Areal Linguistics Research Articles

Linguopsychological Analysis of the Characters of Guy De Maupassant on the Example of Short Story “Pierrot”

The article considers the distinctive features and specificity of the style of French novelist master Guy de Maupassant. By conducting a deep analysis of the novel “Pierrot”, the writers had set a goal to demonstrate how psychological realism and subjective attitude to the surrounding world are reflected in the author’s work. The writer manages to emphasize the strengths and weaknesses of the natures of his characters via lexical means. In the novel “Pierrot” Maupassant emphasizes the description of the psychological profiles of the characters. The relevance of the topic of the article is attached by the fact that at the present time there is a lack of research in the field of linguopsychological analysis of the works of French literature of the XIX century. In philology, one of the significant problems is the issue of understanding and interpreting texts. The research was conducted as part of areal linguistics — the sphere of the dynamically developing scientific direction. The main method used for the selection of practical material was the linguistic method of continuous sampling. Apart from that, the conceptual analysis of lexicographic sources was used. The way of reconstruction of the human lexicon, the analysis of lexical and grammatical structures, which the writer uses when describing the images and actions of characters, allow the authors to open the lexical and semantic connections existing in the consciousness of the person. The forms and methods of linguopsychological analysis of the work of art considered in the article allow to better understand the meaning of the author's text. They also contribute to the transfer of the author's vision of reality, the reconstruction of the images of his characters and the atmosphere in which the actions unfold. The objectives of the study are to establish some basic concepts for French culture and to analyze linguistic and stylistic language tools.

ДИАЛЕКТНАЯ ЛЕКСИКА СОВРЕМЕННЫХ ГОВОРОВ КАК ПОКАЗАТЕЛЬ СЛОЖНОСТИ ИХ ВНУТРЕННЕЙ ОРГАНИЗАЦИИ

The monographic study Vocabulary of Samara Dialects by T. E. Bazhenova provides a full description of the region’s lexical system. Our article is a review of this book. The history of Samara dialects and the complexity of their formation, the unusual history of the settlement of the region cause objective difficulties in determining the typology of these dialects. When addressing the issues of areal-typological characteristics of Samara dialects, the author of the monograph points to a number of features of the lexical system prevailing in the region. Systematically analyzing the vocabulary of Samara dialects, T. E. Bazhenova identifies numerous thematic groups. Her identification is based on the principles and traditions that have deve­loped in Russian linguistics, in particular in Russian dialectology and areal linguistics, updated in such major scientific projects as Lexical Atlas of Russian Folk Dialects . In addition, the author takes into account the thematic groups that traditionally developed in the dialects of the region and reflect its specificity. Such a multidimensional approach allows a linguist to look at the vocabulary of one territorial entity as an integral continuum. Moreover, Bazhenova uses the principle of consistency not only in the identification of thematic groups but also when considering individual lexical units, their semantics and the relations in which these lexical units are with other elements of the system under study. The author comes to a conclusion that the lexical system can be an indicator of the аreаl-typological characteristics of a group of dialects. The vocabulary of Samara dialects clearly demonstrates the complexity of interlacing dialect traits, genetically marked as opposite and diverse. The monograph is an open study having good prospects for obtaining new results.

