PhilSoc Meetings

Synchronic and Diachronic Complex Tone in Endangered Tenyi Languages
Savio Meyase (University of York)

The languages in the northeast of India in the eastern Himalayan range are rather poorly documented and the availability of linguistic studies for these languages is next to nothing compared to many other languages of the world. The main reasons for this are geographic isolation and economic backwardness, and historic as well as extant abandonment from authorities in control. Apart from digitally archiving endangered language data, I also study the diachronic changes in both the tones and non-tonal elements of the related languages of Tenyidie and reconstruct a proto-Tenyi language with an attempt to establish the relationship of the languages and variants into a traditional language family tree.

The Tenyi languages are tonal languages employing at least four lexical tones. Any language having more than two tones in the inventory is considered a complex tone system, and only very few languages have been documented to have more than three tones. The phonological study of complex tones itself is still at a nascent stage. My previous work (2021, 2022) showed that Tenyidie tones, while appearing complicated and unpredictable, can be neatly studied with hitherto available phonological tools with the proposition that tones can (and should) be split into smaller units. The tonal model I proposed with these tonal units is shown in the PDF of this abstract (see below).

This proposal, and the model that I used, is also being borne out by the newer languages that I am looking at the moment, with support especially from Sopvoma [Mao] where the patterns of tone change are different but still bears out the tonal model used for standard Tenyidie. The comparison of tonal data between Tenyidie and Sopvoma also provides evidence of how tone in these languages could have evolved from a simple two-tone system with cues again supporting the atomisation of tones into smaller features.

The comparisons, reconstructions and the archival of these languages are done with a curated version of the Leipzig-Jakarta list (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009).

References
Haspelmath, Martin and Uri Tadmor (eds.), 2009. Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Mouton de Gruyter.
Meyase, Savio, 2021. ‘Polarity in a four-level tone language’. Phonology (38).
Meyase, Savio, 2022. Tenyidie Tone. PenThrill Publications.

Comparative Constructions at the Interface between Syntax and Semantics: Lessons from Malay
Eve Suharwardy (University of Manchester)

The syntactic realisation of the standard of a comparative is either phrasal or clausal. In the case of English, it is typically assumed that both are possible, see the contrast between (1a) vs (1b/c).

1. a. Jon is taller than [Laura].
   b. Jon is taller than [Laura is].
   c. Jon owns more video games than [Laura owns videogames].

However, the availability of both comparative standards is in fact a point of variation crosslinguistically. Where Russian and Greek display the same pattern as English (Pancheva 2006; Merchant 2009), there are many languages which lack clausal standards altogether, e.g. Hindi, Turkish and Samoan (Bhatt & Takahashi 2011; Hofstetter 2009; Hohaus 2015).

In order to determine the syntactic status of the standard phrase, we can use various diagnostics. For example, the availability of constructions subcomparatives (e.g. ‘the desk is longer than the door is wide’) indicates clausal standards, whilst the availability of a reflexive remnant in the standard (e.g. ‘no star shines brighter than itself’) indicates phrasal ones. In this talk, I present original fieldwork data regarding the application of these diagnostics to the Austronesian language, Malay, the results of which have significant implications for the semantic analysis.

All things prepositional: argument structure throughout the history of English

This paper investigates changes in prepositional argument structure in the history of English, viz. patterns featuring verb-attached prepositional phrases fulfilling various functions from prototypical adjuncts to complements. I use data from the Penn-Helsinki Corpora of Historical English, covering Middle, Early Modern, and Late Modern English (ca. 1150 to 1900) to assess the general hypothesis that PPs increased in frequency and expanded in functions over time as part of the general shift of English from a more synthetic to a more analytic language (e.g. Baugh & Cable 2002). I do so by zooming in on three particular case studies: (i) the development of prepositional verbs such as insist on, (ii) competition between PPs and NPs in the conative alternation, like in kick (at) the ball, and (iii) competition between PPs and NPs with time expressions as in (on) that day, we left. Overall, the results suggest that the history of English PPs is more complex than often presumed (e.g. Szmrecsyani 2016), and demonstrate an intricate interplay of cognitive factors like complexity and lexical biases in PP-diachrony (e.g. Levshina 2018; Pijpops et al. 2018).

References

Baugh, A. & T. Cable. 2002. A history of the English language, 5th edn. London: Routledge.
Levshina, N. 2018. Anybody (at) home? Communicative efficiency knocking on the Construction Grammar door. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 6, 71-90. https://doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2018-0004.
Pijpops, D., D. Speelman, S. Grondelaers & F. Van de Velde. 2018. Comparing explanations for the Complexity Principle. Language and Cognition 10(3), 514-543. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2018.13.
Szmrecsyani, B. 2016. An analytic-synthetic spiral in the history of English. In E. van Gelderen (ed.), Cyclical change continued, 93-112. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.227.04szm.