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Kathryn Klingebiel, ‘Occitan Linguistic Bibliography for 2012’, Tenso, 29:173–208. See also YWMLS, 75:150–57. Aitor Carrera reports on ‘Activitats de la Catedra d’Estudis Occitans de la Universitat de Lleida’, ER, 36:437–38. Marie-Laure Savoye et al., *‘Sur les traces d’Edith Brayer: catalogue des manuscrits francais et occitans de la Bibliotheque Vaticane’, MEFR, 126.2, . The world of Occitan scholarship and literature has now lost Pierre Bec (1921–2014), memorialized by Francois Pic in and by David grosclaude, Anem! Occitans!, 149:4–5, . Further obituaries for Peter T. Ricketts (†7 May 2013) and Marti de Riquer (†17 September 2013) have appeared: for the former, by Walter Meliga in RLiR 78:303–6 and F. R. P. Akehurst in Tenso 29:231–44 (with substantial bibliography, 234–44); and for the latter, by Alberto Varvaro in MedRom, 37, 2013:432–35. Varvaro (1934–2014) was himself remembered in necrologies by Laura Minervini and giovanni Palumbo in RLiR, 78:607–17, and by Francisco Rico and Isabel de Riquer in El Pais (1 November 2014). Other losses noted in 2014: Moshe Lazar (†13 December 2012), remembered by Robert A. Taylor in Tenso, 29:225–30; James J. Wilhelm (†13 December 2012), with obituary by Janet A. Walker, Tenso, 29:219–24; and Marcelle D’Herde Heiliger (†1 March 2014). Yan Lespoux, ‘Un pilier meconnu de l’occitanisme: Pierre-Louis Berthaud (1899–1956)’, AIEO 10, 625–33, traces the crucial role played by this mentor of Robert Lafont in the Occitan movement between 1930–1960. Jean Thomas, ‘Fernand Barrue, entre gasconha e Lengadoc’, AIEO 10, 852–59, provides a portrait of a now-forgotten poet (1891–1956), author of three collections, who returned to using his native gascon in his late works—and whose poetry deserves a full edition. Id., ‘Paul Debar (1794–1853)’, Gardy Vol., 897–909, reviews the life and work of a poet who is cited 94 times in Mistral’s Tresor. Bernat Vernhieras, ‘Andrieu Lagarda, passaire de la lenga’, AIEO 10, 921–30, recaps the productive career and ‘obra considerabla’ of this militant Occitanist of the generation of 1945. R. Anthony Lodge, *‘Jacques-Louis Menetra and his experience of the langue d’oc’, pp. 210–17 of Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900: A Sociolinguistic and Comparative Perspective, ed. gijsbert Rutten et al., Amsterdam, Benjamins, viii + 334 pp. Elena grinina and galina Romanova, ‘La imatge de l’occita a Russia’, AIEO 10, 954–57, present a brief overview, with specific attention to two works: Academia de Linguistica, La formacio de llengues romaniques literaries: el provencal/l’occita, 1991; and Tatiana Alisova and Camila Pluzhnikova, El provencal antic: La historia de l’Occitania medieval. La gramatica historica. Crestomatia, 2011.

This article resumes and critically discusses the literature published on Rhaeto-Romance (Romansh in Switzerland, Ladin and Friulian in Northern Italy) in 2019.

Body part terms such as ​face can have various meanings, but the nature of those meanings varies across languages. Apart from its basic meaning ‘face’ as a human body part, the Vietnamese term m​ặt incorporates the notion of ‘surface’ and ‘frontside’ as well as specific metaphors for ‘sun’ and ‘moon’. This diversity of meanings poses a challenge for models of the structure of the mental lexicon. The approach adopted in this chapter suggests that body part extensions are established by a connection of similarity features between body parts and objects. In the case of the concept ​face​, these features include the function of ‘being a representation of an entity’, shape, and spatial alignment. The two similarity dimensions shape and spatial alignment seem to motivate a variety of semantic extensions and could provide valuable insights along with existing studies that investigate the cultural and physiological motivation of body part extension.

