written by Vasiliki Vita (SOAS University of London), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society

1. Introduction

As a Micronesianist, I was not sure how my contribution at a conference about African Linguistics would be significant. However, when I was invited to work with Tom Jelpke and John Kyamanywa in Uganda, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to share knowledge and learn more about Uganda and its languages. Thanks to a Philological Society bursary, I managed to travel to Uganda for 10 days in order not only to fulfill the goals of a British Institute in Eastern Africa Thematic Research Grant, but also attend the Languages Association of Eastern Africa 3^rd Conference on “Empowering Communities through Language Research and African Linguistics for Sustainable Development”. In the title, I use wayfinding as defined by Iosefo, Harris & Holman Jones (2020: 23), “an embodied, practical, adaptive and relationally driven practice, … [that] calls on researchers to immerse themselves in journeys of discovery and transformation that value [Indigenous] cultural knowledges and acknowledge [their] blind spots”. In the case of this journey, the war^[1] was not our piko^[2]. It was the Boda Bodas, local motorcycle taxis, that carried us through this journey. I am also using the plural “we” because I will be talking about this journey as one that “cannot be viewed as belonging to any one person, and wayfinding is never done on one’s own” (Iosefo, Harris & Holman Jones 2020: 21).

2. LiVanuma and stories

LiVanuma is a language spoken in Bundibugyo, Western Uganda, near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to CCFU (2015), the BaVanuma ethnic group is estimated to have fewer than 25,000 people in Uganda, many of whom do not speak the language (Kyamanywa & Jelpke forthcoming). Building on their research, Kyamanywa and I embarked on a journey to document family histories, experiences, and languages. The aim is to compile a biographical (hi)storybook to tell the stories of BaVanuma people in Uganda in their own language (Jelpke, Kyamanywa & Vita 2023).

3. Wayfinding in Bundibugyo

To document these stories, we flexibly travelled on Boda Bodas from village to village to reach BaVanuma people who were willing to share their story (see Figure 1 for example). We must recognize the contribution of local coordinators for reaching out to various speakers and getting us in touch with them. Later, attending the conference, Wizlack-Makarevich (2023) referred to this kind of language documentation as the “helicopter method”, of going from place to place, gathering data, and relying on local intermediaries to help make the connections.

The piko here might physically be a different one, but it is still a war that allowed us “to stay in continual communication with the world around” us (Rogers 2020: 153), and “to move from stillness, bringing the island to [us] through ‘be-coming’” (Spiller 2016: 31). Like Pacific wayfinders we used our war as “the geographical centre of navigational orientation” (Eckstein & Schwarz 2019: 30) and removed “the lines on the map that segregate and compartmentalize” (Iosefo, Harris & Holman Jones 2020: 21) our world (see Figure 2 for a map of our journey with the black dots symbolizing the villages we visited).

The documentation process included making audio and video recordings of speakers narrating family stories, talking about their relatives, experiences living in Uganda and what the LiVanuma language means to them in terms of personal and community identity, as well as wellbeing. After narrating their story, speakers were encouraged to listen to their story and write it down (Figure 3). Participants in Kyamanywa and Jelpke (forthcoming)’s project had expressed an interest in writing the language.

4. Kampala and LAEA 3

The journey back to Kampala was a tiring one with us taking a different war this time and 10 hours to reach our destination. John and I talked about the mountains in the Bundibugyo District and reminisced about our journey through them. As Conquergood (2002: 146), Iosefo, Harris & Holman Jones (2020: 23) put it, our wayfinding was not just “moving and inhabiting”, but “a relational practice with the earth and sky”, “anchored in practice and circulated within a performance community”. After getting enough rest, we prepared for a full two days of conference talks learning about the work of colleagues in Africa.

In the first plenary talk, Nyaga (2023) focused on promoting mother tongue education and encouraged everyone to speak African languages at home. Kyamanywa and Jelpke’s talk then started, where they presented the preliminary results on documenting the LiVanuma sociolinguistic landscape. It was interesting to see people’s reactions in the audience, with many Ugandan researchers noting that they had never heard of the BaVanuma people and their language before. As wayfinders, we share stories in true embedded and embodied fashion through relationship and collective engagement with multiple ways of knowing (Gounder 2015).

What I found most interesting, was the plenary on the second day by Alena Witzlac-Makarevich. Wizlack-Makarevich (2023) encouraged for the multi-modal documentation of African languages, which comparatively to other places around the world is lagging (Lüpke 2019). She talked about the importance of data governance and recognizing the value of corpora in language maintenance and promotion, especially for endangered languages.

