| 1. |
- Agbetsoamedo, Yvonne, 1974-, et al.
(author)
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Unravelling temperature terms in Sɛlɛɛ
- 2015
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In: The linguistics of temperature. - Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Company. - 9789027206886 - 9789027269171 ; , s. 107-127
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper investigates the encoding of temperature in Sɛlɛɛ, a Niger-Congo language of the Kwa group, spoken in Ghana. The lexicon of temperature in Sɛlɛɛ consists of six central and two non-central temperature terms, distributed among the word classes of nouns, adjectives and verbs. The grammatical constructions associated with temperature evaluation vary according to the word-class status of each temperature term and its contexts of use. The distribution of the different grammatical constructions according to different types of temperature evaluation is discussed in the paper. Metaphorical uses of temperature-related terms are also discussed in the context of neighbouring and highly related languages. Finally, special patterns of temperature evaluation in connection with water are surveyed.
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| 2. |
- Di Garbo, Francesca, 1983-
(author)
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Evaluative morphology and noun classification : a cross-linguistic study of Africa
- 2013
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In: SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics. - 1336-782X. ; 10:1, s. 114-136
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper aims at illustrating how, in languages with grammatical gender, this feature of noun morphology interacts with evaluative morphology. This is done on the basis of a sample of sixty-two African languages. The paper shows that interactions among gender and evaluative morphology are quite regular in the African languages. Two major types of interactions are found depending on whether a language hasa rich or a limited number of noun classes. The geographic diffusion and diachronic stability of these interactions are discussed. The correlation between gender and evaluation in the African languages has promising implications for our understanding of the two grammatical domains and fostersfurther research questions as to how common the relationships between these domains are cross-linguistically, and why they emerge in the first place.
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| 3. |
- Di Garbo, Francesca, 1983-
(author)
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Gender and its interaction with number and evaluative morphology : An intra- and intergenealogical typological survey of Africa
- 2014
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation investigates interactions between gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology in a sample of 100 African languages, and provides a method for assessing the role that these interactions play in the grammatical complexity of gender systems. The dissertation is organised around three research foci.First, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and number along the following dimensions: exponence, syncretism, indexation, correlations in type of marking, and gender assignment. The study provides evidence for the possibility that nominal features are organised in a relevance hierarchy. In addition, the study shows that animacy and lexical plurality play a crucial role in the distribution of special patterns of plural indexation. The study also shows that pervasive indexation systems in the language sample always involve both gender and number. Finally, the study shows how gender assignment can be used as a means for encoding variation in the countability properties of nouns and noun phrases.Second, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and evaluative morphology in the languages of the sample. Two types of interactions are found. The study shows that the distribution of the two types depends on three factors: the type of gender system, the number of gender distinctions and the possibility of assigning a noun to more than one gender.Third, the dissertation investigates the role that interactions of gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology play in the absolute complexity of gender. The study proposes a metric for gender complexity and uses this metric to compute complexity scores for the languages of the sample. The results suggest that the gender systems of the language sample lean toward high complexity, that genealogically related languages have the same or similar complexity scores, and that the distribution of the outliers can often be understood as the result of language contact.
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Di Garbo, Francesca, 1983-, et al.
(author)
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Non-canonical gender in African languages : A typological survey of interactions between gender and number, and between gender and evaluative morphology
- 2018
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In: Non-canonical gender systems. - Oxford : Oxford University Press. - 9780198795438 ; , s. 176-210
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This chapter investigates interactions between gender and number, and between gender and evaluative morphology in eighty-four African languages. It argues that interactions of gender with other grammatical domains (e.g. number) and/or with domains of derivational morphology (e.g. diminutive/augmentative) represent instances of non-canonical gender. This is based on two assumptions: (1) canonical morphosyntactic features should be maximally independent from each other, and (2) canonical gender should be an inherent lexical property of nouns, not manipulable for semantic or pragmatic purposes. The gender systems of the sampled languages appear to be frequently non-canonical because they are prone to interact with the morphosyntactic encoding of number distinctions and with the formation of diminutive and augmentative nouns. The chapter further outlines some suggestions as to how interactions between gender and other domains of nominal morphology may contribute to assess asymmetries between gender and other functional domains, as well as the complexity of gender systems.
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| 6. |
- Di Garbo, Francesca, 1983-, et al.
(author)
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The evolving complexity of gender agreement systems
- 2019
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In: Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity. - Berlin : Language Science Press. - 9783961101818 - 9783961101801 ; , s. 15-60
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper proposes to integrate the diachronic dimension to the typological study of gender complexity, and focuses on the morphosyntactic encoding of gender distinctions via agreement patterns. After investigating the processes of language change that foster the reduction, loss, expansion and emergence of gender agreement in a sample of fifteen sets of closely related languages (N= 36 languages), we discuss how gender agreement systems in decline and on the rise pattern in terms of complexity. We show that declining and emerging gender agreement systems may exhibit increase or decrease in complexity and discuss how this relates to the fact that they represent transitional stages between absence of gender and full-fledged gender systems. In our analysis, we make use of typological implicational hierarchies in the domain of agreement as a tool to account for diachronic variation and for the patterns of simplification/complexification in the agreement systems of the sampled languages.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
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Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity : Volume I: General issues and specific studies
- 2019
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Editorial collection (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia.This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.
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| 9. |
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Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity : Volume II: World-wide comparative studies
- 2019
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Editorial collection (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. Volume two consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.This volume is preceded by volume one, which, in addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia.
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| 10. |
- Sinnemäki, Kaius, et al.
(author)
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Language Structures May Adapt to the Sociolinguistic Environment, but It Matters What and How You Count : A Typological Study of Verbal and Nominal Complexity
- 2018
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In: Frontiers in Psychology. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 1664-1078. ; 9
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this article we evaluate claims that language structure adapts to sociolinguistic environment. We present the results of two typological case studies examining the effects of the number of native (=L1) speakers and the proportion of adult second language (=L2) learners on language structure. Data from more than 300 languages suggest that testing the effect of population size and proportion of adult L2 learners on features of verbal and nominal complexity produces conflicting results on different grammatical features. The results show that verbal inflectional synthesis adapts to the sociolinguistic environment but the number of genders does not. The results also suggest that modeling population size together with proportion of L2 improves model fit compared to modeling them independently of one another. We thus argue that surveying population size alone may be insufficient to detect possible adaptation of linguistic structure to the sociolinguistic environment. Rather, other features, such as proportion of L2 speakers, prestige and social network density, should be studied, and if demographic numeric data are used, they should not be used in isolation but rather in competition with other sociolinguistic features. We also suggest that not all types of language structures within a given grammatical domain are equally sensitive to the effect of sociolinguistic variables, and that more exploratory studies are needed before we can arrive at a reliable set of grammatical features that may be potentially most (and least) adaptive to social structures.
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