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This paper explores the hypothesis of contact-induced change for the rise of the partitive case in Finnic languages and of the partitive case/determiner in Basque. On the basis of the well-established Indo-European partitive-genitive case and taking into account the lack of such a basis on the Uralic side, we argue that the partitive case in Finnic languages has arisen as a result of Balto-Slavic influence. Concerning the Basque partitive determiner, we likewise suggest a contact scenario (with Romance languages) as being responsible for the development of an entire system of determiners, including the definite and possibly the indefinite article as well as the partitive marker, which originates in an old ablative ending but crucially lacks the morphological properties characteristic of Basque inflectional markers.

Grammatical notions like that of ‘subject’ are widely used in second language teaching. However, while the grammatical subject is generally regarded as easily identifiable in the Indo-European languages of Europe, as e.g. English, French or Italian, and is a key element in determining word order, the application of this notion to Chinese has given rise to endless controversies. On the other hand, pragmatic-discourse considerations such as topichood, world knowledge, and context, and semantic notions such as agency, causation, and the roles of participants in the described event, appear to be more significant in Chinese as factors determining word order and interpretation of utterances. In this paper, we first provide an overview of the main differences concerning subjecthood, topichood and word order in English, Italian and Chinese, highlighting their impact on learner varieties of Chinese. We then summarise the state-of-the-art of research on subject and topic, with a focus on Chinese. Lastly, we discuss the implications of these theoretical issues for Chinese as a Second/Foreign Language teaching: to this end, we propose a critical overview of how the issue of topichood and subjecthood are treated in a sample of recent English-language, Italian-language and Chinese-language coursebooks and reference materials, and propose some recommendations for instructors.

The paper deals with the coding of the Possessive Source (the Source argument of the verb ‘to take’) in the 39 languages of Europe. I mainly used primary sources of data, such as elicitation. The most common way of the coding of the Possessive Source in my sample was the ablative coding, by which I mean the typical coding of the Source argument of motion verbs (cf. Peter has returned from his boss / from London). The ablative meaning itself can be coded in different ways, depending on the specific location: it can be apudelative, superelative, inelative, etc. The synсretic marking of the Possessive Source and the Source of motion verbs can be explained by their semantic similarity. The other common way of coding of the Possessive Source is the recipient coding, by which I mean the coding of the second animate argument of the verb ‘to give’. The Recipient and the Possessive Source have the same benefactive / malefactive properties prompting their syncretic marking. By locative coding I mean the coding of the location near the Landmark (cf. to stand by the river, to be at one’s friend’s). This type of coding is typical of East Slavic languages, Italian and some dialects of Norwegian. The synсretic marking of locative and source meaning has been previously attested for non-possessive (inanimate) Sources. The other types of the coding of the Possessive Source can be considered marginal for Europe. The data of the study in question has been presented as a semantic map.

Emergentist approaches to language are burdened with two responsibilities in contemporary cognitive science. On the one hand, they must offer a different and better understanding of the well-known phenomena that appear to support traditional formal approaches to language. On the other hand, they must extend the search for alternative explanations beyond the familiar languages of Europe and East Asia. I pursue this joint endeavor here by outlining an emergentist account for constraints on local anaphora in English and Balinese, with a view to showing that, despite numerous proposals to the contrary, the two languages manifest essentially the same system of coreference and that the system in question is shaped by processing pressures rather than grammatical principles.

This article examines Mikhail V. Lomonosov’s translation techniques and idiolect in his A Brief Guide to Eloquence (1748), with most of the examples being translated fragments of European literature. A comparison of the translated fragments from Cicero (the author analyses 82 excerpts from the antique orator’s works) with Lomonosov’s own Latin texts makes it possible to see some features of Lomonosov’s translation techniques. Except for the translated fragments included in the textbook on rhetoric, some of Cicero’s works were entirely translated into Russian in the eighteenth century. The author also compares Lomonosov’s translated fragments from Cicero (Cic. Leg. Man., Cat., Arch., Har. resp., etc.) with translations by K. Kondratovich, which were released twenty years after those by Lomonosov. The aim of the research is to show the peculiarities of Lomonosov’s translations, resulting both from the specifics of his translation techniques and the task of these texts as examples of Russian eloquence. The comparative method allows the author to conclude that Lomonosov managed to adequately convey the content and form in his translations and to recreate the style while closely adhering to the original – all this convinced him that the Russian language ‘stands out among all the languages of Europe in its grandeur and richness’. In Lomonosov’s translation techniques, there is a tendency for word-by-word translation and an attempt to preserve the Latin syntax; there is also a noticeable tendency to replace specific ancient culture-specific concepts with modern ones (a principle dating back to humanistic translations into Latin and vulgar languages). The translator’s adherence to the original is of practical importance for historians of literature and allows us to determine when the original text was taken from textbooks on rhetoric.