Areal linguistics and etymology

1. This article reconstructs six pairs of PSl equivalents for ‘alder' preserved in Slavic dialects in an appellative and/or onomastic function, whose elements can be distinguished from one another by grammatical gender (feminine or masculine) and declension type: *olьxa - *olьxъ, *olьša - *olьšь, *olьs'a - *olьs'ъ, *elьxa - *elьxъ, *elьša - *elьšъ, and *elьs'a - *elьs'ъ. The masculine forms are known only in East and South Slavic dialects. 2. The elements of the pair with the oldest phonetic form, which show the word-formational relationship of an ā-stem for the feminine form (*alisā) versus an o-stem for the masculine form (*aliso-s), can be dated at least to early PSl; other phonetic pairs developed later because they contain younger phonetic forms. 3. The base pair (*alisā ‘alder' - *aliso- ‘alder?') shows the same word-formational and morphological relationship as certain other expressions for trees derived from stems denoting colors (e. g., PSl *berzā - *berzo- ‘birch', *berstā - *bersto- ‘elm'). 4. The masculine and feminine elements of all pairs are phonetically equal, refl ecting the same principles of Slavic phonetic development (except for the oldest phonetic change at word onset manifested in Slavic *o- : *(j)e-, which cannot be unambiguously explained): cf. the pan-Slavic development of PIE *s > PSl. *x (*oalisā > *oalixā or *ealisā > *elixā), the pan-Slavic development of PIE *i > PSl. *ь (*oalixā > *olьxa, *ealisā > *elьxa), and the development of PSl *x > s' after progressive palatalization (*oalixā > *olьs'a, *ealisā > *elьs'a) in East and South Slavic dialects. In contrast, the -š- in the West Slavic forms *olьša, *jelьša is explained as a structural element rather than the West Slavic refl ex of the progressive palatalization of PSl. *x > *š' (*oalixā > *olьš'a, *ealisā > *elьš'a), as would be expected. The reason for this should be sought in the South Slavic phonetic forms of the type *olьša and *elьša, in which the appearance of -š- could imply morphological generalizations from various derivatives. 5. The PSl presence of phonetic variants with a sibilant *s' < PSl *x (i. e., *elьs'a and *elьs'ь) in South Slavic is indicated by rare lexical vestiges from the periphery of the vast linguistic area extending from eastern Prekmurje and Prlekija in Slovenia to Kajkavian territory (i. e., the area around Varaždin, Kotoriba, Gola to the east of Koprivnica, the area around Zagreb, and the southern edges of Slavonia in Croatia) as well as the Čakavian area (i. e., Brinje in the Lika region, and Jelsa on the island of Hvar in Croatia). 6. The phonetically innovative South Slavic forms *elьs'a, *elьs'ь alongside archaic *elьxa, *elьxъ can be compared to the phonetically innovative East Slavic forms *olьs'a, *olьs'ь alongside archaic *olьxa, *olьxъ, and the *s' can be defi ned as an East or/and South Slavic refl ex of *x after progressive palatalization, which extends well into the PSl period and, alongside PSl *vьxъ (East and South Slavic *vьs'ь and West Slavic *vьš'ь), is another lexeme with progressive palatalization of *x in the stem.

Порівняльне мовознавство: цілі, завдання, перспективи розвитку

This is a survey of comparative linguistics viewed as a set of the related paradigms that embrace comparative historical linguistics, aerial linguistics, linguistic typology and contrastive linguistics. The treatment of the science in question is largely based on the author’s long-standing experience deduced from research projects and from teaching it as a University professor. Placing the aforementioned paradigms under the umbrella concept “comparative linguistics” seems relevant and appropriate due to their sharing the key tool of investigation, i.e., COMPARISON, also due to their providing each other with applicable procedures and principles, as in case of two seemingly closer pairs, comparative historical and aerial areal linguistics, on the one hand, linguistic typology and contrastive linguistics, on the other hand.

A gradient perspective on modeling interdialectal transitions

Finding the boundaries of linguistic variants and studying transitions between variants are key interests in classical linguistic geography. However, the definition of boundaries in areal linguistics is vague, and a quantitative characterization of transitions at the interface between dialectal variants is missing. We conceptualize these transitions as gradients, aiming to quantitatively account for the transition patterns which are traditionally only implicitly inferred from visualizations. Fitting of logistic functions in different spatial scopes (profiles as well as surfaces) is proposed as an approach to model the transition at the interface between the dominant usage areas of dialectal variants. Logistic functions can accommodate the breadth of boundary concepts, ranging from sharp isoglosses to transitions with different gradualities. The parameters of the fitted logistic models as well as supplementary measures then allow for the quantitative characterization and comparison of transitions across variables. To demonstrate the proposed methodology, we use Swiss German syntactic data on dialectal variables with a single transition zone.

The Database of Eurasian Phonological Inventories: a research tool for distributional phonological typology

Abstract The paper presents an overview of The Database of Eurasian Phonological Inventories—a new information resource and analytical tool for research in the field of distributional phonological typology, theoretical phonology, and areal linguistics.

