Word order correlations and word order change: an "applied-typological” study on literary Armenian varieties

Jasmine Dum-Tragut


Since Greenberg's (1963) implicational universals, there have been various discussions about correlations between certain pairs of grammatical elements and basic word order and the predictability of syntactic developments in individual languages, or even linguistic areas, on the basis of these implicational universals and correlational pairs.

The syntactic analysis of natural languages shows that some implications are not necessarily compelling. Deviations from implicational norms can be caused by simple pragmatic or semantic circumstances or by linguistic borrowing. The correlation of the order of nominal modifiers and head-noun with the basic word order features is still in debate. Which correlations are "universal”? Which ones give revealing information about syntactic patterns and word-order changes in a particular language?

The study of Armenian syntax has so far had little attention within both Armenian studies and General Linguistics. In the present study, word-order patterns and the diachronic syntactic change in literary Armenian varieties are described by means of word-order correlations, word-order principles and the interaction of morphological agreement and syntactic ordering. Conventionalized word-order patterns and preferences in Classical, Middle and both Modern Armenian varieties are formulated. These are supported by statistical frequencies taken from Armenian text corpora. Order preferences and frequencies in all stages of literary Armenian also contribute to a new discussion about the status of Armenian as a rather 'free' or 'variable' word order language, and prove that the relevant syntactic change was already in the initial stage in the oldest literary variant, Classical Armenian.

ISBN 9783895867514. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 22. 400pp. 2002.

Tense in Persian

Its Nature and Use

Behrooz Mahmoodi Bakhtiari


TENSE IN PERSIAN: ITS NATURE AND USE, is a comprehensive work on the Persian tense system, which is composed in 6 chapters.

1) Theoretical preliminaries
2) Review of the related literature
3) The morphology of Persian tenses
4) The semantics of Persian tenses
5) Tense in the Persian discourse
6) Summary and conclusion.
Bibliography.

The theoretical framework chosen for this study was Comrie's (1985) work TENSE, but some other important books such as Dahl (1985) TENSE AND ASPECT SYSTEMS, and Decklerk (1991)'s work TENSE IN ENGLISH have been used. Covering the different aspects of the Persian tense, the book can be useful for those interested in TAM studies, specially those who are interested in Indo-European linguistics.

ISBN 9783895866746. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 24. 220pp. 2002.

A Phonology of Southern Luri

Eric John Anonby
Leiden University / Canada Institute of Linguistics

Southern Luri, an Indo-European language in the Southwestern Group of Iranian languages, counts almost one million speakers.  Still, while brief linguistic sketches have been written in Farsi, the existence of Southern Luri as a distinct language group has until recently been unknown to Western scholarship.  In a recent comparative work, ‘Update on Luri: How Many Languages?’ (2003), Anonby established the existence of three separate languages in the Luri continuum: Lurist?ni, Bakhti?ri and Southern Luri.

In the present study, the author provides a window into the phonological system of Southern Luri.  Although closely related to both Bakhti?ri and Farsi, the language is nonetheless distinguished by a number of particular - and at times striking - phonological characteristics.  The vowel system is marked by a rich inventory of diphthongs, several of which exhibit historical /h/ as a lengthening element.  Among the numerous phonological processes, pervasive short vowel reduction and a series of consonant softenings are most prominent.  Rigorous restrictions in the composition of syllables drive most of the morphophonemic processes.  The study addresses the impact of borrowing on the language and concludes with a précis on speech style, stress and intonation processes.

Erik John Anonby is a researcher in Linguistics at Leiden University and instructor at the Canada Institute of Linguistics.  Previous to his work on Iranian languages, he conducted research in Chad, Africa.  His explorations have focussed on topics as diverse as phonological analysis, dialectology, translation theory and ethnoornithology.  In addition to comparative work on the Luri languages, he has published poetry and numerous articles as well as the longer works B?hendayal: Bird Classification in Luri (forthcoming), A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Zaghawa (Beria) of Chad and Sudan (2000) and An Analysis of Name-transference in LXX Isaiah 1-12 (1997).

ISBN 9783895867231. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 25. 150pp. 2003.