In the chapters of this volume, the authors describe the paradigms of complex nominal relators (CRs for short) in various languages of Europe, both Indo-European (Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Greek and Albanian) and non-Indo-European (Estonian and Permic (Finno-Ugric), Basque (isolate), Turkish and Maltese (Afro-Asiatic)). In this final chapter, we propose to go beyond individual descriptions, and discuss the results presented in all chapters from a wider typological perspective.

This special issue explores the role of Latin in shaping the syntactic patterns of the European languages. Among the key issues examined are the identification of sources of syntactic change, whether internal or external, the chronologization of these changes, and their actualization. Authors have tackled such cutting-edge topics as the role of sociolinguistic motivation in syntactic change in the vernaculars, the complex role played by translators, and the syntactic creativity that may occur as a result of calquing. Several authors, conversely, question the role of Latin in influencing particular structures, and propose alternative explanations. It is hoped that the present special issue succeeds in filling some gaps in our understanding of the roofing effects of Latin, as we attempt to track down and interrogate the causes and effects of syntactic change in the languages of Europe. ispartof: Belgian Journal of Linguistics vol:33 pages:1-10 status: published

This paper studies constructions dedicated to the expression of an after the fact reprimand to a second person in the languages of Europe. Taking a usage-based perspective, it argues against earlier analyses of these reproachatives as imperatives, optatives or conditionals, which fail to capture their idiosyncrasies and overpredict both their cross-linguistic frequency and the grammaticality of types of imperative in a language. Based on a closer examination of Dutch, the paper assumes a middle position between the existing views in that it argues for an account of the Dutch reproachative as the hybrid outcome of the interaction of the aforementioned constructions and of processes such as analogy, conventionalization and insubordination. It explores to what extent such an analysis applies to the other European languages featuring a reproachative and what its implications are for our understanding of imperative semantics.

Phraseology and idioms have been scantly investigated in the field of dialectology, compared to the rich tradition of phonetic and lexicological studies that made available long ago accurate dialectal maps and atlases for all the languages of Europe. There is no lack of irony in this given the etymology of the word idiom itself(

In this paper, we define two quantitative distances to measure how far apart two languages are. The distance measure that we have identified as more accurate is based on the perplexity of n -gram models extracted from text corpora. An experiment to compare forty-four European languages has been performed. For this purpose, we computed the distances for all the possible language pairs and built a network whose nodes are languages and edges are distances. The network we have built on the basis of linguistic distances represents the current map of similarities and divergences among the main languages of Europe.

All the volumes of the publication Word-Formation: An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe can be useful to an internationalisation of the discipline of word-formation and can raise new theoretical and methodological questions, finding alternative solutions (including a critical appraisal of certain views or a new evaluation of the existent approaches). In any case, the survey of research published in several countries, foregrounding certain theories and methodologies and their possible limitations by the languages that form its subject-matter, and in general, a broad spectrum of open questions may also be stimulating to a new view of the languages under scrutiny. Besides, those volumes offer an abundance of material for future comparative studies of both theoretical aspects and their application in studying matters of word-formation and usage, also including those based on the material from the languages that are not (closely) related.

