The atlas of the Balkan linguistic area program

African languages have played an important role in the development of linguistic theory but their role in the fields of historical linguistics and linguistic typology has been less prominent. Africa’s linguistic diversity has been long underestimated given the dominance of the four-family model proposed by Joseph Greenberg. Criticism of this model has long held among specialists in some of Africa’s smaller and lesser-known language families, but has only recently become more widely acknowledged among linguists. Archaeologists, geneticists, and others continue to model African prehistory based on African linguistic classifications, which are outdated and which have failed to withstand scrutiny. This teaching and learning guide suggests a program to train scholars in recognizing and evaluating the standards by which various African language classifications have been made. Africa’s linguistic diversity will be shown to be far greater than what is suggested by the four-family model.

“Linguistic areas” are defined as social spaces (regions, countries, (sub-)continents) in which languages from different families have influenced each other significantly, leading to striking or remarkable structural resemblances across genealogical boundaries. Since the early work of Trubetskoj and his contemporaries, work on other parts of the world, for example the Indian subcontinent, has unveiled a number of other regions where contact between languages has led to convergence, and thus the general field of areal linguistics has developed. This article surveys the different proposals for linguistic areas roughly continent by continent, and then lists a number of general overviews and contributions in textbooks and handbooks. As the notion of “linguistic area” was further developed, a number of definitional and theoretical issues came up. During most of the past century, linguistic areas were thought of as something special, out of the ordinary. In addition, the view arose that there were regions which qualified as linguistic areas and others which did not. At the beginning of the 1990s awareness grew that many linguistic patterns and features, both typological and historical, could and should be studied in an areal perspective. This areal turn led to a reconceptualization of many of the issues involved in areal linguistic studies, many of them involving problems of scale and operationalization. Even though the notion of “linguistic area” has been much criticized in the strict sense, the areal perspective keeps gaining ground in the study of the distribution of linguistic features. A final section of this survey will be devoted to psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic mechanisms and scenarios leading to linguistic areas. While earlier approaches had been mostly structural and historical, recent work in areal linguistics tries to bridge the gap with meso-level language contact studies: how do languages actually converge and what are the mechanisms promoting or blocking this type of convergence? Languages do not converge by themselves; rather, it is the agency or unconscious behavior of speakers that has this effect.