The Role of Paradigmatic Morphology in Historical, Areal and Genealogical Linguistics

Paradigmatic morphology is a central and crucial concept for several branches of comparative linguistics. The observation of shared paradigms in languages which were not suspected of having a common ancestry stands at the cradle of modern genealogical linguistics and dominates the discussion(s) about not firmly established or merely putative language families or phyla to this day, the very different morphological techniques different languages use for the formation of paradigms mark the beginning of language typology, now a major pillar of the language sciences, and the question, to which degree languages—closely, distantly, or not at all related with each other—may borrow morphological paradigms (part or whole) from each other or might have done so in the past (which, if true and not properly detected, might lead to superficially persuasive, but factually erroneous, claims and hypotheses of genealogical relatedness) continues to be an important theoretical and practical issue in comparative linguistics. The contributions to this volume address, i. a., all of these questions and areas and offer much food for thought about historical morphology, areal linguistics and, above all, language classification—going far beyond the “Altaic hypothesis” , which figures prominently in some of them.

Махмуд Кашгари - основоположник ареальной лингвистики

Mahmud Kashgaria’s work - “The dictionary of Turkic languages” (“Divan lugat at-tyurk”) is the complex work of comparative-historical linguistics, a lexicography, anthropological linguistics, areal linguistics, a linguistic culture, dialectology. In article the historical questions are considered and its communication with “The map of the Turkic world of the XI century”, the content of “Divanu lugat at-tyurk” in its close coorelation with the “Map” is discovered which is the annex to dictionary reveals. The author of article notes that Mahmud Kashgaria has revealed interrelation of dialectic features of Turkic tribes with their geographical habitat and also language similarity of Turkic tribes. In the conclusion are told that in the history of world linguistics “Divanu lugat at-tyurk” is the first work on areal linguistics.

Neutral gender assignment with female given names and other referential options im riograndese hunsrik

This paper focuses on the grammatical category gender. Subject of the discussion is the usage of neutral gender in reference to women (hereinafter referred to as „femineuters“) in a West Middle German-based „abroad variety“ of the German language, the so-called „(Riograndese) Hunsrik“, which is spoken to the present in the southern part of Brazil resp. in neighboring regions. Three genus carrying structures were considered: the definite article before given names, the personal pronoun and the possessive pronoun. The theoretic-empirical examination is grounded on questions affected from different fields of study: variationist linguistics, (socio)pragmatics, semantics, and contact linguistics, areal linguistics, as well as system linguistics. The results are based on a wide set of dialect data, recently collected in an indirect inquiry through a questionnaire (using assessment tasks backed by pictures and context histories). It is assumed, that not only (language) geographic-areal factors (such as areal-administrative demarcation, city-country-distinction, and continuous language contact constellation (dialectal) German: (Brasilian) Portuguese) have an influence on the choice of genus when referring to a female person, using the grammar structures mentioned above. Also, the sociopragmatic aspects (such as age, familiarity, function/status in public, or place of origin/residence) seem to play an important role.

Converbal endings *-mi and *-rAki- in Tungusic from the perspective of areal linguistics

Converbal endings *-mi and *-rAki- in Tungusic from the perspective of areal linguistics

SIVUKH VERNACULAR WITHIN THE SETUP OF DIALECTS OF THE AVAR-ANDI-TSEZ GROUP OF DAGESTAN LANGUAGES

The paper considered one of the urgent challenges of areal linguistics arisen on a contemporary scene of levelling languages, and cultures undergoing globalization, – i.e. studying the Sivukh vernacular of the Karatin language, and drawing its isoglosses on the map of dialects for Dagestan languages. The study specified a position the Sivukh vernacular has taken in the set of Avar – Andi – Tsez group of Dagestan languages, and provided the data from history and ethnography specifying the factors capable of contributing to its development and alteration. The author referred to phonetic and morphological features and other language-related features of various Dagestani languages and dialects, when comparing them with the Sivukh vernacular and specifying details on their similarity or discrepancy. Taking for instance the Karatin and Tukitin, and Andy and Sivukh languages and dialects, the study has shown that numerous dialects and vernaculars within the language affinity group of Andy and Tsez sub-groups undergo isolation and differentiation owing to disintegration of language units that once being relatively homogenous. The study has noted that the Sivukh vernacular is mostly similar to the Karatin language and significantly distanced from other dialects.

How can computer technologies help linguistic typology?

The intensive development of computer linguistics in recent years shows that linguistic theories can be quite useful in solving various computer technology-associated problems. In particular, we mean information search and scanned text, or spam recognition. In turn, such technologies can be useful to solve purely linguistic tasks. This article exemplifies this statement by the Jazyki mira (Languages of the World) computer database, based on a series of monographs of the same name, prepared by the Department of Typology and Areal Linguistics of the RAS Institute of Linguistics under the general editorship of A.A. Kibrik.