Within the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies (Paradis, 1988a,b; Paradis & LaCharité, 1993, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2008, henceforth TCRS), we provide a formal analysis to the Arabic loanwords in seven languages spoken in Ethiopia: Ge’ez, Tigre, Tigrinya, Amharic, Harari, Argobba and Gurage. The analysis draws upon a corpus of 540 loanwords extracted from the works of Leslau (1956a,b,c; 1957a,b,c; 1958; 1963; 1990). The article presents theoretical challenges to the TCRS Loanword Model (Paradis & LaCharité, 1997), in particular to the Threshold Principle which stipulates that an illicit segment should universally undergo less than two repairs to be licensed in the borrowing language; beyond this limit, it will be deleted. The adaptations of Arabic segmental malformations in these seven Ethiopian languages, however, exceed this number totaling in certain cases to six repairs. The article also discusses the Arabic gutturals, [ʔ], [ʕ] and [ħ], which undergo unpredictable deletion in Amharic and Argobba, showing that the Non-Availability Hypothesis (Paradis & LaCharité, 2001) cannot account for these deletions either. Although the Francophones systematically delete gutturals in Arabic loanwords due to the non-availability of Pharyngeal node in French, the inventories of Amharic and Argobba include the laryngeal [h], the uvular [q] and the glottalized ejectives, thus employing Pharyngeal node plus the features [RTR] and [constricted glottis] as phonologically treatable primitives.

This paper studies how gender indexicality occurs in some vernacular Arabic varieties, as a phenomenon linked to linguistic variation. Its objective is to test the types of gender indexicality found in this context, and to describe the areas of grammar where they are applied, particularly concerning phonology and morphology. To do this, several different contexts within the Arabic-speaking communities have been analysed since the indexed form strictly depends on the background and may not be understood without an in-depth analysis of the social and cultural circumstances surrounding the speech-act. The analysed data, coming from specialized literature and fieldwork, show that some variants tend to index the gender of the speaker more than that of the addressee. Furthermore, gender indexicality in contexts of variation shows more often sex-preferential tendencies rather than sex-exclusive tendencies.

This study examines the categorial status, syntactic derivation, and tense of active participles in an urban variety of Jordanian Arabic. It is shown that unlike in other Arabic varieties, active participles in Jordanian Arabic fall into three distinct categories (namely, nominal, adjectival, and verbal) with respect to their morphophonological, syntactic and semantic structures. Moreover, it is argued that active participles are not lexically underspecified or homophonous, but are rather derived distinctively in the syntax. This study also explores tense in active participle clauses. Verbless clauses with adjectival and nominal active participles as the only predicates solely project present tense; a past or future tense is available only if a copula is involved. In contrast, clauses with verbal active participles, which are morphologically unmarked for tense, are shown to license temporal adverbs of different time references. It is argued that such clauses project a covert agreement tense whose time frame is established by time adverbs.

This article discusses proof-of-concept research into the structure of the vocabularies of three Old English texts, Beowulf, Andreas and the Old English Martyrology. With the help of the Web application Evoke, which makes A Thesaurus of Old English (TOE) available in Linguistic Linked Data form, the words that occur in these three texts have been tagged within the existing onomasiological structure of TOE. This tagging process has resulted in prototypes of ‘textual thesauri’ for each of the three texts; such thesauri allow researchers to analyse the ‘onomasiological profile’ of a text, using the statistical tools that are built into Evoke. Since the same overarching structure has been used for all three texts, these texts can now be compared on an onomasiological level. As the article demonstrates, this comparative approach gives rise to novel research questions, as new and distinctive patterns of vocabulary use come to the surface. The semantic fields discussed include “War” and “Animals”.