The category of ‘adverbial clause’ seems to be relatively well-justified for understanding the grammar of the everyday spoken languages of Europe, although fuzzy boundaries are generally recognized. In this paper, we explore whether the category ‘adverbial clause’ is useful for understanding conversational Japanese by considering the behavior of the three most frequent clause connectors, kara ‘because/so’, kedo ‘but’, and -tara ‘if’. Noting the reliance of this category on a biclausal ‘main’ vs. ‘dependent’ distinction, we consider four frequent patterns in our data which challenge the advisability of positing ‘adverbial clause’ for the grammar of this language: a) the ‘main’ clause is structurally ‘less than’ a main clause; b) the ‘main clause’ is missing; c) the alleged ‘adverbial clause’ or the alleged ‘main clause’, or the combination, consists of fixed expressions; d) the clause combination typically consists of more than two clauses. We conclude that the notion of ‘adverbial clause’ needs to be augmented with accounts of these robust clause combining patterns.

Heine and Kuteva show that the languages of Europe are becoming more and more alike in very specific areas such as the use of articles and relative pronouns. One might say that a European Sprachbun...

The present thesis consists of an introduction and the following papers:The aspect-evidentiality system of Middle Mongol. Ural-Altaic Studies, 13. (forthcoming)The tense-aspect system of Khorchin Mongolian. In: Pirkko Suihkonen & Lindsay Whaley (eds.), Typology of Languages of Europe and Northern and Central Asia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (forthcoming)Aspect and epistemic notions in the present tense system of Khalkha Mongolian. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. (forthcoming)Factual vs. evidential? - The past tense forms of spoken Khalkha Mongolian. In: Ad Foolen, Helen de Hoop, & Gijs Mulder (eds.), Empirical Approaches to Evidentiality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (under review)Its purpose is to give an account of tense, aspect and evidentiality in three Mongolian varieties: Middle Mongol (MM) as spoken in the Mongol Empire, Khalkha Mongolian as spoken in the Mongolian state, and Khorchin Mongolian as spoken in eastern Inner Mongolia, China. MM started out with a tripartite tense distinction and a medium-sized aspectual system. Its past evidential system was tripartite with suffixes for firsthand, non-firsthand and evidentially neutral information. In Khorchin, which developed under the influence of Mandarin and Manchu, evidentiality was lost, and tense was simplified into a past / non-past distinction, alongside with a discontinuous proximal future / past marker. The aspect system underwent some changes, but retained its complexity. Khalkha, which developed under the influence of Turkic and Tibetan, underwent some shared innovations with Khorchin, but retained participles as a multifunctional unit within finite predicates, so that its aspectual system grew more complex. The past evidentiality distinctions of MM were basically retained, but the introduction of present tense evidentiality brought a number of changes: the evidentially neutral value shifted to signaling assimilated knowledge, and discontinuous future uses were introduced for all past markers.

The aim of this paper is to research for the role and the operation of Albanian language in Balkans. The Albanian language is spoken by seven million people in the south-western of Balkans. Albanian is a language of the extensive Indo-European family and is thus related to a certain degree to almost all other languages of Europe. Albanian is officially spoken in the Republic of Albania and Kosova. Traditional Albanian settlements can be encountered sporadically elsewhere in Arbansi of Zadar (in Croation); in some cities of Serbia; Macedonia; Montenegro and in the Bulgarian-Greek-Turkish border region. A few Albanian speakers are also to be found in the Ukraine (village in the regions Melitopol' and Odessa) and notably in villages in Bulgarian (in Mandrica). As a geographical and cultural entity, and as a nation, Albania has often been enigmatic. The first document in Albanian language is: Paulus Angelus, 1462 "I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit".

Distinctive vowel length has been only recently re-introduced into the Romani varieties that have been in intimate contact with the various languages of Europe exhibiting vowel quantity. This article describes the process of analogical extension that accounts for certain intra-dialectal variation of vowel length found within the South Central Romani dialect group. The emergence of vowel length by means of this process is demonstrated by the example of the possessive pronouns and the remoteness suffix of Vend Romani, a variety spoken in Western Hungary. This analysis also discusses the phonological and semantic constraints of the examined instances of analogical change.

