Language contact has presumably had an impact on all of the world’s languages. This Ph.D. dissertation provides a thorough description of the lexical outcomes of the contact between the arguably... Show moreLanguage contact has presumably had an impact on all of the world’s languages. This Ph.D. dissertation provides a thorough description of the lexical outcomes of the contact between the arguably young American Spanish and the youngest variety of Southern Hemisphere Englishes, thus closing a gap in the literature on Spanish and English as contact languages.Situated at the crossroads of toponomastics, lexical semantics, and language attitudes, and embedded within a theoretical framework of contact linguistics, this thesis addresses the contact history of Falkland Islands English with Spanish and examines to what extent such contact played a part in the shaping of the archipelago’s official language. To do so, an innovative mixed-methods approach is used to broaden the analytical depth of the results. Furthermore, a range of sources are used, i.e., archival research, literature reviews, and ethnographic fieldwork.The findings show that (i) Spanish-English contact in the Falklands has left two main linguistic products: loanwords and place names; (ii) even though the Falklands currently host an English-speaking community, the Islands have a long history of Spanish-speaking settlers; (iii) Spanish loanwords are mainly related to horse tack and horse types, and most words are tightly connected to gaucho vernacular but not exclusively with their equestrian duties, and (iv) Falkland Islands English hosts a handful of loanwords that are originally from autochthonous South American languages.This dissertation will be of interest to scholars working on language contact, toponomastics, world Englishes, and ethnolinguistic approaches to data collection. Show less
This book comprises a synchronic description of Tagdal a Songhay-Berber mixed language spoken in the southeastern and central regions of the Republic of Niger. It begins with a summary of the... Show moreThis book comprises a synchronic description of Tagdal a Songhay-Berber mixed language spoken in the southeastern and central regions of the Republic of Niger. It begins with a summary of the historic and general sociolinguistic situation in Niger and how it affects speakers of Tagdal, followed by a description of the sound system, beginning with the consonant and vowel inventories, as well as some phonological processes. The largest sections include a description of the grammar, starting with the morphology. The intricate interactions between stress placement, vowel and consonant length, and certain aspects of the morphology are described in detail. Special attention is given to the idea that Tagdal contains two prosodic sub-systems, one for vocabulary of Songhay origin and another for vocabulary of Berber-Tuareg origin. This leads to processes such as suppletion of Songhay cognates, with suppletive stems of Tuareg origin. The syntax of Tagdal is also described, including descriptions of how clauses are combined to form both simple and complex sentences. Attention is also paid to how Tagdal combines sentences into higher-level units such as paragraphs, sections and discourses. Show less
This thesis considers Purepecha from the perspectives of genealogy and contact, as well as offering insight into word formation processes. The genealogy study re-visits the most prominent... Show moreThis thesis considers Purepecha from the perspectives of genealogy and contact, as well as offering insight into word formation processes. The genealogy study re-visits the most prominent classification proposals for Purepecha, concluding on the basis of a quantitative lexical comparison and a typological comparison of affix ordering that there is no signal of relatedness between Purepecha and any other sampled language. The two language contact studies address possible interaction between Purepecha and other languages at long-distance, regional and local levels. The lexicon of metallurgy, the most convincing archaeological evidence for long-distance interaction, does not support this contact scenario although the lack of observable loanwords in this domain may reflect the largely non-verbal nature of technology transmission. At the regional and local levels Purepecha also displays very few borrowings from the prehispanic period. This paucity of borrowings is reversed in the modern period, with Spanish exerting a heavy influence in all domains. The shift in borrowing pattern is explained by huge socio-political change since the imposition of Spanish. The word formation studies focus on the varying semantic transparency of roots and suffixes, with a specific emphasis on olfactory language. They also introduce the notion that roots may be precategorial in nature. Show less
This thesis presents a detailed description of the phonology, the tone system and the grammar of Liko, a Bantu language spoken by about 70,000 people in the northeastern part of the Democratic... Show moreThis thesis presents a detailed description of the phonology, the tone system and the grammar of Liko, a Bantu language spoken by about 70,000 people in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It provides numerous examples. Liko has a nine-vowel system with ATR contrast in the mid and high vowels. Its pervasive vowel-harmony system is [+ATR] dominant, but there are dominant verbal and nominal [−ATR] enclitics which influence preceding [+ATR] non-high vowels. Liko is a tone language with both lexical and grammatical tone contrasts, depressor consonants and automatic as well as non-automatic downstep. Liko is one of the "Northern Bantu Borderland" languages. The