A Short Grammar of Hieroglyphic Luwian

John Marangozis

Luwian along with Hittite, Pallaic, Lycian, Carian, and other Anatolian languages, belongs to the Anatolian branch of the Indoeuropean languages. Luwian is known from writings of the second millennium BC, as “Cuneiform Luwian” and from writings of the first millennium BC, as “Hieroglyphic Luwian”.

Luwian (Louvitte, Luwische) is the language of the former land “Luwiya”, of Asia Minor, i.e. the S.-SW part of Asia Minor, constituted by the later provinces of Caria, Lycia, Pisidia, Pamphylia, and Cilicia. Later on, this area was occupied by the Hittites, as part of the Hittite Kingdom, from the 15th to the 12th century BC., and was known by the names of Kizzuwatna and Arzawa. Kizzuwatna was mainly the SE part and Arzawa the SW of old Luwiya. The federation of Arzawa consisted of a coalition of Hittite vassal states, like Mira-Kuwaliya, Hapalla, Seha-River Valley land, and later of some additional states.
Luwian texts in cuneiform writing were stored in the archives of Hattusa, the Hittite capital, in the form of clay tablets which were incinerated ca, 1200 BC. These texts contained the following categories of material:
- Magic rituals
- Mythological stories
- A fragment of a letter
- and a great number of obscure fragments.

ISBN 9783895863417. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 26. 56pp. 2003.

Femininum Genus

A Study on the Origins of the Indo-European Feminine Grammatical Gender
Francisco José Ledo-Lemos
Universidad de Salamanca

The grammatical feminine gender was developed by Indo-European in relatively recent times, and was superimposed on an older system of two genders (animate / inanimate). The virtual totality of Indo-Europeanists would agree with this affirmation; but there is no agreement between researchers over the factors which led to the emergence of this new gender.

By analyzing the diverse uses of the suffix *-eH2-, Karl Brugmann managed to explain why the feminine grammatical gender includes many words which are not semantically feminine. Brugmann's perspective is still substantially correct, but, in the exact terms in which he formulated this theory (more than a hundred years ago), it cannot give a satisfactory explanation to three important questions: (1) How did the diversity of uses of the suffix *-(e)H2- originate? (2) How did some adjectives develop specific forms for feminine agreement? (3) Why are the â-stems and the thematic declension in complementary distribution?

The different theories that have been proposed since Brugmann can sometimes answer one or (at best) two of these questions, but there is not a theory which can resolve the three questions simultaneously. Such a theory is, precisely, the object of the present study.

ISBN 9783895864230. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 21. 240 pp. 2000.

A Grammar of Gujarati

Raimond Doctor
University of Pune, India

Gujarati, belonging to the Indo-Aryan family, is spoken by approximately 46,100,000 or more speakers. It is the official language of Gujarat state and is also used in 16 other countries around the world, thanks to the Gujarati diaspora. Having several dialects, which moreover have been little explored, Gujarati is very rich in literary style and has a long literary tradition. The grammatical analysis proposed here is of Gujarati as taught and used by educated speakers of the language.

The grammar provides basic information on the phonology, writing system, morphology and the syntax of the language. A short introduction outlines the geolinguistic situation of Gujarati. The chapter on phonology studies the vowels, consonants as well as the syllable structure of Gujarati. Special attention is given to the murmur sounds of the language, since these are a marked feature of Gujarati. A short overview of the syllable structure and of the prosody of Gujarati is also furnished. The analysis of the writing system starts off with a brief historical sketch of the evolution of Gujarati graphemes, followed by a script grammar of the consonants, vowels/matras, and other modifiers. Conjuncts and ligatures both of the vowels and the consonants are also analysed.

Gujarati is essentially a morphological language and hence major stress is laid on its morphology. This chapter describes nominal and verbal morphology as well as the adjuncts. There are two numbers, three genders and three cases, with the nominal elements being declined according to their final elements. The analysis of the verbal system outlines the tenses and the moods. Causatives, which are a special feature of Gujarati, are of particular interest. Non-declined elements constitute adverbs, clitics, particles and connectives. A special section is also given over to derivational morphology with a study of the most important suffixes and prefixes of the language, derived both from Sanskrit and Persian. The broad overview of syntax describes the basic sentence types of Gujarati, word-order, participial structures, negation and coordination and subordination. The last chapter provides a list of the most common idiomatic structures of the language. The study is essentially corpus-linguistics driven and examples provided are based on a large oral and written corpus of present-day Gujarati. For the convenience of those familiar with the Gujarati script, the examples are transcribed both in IPA and in Gujarati.

