Between the birth and death of future tenses

Related languages as a natural lab for research into grammatical change


C-Wiemer_2

Björn Wiemer, Eugen Hill, Daniel Kölligan, Jan-Niklas Linnemeier
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Universität zu Köln, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
 

This monograph is the first attempt at a comprehensive dynamic description of future tenses that have been attested in a whole language family, namely the Indo-European one. In general, future tenses are known as a non-obligatory feature of grammar which are repeatedly lost and acquired anew. Together with this, futures are particularly prone to variation, displaying a variety of additional (morpho)syntactic and functional properties. The authors intend to identify factors which trigger and/or facilitate the rise and subsequent evolution of different types of futures.

To this end, this investigation is sketched on the basis of the Indo-European language family, so that the rise and evolution of futures are comprehensively investigated in a range of languages with similar typological characteristics and of identical genealogical provenance. Their ultimate common ancestor did not have any dedicated future tense, and the different branches of this family embrace numerous closely related and therefore originally very similar languages spoken in Europe and Asia. The Indo-European language family is thus used a kind of natural laboratory, providing dynamic data on futures in diverging language systems.
 

ISBN 9783969392140 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 58. 136pp. 2024.

 

Dumi Analyzed Texts: Story collection in Dumi 

(with Grammar Sketch)


Netra Mani RaiC-Rai3

This volume is a compilation of a brief introduction to the Dumi people, a grammatical sketch and analyzed texts in Dumi. Among 29 Kirati languages, Dumi (iso 639-3 dus; Glottolog dumi1241) is endangered and is a minority Kirati language of the Rai group, which belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family with a total population 8,638 (female: 4,373 and male: 4,265) as reported in the national census 2021. It is spoken in their origin (i.e., the remote hill area) of the northern Khotang District in eastern Nepal.

Dumi is an agglutinating language, and therefore morphemes are attached to the verb stem tense, number and person. Tense, aspect and mood tend to appear as a complex category. Dumi is morphologically an ergative-absolutive language which has a rich case system and is characterized by some morphosyntactic features, inclusiveness vs. exclusiveness in first person non-singular personal pronouns, past and non-past tense system, such as pronominal possessive suffixes and indefinite suffixes that are attached to nouns, and some agreement features evidenced in verbs. Dumi encodes information such as subject and object in ditransitive verbs.
 
This volume consists of three sections. The first section presents basic information about the Dumi people and their language. In section two, there are highlighted the grammatical features found in Dumi. In section three, there is the collection of the interlinearized and analyzed texts. A total of 12 selected texts of true stories have been included in this volume hoping that this text collection will provide rich and varied data for illustrating several features in complex pronominalized Dumi.

 

ISBN 9783969392157. Languages of the World 67. 296pp. 2024.

 

Analyzing Pragmatic Variation in English
New Developments in Contrastive, Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Pragmatics

Ronald Geluykens &  Ilka Flöck (eds.)C-geluykens_5

University of Oldenburg; University of Lüneburg 

 

The past few decades have witnessed a veritable research boom in interlanguage, cross-cultural, and contrastive pragmatics, as well as in the area of (im)politeness, resulting in a widening perspective with regard to data types, objects of inquiry, and analytical methods. The present edition takes stock of recent developments in the field, as well as offering a selection of empirical papers that explore new research avenues, with a focus on different types of variation in English, on the use of a variety of different data collection procedures, and on a variety of face-threatening acts. 

In the first part of this collection, it is discussed how these three areas of pragmatic research relate to, and differ from, each other, as well as examining a number of methodological issues relevant for studying pragmatic variation. The second part brings together a number of papers on interlanguage English, with an emphasis on the benefits and drawbacks of using controlled elicitation data. The contributions in the third and final  section focus on contrastive and cross-cultural pragmatics, with special reference to the use of more naturalistic data.
 
Table of Contents:
 
PART I: METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
 
Ronald Geluykens & Ilka Flöck
Analyzing Pragmatic Variation: An Introduction
 
Ronald Geluykens
Methodology Revisited: An Evaluation of Research Methods in Pragmatics 
 
Ilka Flöck & Ronald Geluykens
Comparing Empirical Methodologies in Pragmatics: A Meta-Analysis of Research on Directive Speech Acts
 
PART II: INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATICS AND CONTROLLED ELICITATION DATA
 
Ronald Geluykens & Bettina Kraft
Social, Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Variation in Complaints: The Usefulness of DCTs for Quantitative Variational Analysis
 
Christina Peters & Ronald Geluykens
Pragmatic Transfer in Native and Interlanguage Refusals: A Contrastive Analysis of English and German
 
Hanna Agena & Ronald Geluykens
Pragmatic Transfer and Social Variation in Interlanguage Requests 
 
Yan Jiang & Jean-Marc Dewaele
Self-reported Frequency of Swearing in Chinese Dialects, Putonghua, and English in the Speech of Chinese Multilingual University Students
 
PART III: CONTRASTIVE PRAGMATICS AND NATURAL(ISTIC) DATA
 
Katharina Heisterkamp & Ronald Geluykens
Responses to Thanks in Irish English: A Comparison of Elicited and Naturalistic Data
 
Jill-Dean Rose & Ilka Flöck
Explicit Apologies in Fictional Telecinematic Discourse
 
Alena Jansen & Ilka Flöck
Apologies and Corpus Pragmatics: Comparing a Form-to-Function and Function-to-Form Approach in SPICE-Ireland
 
Ilka Flöck
Requests in Informal Conversations: A Contrastive Study of English and German
 

ISBN 9783969392126 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics 34. 332pp. 2024.

 

Paul Trost

Indogermanisches Worttabu und andere Texte zum Sprachtabu


Vít Boček & Bohumil Vykypěl (Hrsg.)

C-Vykypel_16

Der vorliegende Band enthält Paul Trosts unpublizierte Dissertation von 1934 zum indogermanischen Worttabu. Bereits diese frühe Arbeit zeichnet sich durch diejenigen Züge aus, die typisch für Trosts Werk waren: thematische Breite, gedankliche Tiefe, gedrängte Darbietung. Zur Dissertation gesellen sich mehrere kleinere früher bereits publizierte Texte, in denen einige Aspekte des Themas näher ausgeführt werden.

Inhalt: Indogermanisches Worttabu (A. Der Sinn der Frage. B. Das Worttabu. C. Das Tabuwort). Schimpfwörter als Kosenamen. Zur Wesensbestimmung der Kenning. Der paronomastisch-potenzierende Genitiv Pluralis. Bemerkungen zum Sprachtabu. Das Tabu des Vokativs. Wilhelm Havers’ Neuere Literatur zum Sprachtabu. Beilage: Zwei Briefe an Wilhelm Schulze und Tabu-Plural.   
 
ISBN 9783969392263. Travaux linguistiques de Brno 16. 168 S. 2024.