The Thesaurus of Old English (TOE), first published in 1995, had its origins in a body of slips derived from standard dictionaries, principally the Clark Hall and Merritt Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and the Bosworth-Toller volumes. These slips were made to supply the Glasgow Historical Thesaurus (HT) project (1965–2009) with a firmer idea of the range and totality of Old English vocabulary than available in the OED. In 1976 the decision was taken to deploy the Old English materials as a pilot thesaurus for the HT. With compilation of the slips completed in 1982, researchers were able to begin sorting the slips into groupings based on meaning and to see areas of the HT classification take shape in miniature. The TOE data, absorbed into the larger structure of its parent project, allow us to view English words that disappeared by 1150 alongside those that continued in use.

The topic of figurative language in Old English (OE) has recently become the focus of substantial research. In this article, the authors will describe work on the semantic description of the lexicon of shame words in OE and in particular the taxonomical organisation of this lexicon on the basis of different kinds of semantic mappings (metonymic, metaphorical). Next, they will explore the use of the Evoke platform as a means of visualising and navigating this lexicon and show how it can be used to enrich A Thesaurus of Old English (TOE). The authors also describe ongoing work on the modelling and publication of this data as a linked data resource consisting of a lexicon and a taxonomy in SKOS of different kinds of metaphoric/metonymic sense shifts.

At the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (Dutch Language Institute), DiaMaNT, a diachronic semantic computational lexicon of Dutch, is being developed, based on the scholarly historical dictionaries of Dutch. The main purpose of this lexicon is to enhance text accessibility and foster research in the development of concepts. This article explores the feasibility of enriching DiaMaNT with an existing semantic classification by linking a subset of the vocabulary of the Dictionary of Old Dutch to A Thesaurus of Old English.

This article provides an introduction to the web application Evoke. This application offers functionality to navigate, view, extend, and analyse thesaurus content. The thesauri that can be navigated in Evoke are expressed in Linguistic Linked Data, an interoperable data form that enables the extension of thesaurus content with custom labels and allows for the linking of thesaurus content to other digital resources. As such, Evoke is a powerful research tool that facilitates its users to perform novel cultural linguistic analyses over multiple sources. This article further demonstrates the potential of Evoke by discussing how A Thesaurus of Old English was made available in the application and how this has already been adopted in the field of Old English studies. Lastly, the author situates Evoke within a number of recent developments in the field of Digital Humanities and its applications for onomasiological research.

This conversation with the author Neera Kapur-Dromson took place in Nairobi, Kenya, on 9th March 2018 during filming of the documentary film ‘Afrasian Memories in East Africa’ in which Neera Kapur-Dromson features. Neera Kapur-Dromson lives in France and Kenya. She is the author of the book ‘From Jhelum to Tana’. Here, Neera-Kapur Dromson reflects upon transregional interactions across the Indian Ocean as a memory space through life histories of various generations of her ancestors, various actors within the cosmopolitanisms of the Indian Ocean and her own experiences. She discusses how specific Indian Ocean societies experienced, were shaped by and negotiated multiple transformations related but not limited to nation-state politics, transoceanic trade, citizenship politics, colonial railway projects, identity politics, religion and transculturality as migrations, colonialism, and resultant interactions occurred across time and space. Her discussion visualises and demystifies the emergence of entangled Afrasian transregional spaces within the complexity of cosmopolitan societies across the Indian Ocean. The film was part of an international research project at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, titled Africa’s Asian Options (AFRASO). It was launched during an AFRASO symposium titled “Afrasian Entanglements: Current Dynamics and Future Perspectives in India-Africa Relations” at the University of Mumbai in June 2018.

The article takes the excavated cosmological texts as a basis for reinterpreting the relationship between cosmology, epistemology, and action in Warring States period thought, by focusing on the role of names in situatedness and self-actualization of being. It proposes to view the speculative and the practical concerns in terms of a dynamic union of the receptive and the creative within the onto-generative cycle. Building on Chung-ying Cheng’s onto-generative approach and Heidegger’s hermeneutics of Dasein in Sein und Zeit, the article identifies names as the centre (Gadamer’s Mitte) in which the receptive and the creative aspect of being come together.

This essay depicts the details of the history of a well-known Kurdish lexeme on the background of the related forms in Iranian.

