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Copyright of Estudios de Linguistica del Espanol is the property of University Library of Bern and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Boletín de Filología is the property of Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Brasileira de Linguística Antropológica is the property of Revista Brasileira de Linguística Antropológica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Estudios Románicos is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The dialects of Ewen vary widely with respect to the forms and uses of reflexive, reciprocal, and intensifier pronouns derived from the stems meːn and bej. This paper establishes nine isoglosses based on the features of these pronominal forms and plots them on the dialectal map of Ewen. In a second step, comparative evidence from other Tungusic and some contact languages of Ewen is adduced in order to shed light on the diachronic developments underlying the current dialectal distrubtion of the forms in question. As a result, a number of tentative historical scenarios for the developments of reflexives and intensifiers both in Ewen and in Tungusic in general are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition (BDLT) has been one of the longest-running Slavic digital humanities projects in the United States. Initially conceived in 2008 as a series of printed volumes, the digital project was built upon the foundation of a long-term international collaboration dating to the 1970s. As BDLT nears completion in 2019, this paper reflects on the trajectory of its development and its sustainability as an unfunded digital humanities project, and the ways it can serve as both a model and cautionary tale for others who seek to undertake similar work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States" (LAMSAS) is admirably accessible for reanalysis (see http://hyde.park.uga.edu/lamsas/, Kretzschmar, 1994). The present paper applies a lexical distance measure to assess the lexical relatedness of LAMSAS's sites, a popular focus of investigation in the past (Kurath, 1949; Carver, 1989; McDavid, 1994). Several conclusions are noteworthy: First, and least controversially, we note that LAMSAS is dialectometrically challenging at least due to the range of field workers and questionnaires employed. Second, on the issue of which areas ought to be recognized, we note that our investigations tend to support a three-way North/South/Midlands division rather than a two-way North/South division, i.e. they tend to support Kurath and McDavid rather than Carver, but this tendency is not conclusive. Third, we extend dialectometric technique in suggesting means of dealing with alternate forms and multiple responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on some of the more serious issues faced by the Macedonian language. One of them, is certainly the lack of a serious scholarly Macedonian grammar that shall be up-to-date with the development of the language which, like all other languages, is a complex adaptive system. Consequently, there is a lack of a historical grammar and modern language grammar. Another serious issue identified is the unfinished work on the Macedonian dialect dictionary and, in general, the inadequate care for dialectology. In the first part of the paper, we highlight the link between the need for greater linguistic research and the fact that this volume of the journal Contributions is dedicated to the marking of the 80th birthday of academician Bojan Šoptrajanov, our "honorary linguist". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the phenomenon of the genitive of negation (GenNeg) in the Aukštaitian dialects of Lithuanian. It is shown that there is areal variation in case marking of an object of a negated verb. West Aukštaitian dialects (the Kaunas region) allow innovative accusative marking of an object of a negated verb much more often (although not as often as is claimed in the dialect descriptions) than South and East (the Vilnius region) Aukštaitian dialects where the genitive marking is very consistent. Even though South Aukštaitian has more examples of accusative marking than East Aukštaitian, the percentage is still very small. Different types of negated contexts (local vs distant) are not so relevant for the choice of case marking in South-East Aukštaitian, but play a moderately significant role in West Aukštaitian: the accusative marking is more common in distant negated contexts. In East Aukštaitian, direct objects of infinitives embedded under negated verbs can also be marked by the nominative, i.e. verbal negation does not affect the case marking of the so called nominative objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first attempt to provide the outlines of the Chocha-ngachakha, a Tibetic language spoken in Eastern Bhutan. This language (particularly the Tsamang dialect described here) has preserved many archaic features that are not found in the southern Himalayas. The linguistic conservatism of Tsamang Chocha-ngachakha is not confined to phonology but extends to grammar and vocabulary. The data from Chocha-ngachakha sheds new light on the evolution of the Tibetic family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lenguas Modernas is the property of Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Boletín de Filología is the property of Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Most local varieties of Kyrgyz show a composite or in-between character. However, the Ichkilik group of dialects stands apart from other Kyrgyz dialects. The Ichkilik is actually a collective name of the group of tribes mainly settled in the Batken province of Kyrgyzstan and adjoining regions such as Fergana, Jergetal and Pamir of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The linguistic data gathered so far shows that the Ichkilik idiom is quite distinctive not only from standard Kyrgyz, but from neighboring dialects as well. On the one hand, the language of Ichkiliks has a strong in- fluence of Turkic languages such as Uighur and Uzbek. On the other