The paper tries to account for several instances of emerging suppletion by establishing a cross-linguistic tendency of suppletion replication in grammaticalization. It can be shown that words which acquire new grammatical functions and therefore enter a different class of lexemes tend to copy suppletion patterns already present in other members of this class. This development can be triggered by factors of different nature, either internal to the language in question or rooted in contact between different languages or dialects of the same language. The suppletion replication tendency is demonstrated on several cases of grammaticalization of demonstrative or relative pronouns into 3rd person pronouns. This typologically common development is known to have led to the creation of new suppletion in several languages of Europe. In the present paper, three particularly telling cases from Slavonic, dialects of Lithuanian and early West Germanic dialects spoken on the continent are discussed in detail.

My present work is a study of British authors published abroad. In the seventeenth century, English and Scots had a negligible readership outside the British Isles. The principal languages of Europe were Latin, the language of the clerisy and of scientific exchange, and French, the language of chivalry and diplomacy. It follows that British authors could make an impression abroad only if they wrote in Latin or if their work underwent translation. The quantity and significance of the resultant literature is little understood. Additionally, because there is so little translation of literary texts, the importance of translation out of English is often underestimated. A huge amount of political and theological writing was published in Dutch translation: There is also an important phenomenon of “onward translation” from Dutch to German, and from German to the Scandinavian languages, Polish, and other tongues, without reference to the original English texts (there is also a smaller, but significant “onward” process from French to other romance languages). The Elizabethan puritans in particular have a major presence in Continental translation. There is also a political dimension to publication abroad: The English state attempted to remedy propaganda disasters by having recourse to foreign presses, and dissident writers attempted to sway opinion both at home and abroad. Furthermore, significant quantities of writing were produced within diaspora communities; the most salient being the separatist Protestant churches in the Netherlands that included the Pilgrim Fathers, and the Catholic seminaries and monasteries. Many of these had well‐developed networks of international communication.

The aims of this study are twofold: to propose methods for measuring (dis)similarities in the organization of valency class systems across languages, and to test them on a sample of European languages in order to reveal areal and genetic patterns. The data were gathered for 29 languages using a questionnaire containing 130 contextualized uses of bivalent predicates. The properties under study include (i) lexical range of transitives, (ii) lexical range of valency frames defined in terms of the “locus” of non-transitivity (whether A or P arguments are encoded by oblique devices), (iii) overall complexity of valency class systems, and (iv) lexical distribution of verbs among valency classes. In case of the simpler properties (i)–(iii), maps with quantified isoglosses and pairwise comparison of languages based on Hamming distance are used. For (iv) these methods are inapplicable (valency classes cannot be equated across languages), and I propose a distance metric based on entropy and pairwise mutual information between distributions. The distance matrices are analyzed using the NeighborNet algorithm as implemented in SplitsTree. I argue that more holistic properties of valency class systems are indicative of large areal effects: e.g., many western European languages (Germanic, Romance, Basque and some Balkan languages) are lexically “most transitive” in Europe. Low-level areal signal is clearly discernible in the data on more subtle aspects of the organization of valency classes. The findings imply that distributions of verbs into valency classes can develop quickly and are transferable in contact situations, despite drastic dissimilarities in argument-coding devices.

The paper deals with the areal-typological profiling of Ukrainian among languages of Europe, constituting Standard Average European (SAE) and especially Central European (CE). Placed recently in the context of the ‘areal typology’ and the ‘dynamic taxonomy’, Ukrainian together with Russian and Belarusian appear to be mere replica languages. Such languages are capable of only borrowing surface structures migrating all over the Europe unie or imitating deep structures on the model of SAE or CE. In order to elaborate on an alternative profiling of Ukrainian among languages of (Central) Europe, the author concentrates on both phonological and morphosyntactic features treated commonly as CE Sprachbund-forming (the spirantization of *g, the dispalatalization of the palatalized consonants, the existence of medial l, the umlauting, the three-tense system, including a simple preterit from the perfect, and the periphrastic ‘ingressive’ future). As a result, the author advances another vector of areal classification, thus positioning Russian in the core of ‘Standard Average Indo-European’ and (Southwest) Ukrainian as an intermediate language between Russian and the rest of (Central) European languages.