Intensifiers and reflexives in SAE, Insular Celtic and English

Abstract Intensifiers and reflexives have been studied as features both in areal linguistics and in the context of substratum hypotheses. While typical SAE languages differentiate between intensifiers and reflexives, English, Welsh and Irish use complex intensifiers for both functions. This article discusses the two strategies with regard to their diachronic developments, starting with PIE. Complex intensifiers are first recorded in Old British and emerge only later in English and Irish. These complex intensifiers are then increasingly used as reflexives, constituting an instance of areal divergence from SAE between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Breton, on the other hand, maintains its intensifier - reflexive differentiation due to areal convergence.

Geography and Spatial Analysis in Historical Linguistics

AbstractSpatial patterns associated with language contact, language spread, and isolation have been included, albeit peripherally, in traditional theories of historical linguistics. The development of mapping and spatial analysis tools, combined with innovations in quantitative approaches to diachronic linguistics, has introduced a new era in linguistic geography. Geographic research in historical linguistics, however, is largely carried out in the separate traditions of various linguistic subfields. Many commonalities exist between the questions asked and the methods applied in each of these subfields, and increased interaction across dialectometry, phylogenetics, and areal linguistics has the potential to reinvigorate linguistic geography and accelerate progress on questions about geography and the spatial outcomes of language change and language expansion.

Geographical Typology and Linguistic Areas, with Special Reference to Africa ed. by Osamu Hieda, Christa König, Hirosi Nakagawa (review)

Reviewed by: Geographical Typology and Linguistic Areas, with Special Reference to Africa ed. by Osamu Hieda, Christa König, Hirosi Nakagawa Jeffrey Heath Geographical Typology and Linguistic Areas, with Special Reference to Africa. Edited by Osamu Hieda , Christa König , and Hirosi Nakagawa . Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Studies in Linguistics 2 . Amsterdam : John Benjamins , 2011 . Pp. vi + 320 . $143.00 (hardcover). This is a collaboration between a Japanese university and a collection of western linguists, brought together for a 2009 conference in Tokyo. It has the feel of an actual conference, complete with a blessing from the university president and a presentation of the university’s Center for Corpus-Based Linguistics. The chapters are broadly united by a language-contact focus, ranging from specific language pairs to broad areal linguistics. About two-thirds of the volume deals with grammatical effects of contact. The authors appreciate that native and foreign structures interact in a complex way, only occasionally resulting in perfect calques (isomorphism). Alexandra Aikhenvald’s pro-grammatic “Areal Features and Linguistic Areas: Contact-Induced Change and Geographical Typology” (pp. 13–39) proposes a leaky four-part typology of contact-induced processes: reanalysis; reinterpretation and extension (of inherited morphemes and categories); grammaticalization (see below on Heine’s chapter); and grammatical accomodation (contamination by a phonologically similar foreign form). Yaron Matras, in “Explaining Convergence and the Formation of Linguistic Areas” (pp. 143–60), advocates a more cognitive approach to borrowing and pattern transfer, with a top-down emphasis on communicative strategies. [End Page 397] Bernd Heine’s “Areas of Grammaticalization and Geographical Typology” (pp. 41–66) considers whether suspiciously similar grammaticalizations within an area are single-step calques (“polysemy copying”) or parallel multistage compressions with light prodding from contact languages. Much of the paper is concerned with African reflexive-object constructions (‘he cut him’, ‘he cut his body’, ‘he cut his head’, ‘he cut his life/soul’, or ‘he cut-reflexive’ with a verbal derivational affix). While ‘body’ reflexives dominate central and southern Africa, Heine finds that ‘head’ reflexives are dominant in two zones (western Sahel and Ethiopia), separated by an eastern Sahel zone with mostly ‘life/soul’ reflexives. Even Arabic dialects obey these regional patterns. Complicating factors are reflexive or logophoric syncretisms, and the discovery since the chapter was written of Russian-like transpersonal reflexives in some Dogon languages (Togo Kan, Tomo Kan). Tom Güldemann’s “Proto-Bantu and Proto-Niger-Congo: Macro-Areal Typology and Linguistic Reconstruction” (pp. 109–41) is a serious reflection on macrolevel reconstruction methodology. Niger-Congo is unusual in that several linguists have argued for a protolanguage with heavy-duty affixal morphology that has been whittled down in some of the descendants still in West Africa, such as Kwa, but preserved in mainstream Bantu, which spread far to the east and south. Outside of Africa, the usual pattern is for linguists to posit an ideal “golden age” protolanguage well endowed with free particles, each with a simple gloss, that later became compacted into morphologically messy daughter languages. Güldemann is cautiously sympathetic to the view that Proto-Niger-Congo was semisynthetic, and that mainstream Bantu developed its more baroque affixal morphology later under the influence of long-lost substratum languages. Matthew Dryer’s “Noun-Modifier Order in Africa” (pp. 287–311) reflects the transition in professional linguistic typology from Greenbergian worldwide ordering correlations to area-specific correlations. The latter imply that deep historical relations (genetic and contact) can trump synchronic functional pressures. Methodologically, this requires not only a large number of languages but also consideration of distributions across genetic stocks. Using detailed maps, Dryer shows that modifiers (adjectives, numerals, definites, possessors) have a stronger tendency to follow nouns in sub-Saharan Africa than in other continents, when intersecting features (e.g., verb-object versus object-verb order) are controlled for. Brief mention will suffice for the other grammatical chapters. Christa König’s “Case Marking and Linguistic Geography” (pp. 67–90) considers two pairs of adjacent Cushitic and non-Cushitic languages where structural case-marking systems have converged unidirectionally. Kazuhiro Kawachi wrestles inconclusively with definitions of linguistic area in “Can Ethiopian Languages Be Considered Languages in the African Linguistic Area? The Case of Highland...

