Suchergebnisse

The Caucasus is characterized by a relatively high level of linguistic diversity, whether measured in terms of number of languages, number of language families, or structural properties. This is in stark contrast to low levels of linguistic diversity in neighboring areas (Europe, the Middle East), although the Caucasus does not reach such high levels of linguistic diversity as are found in New Guinea. There is even a variation between greater diversity in the North Caucasus and less diversity in the South Caucasus. Illustrative structural properties show not only idiosyncratic properties of individual languages and families but also features that have spread across the boundaries separating languages and families, sometimes with variation across languages with regard to finer points of detail, although few features characterize the Caucasus as a single linguistic area. Social factors have probably played at least as important a role as has geography in the development of linguistic diversity in the Caucasus.

Mainland Southeast Asia has long been recognized as a classic example of a linguistic area, but earlier characterizations of this language area have typically been intuitive, for instance providing seemingly impressive lists of features known to be shared by Mainland Southeast Asian languages but without considering a list of features on which these languages differ, without explicitly considering the extent to which the features in question are common or rare across the world as a whole. By using the maps in the World Atlas of Language Structures, it is possible to build up a more structured assessment of the extent to which Mainland Southeast Asia constitutes a linguistic area. Many maps show a clear delimitation between Mainland Southeast Asia and the rest of Eurasia, although the precise boundary varies from map to map, as does the presence and location of intermediate zones. The dividing line between Mainland Southeast Asia and Insular Southeast Asia is much less clear-cut, thus providing some evidence for a more general Southeast Asian linguistic area.

Linguistics; Anthropology; Mainland Southeast Asia

The volume is highly relevant to the current regional and international discussion on endangered languages, language contact, documentation and areal typology. The publication is the outcome of a fruitful theoretical and methodological exchange between Latin American scholars and international scholars working in other regions. Most of the papers target Latin American languages. Additionally, new insight into the contact situations in Indonesia, Iran, Australia and Papua New Guinea is provided.

Mainland Southeast Asia (hereafter: MSEA) can be broadly defined as the area occupied by present day Cambodia, Laos, Peninsular Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam, along with areas of China south of the Yangtze River. Also sometimes included are the seven states of Northeast India, and—although here the term 'mainland' no longer applies—the islands from Indonesia and Malaysia running southeast to Australia and West Papua (see Map 1). There are no exact borders around the MSEA area. Different scholars draw lines in different places. But there is nevertheless a core (Comrie 2007: 45). MSEA is always taken to include Indochina—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—together with Thailand, and, usually, Peninsular Malaysia and part or all of Myanmar (see Map 2). This book covers the broader scope of Greater MSEA, with several chapters moving beyond the core area of Indochina and Thailand, in all directions; see chapters in this book by Vittrant and by Jenny on Myanmar (cf. Bradley 1995; Watkins 2005), by Post on Northeast India (cf. Morey and Post 2008, 2010; Hyslop, Morey, and Post 2011, 2012, 2013), by Gil on Insular Southeast Asia (cf. Adelaar and Himmelmann 2005; Blust 2013a, b), and by de Sousa on Southern China (cf. Bauer 1996; Ansaldo and Matthews 2001; Chappell 2001).

Akabea belongs to the Great Andamanese family, one of the two indigenous language families of the Andaman Islands. All that remains today of this family is a handful of "rememberers" of so-called Present-day Great Andamanese, based on the language furthest removed from Akabea. None of the traditional languages was the subject of professional linguistic documentation or analysis. However, two government officials collected extensive material, with Akabea being the language most thoroughly treated. Neither was a trained linguist, and one might wonder whether anything reliable can be derived from their documentation. We have worked in detail with the Akabea material, and conclude that while there are obvious gaps (e.g. in the phonetics), the overall picture is that of a very consistent and elaborate grammatical and lexical structure. We present two typologically unusual features of Akabea. One relates to the conceptual basis of the language's lexicon, which makes extensive use of somatic (body-part) prefixes, e.g. Akabea aka- 'mouth'. These are sometimes used literally (as in the word for 'mouth'), sometimes by semantic extension (e.g. in words relating to food and speech). The other concerns an unusual grammatical feature of the language, namely verb root ellipsis. In English, it is possible to omit verbs under appropriate pragmatic conditions, e.g. in response to Is he reading? one can answer Yes, he is, with omission of the whole word reading, but not *Yes, he is -ing, with omission of just the root read. Precisely this bizarre non-existent English type is what is attested in Akabea. ; A língua akabea pertence à família grande-andamanesa, uma das duas famílias linguísticas indígenas das ilhas Andamão. Tudo o que sobra hoje desta família é um pequeno número de "lembradores" da língua chamada grande-andamanês contemporâneo, a língua mais distantemente relacionada com o akabea. Nenhuma das línguas tradicionais foi o objeto de documentação o de análise linguística profissional. Contudo, dois funcionários ...

Abstract
Great Andamanese constitutes alongside Ongan one of the two indigenous language families of the Andaman Islands. The phonological typology of the Great Andamanese languages includes a number of features of areal interest, including retroflex consonants (characteristic of South Asia) and lack of phonemic fricatives (reconstructed for Proto-Dravidian). Its morphosyntactic typology has some unremarkable features from a global typological perspective, such as verb-final clause order combined with postpositions and possessor-before-possessed but with postnominal attributive adjectives, alongside highly unusual features such as: somatic prefixes; several series of personal pronouns whose choice depends not only on grammatical relation/semantic role but also, for instance, on clause type; negation of a verbal clause by expressing it as the non-finite subject of a negative copular clause; and root ellipsis.

AbstractWe present initial exploratory work on illuminating the long-standing question of areal versus genealogical connections in South Asia using computational data visualization tools. With respect to genealogy, we focus on the subclassification of Indo-Aryan, the most ubiquitous language family of South Asia. The intent here is methodological: we explore computational methods for visualizing large datasets of linguistic features, in our case 63 features from 200 languages representing four language families of South Asia, coming out of a digitized version of Grierson'sLinguistic Survey of India. To this dataset we apply phylogenetic software originally developed in the context of computational biology for clustering the languages and displaying the clusters in the form of networks. We further exploremultiple correspondence analysisas a way of illustrating how linguistic feature bundles correlate with extrinsically defined groupings of languages (genealogical and geographical). Finally, map visualization of combinations of linguistic features and language genealogy is suggested as an aid in distinguishing genealogical and areal features. On the whole, our results are in line with the conclusions of earlier studies: Areality and genealogy are strongly intertwined in South Asia, the traditional lower-level subclassification of Indo-Aryan is largely upheld, and there is a clearly discernible areal east–west divide cutting across language families.