scholarly journals Numeral classifiers and number marking in Indo-Iranian

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chundra A. Cathcart ◽  
Andreas Hölzl ◽  
Gerhard Jäger ◽  
Paul Widmer ◽  
Balthasar Bickel
Keyword(s):  
Transition Rates ◽  
Posterior Distributions ◽  
Alternative Possibility ◽  
Evolutionary Transition ◽  
Numeral Classifiers ◽  
Number Marking ◽  
European Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Phylogenetic Model ◽  
Plural Marking

Abstract This paper investigates the origins of sortal numeral classifiers in the Indo-Iranian languages. While these are often assumed to result from contact with non-Indo-European languages, an alternative possibility is that classifiers developed as a response to the rise of optional plural marking. This alternative is in line with the so-called Greenberg-Sanches-Slobin (henceforth GSS) generalization. The GSS generalization holds that the presence of sortal numeral classifiers across languages is negatively correlated with obligatory plural marking on nouns. We assess the extent to which Indo-Iranian classifier development is influenced by loosening of restrictions on plural marking using a sample of 65 languages and a Bayesian phylogenetic model, inferring posterior distributions over evolutionary transition rates between typological states and using these rates to reconstruct the history of classifiers and number marking throughout Indo-Iranian, constrained by historically attested states. We find broad support for a diachronically oriented construal of the GSS generalization, but find no evidence for a strong bias against the synchronic co-occurrence of classifiers and obligatory plural marking. Inspection of the most likely diachronic trajectories in individual lineages in the tree shows a stronger effect of the GSS among Iranian languages than Indo-Aryan languages. Taken as a whole, these findings suggest that the association of classifiers and optional number marking in Indo-Iranian is neither solely the effect of universal mechanisms nor of the contingency of local contact histories.

scholarly journals The Evolutionary Dynamics of Negative Existentials in Indo-European

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahar Shirtz ◽  
Luigi Talamo ◽  
Annemarie Verkerk
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Skewed Distribution ◽  
Phylogenetic Comparative Methods ◽  
Transition Rates ◽  
Evolutionary Models ◽  
Posterior Distributions ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Family Based ◽  
Negative Existentials ◽  
Phylogenetic Modeling

Where in earlier work diachronic change is used to explain away exceptions to typologies, linguistic typologists have started to make use of explicit diachronic models as explanations for typological distributions. A topic that lends itself for this approach especially well is that of negation. In this article, we assess the explanatory value of a specific hypothesis, the Negative Existential Cycle (NEC), on the distribution of negative existential strategies (“types”) in 106 Indo-European languages. We use Bayesian phylogenetic comparative methods to infer posterior distributions of transition rates and parameters, thus applying rational methods to construct and evaluate a set of different models under which the attested typological distribution could have evolved. We find that the frequency of diachronic processes that affect negative existentials outside of the NEC cannot be ignored—the unidirectional NEC alone cannot explain the evolution of negative existential strategies in our sample. We show that non-unidirectional evolutionary models, especially those that allow for different and multiple transitions between strategies, provide better fit. In addition, the phylogenetic modeling is impacted by the expected skewed distribution of negative existential strategies in our sample, pointing out the need for densely sampled and family-based typological research.

Modern Greek V V dvandva compounds: A linguistic innovation in the history of the Indo-European languages

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Ralli
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Compound Formation ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
European Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Internal Change ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Asian Languages

This paper deals with [V V] dvandva compounds, which are frequently used in East and Southeast Asian languages but also in Greek and its dialects: Greek is in this respect uncommon among Indo-European languages. It examines the appearance of this type of compounding in Greek by tracing its development in the late Medieval period, and detects a high rate of productivity in most Modern Greek dialects. It argues that the emergence of the [V V] dvandva pattern is not due to areal pressure or to a language-contact situation, but it is induced by a language internal change. It associates this change with the rise of productivity of compounding in general, and the expansion of verbal compounds in particular. It also suggests that the change contributes to making the compound-formation patterns of the language more uniform and systematic. Claims and proposals are illustrated with data from Standard Modern Greek and its dialects. It is shown that dialectal evidence is crucial for the study of the rise and productivity of [V V] dvandva compounds, since changes are not usually portrayed in the standard language.