ISBN 9783895863974. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 28. 100pp. 2004.

General and applied Romani linguistics

Proceedings from the 6th International Conference on Romani Linguistics
Barbara Schrammel, Dieter W. Halwachs & Gerd Ambrosch

The volume ‘General and applied Romani linguistics’ presents papers form the 6th International Conference on Romani Linguistics 2002 in Graz, Austria. The collection reflects recent trends in Romani linguistics. The last decades of saw both an intensification of the traditional subdisciplines, such as descriptive linguistics and dialectology, as well as the emergence of new subdisciplines, e.g. computational linguistics and sociolinguistics. Parallel to this Romani linguists, using Romani as an unique and valuable language sample, more and more participated in theoretical linguistic discussion.

Section 1 contains two papers on dialectology. Matras proposes a groundbreaking new approach to the classification of Romani dialects, while Igla concentrates on the internal classification of a particular dialect group of Romani. Section 2 features descriptive studies on Romani varieties with little documentation so far (Sechidou on a Greek Romani dialect, Cherenkov on a Russian dialect, Adiego on Spanish Caló and Lapov on Romani varieties in Croatia). The papers in section 3 all discuss language change in Romani. Some are concerned with contact-induced language change (Schrammel, Draganova and to some extent Pirttisaari), others discuss language internal change (Boretzky, Simonsen). Section 4 finally introduces computational Romani linguistics with a paper by Granquist on a morphological parser for Romani. The final section contains papers on different aspects of Romani sociolinguistics (Friedman on the future of Romani in Macedonia, Petrović & Stefanović on Roma refugees in Kosovo, Marushiakova & Popov on the communication of nomadic Gypsy groups).

Contents:

1. Romani dialectology

Yaron Matras: The classification of Romani dialects: A geographic-historical perspective

Birgit Igla: Sinti-Manuš: Aspects of classification

2. Descriptive studies on individual Romani dialects

Lev. N. Cherenkov: The Plaščuny and their dialect

Irene Sechidou: The dialect of Ajios Athanasios

Ignasi-Xavier Adiego: The Vestiges of Caló Today

Zoran Lapov: The Romani groups and dialects in Croatia. With a special emphasis on the Romani borrowings in the Croatian language

3. Language change with and without contact

Desislava Draganova: Turkish verbs in Bulgarian Romani

Barbara Schrammel: Borrowed verbal particles and prefixes: A comparative approach

Helena Pirttisaari: A functional approach to the distribution of participle suffixes in Finnish Romani

Norbert Boretzky: Metathesis and other, functionally related, sound changes in Romani

Gitte Grønning Simonsen: Semantic changes in body parts from Sanskrit to Romani

4. Computational linguistics

Kimmo Granqvist: ROMTWOL - An implementation of a two-level morphological processor for Finnish Romani

5. Sociolinguistics

Victor A. Friedman: The Romani language in Macedonia in the third millennium: progress and problems

Jelena Petrović & Lada Stefanović: Socio-linguistic aspects of language of Roma refugees from Kosovo - A comparative study

Elena Marushiakova & Vesselin Popov: Communications between nomadic Gypsy groups

ISBN 9783895867415 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics H29. 200pp. 2005.

Modality in Hindi

Shlomper Genady
Hebrew University, Jerusalem

The questions of semantics in general and modality in particular are matters of special interest in linguistics during last few decades. This subject was undeservedly neglected in the Indological literature. Lavish amount of works on the subject was devoted almost exclusively to the European languages. The purpose of the study was to fill, even though partly, the empty niche.

‘Modality’ is a term which is used in linguistics for marking a wide range of notions expressing attitudes of the speaker to the content of sentence. Among the aims of the study was to find out the main modal devices of Hindi and classify them. The semantic approach for defining modal mechanisms in language proves to be the most reliable. That was the reason why the system elaborated by F.R. Palmer in his research “Mood and modality” (1986) was chosen as a framework for the study. His principles with some additions were successfully applied to the analysis of Hindi language.

