Abstract
This article presents a frequently used versatile classifier
və¹³
in the endangered Ngwi language Zauzou. After investigating seven morphosyntactic contexts in which
və¹³
may occur, this ...classifier exhibits considerable syntactic and semantic overlaps with ordinary classifiers and the inanimate plural quantifier in this language.
və¹³
is used as the only classifier for unclassified nouns (i.e., some abstract and count nouns) and an alternative classifier for nearly all kinds of ordinary sortal or mensural classifiers for inanimates, especially when the canonical classifier is not known to the speaker. It shares a wide range of distributions with ordinary numeral classifiers and the plural quantifier and parallels these two classes of determiners in marking various referential values in different noun phrases. However,
və¹³
is semantically special in that it may classify nouns of various semantic classes, including abstract and mass nouns, and is underspecified in number. It is compatible with singular, plural and mass interpretations. The final quantity in the reference must be determined in the context. Moreover,
və¹³
is a lexical item involved in marking partitives, the function that is not found in ordinary classifiers and the plural quantifier. This study is a systematic description of an under-studied type of versatile classifier, highlighting the internal complexity of a classifier system in Tibeto-Burman languages.
Understanding language shift Grenoble, Lenore A; Osipov, Boris
Linguistic approaches to bilingualism,
2/2023, Letnik:
13, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
This is a response to the commentaries on our epistemological paper, The dynamics of bilingualism in language
shift ecologies. The commentaries highlight the challenges in studying language ...shift ecologies and the competing goals of
different research approaches. We hope this set of papers invokes rich discussion about other possible research questions we can
ask and the research methodologies we can use to answer them.
Nature and number of the speaker base are one of the most significant factors in measuring the vitality of the language. A language is endangered when fewer and fewer people identify with it, and ...hence they neither use it nor pass it on to the next generation. On the dimension of domains of use, a language used in fewer and fewer domains of daily activity gradually lose the characteristic of being closely associated with the community and when it finally losses the 'Home' domain it ceases to exist. Finally, one of the most important factors that motivate language shift is internal and external pressure or support that exist for a language. Any tool that seeks to assess endangerment must shed its traditional 'Europeanized' notion of 'language' and 'language use' before it can take the work in Hand. Here, Narayanan assess the two tools that have been broadly used in Indian settings, Ethnologue's EGIDS-Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale and UNESCO's LVE-Language vitality and Endangerment Index.
WORD ORDER TYPOLOGY OF RĀJI HAGHBIN, Faride; JAMALEDDIN, Faranak; TALEBI-DASTENAEI, Mahnaz
Dialectología,
06/2020
25
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
This paper reports on the results of an empirical study of word order correlations based on the samples of the Barzoki dialect of the Rāji language (Esfahan Province, Iran) with respect to Dryer's ...proposed criteria (1992). Barzoki Rāji is an endangered language with small communities of less than 50 speakers. The data was elicited from audio recordings of 4 of Rāji’s native participants, including 2 males and 2 females. The findings of this survey show that 15 criteria of 26 criteria act as an OV language and 11 criteria act like a VO language. Therefore, it can be stated that more than half of the Barzoki criteria show the linguistic criteria of OV language.
This paper introduces our special issue about ideologies in sign language vitality and revitalization and discusses ideologies related to the vitality of sign languages. Rather than taking for ...granted the notions of vitality and endangerment or developing criteria for measuring sign language vitality, the papers in this issue will provide a discursive construction of sign language endangerment. This construction in turn provides critical and historical reflection on how vitality has emerged as a concern for sign languages in specific local, national, and international contexts, the actors and institutions bringing forward this framing, and in whose interest it is to promote such discourses. The issue will survey how and by whom these ideologies are described, mobilized and legitimized, and what conceptualizations of language are emphasized and by whom.
There are thousands of languages in the world, many of which are in danger of extinction due to language competition and evolution. Language is an aspect of culture, the rise, and fall of a language ...directly affects its corresponding culture. To preserve languages and prevent their mass extinction, it is crucial to develop a mathematical model of language coexistence. In this paper, we use a qualitative theory of ordinary differential equations to analyze the bilingual competition model, and obtain the trivial and non-trivial solutions of the bilingual competition model without sliding mode control, then analyze the stability of solutions and prove that solutions of the model have positive invariance. In addition, to maintain linguistic diversity and prevent mass extinction of languages, we propose a novel bilingual competition model with sliding control. The bilingual competition model is analyzed by proposing a sliding control policy to obtain a pseudo-equilibrium point. Meanwhile, numerical simulations clearly illustrate the effectiveness of the sliding mode control strategy. The results show that the likelihood of successful language coexistence can be increased by changing the status of languages and the value of monolingual-bilingual interaction, provides theoretical analysis for the development of policies to prevent language extinction.
This study investigates the linguistic expression of bring and take events and more generally of the semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion (‘directed CAM’) across a sample of eight ...languages of the Pacific and the Americas. Unlike English, the majority of languages in our sample do not lexicalise directed CAM events by simple verbs, but rather encode the defining meaning components – caused motion, accompaniment, and directedness – in morphosyntactically complex constructions. The study shows a high degree of crosslinguistic diversity, even among closely related languages. Meaning components are contributed to directed CAM expressions by a mix of lexical semantics, morphosyntax, and pragmatic means. The study proposes a text-based, semantic typology of directed CAM events by drawing on corpus data from endangered languages.
Armenian (or , /hɑjeˈɾen/, ISO 639-1 hy) comprises an independent branch of the Indo-European language family.1 Its earliest attested ancestor is Classical Armenian in the fifth century CE (see Godel ...1975; Thomson 1989; DeLisi 2015; Macak 2016). Modern Armenian is classified into two dialect families: Eastern Armenian (ISO 639-3 hye) and Western Armenian (ISO 639-3 hyw). Eastern Armenian is spoken in modern-day Armenia, and large speaker communities also exist in Georgia, Russia and Iran (shown in Figure 1). Western Armenian was historically spoken in the Ottoman Empire, but now includes varieties spoken throughout the Armenian diaspora in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas (Donabédian 2018). There are substantial Western Armenian speaker communities in Turkey (Istanbul), Lebanon (Beirut), Syria (Aleppo, Damascus), California (Fresno, Los Angeles County), France (Marseilles), Australia (Sydney) and Argentina (Buenos Aires). There are also recent diaspora communities of Eastern Armenian speakers in California (Karapetian 2014), as well as communities of Western Armenian speakers in Armenia who escaped the Armenian genocide during World War I, who repatriated after World War II, or who fled the ongoing Syrian civil war. UNESCO lists Western Armenian as an endangered language in Turkey, and there are significant language promotion efforts in many diaspora communities that are intended to combat declining use by speaker generations born in the Americas and Europe (Al-Bataineh 2015; Chahinian & Bakalian 2016).
Tsua is a critically endangered language of the Eastern Kalahari Khoe languages where the historical processes of click replacement and click loss are relatively common. An acoustic analysis of ...Tsua's remaining alveolar and palatal click consonants that have not undergone click loss reveals that on three statistical spectral moments - center of gravity, skew, and kurtosis - the Tsua alveolar and palatal click bursts do not markedly differ from each other. T-tests reveal that the differences are not statistically significant. Moreover, the click burst duration and intensity differences are not statistically significant either. In contrast, an analysis of the alveolar and palatal clicks in Jul 'hoan, which does not exhibit click loss, shows that these clicks are significantly different on all the acoustic measures. These findings may help shed light on the diachronic process of click loss in Tsua.
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