linguistic areas have largely focused either on purely qualitative investigation of area formation processes, on quantitative and qualitative exploration of synchronic distributions of linguistic features without considering time, or on theoretical issues related to the definition of the notion "linguistic area". What is still missing are approaches that supplement qualitative research on area formation processes with quantitative methods. Taking a bottom-up approach, we bypass notional issues and propose to quantify area formation processes by a) measuring the change in linguistic similarity given a geographical space, a socio-cultural setting, a time span, a language sample, and a set of linguistic data, and b) testing the tendency and magnitude of the process using Bayesian inference. Applying this approach to the expression of reflexivity in a dense sample of languages in northwestern Europe from the early Middle Ages to the present, we show that the method yields robust quantitative evidence for a substantial gain in linguistic similarity that sets the languages of Britain and Ireland apart from languages spoken outside Britain and Ireland and cross-cuts lines of linguistic ancestry.

Some languages constrain the recursive embedding of NPs to some specific morphosyntactic types, allowing it for example only with genitives but not with bare juxtaposition. In Indo-European, every type of NP embedding — genitives, adjectivizers, adpositions, head marking, or juxtaposition — is unavailable for syntactic recursion in at least one attested language. In addition, attested pathways of change show that NP types that allow recursion can emerge and disappear in less than 1000 years. The wide-ranging synchronic diversity and its high diachronic dynamics raises the possibility that at many hypothetical times in the history of the family recursive NP embedding could have been lost for all types simultaneously, parallel to what has occasionally been observed elsewhere (Everett 2005, Evans & Levinson 2009). Performing Bayesian phylogenetic analyses on a sample of 55 languages from all branches of Indo-European, we show however that it is extremely unlikely for such a complete loss to ever have occurred. When one or more morphosyntactic types become unavailable for syntactic recursion in an NP, an unconstrained alternative type is very likely to develop in the same language. This suggests that, while diachronic pathways away from NP recursion clearly exist, there is a tendency – perhaps a universal one – to maintain or develop syntactic recursion in NPs. A likely explanation for this evolutionary bias is that recursively embedded phrases are not just an option that languages have (Fitch et al. 2005), but that they are in fact preferred by our processing system.

This article proposes a  classification of Middle Welsh constructions with event nouns, the only productive non-finite category in this language. It is based on a catalogue of criteria which have been suggested in General Linguistics for a description of linked states of affairs, viz. variables that relate to the assertive profile, the semantic dependence, coordination, the syntactic level of attachment, the degree of deverbalization, the degree of nominalization, and negation operator scope. The survey shows that Middle Welsh event nominalizations on their own assume functions covered by different non-finite structures known from related Indo-European languages (e. g.  participles, verbal nouns, supines, infinitives, compounds etc.). Furthermore, event nominalizations substantially contribute to the construction of narratives on a higher level of syntactic organisation.

The intricate preverbal complex of Early Irish hosts a morpheme
imm-(a-n) with verypeculiar constructional and semantic properties. In this article, we venture to give a description of imm-(a- n) by taking into account the various changes it induces on argument representation, and explore how it modifies the semantics of the verb stem it combineswith. The chronology of the data at our disposal suggests that it first denoted reciprocalstates of affairs and quickly developed into a device expressing collective simultaneousaction events (csa, i.e., multiple participants perform the same action in the same temporal and locational setting, but not on each other) and from the point of view of semantics are treated as active verbs. As far as argument representation is concerned, it develops intoa construction which combines both features of the passive (subject demotion) and the antipassive (object demotion) diathesis.

@book{aktenzurich2020ed,
address = {Innsbruck},
title = {Indogermanische Morphologie in erweiterter Sicht},
editor = {Sommer, Florian and Stüber, Karin and Widmer, Paul and Yamazaki, Yoko},
publisher = {Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität},
year = {2022}}

In this article we venture to elucidate the origin of the Albanian subjunctive marker të-. We contend that this marker is historically linked to a morphosyntactic device which is traditionally described as linking article and which licenses nominal syntactic units as constituents of larger syntactic units. Based on the observation that there is a substantial distributional, functional and semantic overlap between nonfinite verbal forms marked with të-and finite subjunctive predicates, we propose that the subjunctive marker spread across host classes from nominals to nonfinite predicates and to finite subjunctive predicates. The spread into the finite verbal domain is areally fostered, while the licensing device itself is an independent Albanian development that possibly picks up a vertical, Indo-European signal.