My talk was also on the second day. Listening to other researchers, I realized once again, that boundaries are fluid, and knowledge is to be shared regardless of where it was acquired. “Hyper-collaboration” in the sense used in Di Carlo et al. (2022) and Vita, Nestor & Marino (2023) focuses on the value of the network that can be activated at any time for activities that benefit the group most impacted. Language-related initiatives and activities presented at the conference also showcase the fact that they all start with documenting and reaching out to tradition but are borderless and rooted in the desire for belonging (see for example Okurut, Kiguli & Tibasiima (2023) discussing the music of an expatriate Ugandan artist).

5. Conclusion

Our wayfinding in Uganda was not limited by borders and lines on the map. It was active, intimate, hands-on, and participatory, like the ‘traditional’ knowledges of Pasifika people (Iosefo, Harris & Holman Jones 2020). Attending the 3^rd Conference of the Languages Association of Eastern Africa was an invaluable experience not only for sharing our work, whether that is with John and Tom, the Young Historians of Sonsorol or the virALLanguages initiative, but also discovering the work of African colleagues and further work on the documentation and maintenance of linguistic diversity. My wayfinding continues and I am thankful for all the individuals who consider me worthy to invite to the journey.

Endnotes

^[1] Sonsorolese word for “canoe” which is nowadays used to describe any means of transport, including airplane and car

^[2] Hawaiian word for “navel”.

^[3] For a more detailed labeled map, visit: https://goo.gl/maps/4NGnwXtPt6MLzoBj8. 

References

Conquergood, Dwight. 2002. Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research. TDR/The Drama Review 46(2). 145–156. https://doi.org/10.1162/105420402320980550.

Di Carlo, Pierpaolo, Leonore Lukschy, Sydney Rey & Vasiliki Vita. 2022. Documentary linguists and risk communication: views from the virALLanguages project experience. Linguistics Vanguard. De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0021.

Eckstein, Lars & Anja Schwarz. 2019. The Making of Tupaia’s Map: A Story of the Extent and Mastery of Polynesian Navigation, Competing Systems of Wayfinding on James Cook’s Endeavour , and the Invention of an Ingenious Cartographic System. The Journal of Pacific History 54(1). 1–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2018.1512369.

Gounder, Farzana (ed.). 2015. Narrative and Identity Construction in the Pacific Islands (Studies in Narrative). Vol. 21. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.21.

Iosefo, Fetaui, Anne Harris & Stacy Holman Jones. 2020. Wayfinding as Pasifika, indigenous and critical autoethnographic knowledge. In Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography. Routledge.

Jelpke, Tom, John Kyamanywa & Vasiliki Vita. 2023. Cultural-linguistic priorities of a minority community: folk history, language documentation, and orthography development with the BaVanuma people of Bundibugyo, Western Uganda. British Institute of Eastern Africa Annual Thematic Research Grants 2023-2024.

Kyamanywa, John & Tom Jelpke. forthcoming. LiVanuma linguistic vitality: A sociolinguistic documentary project.

Lüpke, Friederike. 2019. Language Endangerment and Language Documentation in Africa. In H. Ekkehard Wolff (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics, 468–490. 1st edn. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108283991.015.

Nyaga, Susan. 2023. Comparative issues in mother tongue advocacy in Africa: can negative attitudes towards African languages be changed? In The Third Conference of the Language Association of Eastern Africa. Kampala, Uganda.

Okurut, Lazarus, Susan Kiguli & Isaac Tibasiima. 2023. Place and Belonging in the songs of Madoxx Ssemanda Ssematimba. In The Third Conference of the Language Association of Eastern Africa. Kampala, Uganda.

Rogers, Christine. 2020. Almost always clouds: Stitching a map of belonging. In Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography. Routledge.

Spiller, Michelle. 2016. Calling the Island to You: Becoming a Wayfinder Leader. https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/handle/2292/32638. (6 September, 2023).

Vita, Vasiliki, Daphne Nestor & Lincy Marino. 2023. Experiences from documenting Ramari Dongosaro in a multilingual context. In. Online.

Wizlack-Makarevich, Alena. 2023. Creating and utilizing corpora for language description and development: lessons learned from three projects across the African continent. In The Third Conference of the Language Association of Eastern Africa. Kampala, Uganda.

2015. The Cultural Rights of Ethnic Minorities in Uganda – a call for action. Kampala: Cross Cultural Foundation of Uganda. http://crossculturalfoundation.or.ug/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/The-Cultural-Rights-of-Ethnic-Minorities-in-Uganda-A-call-for-action-@CCFU.pdf.