N. V. Kyuner (1877-1955): ‘Korea in the Second Half of the 18th Century.’ The Unpublished Typescript

2018 ◽  
pp. 24-37
Author(s):  
Nataliya A. Chesnokova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Far East ◽  
Development Stage ◽  
State University ◽  
Korean Society ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crown Prince ◽  
Eastern Institute

Nikolai Vasilievich Kyuner (1877-1955) was a Russian Orientalist. Having graduated with merit from the St. Petersburg State University, he was sent to the Far East and spent there two years. Having returned, he was appointed head of the department of historical and geographical sciences at the Eastern Institute (Vladivostok) in 1904. Kyuner was one of the first Orientalists to teach courses in history, geography, and ethnography. His works number over 400. The article studies a typescript of his unpublished study ‘Korea in the second half of the 18th century’ now stored in the Archive of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg). Little known to Russian Koreanists, it nevertheless retains its scientific significance as one of the earliest attempts to study the history of the ‘golden age’ of Korea. The date of the typescript is not known, though analysis of the citations places its completion between 1931 and 1940. The article is to introduce the typescript into scientific use and to verify some facts and terms. N. V. Kuyner’s typescript consists of 8 sections: (1) ‘Introduction. Sources review’; (2) ‘General characteristics of the social development stage of Korea in the second half of the 18th century’; (3) ‘Great impoverishment of the country’; (4) ‘Peasantry’; (5) ‘Cities’; (6) ‘Popular revolts’; (7) ‘Military bureaucratic regime’; (8) ‘The Great Collection of Laws’ (a legal code). There are excerpts from foreign and national publications of the 19th - early 20th century, and there’s also some valuable information on Korean legal codes and encyclopedias of the 18th century, which have not yet been translated into any European languages. The typescript addresses socio-economic situation in Korea in the 18th century; struggles of the court cliques of the 16th-18th centuries and their role in inner and foreign policies of the country; social structure of the society and problems of the peasantry; role of trade in the development of the Middle Korean society; legal proceedings and legislation, etc. One of the first among Russian Koreanistics, N. V. Kyuner examined causes of sasaek (Korean ‘parties’) formation and the following events, linking together unstable situation in the country, national isolation, and execution of Crown Prince Sado (1735-1762).

An Historiographical Guide to Subcarpathian Rus'

1973 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 201-265
Author(s):  
Paul R. Magocsi
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
General Nature ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Article Deal ◽  
Enormous Amount ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Cultural Developments

It is customary among western scholars who have written about the Carpatho-Rusyns to consider them “the most forgotten among the forgotten.”2 Little is known in the West about the political, economic, and cultural developments of Subcarpathian Rus', especially before 1918. Yet such an enormous amount of material has been written in eastern European languages about this territory that as early as 1931 the noted Slavic linguist Roman Jakobson could write: “In the whole east Slavic world, there is hardly any other marginal area whose past has been examined with such affectionate meticulousness and scholarliness as Carpatho-Russia.”3The present study is intended as an introductory guide to the voluminous historiography of Subcarpathian Rus'. The material has been arranged according to the following topical and chronological subdivisions: bibliographical aids; general historical studies; early history to 1514; 1514 to 1711; 1711 to 1848; 1848 to 1918; 1918 to 1938; October, 1938, to March, 1939; 1939 to 1944; 1945 to the present; cultural developments; Rusyns in Hungary; Rusyns in Jugoslavia; and Rusyns in the United States. Works will be discussed under the heading which most nearly describes the period dealt with in the text regardless of the date of publication. The time periods were not designated arbitrarily but are based on certain historical events the significance of which will be clarified in the appropriate subsection. Most studies treated in this article deal exclusively or primarily with Subcarpathian Rus' only a few are concerned with problems of a more general nature. Many studies dealing with the recent history of the area are not necessarily included because they represent sound historical research but because they are valuable, highly selective accounts of crucial events, many of them written by the participants themselves.