MESO-AMERICA AS A LINGUISTIC AREA Lyle Campbell Terrence Kaufman Thomas C. Smith-Stark SUNY AlbanyUniversity ofColegio de México Pittsburgh That Meso-America constitutes a legitimate linguistic area has been questioned. To address this question, concepts of 'areal linguistics' are here surveyed and refined. Proposed Meso-American areal traits are reconsidered against these findings, and are compared with those of other established linguistic areas. Meso-America proves to be a particularly strong linguistic area. These results contribute both to the study of MesoAmerican languages and to an understanding of areal linguistics generally.* In recent years it has been proposed that Meso-America (henceforth MA)— defined basically as a culture area extending from central Mexico through northern Central America—is a linguistic area. The first attempts at characterizing the area were made by Hasler 1959, Kaufman 1973, 1974a,b, Campbell 1971, 1977, 1978a, 1979, and Campbell & Kaufman 1980, 1983 (see also Bright 1984, Rosenthal 1981); nevertheless, doubts have been expressed (cf. Hamp 1979, Holt & Bright 1976, Suárez 1983a). Some have thought that MA is not a single, well-defined area in the sense of others recognized in the literature, such as the Balkans or South Asia, but rather may be composed of several smaller, regionally defined areas (cf. Hamp 1979). For that reason, our primary purpose here is to investigate MA in detail from an areal viewpoint. However, to determine MA's status requires us first to clarify the nature and definition of linguistic areas in general. We will do this in §§1-3, and then return to the characteristics of MA in §4. 1. Definition of Areal Linguistics. As broadly conceived, AL deals with the results of the diffusion of structural features across linguistic boundaries. As commonly viewed, linguistic areas are characterized by a number of linguistic features shared by various languages—some of which are unrelated, or are from different subgroups within a family—in a geographically contiguous area. The phenomena of the linguistic area are also referred to at times by the terms 'convergence area', 'Sprachbund', 'affinité linguistique', 'diffusion area', 'adstratum' etc.1 However, when it comes to more precise definitions, there is considerable controversy concerning just what AL is. * We wish to thank William Bright and Sarah G. Thomason for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper; but we do not mean to imply that they are necessarily in agreement with our use of their statements. We also acknowledge the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for providing Lyle Campbell the opportunity to engage in full-time research in 1981-82, during which time he did the research for this paper and wrote up a preliminary version. Terrence Kaufman and Thomas Smith-Stark have evaluated the original manuscript and made various additions to it. Thus the list of authors reflects not only alphabetical order, but relative input to the final product. We three authors are in essential agreement concerning the arguments and conclusions. 1 Areal phenomena are, to a greater or lesser degree, related to such other areas of study as multilingualism, substrata, superstrata, linguistic geography, borrowing, and language shift or main530 MESO-AMERICA AS A LINGUISTIC AREA531 Many attribute the formal birth of AL to Trubetzkoy's famous proposition 16, presented at the First International Congress of Linguistics (1928:17—18):2 'Gruppen, bestehend aus Sprachen, die eine grosse Ähnlichkeit in syntaktischer Hinsicht, eine Ähnlichkeit in den Grundsätzen des morphologischen Baus aufweisen, und eine grosse Anzahl gemeinsamer Kulturwörter bieten, manchmal auch ausser Ähnlichkeit im Bestände der Lautsysteme —dabei aber keine gemeinsamen Elementarwörter besitzen—solche Sprachgruppen nennen wir Sprachbunde.' (emphasis in original) Trubetzkoy's term Sprachbund, roughly a 'union of languages', came to be used as a technical term in English. The name 'linguistic area' (LA), as a translation of Sprachbund, was first employed by Veiten 1943, and was made well known by Emeneau 1956. Trubetzkoy (1931:233-4) compared AL to traditional dialect geography, but with 'isoglosses' which extend beyond the boundaries of a single language. This view of LA's as akin to the features characterizing cross-language linguistic geography is common in later literature (cf. Jakobson 1931, 1938). tenance; in this...

From the perspective of areal linguistics, Modern Greek, along with several other languages, is specific in that its involvement in three linguistic areas is being considered: the Balkan, European and Mediterranean. However, these three research areas differ in the length of the research tradition, the degree of both the theoretical elaboration and the descriptive and interpretative work carried out, and consequently in the power of their statements. This paper aims to briefly summarize and critically assess the history of research on Greek from these three perspectives, including the mutual intersections between the three linguistic areas (sections 1 and 2). Placing these research areas side by side and comparing them allows us to better understand the methodological problems faced by areal linguistics. Some of these (the synchronic vs diachronic view, the number of features constituting a linguistic area and their different explanatory value, centre vs periphery approach) are pointed out in section 3 in the discussion of the new way of modelling and visualizing linguistic areas (maps of isoglosses and isopleths) that emerged at the turn of the 20th century. After discussing these questions, together with an examination of the place that Greek occupies in the mentioned linguistic areas, we conclude in section 4 by suggesting the method of research that we consider to be the most promising at present in areal linguistics. This is the classification of features in linguistic areas based on three dimensions: 1) the diachronic dimension, 2) the synchronic dimension (tracking the synchronic dynamics of the phenomenon under investigation), 3) the stratification dimension (not only standard but also nonstandard/colloquial/territorial varieties should be investigated). We consider Seiler's (2019) model to be the best approach in this regard so far since it comes up with a classification of Standard Average European (SAE) features in a particular language into certain types based on the three dimensions mentioned above. Our ambition is to show the necessity of such a more fi ne-grained analysis also for Greek in Standard Average European.

