Linguistic convergence/divergence

This paper deals with grammatical aspects of code-switching between Italian and Italo-Romance dialects, and focuses on the case of negative constructions featuring a MICA-type particle (i.e. a particle deriving from the Latin MICA(M) " crumb ") in a corpus of Italian and bresciano speech data. The case at hand, which will be examined following the so-called comparative variationist method (cf. Poplack & Tagliamonte 2001 inter alia), will offer valuable insight into the conventionalization of mixing patterns and the interplay between code-switching and convergence in Italo-Romance.

En el presente trabajo se ofrece una panorámica de los procesos de convergencia lingüística que podrían ponerse en marcha en todo o parte del mundo latino debido a la globalización de las comunicaciones. Una primera parte trata de la diversidad lingüística, causada por el cambio lingüístico, y presenta las razones y mecanismos de la divergencia que causa esa diversidad. Así mismo se analiza por qué, cómo y cuándo convergen las variedades lingüísticas formando lo que se conoce como lenguas y cómo algunas lenguas se convierten en instrumentos de comunicación internacional. Tras ello se analizan los procesos de convergencia entre  lenguas y se valoran los que podrían actuar entre las actuales lenguas neolatinas.

Sri Lankan contact Malay (SLM) and Portuguese (SLP) share sprachbund-discordant features, including pre-verbal functional markers for TMA and negation. Yet their negation strategies also differ. In SLM, negation morphology is a diagnostic for the finiteness status of verbs. SLP verbs are contrastively negated, based on aspectual (not tense/finiteness) contrasts, and participles in adjunct clauses have distinctive non-finite negation. SLM marks finiteness status on matrix auxiliaries in a biclausal periphrastic construction. In the SLP construction, auxiliary and participle cannot be independently negated and the auxiliary cannot be separate from the verbal complex, arguing against biclausal status. SLM marks negative polarity in quantified nominal constituents, but has no negative concord, whereas SLP has negative concord, but relatively little negative polarity marking.

The present paper attempts at exploring, classifying and resolving various types of divergence patterns in the context of English-Urdu
Machine Translation where English and Urdu are SL and TL respectively. So far as the methodology is concerned, we have observed
the English-Urdu pair sentences and analyzed the translated output taking into consideration different areas of translational
divergences. We have taken one thousand corpus of the ILCI English sentences for this study and analyzed the translated Urdu output
in bulk taking into consideration different areas of translational divergences on web-based Machine Translation platforms namely,
Bing and Google Translate. Dorr’s (1994, 1995) theoretical framework has been adopted for the classification and resolution of the
linguistic divergences in this undertaken study. Dorr has classified the divergences into two broad categories (lexical-semantic and
syntactic divergences) and proposed Lexical Conceptual Structure-based resolution for them. This study would help identify, classify
and resolve the underlying divergence patterns between these languages so as to develop MT systems considering the divergence errors
and enhance the performance of the MT.

Following the realization that the northwestern dialect continuum of Catalan is splitting along the political border between Catalonia and Aragon, in Spain, this article upholds the view that internal borders should be incorporated into border studies, since they often trigger processes of linguistic convergence and divergence which alter the most common patterns of linguistic diffusion. The language change is analysed in apparent time using a combination of dialectometric techniques that constitute an innovation within the field of border effects, and which, in the specific case of Catalan in Aragon, illustrates the usefulness of dialectometry in detecting processes of structural hybridization in areas where the vitality of the language is most seriously undermined. Lastly, this article evinces the need to further develop a form of social dialectometry that not only answers sociolinguistic questions, but also makes it possible to objectively evaluate the social motivations fuelling the ongoing changes.

This article concerns establishing a plausible connection between the word jang(an) in colloquial Malay varieties and jang-, a form which negates infinitives, in the diasporic contact variety Sri Lankan Malay. The principal claim is that jang(an) marks irrealis modality in Southeast Asian Malay varieties, in which it is frequently (optionally) deployed in negative subjunctive-like embedded clauses. A related claim, dependent on the first of the two, is that the irrealis interpretation conveyed by jang(an) makes it a semantically plausible bridge from a Malay grammar with clausal symmetry to the grammar of Sri Lankan Malay. In Sri Lankan Malay, embedded clauses are frequently non-finite, with infinitives similarly conveying irrealis meaning. Sri Lankan Malay jang- is in complementary distribution with the affirmative infinitival prefix me-, which is also derived from a marker of irrealis modality (mau) in colloquial Southeast Asian Malay varieties.

This paper summarises the sociolinguistic context of Basque-Spanish contact, with special attention to the language policies of the 20th century, as well as the attitudes of bilingual and monolingual speakers in Spanish towards the Basque language. In this framework, two outcomes of language contact are explained from a conversational point of view. On one hand, linguistic convergence and its role in explaining the contact induced changes in the two languages; on the other hand, the code-switching in the context of a single conversation. For both phenomena, languages involved structural characteristics and sociolinguistic factors are essential to our understanding of language contact outcomes. This highlights the multidisciplinary nature of the analysis of contact linguistics.

