Calendrier

• Matthias Urban (Universität Tübingen)

dans le cadre DILIS

Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in questions of language geography: Why is linguistic diversity distributed unevenly across the globe, with some regions, e.g. Amazonia or Papua New Guinea, boasting a very high density of distinct languages and language families, while others do not? Why are individual properties of the sound systems and the grammar of languages often skewed in their distribution? A variety of approaches have been taken to answer these questions, but one line of reasoning that has gained prominence is to seek explanations for at least some distributions –both of languages and their features– in aspects of the physical environment (e.g. Everett et al. 2016, Derungs et al. 2018, Hua et al. 2019).

In this presentation, I set the scene by presenting a short panorama of these, and then move on to discuss recent own work on the topic. Regarding language diversity, I will be concerned specifically with the distribution and genesis of language isolates –languages that could not be convincingly linked to any other language by common descent, and that therefore form self-contained language families of their own (Urban 2021). Regarding the distribution of typological features, I will focus on the distribution of cross-linguistically relatively rare segments, specifically ejectives, whose distribution has previously been claimed to respond to altitude (Everett 2013), and uvulars, which follow a similar distribution (Urban and Moran 2020). In both regards, I test accounts for the genesis of the distributions that invoke the geophysical environment in different ways against alternative baseline accounts, and find at beast weak statistical support for the respective geophysical accounts. Finally, reporting work in progress that elaborates on Urban et al. (2019), I discuss how the areal typology of the Americas, where a geographical signal in the areal typology of western South America may not reflect environmental factors, but population prehistory.

A general conclusion is that, in order to gain adequate insights into the genesis of linguistic diversity and how, if at all, it has been shaped by the physical environment, we need a marriage of large scale quantitative big data approaches with detailed knowledge on the social, economic, and geographical (pre)historical population dynamics of the studied regions.

References

• Derungs, Curdin, Martina Köhl, Robert Weibel, and Balthasar Bickel. 2018. Environmental factors drive language density more in doof-producing that in hunter-gatherer populations. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 285: 20172851. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.2851
• Everett, Caleb. 2013. Evidence for direct geographical influences on linguistic sounds: the case of ejectives. PLoS ONE 8(6): e65275. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065275
• Everett, Caleb, Damián E. Blasí, and Seán G. Roberts. 2016. Language evolution and climate: the case of desiccation and tone. Journal of Language Evolution 1 (1): 33-46.
• Hua, Xia, Simon J. Greenhill, Marcel Cardillo, Hilde Schneemann, and Lindell Bronham. 2019. The ecological drivers of variation in global language diversity. Nature Communications 10: 2047. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09842-2
• Urban, Matthias, Hugo Reyes-Centeno, Kate Bellamy, and Matthias Pache. 2019. The areal typology of western Middle and South America: Towards a comprehensive view. Linguistics 57 (6):1403-1463
• Urban, Matthias, and Steven Moran. 2020. Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: Ejectives and beyond. PLoS ONE 16(2): e0245522.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245522
• Urban, Matthias. 2021b. The geography and development of language isolates 8 (4): 202232. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.202232

• Albert Alvarez (Université de Sonoro, DDL/Collegium de Lyon)

dans le cadre DILIS : Atelier Morphosyntaxe

This talk aims to present a research project to be developed from September 2021 to July 2022 at the Collegium de Lyon and at the DDL Laboratory. This research is focused on nominalizers in Uto-Aztecan languages, a family of more than 30 languages spoken in North and Central America. Nominalizers are affixes attached to a base in order to derive a nominal constituent. These affixes are important in world’s languages because they contribute to the development of language complexity. They can be used for creating new words in a language (in this case, nominalizers are working at the level of lexical morphology, and the derived nominal constituents are thus lexical nominalizations, that is complex lexical items associated with lexical complexity), but they can also be involved in the construction of grammar (syntactic complexity), in particular in the domain of clause combination (in this case, nominalizers are working at the level of morphosyntax, and the nominalized constructions are thus grammatical nominalizations functioning as subordinate clauses embedded in a complex clause). Based on the functional approach to nominalization recently proposed by Shibatani (2019), this study seeks to identify the different synchronic functions associated with these nominalizers in Uto-Aztecan languages and to propose the origins of these markers as well as the contexts and the evolutionary paths involved in their emergence and development. At this stage of the research, I will focus on the event and argument nominalizers in Uto-Aztecan languages, considering their uses in lexical and grammatical nominalizations as well as the possible source constructions at the origin of the nominalization function of these markers. Additionally, it will be shown how the different uses of these nominalizers in Uto-Aztecan languages represent a good morphological support that provides clear evidence in favor of the functional approach to nominalization.

Shibatani, M. 2019. What is nominalization ? Towards the theoretical foundations of nominalization. In Roberto Zariquey, Masayoshi Shibatani, David W. Fleck (eds.), Nominalization in the Languages of the Americas, John Benjamins Publishing: Amsterdam/Philadelphia. 15-167.

[Note: réunion interne. Seuls sont concernés les 15 membres élus, nommés ou de droit du Conseil de Laboratoire.

Note: internal meeting. Only the 15 elected, appointed or ex-officio members of the Conseil de Laboratoire are concerned.]