Areal Linguisticcs

Many English sound-symbolic reduplicatives are known to exhibit the vowel alternation patterns of /ɪ/-/æ/ and /ɪ/-/ɒ/ (e.g. in zig-zag and ding-dong) where the first vowel is higher than the second vowel.

A number of other languages also have their preferred patterns of vowel alternation for disyllabic sound-symbolic reduplicatives (hereafter DSRs).

For example, German, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese DSRs, like English DSRs, show a clear preference towards vowel alternation patterns of the type ↓ 'high-low'.

On the other hand, vowel alternation patterns of the type ↑ 'low-high vowel' where the vowel in the reduplicant is higher than that in the ‘base’ (e.g. tak tuk) is prevalent in Turkic DSRs.

There are also languages in which no clear preferred vowel alternation patterns (↕) are identifiable in their DSRs. Mongolian, which has both far fɜr 'low-high' and fɜr far ‘high-low’ exemplifies this group of languages.

1. Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese belong to different language groups but are geographically close to one another. Their DSRs are mostly of the type ↓ 'high-low'.

2. The vowel alternation type ↑ is utilized in all but one of the Turkic languages investigated here.

3. The only Turkic language under investigation here that utilizes the type ↕ alternation is Tuvan, which has been under a strong influence of (Khalkha) Mongolian, a type ↕ language.

These observations appear to point to the arealty (and perhaps also to the genetic nature) of vowel alternation patterns in disyllabic sound-symbolic reduplicatives.

Although it is easy to fathom why Eurolinguistic research tends to concern what is
called Standard Average European (see Haspelmath 2001) rather than peripheral non-Indo-European languages of Europe this author’s opinion is that a closer look precisely
at the latter makes the linguistic picture of Europe more interesting, more true and
more complex. At the same time a few methodological questions arise. Some of them
are presented and (partially) discussed in this study

В статье рассматриваются гидронимы, засвидетельствованные в бассейне Шексны в ходе работы Топонимической экспедиции Уральского университета. В конце XIV в. эта территория входила в состав Белозерского княжества и сохранила историко-культурное, языковое и топонимическое единство с Белозерьем. Топонимия данной зоны содержит черты, сближающие еѐ как с белозерскими названиями (во многом прибалтийско-финскими), так и с преимущественно волжско-финской топонимией исторических мерянских земель.

Since the seminal work of Greenberg (1963), there has been a clear focus by some typologists to explain cross-linguistic patterns and their diachronic development, often by citing various kinds of change through language contact (Trudgill 2011). This task can be difficult given the understudied nature of many of the world’s languages, as well as the scope of the endeavors, be they focused macroscopically on a wide variety of languages or more succinctly on a particular geographical area or Sprachbund. The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS; Dryer and Haspelmath 2011, 2014) database allows for a unique new approach to older questions of contact-induced change by virtue of loci (geographic positions) of languages included primarily for visual representation on maps. Indeed, some of these visual representations are quite striking, and some were the inspiration for the work that follows, which utilizes principles from big data analyses and geographical proximity.

The present study utilizes a novel method of iteration through the entirety of the database in an effort to bridge the gap between the macroscopic and microscopic approaches. The focus is on rare syntactic types as defined by the distribution of the orders of subject, object, and verb within the database. The properties of these subsets of languages are collected, as are the properties of their geographical correlates at various distances from each subset’s loci. This allows for comparison between the properties of a language type (e.g. non-rigid object-verb languages) and those languages which are spoken within some proximity of those in the type (i.e. with some heightened probability of being in a contact situation) over an arbitrary number of linguistic features.

The results suggest that the non-rigid OV type tends to be spoken in areas with surrounding VO speakerships relative to the rigid OV type. More generally, there is some propensity for syntactic features of a rare, disharmonic type (cf. Dryer 1992; Hawkins 2014) to reflect the features of those languages spoken in proximity – a propensity which is not shared by more common types. This is taken to support the idea that syntactic change can result from language contact. Furthermore these data are compared with existing microscopic work on language contact and contact-induced change (e.g. Emonds and Faarlund 2014; Nicolai 2003) in an effort to complement them and bridge the gap between the two approaches.

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 ...