Martine Vanhove

Thomas Stolz

Hitomi Otsuka

Aina Urdze

This collection of articles takes up the issue of Contact Morphology raised by David Wilkins in 1996. In the majority of contact-related studies, morphology is at best a marginal topic. According to the extant borrowing hierarchies, bound morphology is copied only rarely, if at all, because morphological copies presuppose long-term intensive contact with prior massive borrowing of content words and function words. On the other hand, especially in studies of morphological change, contact is often identified as the decisive factor which triggers the disintegration of morphological systems. However, it remains to be seen whether these two standard treatments of morphology in contact situations exhaust the phenomenology of Contact Morphology. The 14 papers of the present volume shed new light on the behavior of morphology under the conditions of language contact. Fresh empirical data from 40 languages world-wide are presented and new theory-based concepts are discussed. Morphologies in Contact is a first in the history of both morphology and language contact studies. It is meant to mark the beginning of an international research program which explores the entire range of aspects connected to morphologies in contact and thus, paves the way for a full-blown Contact Morphology qua linguistic discipline.

Morphologies in Contact

Evangelia Adamou

Katharina Haude

The articles compiled in this volume offer new insights into the wealth of prosodic and syntactic phenomena involved in the encoding of information structure categories. They present data from languages which are rarely, if ever, taken into account in the most prominent approaches in information structure theory, and which belong to the Afroasiatic, Amerindian, Australian, Caucasian, and Niger-Congo language stocks. In addition to the significant descriptive value of these pioneering contributions, several studies also draw attention to previously undescribed or typologically rare phenomena. By adapting a variety of methods to under-described and endangered languages, ranging from experimental to naturalistic corpus studies, this volume also aims to serve as an invitation for further research in this direction.

Studies in prosody and syntax

Information Structure in Lesser-described Languages

This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

Towards a Typology of Lexical Semantic Associations

From Polysemy to Semantic Change

Elizabeth Hume

Bernard Comrie

Manwel Mifsud

Ray Fabri

This collection of articles highlights a selection of on-going research projects. Phonological, morphological, and syntactic issues are addressed by international experts on Maltese. The diachronic development of Maltese, its age-long contact with Italo-Romance, and the present diglossic situation with co-official English are the topics of a variety of contributions to this volume. The repercussions that the promotion of Maltese to the status of official working language of the EU has on the Maltese lexicon are discussed. A project on the sociolinguistics of non-native Maltese-English is presented. The problems posed by the creation of electronic resources for Maltese are equally focused upon. The papers amply demonstrate that Maltese Linguistics can stand on its own outside the traditional field of Oriental Studies.

Selected papers from the 1st International Conference on Maltese Linguistics, Bremen, 1820 October, 2007

Introducing Maltese Linguistics

Martine Vanhove

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