Abstract This paper investigates the origins of Old and Modern Javanese negators. Modern Javanese distinguishes four negators. Predicative ora (‘no(t)’) derives from Old Javanese tan + wwara ‘there is not’ and its high register counterpart botən from tan + wontən . Prohibitive aja (‘don’t’) and its Old Javanese predecessor haywa must derive from Old Javanese hayu ‘beauty, goodness, rightness; beautiful, good, right’ + subjunctive -a: hayu-a was used in desiderative and hortative phrases (‘it would be good if…’), and, with tan , in prohibitives. After loss of tan, hayu-a became lexicalised as haywa , a prohibitive. Its high counterpart sampun is basically an aspect marker (‘already’), which acquired a cessative and prohibitive function. Contrastive dudu (‘no [+noun]; not this [but another]’) originally meant ‘other’. The origin of Phasal duruŋ ‘not yet’ needs further investigation.
Abstract Under-described languages may present diverse strategies of structuring narrative discourse. Investigations into the structure of narratives of such languages, in particular ones with a predominantly oral tradition, are still scarce, and even more so studies that relate the structure with the corresponding linguistic devices. A critical component of the hierarchical structure of discourse is captured in semantic-pragmatic relationships within and across fragments, i.e. strings of text of the length of one or more paragraphs. We investigate texts from two less described languages (Samoan, Austronesian and Chipaya, Uru-Chipayan) to delineate their hierarchical structure on a local and a global level applying three different semantic-pragmatic approaches (among them SDRT) in a comparative way.
Abstract The documentarist turn remains lopsided with respect to the form<>meaning mapping: we risk knowing what speakers said, but not what they meant. Original recordings thus need to be supplemented by discussions with speakers that use methods more similar to traditional methods of textual hermeneutics. Here we exemplify these problems, drawing on our own work with previously untranscribed, untranslated audio recordings in Dalabon. We examine four key issues: an unreported “reversal” construction; adding senses to known vocabulary; unearthing previously unrecorded new food-preparation vocabulary; reference of “triangular kin terms” in actual conversation. Such interpretive discussions with later-generation community members reach beyond the audible to increase the reach of semantic interpretation.
Abstract This chapter argues for a decisive shift in corpus-building practices toward a Multimodal Turn . For decades, smaller-scale spoken and signed languages were less available for linguistic corpus research due to the scarcity of corpora, but the situation has changed: language documentation now provides rich multimodal resources, and many sign languages are recorded in high-definition video, offering unique insights into communicative practices. In contrast, corpora of majority languages often remain limited in video data. We contend that they can draw inspiration from the practices developed in language documentation and sign language research to close this gap. Only by systematically integrating multimodal interaction into corpus design can linguistic research capture the full complexity of human communication.
Abstract Since Givón (1983) and Ariel (1990) , a large body of research continues to assume that zero anaphors reflect a higher degree of accessibility than overt pronominal forms. However, when the features of animacy or person are taken as its metric, existing case studies do not consistently confirm a correlation between high accessibility and zero form, and some report the opposite tendency. In this chapter we bring a broader cross-linguistic perspective to the question, leveraging data from a multilingual richly annotated spoken language corpus covering 16 typologically diverse languages. We identify a surprisingly robust trend in support of a reversal of expected accessibility-accounts: Overall, it is non-human referents rather than human, and third person rather than first and second person, which favour zero expression. Our findings provide cross-linguistic support for the constraint ‘avoid non-human pronouns’, found by Genetti and Crain (2003) for Nepali, and a tendency to overtly realise speech-act participants as pronouns. Furthermore, we identify a significant effect of syntactic role, such that these regularities are more clearly evident for direct objects than for transitive subjects. We explore possible explanations for these results, noting similarities between our findings and well-documented patterns of differential indexing, informativity and surprisal ( Haspelmath 2021 ). More generally, these findings call for a re-assessment of the view that a single principle such as accessibility can account for referential choice among all form types. For the choice between reduced forms (pronouns and zero), distinct principles may be operative.