Standard Average European and the Western Fringe – a Reconsideration

The concept of Standard Average European Sprachbund is one of the most influential and widely known within the field of areal linguistics. According to its advocates, the standard written varieties of the major European languages have become increasingly similar through a series of convergent developments, which took place during the great migrations and the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The languages located at the Western fringe of Europe, i.e. Insular Celtic languages and Basque, display but very few SAE-features and appear to have taken little or no part in this convergence process. The present article will examine the Insular Celtic and Basque features to demonstrate that these languages show more convergent developments than is admitted by the SAEhypothesis. In addition, the diachronic dimension of the SAE will be discussed by dating the emergence of the features within the individual languages. The results of this analysis seriously question both the socio-historic scenario and the time-frame proposed for these developments

Tendenzen und Richtungen in der ungarischen historischen Slavistik

This paper aims at giving an overview of the main traditional tendencies and new trends in historical Slavic linguistics in Hungary. Traditionally, since the end of the 19th century, the main goal of investigations has been the interpretation of the Slavic linguistic and cultural influence on the Hungarian language and culture, having continuously been present in the Carpathian basin for more than a thousand year. The language contacts resulted in a vast number of lexical borrowings, calques, and toponyms of Slavic origin in Hungarian, and also in the appearance of Church Slavonic written sources of local redaction. The author describes the process of the methodological progress in the research of these areas and presents the most important results. Since the 1990’s, new trends have emerged in historical Slavic linguistics in Hungary that can be identified as the application of methods and frameworks of areal and theoretical (cognitive and generative) linguistics, which makes the renewal of this disciplin...

Total reduplication: The areal linguistics of a potential universal by Thomas Stolz, Cornelia Stroh, and Aina Urdze (review)

