Post-predicate elements in the Western Asian Transition Zone
A corpus-based approach to areal typology
1st Edition
Published on 20. December 2024
Book
Hardback
554 pages
978-3-98554-121-8 (ISBN)
Description
This volume explores word-order phenomena across a phylogenetically diverse sample of languages covering a region loosely referred to as the Western Asian Transition Zone, approximately corresponding to western Iran, northern Iraq, eastern Turkey and the Caucasus. The sample includes representatives from four branches of Indo-European (Iranian, Hellenic, Armenian, Indo-Aryan) as well as Turkic, Semitic, Kartvelian, Northwest Caucasian and Northeast Caucasian. Methodologically, we apply a corpus-based approach to word-order, building on two purpose-built and fully accessible data-bases of spoken language corpora, WOWA (Word Order in Western Asia), and HamBam (Hamedan-Bamberg Corpus of Contemporary Spoken Persian). The majority of the languages are historically OV, yet exhibit high rates of post-verbal elements, and these constitute the primary focus of the volume. One of the major findings is the importance of semantic role in determining pre- versus post-verbal placement of clausal constituents: We identify a consistent bias towards post-verbal placement of spatial Goals, which is amplified by increasing areal proximity to the VO languages of the southwestern periphery of the region (Semitic). In the languages in and adjacent to the Caucasus, on the other hand, we find stronger effects of information structure in triggering post-verbal position. Along with contributions on individual languages and varieties, the volume includes an overview chapter outlining the theoretical background and the data sources, summary chapters on sub-regions, as well as contributions from an experimental and psycholinguistic perspective.
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Persons
Editor
Geoffrey Haig is professor of linguistics at the University of Bamberg. He specializes in language typology and areal linguistics, with a focus on quantitative methodologies drawing on multi-lingual spoken-language corpora.
Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand is professor of linguistics at Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran. His research centres on the syntax of Persian and other new Iranian languages. He has published on issues connected with word order, clitics, definiteness, transitivity, aspect and evidentiality.
Nils Schiborr is a postdoctoral research associate at the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Bamberg. He has worked on discourse processing, referential choice, and the interface of discourse and grammar, chiefly from a corpus-based typological perspective. He has co-developed a number of annotated corpora for typological research, among them the Word Order in Western Asia Corpus (WOWA), the Hamedan-Bamberg Corpus of Contemporary Spoken Persian (HamBam), and the Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts (Multi-CAST).
Laurentia Schreiber is a researcher at the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Bamberg. She focuses on language contact and multilingualism in minority languages and obtained her PhD recently with a grammar of endangered Romeyka in Turkey.
Donald L. Stilo has a B.Sc. in Languages from Georgetown University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Linguistics with a concentration in Iranian languages. He taught Persian in various universities in the United States, was a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, for ten years, and in 2005/2006 was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala. He has been retired since 2012 and splits his time between the United States and the Netherlands.