hand, the linguistic data provides evidence that there are certain Oguz and some mixed layers in the dialect. This paper is devoted to a study of the dialect of Ichkiliks. The author focuses on typical characteristics in the phonological system, morphology, sentence structure and lexicon of the dialect. The paper is based on the results of the previous studies on Kyrgyz dialects as well as the author's materials gathered from field researches on the Ichkiliks and their idiom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dialect classification is a classical problem in traditional dialectology. In the course of the last few decades, several quantitative approaches have been suggested as solutions for this problem, one of which uses 'Levenshtein distance' for measuring linguistic distances between dialects. In the present paper we shall introduce the Levenshtein algorithm as well as two methods with which the results of the measuring can be analyzed, viz. multidimensional scaling and clustering. Then we shall apply these methods to the Bulgarian language area and present a quantitative classification of Bulgarian dialects. Finally, we shall compare the classification obtained to the most widely accepted traditional Bulgarian dialect map, analyze the similarities and differences and evaluate our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After 150 years since Alexandru Philippide (1859-1933) - the founder of the linguistic school at Iaşi - was born and after 100 years since the first linguistic atlas of the Romanian language (Linguistischer Atlas des dacorumänischen Sprachgebietes) was published by Gustav Weigand (Leipzig, 1909) the disputes between the two linguists are now making the object of this paper which is based on Philippide's polemic work „Un specialist român la Lipsca“ (A Romanian Specialist at Leipzig; Iaşi, 1910). We are presenting the Romanian philologist's critical views on the results of Weigand's dialectal research on Romanian dialects south of the Danube and on Daco-Romanian dialects. Philippide claims that some results of the recordings and their subsequent interpretation were biased by Weigand's insufficient knowledge of the Romanian language and of the history of the Romanian language. This polemic also brings up the issue of Weigand's Ph. D candidates' papers which are criticized for about the same faults. These were published in 15 volumes of a magazine run by Weigand - „Jahresbericht des Instituts für rumänische Sprache (Rumänisches Seminar) zu Leipzig“. Finally we present some points of view regarding the activity of the institute mentioned in the title of the magazine and which was financed by the Romanian State. The head of the institute is criticized for the superior tone of the interventions and especially for the un-academic vocabulary Weigand used in his polemic writings regarding the works of some Romanian linguists. To conclude, we must point out that we should choose, from the linguistic inheritance left by the two scholars, only the positive aspects to create such a synthesis that would be useful to the history of Romanian linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a preliminary investigation on the documentation of the language of Khetrans. The Khetrans, being one of the many Baloch tribes that speak a language apart from Balochi, primarily occupy the Barkhan district of Balochistan. Earlier observations describe their language as forming a part of Sindhi or being a type of Lahnda. Khetrani is undoubtably a northwestern Indo-Aryan language, and the evidence at the researcher's disposal shows that it does share features with both Sindhi and Siraiki. Historically Khetrani lay well on a dialect continuum that spanned both of these languages and has preserved features intermediate to each. Its adjectival morphology is nearly the same as Siraiki's but the pronominal one closer to Sindhi. Khetrani verb structure is largely similar to and at par with Siraiki for it lacks the “richness” of Sindhi, despite the forms of many cognate verbs being identical to Sindhi. The most salient features of the verbal morphology aligning Khetrani with Siraiki are a sigmatic future and the continuous aspect. The valence model, however, is similar to Sindhi and Khetrani has a Passive Participle peculiar to itself. These features distinguish Khetrani as an independent language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural is the property of Sociedad Espanola para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Jezikoslovlje is the property of University of Osijek, Faculty of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In recent years, dialectometry has gained interest among Catalan dialectologists. As a consequence, a specific dialectometric approach has been developed at the University of Barcelona, which aims at increasing the accuracy of final groupings by means of discriminating the predictable components of the language from its unpredictable ones. Another popular method to obtain dialect distances is the Levenshtein distance (LD) which has never been applied to a Catalan corpus so far. The goal of this paper is to present the results of applying the LD to a corpus of Catalan linguistic data, and to compare the results from this analysis both with the results from Barcelona and the traditional classifications of Catalan dialectology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cashibo-Cacataibo is a Panoan language spoken in the Peruvian Amazon. Despite its relatively small number of speakers this language features a rich dialectal diversity. Although this dialectal situation has previously been documented by G. Tessmann and L. Wistrand, among others, in this article we aim to offer an approach to the dialectology of this language from firsthand data and with an emphasis on the documentation of the phonological aspects that determine the isoglosses separating the Cashibo-Cacataibo dialects. The paper also include references to lexical and morphosyntactic aspects. The conclusions from the data we have collected converge with the results obtained by other scholars: the Cashibo-Cacataibo language consists of four extant dialects (plus an extinct one) with varying degrees of similarity between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of a future (more precisely ‘prospective’) auxiliary from a motion verb in a small group of Neo-Aramaic dialects spoken in Iraq. The long written record of Aramaic allows us to follow the grammaticalization process in some detail, and recent documentation of dialects has shown that various stages co-exist synchronically. The Neo-Aramaic case challenges the theory that future auxiliaries from a verb ‘to go’ should derive from an imperfective in languages which have one. The development of the auxiliary also involves the reanalysis of a present perfect as an immediate future: this apparently surprising development is explained and possible parallels to it in other languages given. The prospective construction exists alongside another future tense and the differences in form and function can be seen to reflect the different origins and ages of the two constructions. There are strong indications that the prospective construction has developed as a result of contact with a similar vernacular Arabic construction. The distribution and level of maturity of the construction in the different dialects can be explained by an origin in a village close to the Arabic-speaking area, and thence diffusion to the neighbouring villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Suvremena Lingvistika is the property of Suvremena Lingvistika and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the status of two vowel mergers in a rural area of the United States. The front-lax merger has traditionally been a southern US merger, and the low-back merger has traditionally been a northern or western US merger. In areas of West Virginia, the same speakers demonstrate both. This geographic overlap of both mergers reinforces the idea that West Virginia is a transitional dialect region. In addition, the traditionally distinct dialect regions of West Virginia are finding increased unity in this overlap of mergers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dialectology is the study of dialects, and dialectometry is the measurement of dialect differences, i.e. linguistic differences whose distribution is determined primarily by geography. The earliest works in dialectology showed that language variation is complex both geographically and linguistically and cannot be reduced to simple characterizations. There has thus always been a perceived need for techniques which can deal with large amounts of data in a controlled means, i.e. computational techniques. This special issue of "Computers and the Humanities" presents a range of recent work on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, there has been limited empirical research on complementizer agreement (CA). We investigate CA drawing on a corpus of 144 speakers from 13 locations across Austria that was elicited through computer supported language production experiments and recorded in conversations. We investigate the linguistic factors that govern the occurrence of CA, as well as its areal distribution. We further explore the role of CA in speakers' linguistic repertoires. The study finds evidence for the hypothesis that the (non-)occurrence of CA is strongly dependent on the structure of its hosting C-elements and finds regional patterns. It also identifies CA as a phenomenon which speakers place in a non-standard register. We use the collected data to test a theory of the emergence of CA from clitic pronouns for Bavarian varieties of German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship to place and language has been central to linguistic research since the beginning. Several distinctive eras of investigation into place and language have taken place, from focusing on relatively nonmobile elderly speakers to deep investigations of how different speakers relate to a particular place. Place impacts language in a variety of ways, from large differences between national varieties to ecological and social distinctions in varieties associated with a small local area or neighborhood. Further, place interacts with other social factors and contributes to linguistic variation in an additive (or perhaps even multiplicative) fashion. As the investigation into the impact of place has developed and evolved, researchers have noted that it is not merely place itself that is the most important, rather the speaker's relationship to place that is perhaps the most crucial aspect. In fact, a speaker with a close connection to place might use features that are associated with a particular place even if those features are stigmatized, because those features represent the speaker's connection to place. Without consideration of how a speaker orients—whether toward or away—any investigation into place or regionality and language will be incomplete. This article is categorized under:Linguistics > Linguistic TheoryPsychology > Language [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study that focuses on the different kinship terms collected in several places in north-western Morocco, using elicitation and interviews conducted between March 2014 and June 2015 with several dozens of informants aged between 8 and 80. The analysed data include terms from the urban contexts of the city of Tetouan, but most of them were gathered in rural locations: the small village of Bni Ḥlu (Fahs-Anjra province) and different places throughout the coastal and inland regions of Ghomara (Chefchaouen province). The corpus consists of terms of address, terms of reference and some hypocoristic and affective terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of standard language varieties on rural dialects is an important factor involved in dialect loss, which is widespread in Europe. In this study, we look at how the three-gender system in the Jämtlandic dialect of Sweden is changing under pressure from the two-gender system of Standard Swedish. The Jämtlandic dialect is an understudied Swedish dialect and an interesting object of