In Albanian, as well as in Romanian, speakers use specific phrases, more or less fix, which differ from one another, depending on the social context wishes are addressed in, the person they are addressed to (including here the sex, age, his/her social status), as well as on the person addressing these wishes (including here the same parameters).
Many of these formulas in Albanian contain the verb uroj ‘to wish’ (< lat. orāre) with the meanings ‘to wish, to congratulate; to bless’. It is frequently used in writing, whereas the orally transmitted wishes are simpler. The presence of the addressee in the morpho-syntactical structure of the wish is signalized by means of the personal pronouns të/ju (‘you’), followed most of the times by a verb in the subjunctive mood. The wish may be also formulated by means of the noun urim (sing.), urime (pl.), ‘wish-wishes’, followed or not by a possessive adjective or by a proper adjective in a nominal structure: Urime! (‘Wishes!’); Urimet e mija! (‘My wishes!’). Another frequent nominal structure is that containing a noun followed by a proper adjective
(usually i, e mirë, “good” i, e mbarë “auspicious” < ‘auguri’, the latter having a large semantic field: ‘good’, ‘auspicious’, ‘flourishing’). This simpler structure is specific especially to the orally transmitted wishes, it is open and quite productive in Albanian, because, instead of the adjectives above-mentioned, other adjectives may be used too,
such as: i, e gëzuar (‘happy, joyful’), i, e shëndoshë (‘healthy’), like in the following exmples: Me krahë të lehta! (ad. litt.. ‘With light arms!’ meaning ‘Good luck with your work!’). Some nominal structures may be built by means of a noun such as shëndet (‘health’), lumturi (‘happiness’), suksese (‘success’), fat (‘good luck’), gëzim (‘joy’), followed or not by a proper noun and, in certain cases, preceded by one of the following prepositions: me (‘with’), për (‘for’), në (‘in’).
Starting from a corpus of texts gathered during the period 2011–2013, the present article aims at analyzing several wishes and curses from the Fersherot speech spoken in Korce area, Albania, highlighting the same types of constructions existing in the Albanian wishes presented above. The examples we shall give in the Fersherot speech clearly demonstrate the concordances with the Albanian language.

A morphological asymmetry is shared by certain Dravidian (and Finnic) languages. The phonological shape of a negation element is dependent on the finiteness of the verb it negates. Pragmatic factors are identified that could motivate the development of this shared asymmetry, using evidence from the grammar of a Dravidian-influenced contact language. I will show that contrastive finiteness marking (finite and non-finite morphology) can facilitate the development of pragmatically-motivated linear reordering of affirmative clauses and negated clauses in order to accommodate new information structure conventions, extending the contrast to negated verbs by expanding the functional range of a negative imperative marker. Radical contact languages resulting from collective adult second language acquisition in naturalistic social contexts are typically presumed to feature reduced functional morphology, in which only highly salient contrasts, such as temporal contrasts, are formally instantiated. If a formal finiteness contrast and other relatively marked properties ("complexity") could develop in a highly analytic contact language that did not previously have them, this suggests that such a sequence of changes is in fact as plausible among genetically-unrelated languages in a sprachbund as it is over longer periods of time in genetically-related languages. We can observe this by examining grammatical change in a language that previously lacked both a finiteness contrast and a corresponding negation asymmetry, but which developed both the contrast and the asymmetry as a result of contact with a genetically-unrelated language that has analogous properties. Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) has undergone grammatical change due to contact with Dravidian (primarily Sri Lankan Muslim Tamil). Several of these changes involve verb morphology and syntax, and are plausibly motivated by discourse-pragmatic triggers. Consideration of tense and (non-)finiteness phenomena, as well as their reflexes in SLM negation, suggests a discourse-pragmatic motivation for these changes. Two discourse processes could conspire to motivate the development of the new morphology in SLM. The first is a clausal asymmetry, in which the predicate representing the most recent event is ordinarily in focus, indicated by tense morphology and position of the clause relative to clauses referring to subsequent events. The second is the communicative need to reassign focus in certain contexts to a temporally non-primary clause, one referring to an event that did not take place first. In spite of a constraint in Dravidian languages blocking the marking of functional contrasts under negation (so that only a negation morpheme can be prefixed to the verb), negation morphology encodes an obligatory finiteness contrast, optimally supporting these information-structuring processes. The clause describing the most recent event in a sentence remains visibly finite under negation, when a temporally secondary clause is focused.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)

Cappadocian is well-known for having two types of agglutinative inflec-tions: (1) mílos ‘mill’, gen. míloz-ju, pl. míloz-ja; (2) néka, pl. néc-es, gen. néc-ez-ju. This chapter shows on the basis of a detailed investigation of the dialectal evidence how these agglutinative inflections originated in the plural of the inherited masculine nouns in -os due to a number of specifically Cappadocian innovations involving deletion of unstressed [i] and [u], differential object marking and the distinction between animate and inanimate nouns and, last but not least, pattern replication from Turkish. It is argued that the two types traditionally recognized as being agglutinative are actually analogical extensions of innovations which originated in the novel plural inflection of animate masculine nouns in -os.