This handbook comprises an in-depth presentation of the state of the art in word-formation. The five volumes contain 207 articles written by leading international scholars. The 16 sections of the handbook provide the reader in general articles and individual studies with a wide variety of perspectives. The final section contains 74 portraits of word-formation in the individual languages of Europe and offers an innovative perspective.

Faba bean (Vicia faba L) took part in the 'agricultural revolution' of post-glacial Europe along with other grain legumes and cereals. In order to assess the diversity and the origin of the words denoting faba bean in the languages of Europe, a lexicological study was carried out with emphasis upon etymological dictionaries. The words in almost all modern Indo-European languages in Europe owe their origin to the Proto-Indo-European root *bhabh bhabhā, also denoting faba bean. The Proto-Altaic root *bŭkrV, denoting pea nut and cone, through the Proto-Turkic *burčak, denoting both pea and bean is responsible for the words in several modern Altaic languages of Europe while the others are borrowings from Arabic. The origin of the words in modern Caucasian languages is the Proto-Caucasian root *howł[ā], meaning both bean and lentil. The words in Uralic languages are either borrowings, mostly from Slavic, or derived from their own words denoting pea.

The subject matter of this article is widespread idioms originating from folk tales and old legends that once were elements of the folklore of various European language communities but later fell into oblivion. The motifs of these tales survived in currently known idioms of many languages of Europe and beyond and thus contribute to constituting a part of the Lexicon of Common Figurative Units.

There are many other issues of interest in these fascinating reviews. For instance, the treatment of Africa in the review by Campbell and Tishkoff [19xThe evolution of human genetic and phenotypic variation in Africa. Campbell, M.C. and Tishkoff, S.A. Curr. Biol. 2010; 20: R166–R173Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (61)See all References[19] notes the remarkably long duration of the correlation between genetic and cultural and linguistic similarities in some African populations, such as the African pygmies and several Khoesan-speaking populations, which may have diverged more than 35 kya [20xThe genetic structure and history of Africans and African Americans. Tishkoff, S.A., Reed, F.A., Friedlaender, F.R., Ehret, C., Ranciaro, A., Froment, A., Hirbo, J.B., Awomoyi, A.A., Bodo, J.M., Doumbo, O. et al. Science. 2009; 324: 1035–1044Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (565)See all References[20]. Very similar conclusions on this theme have been reached [21xThe dawn of human matrilineal diversity. Behar, D.M., Villems, R., Soodyall, H., Blue-Smith, J., Pereira, L., Metspalu, E., Scozzari, R., Makkan, H., Tzur, S., Comas, D. et al. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 2008; 82: 1130–1140Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (208)See all References, 22xMaternal traces of deep common ancestry and asymmetric gene flow between Pygmy hunter-gatherers and Bantu-speaking farmers. Quintana-Murci, L., Quach, H., Harmant, C., Luca, F., Massonnet, B., Patin, E., Sica, L., Mouguiama-Daouda, P., Comas, D., Tzur, S. et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U S A. 2008; 105: 1596–1601Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (94)See all References]. It seems remarkable that groups, which one might refer to as ethnic groups, could have retained linguistic and genetic identities over so long a period of time. Of course, most aspects of those linguistic identities are not available to us as languages change, although the persistence of click consonants in some divergent African hunter-gatherers seems to be one of them that is.Remarkably, also, these observations are not restricted to the remote periods, equivalent to the periods of initial colonisation and its aftermath in Europe and South Asia. They also extend into the more recent periods. In Africa, genetic signatures of historic and prehistoric migration events are visible in several instances, not least the geographic expansion of the Bantu Niger-Kordofanian speakers from Nigeria and Cameroon first into the rainforests of equatorial Africa and then into eastern and southern Africa within the past 5000 years. So, one is presented here with a number of correlations in Africa between genetic and linguistic prehistory, some of them seemingly going back some 35,000 years. This example perhaps seems to offer more grounds for optimism than some distinguished linguists would allow, also in other continents where questions of time depth in historical linguistics are concerned [23xWhy linguists don't do dates: evidence from Indo-European and Australian languages. McMahon, A. and McMahon, R. See all References, 24xThe problem of time depth. Renfrew, C. : ix–xivSee all References]. Indeed, there are indications that the application of phylogenetic methods in this area may prove fruitful [25xIntroduction. Renfrew, C. and Forster, P. : 1–10See all References[25]. As Manfred Kayser notes in his review of Oceania [11xThe human genetic history of Oceania: near and remote views of dispersal. Kayser, M. Curr. Biol. 2010; 20: R194–R201Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (52)See all References[11], Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of lexical data undertaken there by Gray, Drummond and Greenhill [26xLanguage phylogenies reveal expansion pulses and pauses in Pacific settlement. Gray, R.D., Drummond, A.J., and Greenhill, S.J. Science. 2009; 323: 479–483Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (237)See all References[26] revealed a Taiwanese origin of the Austronesian languages about 5200. This can, as he discusses, be related to the molecular genetic evidence, although this is admittedly quite complex. A comparable analysis by Gray and Atkinson [27xLanguage-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin. Gray, R.D. and Atkinson, Q.D. Nature. 2003; 426: 435–439Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (326)See all References[27] applied to the Indo-European languages of Europe and South Asia suggests a time depth of the order of 9000 years for their original divergence, much greater than posited by many Indo-European linguists. It is also much more in harmony with a concomitant spread of farming and language as a mechanism for generating the ultimate geographical extent of this language family [28xThe ‘Emerging Synthesis’: the archaeogenetics of farming/language dispersals and other spread zones. Renfrew, C. : 3–16See all References[28].Perhaps the most important general point that can be drawn from the reviews assembled in this special issue might be that we have not yet learnt how to interpret the data very effectively. A number of contributors have commented upon the need for simulation studies, based upon explicit models which might allow the testing of specific scenarios [29xIntroduction. Matsumura, S. and Forster, P. : 1–6See all References[29], and this is likely to be one of the most important future research directions. Above all, the pace of research is now so fast that new insights are soon likely to become available. These are early days in the field of archaeogenetic research, and I predict that over the next twenty years or so a more coherent synthesis of the data from genetics, archaeology and linguistics is likely to emerge than we can yet envisage.

