Category Archives: Typology

Asadpour co-edits volume on language contact

A new volume on Word Order Variation has been published in the series Studia Typologica [STTYP] (De Gruyter Mouton) by Hiwa Asadpour in collaboration with Thomas Jügel. The focus region is the Iranic-Semitic-Turkic contact area, where many languages are described as verb-final, ‘Targets’ (Goals, Recipients, etc.) tend to appear in the immediate postverbal position, a pattern violating the alleged ‘basic word order’. The volume will be available from August 1 on.

Investigating empirical material, the present volume examines the idea of its contact-induced origin by combining various languages Continue reading Asadpour co-edits volume on language contact

ETPOLL 2022

Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Low-Resource Languages (ETPOLL2022) – Passive and relative clause structures

Host Institution: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Website: https://blog.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/etpoll22/home/

Dates: 16-Jun-2022 – 20-Jun-2022
Location: Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany

During the course of the workshop, we will discuss various empirical and theoretical approaches in the study of low-resource languages, with a particular focus on passive and relative clause structures. Our topics are relevant for researchers in the fields of linguistic typology, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, empirical linguistics, and applied linguistics.

The languages which will be covered in this workshop include: Arabic, Armenian, Azeri Turkic, Balochi, Domari, Japanese, Kurdish, Neo-Aramaic, Persian, Romeyka, Turkish  Continue reading ETPOLL 2022

Am-David: “A Semantic Typology of Definiteness”

Assif Am-David published a monograph based on his dissertation “A semantic typology of definiteness”. This book explores the crosslinguistic distributional patterns of definiteness markers. A distinction is drawn between semantic definiteness and morpho-syntactic definiteness marking. The semantic components of definiteness are arranged, similar to semantic maps, and language-specifically assigned to definiteness markers. This model is based on the results of an empirical study of Q’ekchi’, Otomi, Maori and Basque. The choice of a suitable sample for a typological study is also discussed.

Bibliographic information:

Am-David, Assif (2014): A Semantic Typology of Definiteness. Lampert Academic Publishing.

The book can be purchased at:
www.lap-publishing.com/catalog/details//store/gb/book/978-3-659-56612-7/a-semantic-typology-of-definiteness

Honorifics: Types, Data, and Importance for Linguistic Theory

by Assif Am David, Frankfurt a.M.

Honorifics are a linguistic encoding of social relations in a discourse. Therefore, they are closely related to pragmatic and sociolinguistic phenomena. On the other hand, unlike the latter, they are often highly grammaticalised and require not only pragmatic, but also formal consistency.

Honorifics can be divided into three different axis depending on whose honour (or disrespect) is expressed by the utterance. Comrie first introduced the different axes honorifics can refer to: Continue reading Honorifics: Types, Data, and Importance for Linguistic Theory