Bantu noun-class and agreement system is present to a large extent. Nevertheless, subject agreement is limited in verbal morphology, and object agreement is obligatory for first and second persons and class 1 and 2 objects only. The Liko verbal system is complex. To encode Tense/Aspect/Mood, the language uses segmental morphemes, tone melodies as well as time adverbials. Tone and vowel-harmony rules determine the surface realization of the verb form. Topics in syntax include: verb valency and object agreement, word order, relative clauses, complex sentences and information structure, including an analysis of focus marking. Liko is a language with strict SVO word order. Relativization and left-dislocation reveal a syntactic means to differentiate between objects and adjuncts in this language. The two appendices contain ten texts as well as verb paradigms. Show less
This work provides a typologically oriented description of clause linkage strategies in Ket, a highly endangered language spoken in Central Siberia. It is now the only surviving member of the... Show moreThis work provides a typologically oriented description of clause linkage strategies in Ket, a highly endangered language spoken in Central Siberia. It is now the only surviving member of the Yeniseian language family with the last remaining speakers residing in the north of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk province. Although Ket can be said to have a rather long history of studies, there are issues that still lack a comprehensive and coherent account in the existing literature on the language, issues of clause linkage being one of them. The present study seeks to change the situation by providing a unified description of strategies used to code various clause-linking relations, including coordinative relations, complement relations, adverbial relations and relative relations. The theoretical background of the present study is based on the general framework developed within the functional-typological approach. It incorporates all the advances made during the last decades with respect to Ketology and the study of clause linkage typology to ensure its descriptive and typological value. Show less
The use of utterance-final particles (UFPs) is a salient feature of Taiwan Mandarin, a Mandarin variety spoken in Taiwan. Despite their widespread use, Taiwan Mandarin UFPs have not attracted... Show moreThe use of utterance-final particles (UFPs) is a salient feature of Taiwan Mandarin, a Mandarin variety spoken in Taiwan. Despite their widespread use, Taiwan Mandarin UFPs have not attracted much attention in previous research. One reason for this neglect is that previous studies focus on UFPs that can be found in all Mandarin varieties and take the general validity of the findings for granted. By contrast, this study explores regional variation in the use of UFPs. Analyzing spoken Taiwan Mandarin data recorded from spontaneous conversations, it focuses on the three particles a, la and ê. It examines the core function of these particles in the interaction between the participants in various types of conversational contexts. Besides determining their core-function, this study looks into the differences with respect to UFPs between Taiwan Mandarin and in the Mandarin spoken in mainland China. The properties that are specific to Taiwan Mandarin are analyzed as resulting from long-term contact with different Sinitic varieties, especially Southern Mǐn and Jiāng-Huái Mandarin. Hypotheses about language contact influence on the use of Taiwan Mandarin UFPs are tested using actual language data, and discussed against the historical background of migration of Mandarin speakers to Taiwan in the 20th century. Show less
This study analyses the prehistory of a northeastern Siberian population, the Sakha (Yakuts), from both a linguistic and a molecular-genetic perspective. The Sakha, who are a Turkic-speaking group... Show moreThis study analyses the prehistory of a northeastern Siberian population, the Sakha (Yakuts), from both a linguistic and a molecular-genetic perspective. The Sakha, who are a Turkic-speaking group of cattle- and horse-breeders, migrated to the Lena river from an area further to the south several hundred years ago. This investigation elucidates the extent to which the Sakha interacted with the indigenous populations of the territory that they migrated to, both from the perspective of language contact and from the perspective of genetic admixture. The results show that the Sakha were in contact with two different groups during their history: with speakers of a Mongolic language and with speakers of Evenki. The contact with the Mongolic-speaking group took place during the period of the Mongol Empire, when the Sakha introduced a large number of Mongolic substance copies into their language. In contrast, the contact with the Evenks led to the introduction of a number of schematic copies, but only a relatively small amount of substance copies from Evenki into Sakha. The nature of the copies from Evenki implies that the Sakha were dominantly bilingual in Evenki; surprisingly, however, there is no genetic evidence for the shift of entire Evenk communities to the Sakha language and identity. One explanation for the discrepancy between the linguistic and the genetic results is that the schematic copies entered the language through frequent social interaction of Evenks and Sakha during the initial period after the migration, when the Sakha were few in number. This is an interdisciplinary study that combines both molecular anthropological as well as linguistic methods to elucidate the prehistoric contacts undergone by a northeastern Siberian group of cattle and horse pastoralists Show less
