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- Volume 9, Issue 2, 2019
Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2019
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The radically isolating languages of Flores
Author(s): John M. McWhorterpp.: 177–207 (31)More LessAbstractThe languages of central Flores are all but devoid of affixation, despite that this is hardly typical of the Austronesian languages of their family, including closely related languages elsewhere on the island and nearby ones. A traditional approach to these central Flores languages’ typology is to ascribe their analyticity to grammar-internal drift, under which the disappearance of this affixal battery was due merely to fortuitous matters of stress, analogy, reanalysis, etc. Here I argue that a great deal of evidence suggests that these languages actually underwent heavy second-language acquisition by adults at some point in the relatively recent past, most likely by male invaders from a different island. The evidence includes phenomena familiar from recent developments in creolization theory, as well as a cross-linguistic approach to analyticity and its causes.
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Negation in Kulina
Author(s): Olga Krasnoukhova and Johan van der Auwerapp.: 208–238 (31)More LessAbstractThis study reconstructs the development of a negative existential and a negative pro-sentence in the Arawan language Kulina (Brazil-Peru). We demonstrate that the two elements forming the negative existential construction nowe (hi)ra- are involved in a double polarity swap: (i) an originally neutral lexical item (the dynamic verb nowe ‘show’) has become negative through contamination, and (ii) an originally negative element (hi)ra-, which was responsible for the contamination, is bleaching into a semantically neutral auxiliary. This lexeme nowe, with the auxiliary used only optionally, also functions as a negative pro-sentence now. Thus, synchronically we have a negative pro-sentence that has its origin in a semantically-neutral lexical item. Neither the source of the negative pro-sentence nor this diachronic path has surfaced in the literature on negation so far and thus they are instructive from diachronic and typological perspectives. The hypothesis enriches the literature on both the Jespersen Cycle and the Negative Existential Cycle.
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Isoglosses and subdivisions of Iranian
Author(s): Agnes Kornpp.: 239–281 (43)More LessAbstractThe aim of this paper is to look at some of the problems with the traditional subdivisions of Iranian and at possible new approaches. It builds on an argument made in Korn (2016a), adding discussion and further illustrating problems in the data and methods involved in the traditional model of relations among the Iranian languages. It specifically points out that the traditional family tree is based on a set of isoglosses that is an artefact of the data that happened to be available at the time. In addition, the question arises whether the wave model or the concept of linguistic areas would be more adequate to account for the data. The discovery of a corpus of Bactrian manuscripts encourages a new approach. I argue that a sub-branch including Bactrian, Parthian and some other languages is a hypothesis that deserves to be tested; at the same time, the comparison with other Iranian languages as well as typological considerations permit to assess the role of language contact.
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The origin of purpose clause markers in Proto-Omagua-Kukama
Author(s): Zachary O’Haganpp.: 282–312 (31)More LessAbstractThis article explores the diachrony of three purpose clause markers in Proto-Omagua-Kukama (Tupí-Guaraní; Amazonia): *-taɾa, *-maiɾa, and *=tsenuni. I explain an absolutive pattern of control in these clauses via an account in which the markers originate in a combination of nominalizers, a purpose suffix, and a postposition. I show that a similar system is attested in at least one other related language, Kamaiurá.
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Save the trees
Author(s): Guillaume Jacques and Johann-Mattis List
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