Word order is a fairly fundamental means for speakers to structure discourses, even – or perhaps specifically – in languages that are claimed to use a “free word order”. In a typological study of object affixes and clitics, Gensler [Gensler, Orin, 2003. Object ordering in verbs marking two pronominal objects: non-explanation and explanation. Linguistic Typology 7(2), 187–231] comes to the conclusion that the relative linear order of direct and indirect object markers in his sample of 31 languages exhibits a random distribution which excludes any attempt at explanation based on natural functional principles, suggesting that “any functionally motivated approach to object-morpheme ordering seems out of place” (Gensler, 2003, p. 217). While affixes and clitics for direct objects and indirect objects in ditransitive constructions do not show any crosslinguistically uniform ordering pattern, the situation is less discouraging when it comes to nominal participants. As the findings of Primus [Primus, Beatrice, 1998. The relative order of recipient and patient in the languages of Europe. In: Siewieraka (1998b), pp. 421–473] on European languages suggest, there appear to be significant constraints on the linear order of ditransitive objects. The present paper pursues this line of research further by drawing on a larger corpus of languages across the world: On the basis of data on 390 ditransitive constructions from 315 languages it is argued that there is a small set of principles underlying communicative strategies that can be held responsible for crosslinguistic regularities of ordering objects in ditransitive constructions.

Like archaeologists, linguists and geneticists too use the data and methods of their disciplines to open up their own windows onto our past. These disparate visions of human prehistory cry out to be reconciled into a coherent holistic scenario, yet progress has long been frustrated by interdisciplinary disputes and misunderstandings (not least about Indo-European). In this article, a comparative-historical linguist sets out, to his intended audience of archaeologists, the core principles and methods of his discipline that are of relevance to theirs. They are first exemplified for the better-known languages of Europe, before being put into practice in a lesser-known case-study. This turns to the New World, setting its greatest indigenous ‘Empire’, that of the Incas, alongside its greatest surviving language family today, Quechua. Most Andean archaeologists assume a straightforward association between these two. The linguistic evidence, however, exposes this as nothing but a popular myth, and writes instead a wholly new script for the prehistory of the Andes — which now awaits an archaeological story to match.