Plural marking on noun-associated forms

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-401
Author(s):  
Francesca Di Garbo
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Type ◽  
Lexical Semantics ◽  
Number Marking ◽  
Number Systems ◽  
Plural Marking ◽  
Type 3 ◽  
Semantic Properties

AbstractNumber systems can be morphosemantic or morphosyntactic, based on whether number marking is restricted to nouns or also extends to noun-associated forms, such as adnominal modifiers, predicates, and pronouns. While it is well-known that asymmetries in the distribution of plural marking on nouns can be due to lexico-semantic properties such as animacy and/or inherent number, the question of whether these properties also affect patterns of plural agreement has been less broadly investigated. This paper examines the distribution of plural agreement in 24 Cushitic (Afro-Asiatic) languages. The number systems of the languages of the sample are classified into three types, ranging from radically morphosemantic (Type 1) to radically morphosyntactic (Type 2). A subset of languages displays a combination of morphosemantic and morphosyntactic strategies, and thus qualifies as a mixed type (Type 3). In these languages, the distribution of plural agreement is largely lexically-specified: nouns denoting groups, masses, and collections are more likely to trigger plural agreement than other types of nouns. These results thus show that, similarly to the nominal domain, the lexical semantics of nouns may also affect plural marking on noun-associated forms. Furthermore, in Cushitic, radically morphosemantic and radically morphosyntactic number systems appear to be diachronically connected to each other, with the latter seemingly evolving from the former, as testified by ongoing variation and change in some of the sampled languages. The relevance of these findings for understanding the typology and evolution of number systems is discussed.

The Oxford Handbook of Grammatical Number

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Mental Representation ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Numeral Classifiers ◽  
Number Marking ◽  
The Core ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Linguistic Means

This volume offers an overview of current research on grammatical number in language. The chapters Part i of the handbook present foundational notions in the study of grammatical number covering the semantic analyses of plurality, the mass–count distinction, the relationship between number and quantity expressions and the mental representation of number and individuation. The core instance of grammatical number is marking for number distinctions in nominal expressions as in English the book/the books and the chapters in Part ii, Number in the nominal domain, explore morphological, semantic, and syntactic aspects of number marking within noun phrases. The contributions examine morphological marking of number the relationship between syntax and nominal number marking, and the interactions between numeral classifiers with semantic number and number marking. They also address cases of mismatches in form and meaning with respect to number displayed by lexical plurals and collective nouns. The final chapter reviews nominal number processing from the perspective of language pathologies. While number marking on nouns has been the focus of most research on number, number distinctions can also be found in the event domain. Part iii, Number in the event domain, presents an overview of different linguistic means of expressing plurality in the event domain, covering verbal plurality marking, pluractional modifiers of the form Noun preposition Noun, frequency adjectives and dependent indefinites. Part iv provides fifteen case studies examining different aspects of grammatical number marking in a range of typologically diverse languages.

scholarly journals Conflict and cooperation in eukaryogenesis: implications for the timing of endosymbiosis and the evolution of sex

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arunas L Radzvilavicius ◽  
Neil W Blackstone
Keyword(s):  
Cell Fusion ◽  
Mitochondrial Gene ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Eukaryotic Cell ◽  
Evolutionary Transition ◽  
Evolutionary Transitions ◽  
Conflict And Cooperation ◽  
Conflict Mediation ◽  
Considerable Debate ◽  
History Of

The complex eukaryotic cell is a result of an ancient endosymbiosis and one of the major evolutionary transitions. The timing of key eukaryotic innovations relative to the acquisition of mitochondria remains subject to considerable debate, yet the evolutionary process itself might constrain the order of these events. Endosymbiosis entailed levels-of-selection conflicts, and mechanisms of conflict mediation had to evolve for eukaryogenesis to proceed. The initial mechanisms of conflict mediation were based on the pathways inherited from prokaryotic symbionts and led to metabolic homeostasis in the eukaryotic cell, while later mechanisms (e.g., mitochondrial gene transfer) contributed to the expansion of the eukaryotic genome. Perhaps the greatest opportunity for conflict arose with the emergence of sex involving whole-cell fusion. While early evolution of cell fusion may have affected symbiont acquisition, sex together with the competitive symbiont behaviour would have destabilised the emerging higher-level unit. Cytoplasmic mixing, on the other hand, would have been beneficial for selfish endosymbionts, capable of using their own metabolism to manipulate the life history of the host. Given the results of our mathematical modelling, we argue that sex represents a rather late proto- eukaryotic innovation, allowing for the growth of the chimeric nucleus and contributing to the successful completion of the evolutionary transition.