study, in part because of the social and economic changes that have occurred over the past century. We performed a survey using profiled stimuli to elicit indefinite articles, definite articles and anaphoric pronouns for 36 target nouns. An analysis was conducted on the traditionalness of gender agreement in the material. We consider linguistic features (traditional gender and type of agreement), as well as sociological features (age, gender, education, geographical location, socioeconomic status, and language attitudes). The results show that most participants maintain the traditional three-gender system to a large degree. Age is the most significant predictor of traditionalness. While the youngest participants show the highest variability in gender assignment, they still retain the three-gender system to some degree. In addition, participants to whom the dialect is very important tend to use more traditional agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Generative syntactic theory of the past 35 years has developed from Government and Binding theory with its large set of articulated building principles, parameters and constraints into Minimalism with its small set of general principles and its reduction of syntactic variation to the Lexicon and Phonological Form. Hans Bennis's syntactic work clearly mirrors this development. Also, since the nineties of the past century microcomparative syntactic research has become more prominent in generative syntax, e.g. in the work of researchers such as Richard Kayne and Cecilia Poletto, and Hans Bennis's work is riding this wave as well. Both in the GB and in the Minimalist stage the textbooks that he (co-)authored have strongly influenced theoretical syntax in the Netherlands. The unique contribution of Hans Bennis and his research group at the Meertens Institute in the past 15 years involves the SAND project and the large amount of work building on it. By collecting massive amounts of dialect syntactic data in a theoretically and geographically systematic, and methodologically sophisticated way and by making them available, searchable and visualizable online, the empirical basis of theoretical syntactic research was greatly enhanced. This new research infrastructure makes it possible to address old questions in new ways and to ask new questions, e.g. about the relation between geographic distribution of grammatical properties and the Mental Grammar. The result is an integration of theoretical syntax and traditional dialectology, for the first time in the history of linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the widely held view that a series of pervasive diachronic innovations in Cappadocian Greek owe their development to language contact with Turkish. Placing particular emphasis on its genealogical relationships with the other dialects of Asia Minor, the claim is that language change in Cappadocian is best understood when considered within a larger dialectological context. Examining the limited use of the definite article as a case in point and in comparison with parallel developments attested in Pontic and Silliot Greek, it is shown in detail that the surface similarity of the outcomes of Cappadocian innovations to their Turkish structural equivalents represents the final stages in long series of language-internal developments whose origins predate the intensification of Cappadocian-Turkish contact. The article thus offers an alternative to contact-oriented approaches and calls for a revision of accepted views on the language-internal and -external dynamics that shaped Cappadocian into its modern form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple factors may affect a listener's ability to identify a particular voice. For example, speaker effects such as language and dialect have been shown to negatively impact speaker identification accuracy (Bahr and Frisch 2002, Doty 1998). Mechanical effects such as communication channel (i.e. cell phone, land line) have also been shown to negatively impact voice identification (Künzel 2001). However, the contribution of these factors to signal complexity as a whole has not been well-defined. Therefore, it is the purpose of this investigation to assess the effect of signal complexity on speaker identification. A paired comparison listening task was used to evaluate monolingual listeners' performance when channel (lab quality, landline phone and cell phone transmissions), language (English vs. Spanish), and dialect (different dialects of Spanish) were varied. Accuracy, reaction time, and d-prime scores were used to measure the effect of signal complexity on speaker identification accuracy. Results indicated that listeners were less accurate when the signal was most complex. These findings were across all three measures. The role of signal complexity in the forensic speaker identification process will be described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring dialect distances can be based on the comparison of words, and the comparison words should be based on the comparison of sounds. In this research we used an adjusted version of an articulation-based system, developed by Almeida and Braun (1986) for finding sound distances, using the IPA system. For comparison of two pronunciations of a word corresponding with two different varieties, we used the Levenshtein algorithm, which finds the easiest way in which one word can be changed into the other by inserting, deleting or substituting sounds. As operations weights of these three operations we used distances as found with the Almeida & Braun system. The dialect distance is now equal to the average of a range of word distances. We applied the technique to 360 Dutch dialects. The transcriptions of 125 words for each dialect are taken from the "Reeks Nederlandse Dialectatlassen" (Blancquaert and Peé, 1925-1982). We get a division with clear similarities to traditional dialect maps when classifying dialects. Using logarithmic sound distances improves results compared to results based on constant sound distances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]