This chapter seeks to tease out the intersection of displacement and reconstruction in a specific urban setting: The shopping mall in post-Civil War Beirut. Drawing upon cultural critique of late... Show moreThis chapter seeks to tease out the intersection of displacement and reconstruction in a specific urban setting: The shopping mall in post-Civil War Beirut. Drawing upon cultural critique of late capitalist urbanism, the chapter argues that its design inspires a sense of loss and disorientation that resembles a condition of displacement. In the specific context of Beirut, this is entangled with other, often more violent, forms of displacement.The chapter proceeds to confront this bleak picture of the amnesiac mall with ethnographic studies that describe modes of conviviality in shopping malls in the wider Middle Eastern region. Far from denying their decontextualized architecture and exclusivist class dynamics, these studies show that shopping malls also form sites where social life can thrive. Attention to social liveliness in an otherwise alienating environment will subsequently be used as a ground for the analysis of literary representations of Beirut's consumerist urbanism. The chapter argues that in these works, written by Rabee Jaber and Hassan Daoud, the liveliness of spaces of consumption are presented as a source of solace in the face of loss. The narratives thus offer a glimpse of what urban recovery may look like, even if situated within an exclusive urbanism that continues to deserve our critique. Show less
In the Proto-Quechuan lexicon, many two-segment phonetic substrings recur in semantically related roots, even though they are not independent morphemes. Such elements may have been morphemes before... Show moreIn the Proto-Quechuan lexicon, many two-segment phonetic substrings recur in semantically related roots, even though they are not independent morphemes. Such elements may have been morphemes before the Proto-Quechuan stage (i.e., in Pre-Proto-Quechuan). On the other hand, this may simply be due to chance, or to phonesthesia. In this paper, we introduce the Crosslinguistic Colexification Network Clustering (CCNC) algorithm, as well as an accompanying test statistic, which allow us to evaluate our claims against a neutral standard of semantic relatedness (the CLICS2 database; List, et al. 2018). We obtain very strong statistical evidence that there are hitherto unexplained recurrent elements within Proto-Quechuan roots, but not within Proto-Aymaran roots. Some of these elements are explainable as phonesthemes, but most appear to reflect archaic Quechuan morphology. These findings are consistent with an emerging picture of the early Quechuan-Aymaran contact relationship in which Quechuan structure was reformatted on the Aymaran template. Show less
This dissertation reconstructs the history of the Flores-Lembata languages (Austronesian, eastern Indonesia) by investigating traces of contact in the lexicon and grammar. Part I fills a gap in the... Show moreThis dissertation reconstructs the history of the Flores-Lembata languages (Austronesian, eastern Indonesia) by investigating traces of contact in the lexicon and grammar. Part I fills a gap in the documentation of the Flores-Lembata languages by providing a descriptive grammar of the previously undescribed Central Lembata language. Part II researches the history of the phonology and the lexicon of the Flores-Lembata languages and provides evidence for both inherited lexical items and a non-Austronesian lexical substrate. Part III examines morpho-syntactic features and their history of contact. Eight atypical structural features of the Flores-Lembata languages are described and evaluated on their potential of being the result of contact with non-Austronesian languages of the area.It is proposed that the Flores-Lembata languages have been in contact with one or more languages typologically similar to the non-Austronesian Alor-Pantar languages that are currently spoken on two adjacent islands. This contact between Flores-Lembata languages and non-Austronesian languages must have been ongoing since the time of Proto-Flores-Lembata until after the break-up of the family into subgroups. The Lamaholot subgroups have gained more non-Austronesian features than the other subgroups. This suggests that the contact of each of the subgroups must have varied in intensity and length. Show less