PhilSoc meeting of Saturday 18^th March at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge

The recording of PhilSoc’s recent meeting is now available to view on the society’s YouTube channel. The lecture was held in the Buckingham House Lecture Theatre, Murray Edwards College, and the speaker was Professor Kasia M. Jaszczolt (University of Cambridge):

There is no doubt that cross-linguistic investigations into temporal reference inform psychologists about the properties of the human concept of time. But it is not common to go further: from linguistic externalisations of the human concept of time to the properties of ‘real’ time as it is discussed in philosophy of physics. In this talk I combine what I call ‘linguistic time’ (time_L), ‘epistemological time’ (time_E) and ‘metaphysical time’ (time_M) to show that an insight into semantic properties of markers of temporality in various, tensed and tenseless, natural languages helps explain the apparent conflict between the dynamic, flowing time_E and static time_M – ‘real’ time that does not flow but instead consists of relations of static precedence and succession (on the so-called ‘B theory’, McTaggart 1908). I present some arguments for the modal foundations of the human concept of time (time as supervenient on epistemic modality, Jaszczolt, e.g. 2009, 2020, in press) and conclude that on the level of universal semantic (modal) building blocks, time_E is essentially static – it only flows on the level of their language- and culture-specific combinations that produce  complex temporal concepts. I conclude by presenting formal representations of temporal reference, using the contextualist theory of Default Semantics. 

Select references:

Jaszczolt, K. M. 2009. Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality.  Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Jaszczolt, K. M. 2020. Human imprints of real time: From semantics to metaphysics. Philosophia 48: 1855–1879.

Jaszczolt, K. M. In press. ‘Does human time really flow? Metaindexicality, metarepresentation, and basic concepts’. In: K. M. Jaszczolt (ed.), Understanding Human Time. For Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McTaggart, J. McT. E. 1908. The unreality of time. Mind 17. Reprinted in J. McT. E. McTaggart. 1943. Philosophical Studies. London: Edward Arnold. 110–131.

Virtual meeting of 2nd December 2022, hosted by the University of Edinburgh

The recording of PhilSoc’s most recent meeting is now available to view on the society’s YouTube channel:

This meeting took the form of an early career researcher panel, chaired by Ricardo Napoleão de Souza (University of Edinburgh), and addressed the following question: ‘Is the study of change in languages with little or no historical record fundamentally different from similar work on languages with a lengthy written tradition?’

To this day, there remains a close association between historical linguistics and Indo-European, in part due to the wealth of written sources which scholars can use in historical research on the family. For some, this goes as far as an assumption—often implicit—that historical work based primarily on spoken data is less reliable, accurate, or viable than that based on written sources. These attitudes persist, despite the venerable and successful tradition of historical work on languages without a written record—some of which in fact predates Sir William Jones’s famous ‘common source’ discourse in 1786, heralded as the beginning of Indo-European studies.

In response to this, three early career researchers shared their experiences of using primary spoken data collected in the field to investigate language change, bringing their research perspectives to bear on methodological, conceptual and experiential issues in historical work with unwritten languages.

Speakers:
Ryan Gehrmann (Payap University): ‘Tonogenesis in Mainland Southeast Asia: Reconciling the historical evidence and the comparative evidence’
Tatiana Reid (University of Edinburgh): ‘Untangling the origins of floating suprasegmental component in Nuer’
Laura Arnold (University of Edinburgh): ‘From areal linguistics to historical sociolinguistics: Identifying contact events in northwest New Guinea’

written by Alessandra Serpone (independent scholar)

With support from the Philological Society’s Martin Burr Fund, I was able to attend the 34th Deutsche Orientalistentag (DOT) which took place 12–17th September 2022 at the Freie Universität Berlin. It is the representative conference of German Oriental Studies and is held once every three to five years. This year it was attended by about 1,200 participants from more than 60 countries. All the represented disciplines (e.g. Egyptology, Ancient Oriental Studies, Semitic Studies and Philology, Hebrew Studies, Arabic Studies and Philology, and African Studies) were grouped into 24 sections, and there were presentations by scholars at all phases of their careers.

Attendance at this meeting represented a great opportunity to me, as an early career scholar, to present and discuss my current research with an audience of specialists outside my usual academic network. In addition, I had the opportunity to be inspired by interesting talks closely related to my historical and diachronic interests. As I am mainly focused on ancient Semitic languages, I also found it very stimulating to be exposed to diverse aspects of modern Semitic languages research, such as that on Neo-Aramaic and Modern South Arabian. 

I presented a paper titled Diachronic Considerations on the Personal Marker y– in the Semitic Prefix Conjugation on the first day, as part of the Semitistics Section. As it represents a preliminary overview of my ongoing research, it was highly beneficial for me to receive feedback from the specialized audience, which belonged to both the Semitic and the Afro-Asiatic areas. I found it very helpful to receive comparative remarks and suggestions about how my current work could further develop.

