Of course, languages are not in contact. We could say that speakers of languages are, but even this would be misleading, as we would bestow an undue role to in-dividuals in their capacity as speakers, and at the same time forget that words and patterns spread when they are heard, rather than when they are uttered. As Thomason (2001: p. 2) puts it, “in the simplest definition, language contact…
This work focuses the social context of writing in ancient Western Arabia in the oasis of ancient Dadan, modern-day al-?Ul? in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula between the sixth to first centuries BC. It offers a description and analysis of the language of the inscriptions and the variation attested within them. It is the first work to perform a systematic study of the linguistic variatio…
Elfdalian is the language traditionally spoken in Övdaln (Älvdalen), central Sweden. Due to its linguistic differences to Swedish, coupled with the determination of the speech community, several attempts have been made to acquire an official recognition of Elfdalian as a minority language in Sweden. However, despite growing interest in documenting and revitalising Elfdalian, it is still regar…
This book is a typological study of resemblance in formal verbal marking be-tween two or more of the following seven clausal constructions: passives, antipas-sives, reflexives, reciprocals, anticausatives, causatives, and applicatives. Follow-ingMalchukov (2015;2016;2017),Creissels (2016), andZúñiga & Kittilä (2019),these constructions are called voices. In turn, their formal marking is call…
The field of prosody research belongs to those linguistic disciplines that have de-veloped rapidly in recent decades. This is mainly due to the appreciation it hasreceived in theoretical studies of grammar, but also to the technological revo-lution that has resulted in the widespread availability of software dedicated toconducting analyses and calculating statistics. All stages of experimental …
Today we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Radboud University. This university’s anniversary would not be complete without an honorary doctor in the language sciences. We feel privileged that you agreed to become an honorar y doctor of Radboud University.You have contributed so much to the language sciences. At the start of your career, you…
This book corrals global scholarship on ancient writing systems from China, Mesopotamia, Central America, the Mediterranean, to more recent newly created scripts such as the Rongorongo from Easter Island, the Caroline Island scripts, as well as the alphabet. The aim is to dig into the foundations of writing and showcase the complexities and varieties of scripts, from their invention to the pote…
The distribution of German dorsal fricatives – palatal [ç] and velar [x] – haspreoccupied linguists of diverse theoretical persuasions for over ninety years.Scholars who have discussed the patterning of those sounds include the follow-ing:Jones (1929),Hermann (1932),Bloomfield (1933),Trubetzkoy (1939),Moul-ton (1947),Leopold (1948),Jones (1950),Trim (1951),Dietrich (1953),Trost (1958),Heik…
In the past few years a number of book-length English-language studies of the cultural dimensions of disasters in modern Japan have appeared in print.2 The question arises: Why do we need another? The reason is that none of these books concentrates solely on literature, as this book does, and only a few of the volumes treat the disaster spawned by World War II—the most destruc-tive military c…
Of the many types of multiword expressions identified in the literature, the cur-rent study focuses on a small, structurally defined set of possible prefabricatedsequences (prefabs), in particular, attributive adjective-noun sequences as usedin American English conversation. The paper examines the role of frequency of One source of interest in multiword expressions (MWEs) derived from corpusstu…