The discipline of cognitive narratology applies insights of cognitive linguistics to narrative analysis. This study seeks to demonstrate the value of cognitive narratology by exploring the role of the reader and the extent of the reader’s knowledge in constructing characters. While traditional narrative criticism often limits itself to the world of the text, cognitive narratology recognizes that the reader’s knowledge from other texts and the real world also contributes to the construction of characters. This study will show that the extent of the reader’s literary and social knowledge of a text affects the construction of characters. As a case study, we will examine the calling of Peter in the canonical Gospels and show how four readers with varying degrees of knowledge will arrive at different constructions of Peter’s character.

This study employs an array of cognitive linguistic (cl) models to reveal some of the details in how contemporary readers understand and interpret characters in a New Testament parable, the one often tagged “The Good Samaritan.” It also uses cognitive narrative analysis to explore how Luke constructs and develops the dialog partners in the pericope and the characters in the parable. The larger goal is to use cl to reveal some of the ways in which meanings are evoked, constructed, constrained and opened up. The parable is embedded in a larger narrative and immediate co-text, its characters selected from the stock of Lukan personae. The study explains how narrative spaces are built up; how characters serve as anchors and links to the larger narrative; and how viewpoint shifts proliferate as the story unfolds. The Lukan narrator makes Jesus’ viewpoint clear: “Do this, and you will live!” Readers are implicitly invited to identify with the compassionate character of the parable and emulate him. But the opening question and closing dialog shape the parable’s point, expanding its trajectory beyond mere moral rule revision or definitions of “neighbor” or even of “good” character. This parable allows readers to imagine with Luke a way of life lived in the light of the new epoch Jesus is announcing and inaugurating.

Although language attitudes are frequently investigated, how these attitudes change over time is studied less frequently, despite providing an interesting window into the link between attitudes and ideologies. Conducted some twenty years since the first studies on this topic, the current study provides an updated perspective into language attitudes toward the use of Roman-alphabeted Greek (henceforth, Greeklish) in emails and SMS messages exchanged between Greek native speakers. Adapting the matched guise methodology commonly used in language attitude research to visual stimuli, we collected data from 60 participants of different ages and genders. Overall, their attitudes toward Greeklish were markedly negative, confirming negative attitudes already expressed twenty years prior but also extending them. We propose that technological and demographic but also ideological factors underlie the negative attitudes toward Greeklish expressed by Greek native speakers today.

This paper presents the Homeric Dependency Lexicon (HoDeL), a new resource with a user-friendly interface facilitating the study of Homeric verbs and dependents. HoDeL was induced from the analytical layer of AGDT 2.0, extracting all dependents tagged as SBJ, OBJ, PNOM, and OCOMP with a set of SQL queries. The paper illustrates HoDeL functionalities and shows how they can be employed by researchers to answer specific research questions about the Homeric language. Introducing the uses of HoDeL offers the opportunity to reexamine some crucial, though frequently underestimated, methodological challenges concerning annotated corpora and resources derived from them that relate to the linguistic theories underlying annotations and error propagation. It is argued that the careful documentation of how linguistic resources were created, what data they contain, and how they can be queried through their dedicated interfaces is essential to lay the groundwork for users’ investigations.

The Homeric hapax αἰνοπαθής ‘terribly suffering’ has been adduced as evidence for ancient processes of Indo-European word-formation. In particular, the vocalism of the root, α of -παθ-, would derive from *n̥, an ablaut grade conditioned by the accent on the ending -ής (a “hysterokinetic” s-stem adjective). I reexamine the passage where the word is found and argue the vocalism of -παθής reflects not an archaism but an innovation in Homeric Greek. Using this reanalysis as a point of departure, I review recent literature on s-stem adjectives in Greek, Vedic, and Proto-Indo-European, disputing that the evidence suffices for a hysterokinetic reconstruction. I propose that the PIE accent was borne on the first member of these exocentric compounds as we find it in earliest Old Indic, in the prehistory of Greek, and in certain Greek archaisms.

