Vortrag: Grammaticalization in Amazonia

preliminary quantitative assessment

This talk is centered around Grammaticalization: how is it defined, how can it be described and measured? The latter will be exemplified using a dataset of Amazonian paths of grammaticalization from a sample of some 30 languages.

Providing a brief introduction into the field of grammaticalization research, the definition and some aspects of the research history as well as the main hypotheses will be discussed using examples.
After that, the focus will be quantitative approaches to grammaticalization and their merit for the scientific process for the field under investigation. We will especially have a look at a possible method of measuring grammaticalization recently described by Bisang et al. (forthcoming), which heavily draws on Lehmann’s ground-breaking monograph Thoughts on Grammaticalization (1995 [1982]) and makes use of the World lexicon of Grammaticalization (2nd edition; Kuteva et al. 2019).
We will also spend some time comparing the first results scored by the new method with the predictions of the main hypotheses (‘meaning first hypothesis’ and ‘parallel reduction hypothesis’).

It will then be exemplified how this method of measuring grammaticalization paths is applied using a dataset of Amazonian paths of grammaticalization from a sample of ca. 30 languages.
It may be worth mentioning that historical documents are scarce for most languages in South America in comparison to Eurasia, and so, due to the diachronic nature of grammaticalization research, the dataset will probably consist only of the most prominent paths of the respective languages. The work has no ambition of being close to something like ‘exhaustive’, let alone ‘comprehensive’, and ideally will include only phenomena, which are undoubtedly cases of grammaticalization, while excluding other debateable cases.

Towards the end of the talk we are going to speak about areal variation of grammaticalization – comparing the profile of Amazonia with areas of Eurasia and Africa – but as the work is still ongoing, the comparison is (at the moment) impressionistic in nature.

Info

Tag: 23.05.2020
Anfangszeit: 11:50
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: Herring
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics
Sprache: en

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