scholarly journals Turkisms in one of the early Russian translations of the 18th century

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-201
Author(s):  
Alexander I. Sokolov ◽  
◽  
Irina A. Malysheva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Italian Version ◽  
Italian Translation ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Compound Nouns ◽  
Turkic Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Russian Language ◽  
Made In

The article considers Turkic borrowings in the Russian language at the beginning of the 18th century. The material of the study was a translation of the 17th century treatise “The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire” written by the English diplomat Paul Ricaut and translated into a number of European languages. The Russian translation was done by P.A.Tolstoy from the Italian version in 1702–1714 and published as “The Turkish Monarchy” in 1741. The study presents the methods of phonetic (orthographic) and morphological adaptation of Turkisms by comparing a typographical manuscript for typesetting with edits (made in 1725) and the printed text. The article aims at comparing the usage of borrowings with their forms in the Italian version of the treatise and in the Polish translation since the latter, apparently, was used in the process of typographical editing of the Russian text. A number ofdistorted forms of Turkisms that appeared in the Russian “Monarchy” as a result of the mechanical transfer of typos from the Italian translation were revealed. It has been established that the translation of compound nouns identified in the Turkic languages as izafet constructions was mainly a copying of their forms from the Italian translation. Most of the Turkisms in “The Turkish Monarchy” are exoticisms, but likely relevant for the Russian reader of the 18th century. Hence, the principles of including exoticisms in the “Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 18th Century” require clarification because a number of Turkisms denoting confessional concepts in modern Russian are part of active vocabulary.

scholarly journals The order of trait emergence in the evolution of cyanobacterial multicellularity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrin Hammerschmidt ◽  
Giddy Landan ◽  
Fernando Domingues Kümmel Tria ◽  
Jaime Alcorta ◽  
Tal Dagan
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Phenotypic Trait ◽  
Evolutionary Transition ◽  
Evolutionary Transitions ◽  
Differentiated Cells ◽  
Labor Theory ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
Reproductive Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multicellular Organisms

AbstractThe transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms is one of the most significant events in the history of life. Key to this process is the emergence of Darwinian individuality at the higher level: groups must become single entities capable of reproduction for selection to shape their evolution. Evolutionary transitions in individuality are characterized by cooperation between the lower level entities and by division of labor. Theory suggests that division of labor may drive the transition to multicellularity by eliminating the trade-off between two incompatible processes that cannot be performed simultaneously in one cell. Here we examine the evolution of the most ancient multicellular transition known today, that of cyanobacteria, where we reconstruct the sequence of ecological and phenotypic trait evolution. Our results show that the prime driver of multicellularity in cyanobacteria was the expansion in metabolic capacity offered by nitrogen fixation, which was accompanied by the emergence of the filamentous morphology and succeeded by a reproductive life cycle. This was followed by the progression of multicellularity into higher complexity in the form of differentiated cells and patterned multicellularity.Significance StatementThe emergence of multicellularity is a major evolutionary transition. The oldest transition, that of cyanobacteria, happened more than 3 to 3.5 billion years ago. We find N2 fixation to be the prime driver of multicellularity in cyanobacteria. This innovation faced the challenge of incompatible metabolic processes since the N2 fixing enzyme (nitrogenase) is sensitive to oxygen, which is abundantly found in cyanobacteria cells performing photosynthesis. At the same time, N2-fixation conferred an adaptive benefit to the filamentous morphology as cells could divide their labour into performing either N2-fixation or photosynthesis. This was followed by the culmination of complex multicellularity in the form of differentiated cells and patterned multicellularity.

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