The notion of complexity has been applied to descriptions and comparisons of languages and to explanations related to ease and difficulty of various linguistic phenomena in first and second language acquisition. It has been noted that compared to baseline grammars, heritage language grammars are less complex, displaying morphological simplification and structural shrinking, especially among heritage speakers with lower proficiency in the language. On some recent proposals of gender agreement in Spanish and Norwegian (Fuchs et al., 2015; Lohndal & Putnam, 2020), these differences are representational, affecting the projection of functional categories and feature specifications in the syntax. An alternative possibility is that differences between baseline and heritage grammars arise from computational considerations related to bilingualism, affecting speed of lexical access and feature reassembly online in the minority language. We illustrate this proposal with empirical data from gender agreement and differential object marking. Although presented as alternatives, the representational and computational explanations are not incompatible, and may both be adequate to capture varying levels of variability modulated by linguistic proficiency. These proposals formalize bilingual acquisition models of grammar competition and directly relate the availability and type of input (the acquisition evidence) to the locus and nature of the grammatical differences between heritage and baseline grammars.

Heritage languages are often discussed in terms of their (reduced) complexity, but few attempts have been made to objectively measure the complexity of heritage languages. Here we explore various approaches to the investigation of language complexity, discussing three broad areas of inquiry: (i) attempts to objectively measure grammatical complexity, (ii) the potential role of socio-demographic factors in explaining variability in complexity, and (iii) considerations beyond grammatical complexity, which include the various aspects of complexity invoked when language is used for the purpose of communication. At each point, we highlight potential wisdom to be drawn from existing studies of heritage languages, which help to inform hypotheses for future study. The upshot is that complexity in heritage languages is itself a complex phenomenon – an observation that calls into question traditional characterizations of heritage languages in terms of an overall decrease in complexity.

We focus on complexity from the comparative variationist perspective, a sociolinguistic approach that examines variable aspects of language (that is, different ways of saying the same thing). Arguably, variable elements are harder to acquire than categorical ones, as a Variability Matrix must be acquired along with every element. This matrix contains probabilistic information about when each form is (more) appropriate, according to an array of factors. These include inter-speaker (social) and intra-speaker (linguistic context) predictors. We ask how the Variability Matrix for predictors of a variable compares between heritage speakers (people living in a context where their language is a minority language) and homeland speakers (people living in a context where their language is a majority language), and how these can fairly be compared. In the variationist approach, multivariate regression analyses reveal the predictors (and levels within each predictor) of a response or dependent variable and their corresponding Variability Matrices. However, the variationist field lacks an established comparative methodology to determine how/if varieties differ. One shortcoming is that different-sized samples are often compared, implicating different levels of statistical significance even when the populations’ patterns are identical. Comparison of variable patterns in Heritage and Homeland Cantonese illustrates one solution. We revise analyses conducted previously of two morphosyntactic variables: prodrop and classifiers (Nagy, 2015; Nagy & Lo, 2019) in Cantonese, applying a bootstrap procedure to mitigate issues associated with unequal-sized datasets frequent in studies of minority and endangered varieties. From these analyses, we learn that heritage and homeland grammars’ degrees of complexity are similar: the matrices of (significant) frequencies are the same size. This approach allows us to consider not just which surface forms constitute the heritage vs. homeland varieties, but also the complexity of the decision-making process the speakers apply in selecting among the forms. As one might expect, heritage and homeland speakers are capable of equally complex processes.

The visual mode provides emergent bi/multilinguals an essential resource to construct scientific explanations. Yet, while a metalanguage is used to describe the written mode of scientific language such as, claim, evidence, reason; there is little research that makes students aware of the metalanguage of a visual mode. We propose an introduction to the visual metalanguage will ensure emergent bi/multilinguals better access to the visual mode. This study employs an instrumental case study to examine the introduction of visual metalanguage to a fifth-grade science class. Two cameras record ten emergent bi/multilinguals as they construct scientific explanations in nine lessons. We use a framework informed by social semiotics to analyse the meanings made. The data revealed that an awareness of the visual metalanguage led to an enhanced commitment to illustrate the explanation of the phenomenon, illuminated key concepts and provided more context to the audience. In addition, teacher questioning became more focused.