Ethiopia as a Linguistic Area

Areal linguistics explores the distribution of linguistic traits across geographic space and across language boundaries, with the goal of understanding the dynamics of processes such as language contact, language spread, and language replacement. In Americanist linguistics, the languages of California have been of special interest for arealist scholarship. This chapter reviews the history of areal linguistics in California and discusses some significant recent contributions that explore psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors in “trait sprawl” and attend to functional/pragmatic traits as well as formal ones. Several case studies that illustrate different historical processes underlying trait distributions in California are original to this chapter. Theoretical advances in areal linguistics are reviewed, with special attention to challenges to the concept of a “linguistic area”, and to the need for historicist explanations of trait distributions.

I read with great interest the article recently published on “Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience,” written by Haspelmath and concerning the Open Access (OA) with a particular emphasis from the field of theoretical linguistics (Haspelmath, 2013). However, there are some points in which I disagree with him and I would like to discuss these points as well as I would like to put forth further arguments, adding also an Italian perspective to the topic. First, the author claims that OA has been marginally noticed in the field of theoretical linguistics, at least in his university context. Moreover, he describes the reactions of “disbelief and indignation” of his colleagues when they hear that they should pay a fee for having their manuscripts published. However, I maintain that this picture for OA journals (OAJs) devoted to linguistics is not exactly true: if we search for linguistics-related OAJs on the Directory of OAJs (DOAJ) database, the largest database collecting OAJs, we discover that only 11 journals have a publishing fee (out of 213, that is to say approximately the 5.2%), while for 4 of them there are no available information (about the 1.9%). OA seems to be a vivid and expanding reality, and in the field of linguistics it is highly supported by initiatives such as the OA Initiative in Linguistics (OALI), coordinated by the German linguist Stephen Muller (Muller, 2012) and by the same Haspelmath. Also in Italy, as in Germany, toll-based or subscription-based publishing has revealed its inefficiency: costs that have inflated and increased out of proportion (Giunta, 2010). This kind of publishing is no longer sustainable and affordable. OA seems more cost-effective. Another point I would like to put forward is that OA could provide an exceptional opportunity and a platform for preserving languages diversity. Article Processing Charges (APCs) for OAJs are (completely or partially) waived for researchers coming from underdeveloped or developing countries, even if as we have already seen that are no publishing fees for the majority of linguistics-related OAJs. OA is growing especially in underdeveloped countries and developing nations (Bayry, 2013), since for them it represents a great opportunity to make their voices heard. The service offered to scholars in these countries is undoubtedly of value: they can freely access scientific content and distribute and communicate with other scholars. Researchers from emerging countries could exploit the benefits of OA for sharing information about languages at risk of extinction in a cost-effective way, uploading also audio-resources and creating a great digital archive. UNESCO has already recognized the importance of the Internet and of other new media to fill the linguistic divide, to preserve multiculturalism and to foster “pluralistic, equitable, open and inclusive knowledge societies” (UNESCO). In conclusion, the importance of OA in the era of a severe financial and economic crisis is acknowledged. The current crisis is imposing cuts of funding, recruitment/hiring and turnover freezes, and some countries such as Greece have lost access to prestigious journals (Trachana, 2013). OA can overcome the hurdles and the barriers to the spread and the dissemination of the knowledge. OA could provide an excellent platform for delivering and sharing scholarly data and results, contributing at the same time to make the cyberspace a more multilingual reality.

Africa as a Linguistic Area

A study of the effectiveness of machine learning methods for classification of clinical interview fragments into a large number of categories

The Goal Of This Chapter Is To survey the linguistic areas of the Americas, to the extent that they have been identified. Areal linguistics is very important to the study of Native American languages, for the primary goal of historical linguistic investigations should be to find out what really happened-to determine the real history, be it genetic or contact, that explains traits shared by different languages (Bright 1976). Areal linguistics is concerned with the diffusion of structural features across language boundaries: “The term ‘linguistic area’ generally refers to a geographical area in which, due to borrowing, languages of different genetic origins have come to share certain borrowed features-not only vocabulary but also elements of phonological, grammatical, or syntactic structure” (Bright and Sherzer 1978:228). Linguistic areas are also referred to at times by the terms “convergence area,” “diffusion area”, “Sprachbund”, and “adstratum.”