This paper analyses different variants of the Votic chain rune Kuza piippu? “Where is the pipe?” in the context of Votic-Ingrian convergent processes. The main focus is made on the alternation between the lexemes “granary” and “fence”, and the structure of postpositional phrases containing these lexemes. The analysis is based on 13 variants of the rune published by several researchers, and three variants of the same rune recorded by the author in the village of Luuditsa of the Kingisepp region.
In different variants of Kuza piippu?, three lexemes alternate within the same line: ratiz ‘granary’, aitta ‘granary’, and aita ‘fence’.
The paper concludes that the first variant is the original Votic lexeme meaning ‘granary’, the second one is an Ingrian word that was not fully adopted by Votic, and the third variant emerged as a substitution of the unfamiliar Ingrian word with the phonetically closest Votic word. The Ingrian influence is observed also in the postpositional phrase with the discussed lexemes (‘under the granary ~ fence’). In the earlier versions of the rune, one finds the postposition alla ‘under’ as a separate word. In more recent variants, the head noun and postposition are usually written together as one word, with a formative n between them. This n is the Ingrian marker of the genitive case that was later re-analyzed as the initial consonant of the postposition (alla > nalla).
The research has revealed that even in the variants recorded from the same speaker, the combination of Votic and Ingrian elements is almost arbitrary. The Votic-Ingrian ratio is not as much a characteristic of the idiolect, but rather a characteristic of a particular text.
Therefore, the idiolect cannot be considered as a minimal sociolinguistic object. The author introduces the notion of “variolect” as a language variant with a particular ratio of languages in contact that characterizes a given speech sample.
The mixing of Votic and Ingrian in the western Votic villages is a vivid example of iterative convergence. The Lower Luga Ingrian that emerged as a convergent variety on the basis of several Finnic languages (Ingrian and Votic, most of all), gives birth to new contact varie ties when acquired by Votic speakers.

Статья посвящена анализу различных вариантов водской кумулятивной руны Kuza piippu? «Где трубка?» в контексте водско-ижорских конвергентных процессов. Основное внимание уделяется двум проблемам: варьированию лексем со значением ‘амбар’ и ‘забор’ и структуре послеложных конструкций с этими лексемами. Основным материалом для исследования служат 13 публиковавшихся ранее вариантов руны и три варианта, записанные автором в процессе полевой работы в д. Лужицы Кингисеппского района.
Анализируя три лексемы, появляющиеся в руне Kuza piippu?, — ratiz ‘амбар’, aitta ‘амбар’ и aita ‘забор’, — автор приходит к выводу, что первая из них — это исконно водская лексема со значением ‘амбар’, вторая пришла из ижорского языка и так и не смогла стать закрепившимся заимствованием, а третья появилась в результате замены непривычной ижорской лексемы на фонетически наиболее близкое водское слово. Ижорское влияние заметно и в послеложной конструкции с этими лексемами (‘под амбаром ~ забором’). Если в ранних вариантах руны наблюдается отдельно записываемый послелог alla ‘под’, то в более поздних между существительным и послелогом появляется форматив n, а запись конструкции чаще становится слитной. Этот форматив n является показателем генитива, пришедшим из ижорского языка и в результате переразложения ставшим начальным согласным послелога.
Сопоставление различных вариантов руны, в том числе записанных от одного и того же носителя языка, показывает, что в ней может наблюдаться произвольное сочетание водских и ижорских элементов. Их соотношение является не столько свойством идиолекта, сколько свойством конкретного текста, что не позволяет считать идиолект минимальным социолингвистическим объектом и требует введения нового понятия для обозначения варианта языка, характеризующего конкретный текст с точки зрения соотношения в нем контактирующих языков. Для такого понятия предлагается термин «вариолект». Смешение водского и ижорского языков в западноводских деревнях является ярким примером итерационной конвергенции: нижнелужский ижорский, возникший как конвергентный идиом в результате смешения нескольких языков (прежде всего, ижорского и водского), образует новые контактные варианты, проникая в речь носителей водского языка.

The paper presents the goal, tasks and results of research supported by RSCF grant 14-18-01405. Linguistic change in selected bilingual societies in the Balkans is investigated against the background of the outcomes of the pan-Balkan convergence. The contact situations in the zones of bilingualism, linguistic evolution and contact-induced change on all structural levels give support to the theory, according to which the Balkan Sprachbund is a result of a language shift after a long period of mass bilingualism.