In all languages, lexicons constitute a valuable source of information on femininities and women. This assertion is enhanced in the case of pre-modern Arabic lexicography, due to the diversity of its contents. However, the picture of women in lexicons has always received more attention in the field of lexicography in Western languages than in Arabic. This paper aims to fill a minor part of this noteworthy gap, by shedding light on all semantical, lexical, and orthographic elements which concern the word “woman” (imraʾa/al-marʾa) in pre-modern Arabic lexicons, more specifically, under the root m-r-ʾ.

The traditional approach to Niger-Congo gender systems conflates the number markers of nouns and the gender-number markers of adnominals and pronouns into a single category of ‘class markers’. Using Jóola Fóoñi as an illustration, this paper discusses several types of phenomena commonly found in these systems that are problematic for the traditional notion of noun class and support the necessity of a revision of the conceptual and terminological framework commonly used in the description of Niger-Congo gender systems.

In this essay, the authors explore the phenomenon of utterance we find in speech and teaching. Jean-Luc Marion’s third phenomenological reduction serves as a methodological foundation for this exploration which moves through Biblical literature and autobiography – both centred on the story of the election of Samuel – before leading into a meditation on the Call of and Response to the Other. The Call and Response guide the essay to a theory of prophetic teaching emerging within its phenomenology of utterance that situates itself between philosophical anthropology and philosophical theology, and between Jewish and Catholic traditions.

The entire conceptual content represented by a single morpheme—its plenary meaning—is in general both copious and structured. This structuring consists of both the patterning of its content and the distribution of attention over that pattern. With respect to the patterning of its content, a morpheme’s plenary meaning can be divided into a core meaning and an associated meaning. In turn, its associated meaning can be subdivided into five sectors: the holistic, infrastructure, collateral, disposition, and attitude sectors. And with respect to its distribution of attention, eight specific attentional factors and three general attentional principles are cited. The main attentional factor is that a morpheme’s core meaning is generally more salient than its associated meaning or any of the sectors therein. But another attentional factor holds that the attitude sector, especially its expletivity type, can challenge or exceed the core meaning in salience.

The primary aim of this paper is to explore the functions of the word /fard/ in Iraqi and Khuzestani Arabic. The study is based on the analysis of various text corpora and the elicitation of further examples from native speakers of the varieties investigated. The analysis of these data has shown that /fard/ is a polyfunctional item. Its various functions are the result of several grammaticalization processes. In the first stage, the noun “individual” has become a quantifier that expresses singularity. From this stage it developed into an intensifier, a marker of approximation and the scalar adverb “only.” It has been demonstrated that, from its use as a presentative marker, it developed toward an indefinite article. In contrast to the definite article, which is a grammatical category in nearly every variety of Arabic, the use of an indefinite article is rarely found in spoken Arabic. In Iraqi and Khuzestani Arabic, /fard/ is an indefinite article that possesses a wide range of applications and only a limited set of constraints. Its use, however, remains optional to a very high degree. Its main function is that of a presentative—i.e., introducing a new referent into a discourse. In addition, it also functions as an individuation marker, as a marker for expressing the speaker’s epistemic status (knowledge/ignorance) regarding a referent, and indicating free choice from a set of potential referents. Related to this last function is its use as a mitigating device in imperatives and polite requests.

Like in Classical Arabic and other modern Arabic dialects, the preposition l- marks the dative also in the Jewish Arabic dialect of Baghdad (JB). Under the scope of the syntactic category of dative, one finds different semantic roles like recipients, benefactives, possessors, experiencers, and others. Moreover, some datives operate on the pragmatic rather than the semantic level of the clause. This paper defines and exemplifies seven different dative roles in JB based on their interpretive properties and accounts for their distinctive syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features.