In my talk, I addressed the third-person marker y- of the Semitic prefix conjugation diachronically. Unlike the first and second person markers, it does not bear any resemblance to the independent personal pronouns. Therefore, it does not lend itself to an easy etymological explanation. To determine its origins, I offered some preliminary comparative notes where the theme /y-/ is attested outside the verbal paradigm, as in the demonstrative and relational marker in South Ethiopic, and the interrogative theme in Phoenician, Hebrew, and Ugaritic. What I find rather critical in historical terms are a group of nominal forms (e.g. personal and place names) starting with y-. Although they are traditionally interpreted as ‘transpositions métonymiques de formes verbales’ (Cohen 1970: 34; see also von Soden 1966: 182), e.g. Yi-ṣḥaq = ‘he laughs’, I claim that comparative and historical facts may suggest a different interpretation. I argue that the theme /y-/ goes back to an ancient ‘determinative-relative’ pronoun before a grammaticalization process made it acquire its inflectional status (cf. Pellat 1957: 186; Garbini 1984: 84–88; Garbini & Durand 1994: 109–110), e.g. Yi-ṣḥaq ‘the one who laughs’.

The Martin Burr Fund provided conference support which helped with the cost of travel and accommodation in Berlin. I am thankful to the Philological Society for the opportunity to refine my current research, along with the methodologies applied, and to strengthen my academic network.

References

Cohen, D. 1970. Études de linguistique sémitique et arabe. The Hague: Mouton.

Garbini, G. 1984. Le lingue semitiche. Studi di storia linguistica. Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale.

Garbini, G. & Durand, O. 1994. Introduzione alle lingue semitiche. Brescia: Paideia.

Pellat, C. 1957. Review of L’Arabe classique. Esquisse d’une structure linguistique, by H. Fleisch. Arabica 4(2).183–188. 

Soden, W. von. 1966. Jahwe ‘Er ist, Er erweist sich’. Die Welt Des Orients 3(3).177–187. 

written by Professor Aditi Lahiri & Professor Martin Maiden (University of Oxford)

Every two years The International Conference for Historical Linguistics (ICHL) brings together historical linguists and specialists in related fields to explore advances in areas such as methods and practices of linguistic reconstruction, formal approaches to language change, historical sociolinguistics, computational approaches to historical linguistics, contact and areal linguistics, interfaces between historical linguistics and other disciplines, and many other related areas. ICHL25 was held at the University of Oxford (1–5 August 2022) and involved 421 participants whose oral presentations and posters covered all these areas. Reports we received from participants suggested that the conference was a great success.

The Philological Society sponsored a reception on the final day,  which was attended by 383 participants, and also provided Martin Burr Fund support for a student based in the US to present a paper (see James Tandy’s report: https://blogphilsoc.wordpress.com/2022/08/18/25th-international-conference-on-historical-linguistics-ichl25-oxford/). At the final session of the conference, Professor Aditi Lahiri and Professor Martin Maiden thanked the Society for their contribution. Professor Maiden introduced Professor Lutz Marten, the editor of the Transactions of the Philological Society (TPhS), who then presented a comprehensive account of the society’s goals, encouraging participants to join the society if they were not already members. Professor Marten also discussed the goals of TPhS, pointing out its breadth of coverage and relevance for historical linguistics research. Since there were more than 100 students registered at the conference, Professor Marten also provided information about the Robins Prize, encouraging potential applicants to submit their written work to the competition. Providentially, the winner of the previous Robins Prize, Dr Emily Lindsay-Smith (a leading member of the organising committee), was present and received his congratulations.

written by Sarah Eichhorn (University of Nottingham), Recipient of PhilSoc’s Burr Fund Travel and Fieldwork Bursary for PhD research

Within the field of sociolinguistics, growing attention has been paid to regional and minority languages in recent decades, particularly as communities and governments are becoming increasingly aware of diversity and multilingualism within their societies. France presents a particularly noteworthy context due to its wealth of regional languages that pre-date Standard French—such as Breton, a Brythonic Celtic language—as well as an increasing presence of minority languages like Arabic, which have come to the country more recently via immigration, and are now being passed on to subsequent French-born generations through familial transmission. Despite the linguistic diversity of France, French government language policy heavily favours monolingualism in French, which has historically led to and continues to perpetuate the marginalization of regional and minority languages. However, many regional languages have seen a resurgence in efforts toward revitalization—e.g., through the establishment of immersion schools (Adam 2020), or more militant efforts such as protests and marches. This has led to an increase in visibility and numbers of speakers. Efforts have also been made toward including languages like Arabic as foreign language options in schools (Soriano 2019). 