Sprachenvielfalt und Mehrsprachigkeit sind zentrale Begriffe der schweizerischen Sprachpolitik und Sprachlandschaft und betreffen auch Herkunftssprachen von Migrantengruppen. Obwohl albanischsprachige Gemeinschaften (meist aus Kosovo und aus Mazedonien) seit den 1980er Jahren zu den grössten Migrantengruppen im deutschen Sprachraum und speziell in der Schweiz zählen, ist über die Sprache und das sprachliche Verhalten dieser mittlerweile mehrere Generationen umfassenden Sprechergemeinschaft trotz bedeutender Pionierwerke (Caprez-wenig bekannt. Angesichts der Tatsache, dass gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Integration und Teilhabe sowie Identitätsbildung unentflechtbar mit Sprache, ermöglichter und geförderter Sprachpraxis und Sprachbewusstsein verbunden sind und immer waren, stellt die Untersuchung der herkunftssprachlichen Praxis und ihrer Interaktion mit den neuen Mehrheitssprachen ein dringendes Desiderat dar. In diesem Projekt wird ein umfassendes Bild der sprachlichen Praxis der Herkunftssprachen-sprecher des Albanischen und der verwendeten Sprache(n) über die Zeit und in diversen Kon-taktsituationen erarbeitet, indem Ansätze und Methoden der Herkunftssprachlinguistik und-di-daktik mit solchen der Kontakt-, Sozio-und Variationslinguistik kombiniert werden. Die Verbin-dung dieser Zugänge ermöglicht a) akteurzentrierte bottom-up Einblicke in kontaktinduzierte Spezifikation von Merkmalen (Bewahrung oder Veränderung), die ihrerseits die Voraussetzung für die Modellierung von Sprachkontakt in der Sprachgeschichte und Sprachevolution dar-stellen, und b) die Entwicklung anwendungsorientierter Lösungen für die Pflege von Herkunfts-sprache als Instrument der Integration via gesellschaftlicher Teilhabe und zur Stärkung der im heutigen Europa unentbehrlichen Mehrsprachigkeit. Zu allen Bereichen existieren substantielle Vorarbeiten, doch fehlen sowohl in der Herkunftssprachlinguistik und-didaktik und der Kontakt-linguistik belastbare Studien über längere Zeitverläufe unter maximal kontrollierten soziokultu-rellen Bedingungen. Dies betrifft neben Untersuchungen zum Albanischen als Herkunftssprache in deutschsprachiger Umgebung und den diversen Kontakterscheinungen in den beteiligten Varietäten, auch das mikroperspektivische Nachzeichnen der soziokulturellen Motivation und sprachlichen Prozesse bei Sprachentwicklung in spezifischen Kontaktkonfigurationen. Die sprachlichen Daten werden in drei Sprechergenerationen anhand verschiedener Stimuli elizitiert und in Familiennetzwerken sowie mit crowd sourcing erhoben, soziokulturelle Information mittels biographischer und narrativer Interviews gewonnen. Die Texte werden durch Linguisten und im crowd sourcing-Verfahren durch Herkunftssprachensprecher doppelt kodiert; für letztere können so zugleich Sprachbewusstsein und die Einstellung zur Herkunftssprache erhoben werden. Die entstehenden soziolinguistischen Sprecherprofile und Spracheinstellungen werden mit den sprachlichen Daten korreliert. Anhand der Veränderungen der Sprachstruktur über die Sprechergenerationen hinweg werden somit qualitativ und quantitativ Kontakteffekte unter gut kontrollierbaren Bedingungen extrahiert und evaluiert. Die Verbindung struktur-und soziolinguistischer Ansätze für eine umfassende Analyse der linguistischen, soziokulturellen und gesellschaftspolitischen Relevanz herkunftssprachlicher Aspekte verspricht in dieser Kombination und für alle genannten disziplinären Perspektiven einen signifikanten wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisgewinn sowie anwendungsorientierte Pro-dukte in Form von didaktischen und pädagogischen Materialien. Konkret werden für die Kon-taktlinguistik empirische Daten zur Abschätzung von Kontakteinfluss für phylogenetische Modelle zur Verfügung gestellt, sowie Unterrichtsmaterialien für den Herkunftssprachunterricht erstellt. Die Resultate werden in Form von Qualifikationsschriften, wissenschaftlichen Publika-tionen, Infobroschüren und Webauftritten verbreitet, die erhobenen Daten auf geeigneten Repositorien (DaSCH) deponiert und verfügbar gemacht