Distributional semantics insights on agentive suffix rivalry in French

The formation of French agent nouns (ANs) involves a large variety of morphological constructions, and particularly of suffixes. In this study, we focus on the semantic counterpart of agentive suffix diversity and investigate whether the morphological variety of ANs correlates with different agentive subtypes. We adopt a distributional semantics approach and combine manual, computational and statistical analyses applied to French ANs ending in -aire, -ant, -eur, -ien, -ier and -iste. Our methodology allows for a large-scale study of ANs and involves both top-down and bottom-up procedures. We first characterize agentive suffixes with respect to their morphosemantic and distributional properties, outlining their specificities and similarities. Then we automatically cluster ANs into distributionally relevant subsets and examine their properties. Based on quantitative analysis, our study provides a new perspective on agentive suffix rivalry in French that both confirms existing claims and sheds light on previously unseen phenomena.

Borrowing non-canonical inverse between Kabardian and Abaza

Abaza, a polysynthetic ergative Northwest Caucasian language, shares with its neighbour and distant relative Kabardian a typologically peculiar use of the deictic directional prefixes monitoring the relative ranking of the subject and indirect object on the person hierarchy. In both languages, the cislocative (‘hither’) prefixes are used if the indirect object outranks the subject on the person hierarchy, and the translocative (‘thither’) prefixes are used in combinations of first person subjects with second person singular indirect objects. This pattern, reminiscent of the more familiar inverse marking and hence called ‘quasi-inverse’, is observed with ditransitive and bivalent intransitive verbs and is almost fully redundant, since all participants are unequivocally indexed on verbs by pronominal prefixes. I argue that this isogloss, shared by West Circassian (a close relative to Kabardian) but not with Abkhaz, the sister-language of Abaza, is a result of pattern replication under intense language contact, which has led to an increase of both paradigmatic and syntagmatic complexity of Abaza verbal morphology.

A plural indefinite quantifier on the Romance-Slavic border

This study investigates the plural form uni/une deriving from the numeral ‘one’ in the Istriot dialect of Sissano. Sissano is located in the Istrian peninsula, an area characterized by high intensity of linguistic contact. We argue that the rise of such a peculiar form is indeed induced by contact with Croatian and that uni/une is unique in the Italo-Romance domain since, generally, the plural indefinite forms derived from the Latin numeral ‘one’ are pronouns and never occur in attributive position. The use of uni/ une is not attested in the few grammars of Istriot varieties because it is recent and still undergoing a process of grammaticalization. Therefore, we conducted interviews to verify how and to what extent contact with Croatian affects the meaning and the use of uni/une in Sissano. We found that this form is mostly used as a quantifier, bearing mainly the meaning ‘a pair of’, ‘one group of’, in the context of pluralia tantum and plural dominant nouns. We further observe that this quantifier has achieved a more advanced stage of grammaticalization in the younger generation of speakers than in the older ones. We discuss the role played by pluralia tantum as well as by the growing prestige of Croatian in triggering this borrowing and in fostering the grammaticalization process of uni/une on its way to become a marker of indefiniteness.

Language contact and morphological competition: Plurals in central Sicily

This paper explores the effects of language contact in the nominal morphology of central Sicilian dialects. In particular, this study is concerned with the contact-induced changes related to the distribution of three plural formatives that give rise to competition between different inflectional classes with respect to a number of lexemes. It is shown that sociolinguistic factors such as speaker age account for the distribution of the competing plural forms and the high degree of variation. As a consequence, a slow and gradual change is leading to the disappearance of the plural form that has no equivalent in the contact language, that is, in Italian.

On how morphology spreads

A language’s grammar can be stratified, due to borrowing processes. While being a well-established term in the linguistic literature, the term ‘borrowing’ is sometimes used in a non-uniform way, particularly when it applies to bound morphological formatives. A Stratal Effect is hypothesized, which, applying to varying extent, gives rise to at least three distinct, psycholinguistically motivated types of morphological transfer. A typology of morphological spread is proposed, which consists of three main types: strictly compartmentalized co-morphologies, partially compartmentalized co-morphologies, and morphological borrowing. The widespread view that affix borrowing can be either direct or indirect is questioned and it is argued that most likely, morphological borrowing is always an intermediate process, involving the extraction of formatives and their diffusion within the lexicon.

Pattern borrowing and hybridization in Mubi (East Chadic): The importance of congruence

The plural system of Mubi (East Chadic, Afroasiatic) stands out cross-linguistically within Chadic and worldwide for its extensive use of pattern morphology, fixing the output's vowel qualities and shape while preserving the input's consonants. This paper demonstrates that, while some elements of this system may be conserved from earlier stages of Afroasiatic, others reflect the influence of Chadian Arabic, the regional lingua franca. The process of influence, however, turns out to involve not just straightforward pattern morpheme borrowing (exemplified here by the iambic pattern BaCaaDiFe), but also the reshaping of inherited patterns. The most frequent quadriliteral plural pattern, BuCooDuF, reflects Arabic influence in its shape – mediated by a change in mapping directionality – but Chadic inheritance in its distribution. This result supports the hypothesis that pattern morphology is more easily transferred between related languages.

Language contact and typological change: The case of Estonian revisited

The traditional hypothesis of a typological cycle from agglutination via fusion to isolation and back to agglutination, still invoked by many linguists (albeit with caveats and limitations), would imply a natural drift behind typological changes. Accordingly, such typological changes would typically result from internal developments (such as reductive sound changes), while etymological counter-currents (such as segmentable suffixes replacing earlier stem alternations) could rather be due to language contact. On the other hand, the agglutinative type seems to be stable and resistant to typological change especially in Northern Eurasia, and for the change towards a more fusional type, characteristic of some Finnic and Saami languages in the northwestern periphery of Uralic, a contact explanation might seem plausible. However, a closer scrutiny of Estonian, often mentioned as an example of typological change and characteristically impacted by Germanic, shows that in typological change, internal and external motivations intertwine and interact.