Most research to date focuses on regional OR minority languages, and very little comparative research has been conducted to explore the similarities and differences between the two kinds of language communities (see Filhon 2010). This gap in research has driven the development of my PhD, which seeks to explore a comparative analysis of the Breton-speaking and Arabic-speaking communities in Brittany. The issues I am examining are:

1. How two different communities of language users define and describe their experiences with regard to language. I use the term ‘language user’ rather than ‘speaker’ in order to encompass all individuals of any kind of proficiency in a given language. Many of the Breton language users interviewed for my research are enrolled in language courses and would thus not yet consider themselves full ‘speakers’ of the language, while many Arabic language users speak what they consider to be a ‘dialect’, and do not consider themselves to know ‘true’ Classical/Standard Arabic;
2. whether the language communities interact or intersect; and
3. how they deal with challenges such as French language policy and educational provision.

Through transcribed interview extracts and questionnaires, I am seeking to shed light on how these issues shape the sociolinguistic landscape of France, and Brittany in particular. My two-part research methodology comprises:

1. An online questionnaire in two versions (one for Breton and one for Arabic), distributed to language users across France. I am currently in the process of collecting and analysing responses.
2. Semi-structured interviews conducted with language users across Brittany.

With funding from the Philological Society I undertook eleven weeks of fieldwork in Brittany during May to August 2022. I spent one week in Nantes—a diverse city that, although administratively no longer part of Brittany, is historically considered part of the region and is a hub for Breton language revitalization—and 10 weeks in Rennes, the vibrant capital of Brittany and an even greater hub of Breton revitalization and diversity. I also occasionally travelled to cities such as St-Brieuc and Guingamp for interviews. In total, I conducted interviews with 29 Arabic language users and 27 Breton language users, with a generally equal distribution of age groups between 16 and 65+. The majority of Breton language users have learned or studied Breton in school or in adulthood, and only three learned the language at home. The vast majority of Arabic language users have grown up speaking the language, although it must be noted that most individuals speak a particular dialect, such as Moroccan Arabic or darija, while Classical/Standard Arabic is generally learned in school or at cultural/religious associations (see Caubet 2007, 2008).

I am currently in the earliest stages of data analysis, however some preliminary themes and comparisons have arisen already, such as a tendency for users of both languages to employ the word richesse ‘richness’ to describe their feelings toward their multilingualism. Also, a particularly surprising overlap occurred when I attended several events at an Algerian cultural association and met and interviewed individuals from the Kabylie region, who compared the situation of the indigenous Kabyle language in Algeria to that of Breton in Brittany, and found solidarity with their Breton neighbours and a mutual desire to support linguistic and cultural diversity in both countries. 

The experience of interviewing such a range of individuals and collecting their fascinating stories was rewarding and exciting, and I look forward to cross-analysing the data alongside the questionnaire results.

References

Adam, C. (2020). Bilinguisme scolaire : Familles, écoles, identités en Bretagne. Berlin: Peter Lang GmbH. 

Caubet, D. (2007). L’arabe maghrébin-darja, « langue de France », dans les parlers jeunes et les productions culturelles : un usage banalisé ? In Pratiques linguistiques des jeunes en terrain plurilingue (pp. 25–46). L’Harmattan.

Caubet, D. (2008). Immigrant languages and languages of France. Mapping Linguistic Diversity in Multicultural Contexts, 163–194.

Filhon, A. (2010). Transmission familiale des langues en France : Évolutions historiques et concurrences. Annales de démographie historique, 119 (1), 205–222.

Soriano, É. (2019). L’arabe à l’école : Hiérarchie des mobilités géographiques, inégalités des conditions linguistiques. Recherches En Didactique Des Langues et Des Cultures, 16(2), 1–20.

written by Nicola Swinburne (University of Oxford)

In present day standard English, an auxiliary ‘do’ is employed to support almost all main verbs in the interrogative and negative declarative, exceptions being ‘be’ and (in some dialects) ‘have’. For example:

1.         I do not catch the bus to work regularly.

2.         I don’t know what the answer is.

3.         Did you see Fred last night?

4.         Do you have any bananas?  (cf. Have you any bananas?)

5.         Are you still drinking that tea? (NOT: Do you be still drinking that tea?)

However, in the history of  English, as ‘do’-support (DS) was coming into the language, it was used less with stative verbs such as ‘know’ (Ellegård 1953), as if it held on to the remnant active semantics of ‘do’. 