Ethnolects can be defined as language varieties determined by ethnicity. The ethnolect is especially attributed to the descendants of immigrants. This variety emerges from a language shift situation and takes over the symbolic function from the original language as a marker of ethnicity. The features of ethnolects can be explained by processes involving second language acquisition and bilingualism, namely interlanguage and transfer from the original language. The Moroccan ethnolect in Nijmegen is distinguished primarily by phonological and morphosyntactical features and less by the lexicon. Most of the phonological features can be explained as transfer from Moroccan Arabic and Tarifit Berber. The morphosyntactic and lexical features are due to acquisition processes. There is also an influence from the Nijmegen city dialect on the ethnolect, mainly in pronunciation.

Question classification is very important for question answering. This paper present our research work on question classification through machine learning approach. In order to train th e learning model, we designed a rich set of features that are predictive of question categories. An important component of question answering systems is question classification. The task of question classification is to predict the entity type of the answer of a natural language question. Question classification is typically done using machine learning techniques. Different lexical, syntactical and semantic features can be extracted from a question. In this work we combined lexical, syntactic and semantic f eatures which improve the accuracy of classification. Furthermore, we adopted three different classifiers: Nearest Neighbors (NN), Naive Bayes (NB), and Support Vector Machines (SVM) using two kinds of features: bag -of-words and bag-of n grams. Furthermore, we discovered that when we take SVM classifier and combine the semantic, syntactic, lexical feature we found that it will improve the accuracy of classification. We tested our proposed approaches on the well-known UIUC dataset and succeeded to achieve anew record on the accuracy of classification on this dataset.

Revisiting the Balkan and Meso-American linguistic areas

The article describes distinctive features of a film review as a speech genre which is now one of the most popular genres of the mass media net discourse. The article proves its intertextual character and analyses its lexical and semantic features. Film reviews taken from the following sources: sites of cinema goers: www.imdb.com, www.empireonline.com, www.pluggedin.com ; official sites of film critics (e.g. R. Ebert) https://www.rogerebert.com; official sites of the newspapers: The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/reviews/movies, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/film+tone/reviews and other sites: https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=movie-review, https://www.pluggedin.com/movie-reviews/. The material for analysis comprises about 100 film reviews released in 2020. The reviews are in open access in the Internet. The volume of the analysed material is about 200 pages. The method used to achieve the main objective is interpretation analysis of film reviews. As a result of the theoretical material analysis main directions in the genre research were specified; key distinctive features of a film review were studied. The actuality of the research is determined by the rising interest to net mass media discourse genres. The main objective is to elicit and describe lexical and semantic features of film reviews as a speech genre. The conducted research made it possible to prove the interdiscoursive and poly-discoursive nature of the genre in question and to systematize its lexical and semantic features. The analysis disclosed that intertextuality of a film review is actualized in the interaction of three types of discourse: that of the critic, that of the film and that of other people. Poly-discoursive nature of a film review is expressed through the combination of publicistic, literary and scientific styles features. Another important characteristic is evaluativity represented in emotionally coloured vocabulary. Among other lexical and semantic features are the following: usage of non-specific terms, cliches, rhetorical questions with precedent names, intertextual inserting, various stylistic devices, among which epithets and metaphors are most often used. It’s been observed that a film review is filled with bookish vocabulary as well as stylistically low words and expressions.

From linguistic areas to areal linguistics explores language description and typology in terms of areal background, presenting case studies in areal linguistics. Some concern well-established linguistic areas such as the Balkan, other regions such as East Nusantara (Indonesia) and the Guapore-Mamore (Amazon) regions have never before been studied in an areal perspective, and yet other areas are involved in current debates. The insight has gained ground that languages owe many of their characteristics to the languages they are in contact with over time. Yet the nature of these areal influences remains a matter of debate. Furthermore, areas are often hard to define. Hence the title: a shift from linguistic areas as concrete and circumscribed objects to a new way of doing linguistics: areally. New findings include the observation that there may be many more language areas than previously recognized. The book is primarily directed at linguists working in descriptive, comparative, historical and typological linguistics. Since it covers linguistic areas from four continents, it will have a wide appeal.