All the totality of the modal devices was divided into three subclasses – inherent epistemic and deontic. Each subclass has primary and secondary devices, grammatical and lexical means, which were scrutinized and classified. The “Modality in Hindi” abounds in examples taken from a vast literary corpus which may be useful for every student of Hindi.

The author is a lecturer in Hindi at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has been teaching Hindi and Urdu languages for twenty years, eight of them in Israel. The range of his professional interests covers the applied linguistics and language teaching. He has translated and published a number of literary works from Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi languages, and has published a course of Hindi language for the Hebrew speakers, and a Hindi-Hebrew phrase book.

ISBN 9783895867699. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 32. 183pp. 2005.

Grammatical Agreement in Hindi-Urdu and its major varieties

Pradeep Kumar Das
University of Delhi

Foreword by Bernard Comrie

The work ‘Grammatical Agreement in Hindi-Urdu and its major varieties’ is an attempt to attain a unified theory of ‘agreement system’ in typologically similar and genetically related varieties of Hindi-Urdu. The languages from different part of the globe can be typified into three major groups on the basis of the agreement system that they display: a. Languages that have only Subject-verb agreement. b. Languages that have both Subject-verb & Object-verb agreement on an alternative basis (i.e. the verb agrees with either the subject or the object in different syntactic environment). c. Languages that have primarily Subject-verb agreement, however, other actants (NPs) also find their marking on the verb due to certain pragmatic requirements of the language e.g. specificity marking, animacy factor, scale of honorificity and some patter gap in the system of pronouns or other such notional categories.

The present work has tried to unify the agreement types (a) & (c) into one system and has termed it as a SINGLE SYSTEM OF AGREEMENT and labels the agreement type (b) as a DUAL SYSTEM OF AGREEMENT. The motivation for the combining (a) & (c) into one comes from two main factors; (i) there is no change of the syntactic environment of marking the inflection of other actants (NPs) on the verb besides the subject (ii) the languages do not show overt object agreement.

With this broad classification of the agreement system into two major types, the thesis examines the ‘agreement phenomenon’ in the varieties of Hindi-Urdu e.g. Avadhi, Bundeli, Chhattisgarhi, Garhwali, Marwari, Bhojpuri, Maithili and Angika (Khortha). Unlike other work in the field, this work pays proper attention on the types and nature of different clauses to justify the above mentioned classification.

ISBN 9783895867736. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 33. 270pp. 2006.

Rajbanshi Grammar

and Interlinearized Text

Tikaram Poudel
Tribhuvan University

This is a study of Rajbanshi, an Indo-Aryan langauge of Assamese-Bengali sub group. The present study is based on the dialect of Rajbanshi spoken in the Eastern districts of Jhapa, Morang and Sunsari of Nepal. The focus is functional rather than theoretical.

Rajbanshi has six vowels and 29 consonants. Height and back-front of the tongue are responsible for making the vowel phonemes contrastive in this language. Stop, aspiration, affrication, friction, etc. are the major contrastive features for consonants. Rajbanshi favors simple syllabification, hence, consonant clusters are quite rare.

Nouns inflect for number, gender, case and classifiers. Both adjectives and adverbs are formed from nouns and verbs. Verbs inflect for tense, aspect, modality and negation. The negation puzzle of Assamese Bengali group is also found in Rajbanshi. Compounding and noun incorporation are quite common verbal phenomena in this language. Like other NIA languages, Rajbanshi makes use of compound verbs. They have the aspectual, attitudinal and modal functions in Rajbanshi discourse. The compound verbs are marked categories in the language. The author suggests four ways of identifying compound verbs in this language. They are semantic bleaching of the vector verbs, test of negation, reduplication test and non-finiteness of the first verb. There are restrictions of transitivity, volitionality and the forms of main verbs on the selections of vectors. The process of noun incorporation is a device of changing a nominal category to a verbal one using highly grammaticalized verbs called light verbs. Rajbanshi is a nominative-accusative SOV language. It forms causativization lexically, morphologically and periphrastically.

The study concludes with a sample text with interlinearized and free translation.

ISBN 9783895863233. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 34. 132pp. 2006.