Although ‘do’-support is fairly widespread cross-linguistically (Jäger 2006), it was almost unknown in Romance languages until the report by Benincà & Poletto (2004) of an auxiliary fa ‘do’ in the interrogative of the Camuno dialect of Upper Val Camonica at Monno. In the Monno dialect fa ‘do’-support (FS) is largely obligatory and used with all main verbs except ‘have’ and ‘be’ (and ‘know’: Swinburne, 2021)

In work for my recent DPhil thesis, I showed that in fact FS is more widespread than just the Monno dialect, and can be found in communities along 45 km of the Oglio valley and several side valleys (Figures 1, 2, 3). 

Interestingly, in many of the Middle Valley dialects, e.g. Esine (1), interrogatives may be formed in two ways, either with fa, the ‘do’ support verb (FS) (1a: ‘Does she eat the fish for supper’), or with just main verb (SCI) (1b: ‘Eats she the fish for supper’). As Camuno (like Italian) is a null-subject language, the subject is represented by a clitic, (probably just an agreement marker) on the finite verb and any lexical subject is at the end of the sentence.

	1.	(a)	Fa=la	mangià	‘l peh	da hena,	Maria?		[FS]
			does=scl.3f.sg	eat.infin	the fish	for supper	Maria
		(b)	Màngia=la	‘l peh	da hena,	Maria?			[SCI]
			eats=scl.3f.sg	the fish	for supper	Maria

When such an FS/SCI contrast is available, FS serves pragmatic functions, and is used by the speaker to indicate they have an expectation of the answer and are asking the question to engage the interlocutor and ask for their opinion. 

In dialects where use of fa is optional, the support verb appears to be at a lower stage of grammaticalisation. In these dialects it still has — to varying degrees — the meaning of ‘do’, or of ‘activity’, as prototypically carried out by an agentive subject. This is evidenced by the likelihood that FS will be used to support verbs of different semantic classes. 

I recently carried out additional fieldwork, supported by a Martin Burr Fund award, to further investigate this variation. I measured the frequency of use of FS through an elicitation experiment (which I had used previously) but with new selection of verbs to define more precisely what speakers considered most important in their choice to use FS. Results (Figure 2), firmly established that primary difference in use of FS is the role that the subject is perceived to take in the event. 

Greatest percentage FS use is with verbs with effector subjects (red); least FS use is with verbs with experiencer subjects (green: stative verbs). Verbs with theme subjects  (blue: unaccusative verbs) are approximately between the two. Causative verbs (yellow) pattern among the non-statives, with most use with verbs where activity, particularly motion, is perceived as part of the causing action (e.g. ‘open X’) and less where any such activity is less prominent (e.g. ‘give X’). The version of ‘open’ without the causing action (anticausative: light blue), ‘open’ (by itself), patterns among the stative verbs. Main verb ‘do’ (darker red) is used with FS at a lower rate than other effector-subject verbs and often considered unnecessary with a support verb that still seems to have the semantic content of ‘do’. 

The new fieldwork involved additional speakers from communities where greatest optionality in FS use (i.e. most semantic restrictions) had previously been found, and sampled communities located between zones of optional and obligatory areas in the hope of a better understanding of the final stages of grammaticalisation (Figure 3, 4). 

What can generally be said is that speakers with most generalised use of FS are found within the more isolated communities although these may be just the people who, during their working lives, interacted mostly with neighbours (who also used FS) rather than outsiders (who didn’t). Speakers with lowest use of FS are from communities with high through-traffic and thus had most contact with outsiders, but there are two different influences: a slow and persistent effect (that built up the pattern), and a more recent and rapid one (that is destroying it). 

Speakers who have preserved the most restrictive and highly selective FS use are displaying an original pattern that developed because these communities always were in a dialect contact zone. On top of this, in communities have experienced a rapid recent influx of outsiders due to post-war valley industrialisation, some speakers have changed their dialects during their lifetimes and the overall effect has been to entirely obliterate FS.

The additional phase of the research has helped confirm how use of a ‘do’ support generalises across different types of verbs, and how interactions among speakers can either hasten this generalisation, or stop it in its tracks.

References

Benincà, Paola & Cecilia Poletto. 2004. A Case of do-Support in Romance. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22(1), 51–94. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:NALA.0000005565.12630.c1.

Ellegård, A. (1953). The auxiliary do: The establishment and regulation of its use in English. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.

Jäger, A. (2006). Typology of periphrastic ‘do’-constructions. Bochum: Brockmeyer.

Swinburne, N. (2021). The grammaticalization of do-support in the northern Italian Camuno dialect. DPhil thesis, University of Oxford. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d4e7bb98-ff1a-4ffa-8e10-6a8875631241

written by James Tandy (University of Texas at Austin)

The 25^th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL25) took place at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford from August 1-5, 2022. It was attended by about 400 scholars from around the globe. This was a time of reunion for many, as one of the first major in-person linguistics conferences since the pandemic began. For me as a younger scholar from the U.S., the conference provided an opportunity to meet many historical linguists from outside my home country.

Because I study Mayan languages, which have limited historical attestation, I find it inspiring to see the depth and specificity of research topics that people are exploring in better-documented language families. It also made me aware of some broader principles and ideas that my future research could engage with. Two talks that particularly stood out to me were one by Tine Breban on actuation (explaining why a given change occurred when it did), and one by Matthew Baerman and Mirella Blum on “incongruent analogy” in Dinka (showing a case where analogical levelling was heavily localized, creating a pattern that was irregular with respect to the whole paradigm).

I presented a paper as part of the Tuesday afternoon workshop The Typology of Contact-Induced Changes in Morphosyntax. My talk “Direct affix borrowing: Evidence from two Mayan perfect suffixes” discussed the perfect participle suffixes -ɓil and -maχ, both of which are common in the Mayan language family. I argued that both suffixes spread areally through direct affix borrowing: rather than borrowing the suffix indirectly by way of morphologically complex loanwords, bilingual speakers transferred the suffix directly from the donor to the recipient language. As a result, the borrowed perfect suffix is fully productive even with native roots in the recipient language. Direct affix borrowing is more likely in situations with heavy bilingualism, and where there are strong structural similarities between the languages (Winford 2005, Seifart 2015, Thomason 2015), factors which are enhanced with closely related varieties such as Mayan languages (Law 2013, 2014).

In the presentation, I focused on the spread of -maχ in the Guatemalan highlands, which had some typologically interesting outcomes. I claim that -maχ originated in the Poqom subgroup as a fusion of the older Mayan perfect suffix *-ʔm with a passive suffix *-aχ. Poqom languages retain -m for the perfect in active voice and -maχ in passive voice (Mó Isém 2006). In spreading westward, following a known salt trade route (Hill and Monaghan 1987), -maχ was borrowed into the closely related languages Uspanteko, Sakapultek, and Sipakapense, and slightly more distant Mam and Tektiteko. In Mam, borrowed -maχ augments the inherited participial form -ʔn (from *-ʔm), leading to double-marked forms in -ʔn-maχ (England 1983). This is an example of “reinforcement multiple exponence” in the terms of Harris (2017), notable in that both suffixes are cognate. In Sakapultek and Sipakapense, -maχ is used in both active and passive voice (Du Bois 1981, Barrett 1999), so that the -aχ portion of –maχ has been bleached of the passive meaning it contributed in Poqom.The full slides for my presentation may be found on my website.

I am grateful to the Philological Society for a travel bursary which helped to defray the cost of my international flight and lodgings in Oxford. This opportunity has allowed me to get feedback on my research from a wider audience and to be inspired by the amazing community of historical linguists.

References

Barrett, Edward Rush, III (Rusty). 1999. A Grammar of Sipakapense Maya. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin.

Can Pixabaj, Telma. 2006. Jkemik yoloj li uspanteko (Gramática uspanteka). Guatemala: Cholsamaj.

DuBois, John. 1981. The Sacapultec Language. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of California, Berkeley.

England, Nora C. 1983. A Grammar of Mam, a Mayan language. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Harris, Alice C. 2017. Multiple exponence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hill, Robert M. II, and John Monaghan. 1987. Continuities in Highland Maya Social Organization: Ethnohistory in Sacapulas, Guatemala. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Law, Danny. 2013. “Inherited similarity and contact-induced change in Mayan Languages.” Journal of Language Contact6(2), 271-299.

Law, Danny. 2014. Language Contact, Inherited Similarity and Social Difference: The story of linguistic interaction in the Maya lowlands. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Mó Isém, Romelia. 2006b. Fonología y morfología del poqomchi’ occidental. Licenciate thesis. Guatemala: Universidad Rafael Landívar.

Seifart, Frank. 2015. “Direct and indirect affix borrowing.” Language 91(3), 511–532.

Thomason, Sarah G. 2015. “When is the diffusion of inflectional morphology not dispreferred?” In Gardani, Francesco, Peter Arkadiev, & Nino Amiridze, eds., Borrowed Morphology, 27-46. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Winford, Donald. 2005. “Contact-induced changes: Classification and processes.” Diachronica Vol. 22 No. 2, 373-427.

written by Alex Cairncross (University of Cambridge)

Successful language comprehension requires hearers/readers to resolve ambiguities which can arise at various levels of representation. For example, in (1) there a syntactic ambiguity as the bracketed relative clause (RC) may modify either the son or the doctor. These two readings are known as the high attachment (HA) and low attachment (LA) readings respectively.

1. a. Gianni ha visto il figlio₁ del medico₂ [che correva la maratona].

1. b. Gianni saw the son₁ of the doctor₂ [that was running the marathon].

Traditional psycholinguistic models assumed that when presented with this kind of ambiguity, a universal principle of locality (e.g. LATE CLOSURE, Frazier 1978) would guide hearers/readers to prefer LA. Since Cuetos & Mitchell (1988) however, we have known that speakers of different languages exhibit contrasting biases in their interpretation of sentences like those in (1). While speakers of languages like English have been found to exhibit the expected LA preference, speakers of languages like Spanish and Italian have been observed to exhibit an unexpected preference for HA.

Following Grillo (2012) and Grillo and Costa (2014), this crosslinguistic difference in attachment biases is due to a hidden structural difference, namely the existence of pseudorelatives (PRs) in some languages but not others. While identical to true RCs on the surface, PRs exhibit a number of structural and semantic differences. Crucially, if the embedded clause in (1) is parsed as a PR, this forces a HA interpretation. Thus Grillo & Costa (2014) suggest their PR-FIRST HYPOTHESIS. This basically states that when we are presented with strings as in (1) we universally prefer PR readings over RC ones, all other things being equal. In a language like Italian or Spanish this would drive the observed HA bias. In a language like English, which lacks PRs, a LA bias with true RCs is expected.

Independently however, it has been observed that prolonged exposure to a second language (L2) during adulthood may affect parser biases in one’s first language (L1), a phenomenon known as attrition. While native speakers of Spanish have been repeatedly shown to exhibit a HA bias (e.g. Cuetos & Mitchell 1988, Carreiras & Clifton 1993, 1999), after migrating to an English-speaking country, previous studies using both online and offline measures have found that native speakers of Spanish begin to exhibit a LA bias in their L1 (Dussias 2003, 2004, Dussias & Sagarra 2007).

Thus, on the one hand it has been argued that we can derive the differences between languages from a set of universal parser biases once PRs are taken into account. On the other, it has been observed that parser biases may change within an individual speaker in certain multilingual contexts. How to reconcile these two positions is unclear as the multilingual studies predated the PR account and so did not take PRs into account. In response, I am conducting a series of experiments to explore the attrition of parser biases in a new language pair, L1-Italian, L2-English. In the stimuli for these experiments, PR availability is always directly manipulated so that we can try and disentangle which parser biases (i.e. locality or PR-firstness) are affected by attrition.

Thanks to the fieldwork funding provided by the Philological Society, I was able to travel to the Italy to conduct an eye-tracking-while-reading experiment with native speakers still living in their L1 community. That experiment serves two purposes. First, it will allow us to test some predictions made by the PR account regarding online language processing. Second, these participants will serve as a control group against which to test L1 Italian speakers living in the UK. Although recruitment of the UK based group is still ongoing, results from the group in Italy do provide partial support for the PR account. In items in which PRs were blocked in Italian, participants exhibited a clear and early online LA bias with true RCs. When PRs were available however, the expected HA bias was not observed in online measures but did surface in the accuracy to comprehension questions for the same items.

References

Carreiras, M., & Clifton, C. (1993). Relative clause interpretation preferences in Spanish and English. Language and Speech, 36, 353–372.

Carreiras, M., & Clifton, C. (1999). Another word on parsing relative clauses: Eyetracking evidence from Spanish and English. Memory & Cognition, 27(5), 826–833. doi: 10.3758/bf03198535

Cuetos, F., & Mitchell, D. C. (1988). Cross-Linguistic Differences in Parsing: Restrictions on the use of the Late Closure strategy in Spanish. Cognition, 30(1), 73–105. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2

Dussias, P. E. (2003). Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in L2 Learners: Some effects of bilinguality on L1 and L2 processing strategies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25(4), 529–557. doi: 10.1017/s0272263103000238

Dussias, P. E. (2004). Parsing a first language like a second: The erosion of L1 parsing strategies in Spanish-English bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 8(3), 355–371. doi: 10.1177/13670069040080031001

Dussias, P. E., & Sagarra, N. (2007). The effect of exposure on syntactic parsing in Spanish–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10(1), 101–116. doi: 10.1017/s1366728906002847

Frazier, L. (1978). On Comprehending Sentences: Syntactic parsing strategies (Doctoral dissertation). University of Connecticut.

Grillo, N. (2012). Local and Universal. In V. Bianchi & C. Chesi (Eds.), Enjoy linguistics! papers offered to Luigi Rizzi on the occasion of his 60th birthday (pp. 234–245). Siena, Italy: CISCL Press. Retrieved from https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/110188/

Grillo, N., & Costa, J. (2014). A Novel Argument for the Universality of Parsing Principles. Cognition, 133(1), 156–187. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.05.019