Reviewed by: Total reduplication: The areal linguistics of a potential universal by Thomas Stolz, Cornelia Stroh, and Aina Urdze Anne Zribi-Hertz Total reduplication: The areal linguistics of a potential universal. By Thomas Stolz, Cornelia Stroh, and Aina Urdze. (Studia typologica 8.) Bremen: Akademie, 2011. Pp. 620. ISBN 9783050051734. €128. The project that led to this volume was triggered by previous research (Stolz 2004) revealing total reduplication (TR) as a characteristic feature of the Circum-Mediterranean area, shared by such genetically different languages as Turkish, Hebrew, Maltese, Greek, Italian, and Basque. This result turned out to be at odds with Rubino's (2005a,b) claim that TR is globally absent from Europe (with a few exceptions). Finding that TR is also attested in various other European languages, Thomas Stolz, Cornelia Stroh, and Aina Urdze (SS&U) decided to embark on a systematic areal study of TR on the Old Continent. The general picture that emerges from their research is that TR is a phenomenon of its own, that TR-languages are, as a whole, the norm, and TR-avoiders the exception, and that contrary to Rubino's (2005a,b) claims, TR is a widespread phenomenon in Europe, with TR-languages located in the south and east, and TR-avoiders in the north and center. European TR-constructions are shown to share the formal and semantic properties of the TR-constructions found in countries bordering Europe to the east and south. This areal distribution suggests that European TR-languages are part of larger, intercontinental isoglosses. The book is subdivided into four parts. Part A, 'How to approach total reduplication', is a general advanced course on reduplication, which after a brief introduction (section 1) surveys (section 2) contemporary general textbooks and specialized literature on the chosen topic, and proposes an explicit definition of TR: a prototypical instance is characterized as involving two identical, complete, adjacent occurrences of a meaningful expression, whose doubling conveys some specific linguistic function. The identity criterion crucially involves both phonological and categorial identity (this excludes cognate objects from TR, for example). TR is distinguished from partial reduplication (where completeness does not obtain) and from repetition (a mere, unrestricted, stylistic device). TR is also distinguished from the accidental adjacency of two identical words brought about by syntactic recursivity. Section 3, 'History', surveys theories of reduplication since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Section 4, 'Universal vs. areal', discusses the universal character of TR assumed by Moravcsik (1978) and introduces the view that TR is a 'potential' rather than 'absolute' universal. Section 5 discusses the linguistic functions of TR (e.g. intensification, diminution, number, distributivity, reciprocity, indefiniteness), their respective statuses with respect to the grammar vs. discourse dichotomy, and the issue of iconicity (here the authors adopt Stolz's (2007) model, according to which TR generally signals a deviation with respect to some norm). [End Page 375] Part B, 'Total reduplication: The Maltese experience', presents a detailed description of TR in Maltese, based on an array of written corpora. TR in this language is shown to target adjectives, adverbs, verbs (finite or nonfinite, mostly imperfective and intransitive), and cardinals. The functions of TR are claimed to include intensification, absoluteness, secondary predication, adverbialization, duration, the prolative, the distributive, and lexicalization. Part C, 'Total reduplication: The European perspective', presents an in-depth areal study of European languages with respect to TR, which disconfirms Rubino's (2005a,b) claim that Europe is the only region of the globe that is practically TR-free. According to Rubino, the only TR-languages of Europe are Abkhaz, Armenian, Georgian, Hungarian, and Turkish. SS&U lay out their quantitative methodology, centrally based on the comparative scrutiny of multilingual translations of Saint-Exupéry's Petit prince and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone. Quantitative results show that TR is productively attested in Europe not only in the five languages acknowledged by Rubino, but also in many others. Within Europe, TR is less frequent in Indo-European than in non-Indo-European languages. However, neither Indo-European nor non-Indo-European languages behave homogeneously with respect to TR. Some Indo-European languages are TR-avoiders (e.g. Germanic, Slavic), while some have productive...

Review of:] Nicole Nau. 2011. A Short Grammar of Latgalian

Nicole Nau, A Short Grammar of Latgalian. (Languages of the World/Materials, 482.) München: LINCOM Europa, 2011. ISBN: 978-3-86288-055-3.
 Nicole Nau’s descriptive grammar of Latgalian is a valuable addition to the catalogue of sources from which typologists can draw informationfor cross-linguistic studies. In previous samples—even in the most sizable ones—Latgalian was hardly ever represented, becausethe necessary information about its structural properties was available almost exclusively in articles and monographs written in languagesother than English. There are publications in Latgalian, Latvian, Russian and German on Latgalian matters. However, publishing in theseand other languages has proved to be an obstacle to the diffusion of knowledge about Latgalian beyond the limits of Baltic philology. I donot deny the existence of a variety of scholarly articles in English which treat Latgalian (mostly in the wider context of Latvian dialectologyor Circum-Baltic areal linguistics). However, there had been no fullblown synchronic grammatical description of Latgalian accessible tothe worldwide linguistic community until the book under review saw the light of day in 2011.

The Balkan Languages and Balkan Linguistics

The Balkans were the first linguistic area (sprachbund) to be identified as such. The concept was originally proposed to explain diffusion among languages that were genealogically unrelated or distantly related in terms of normal linguistic change as opposed to notions of corruption and impurity. The fact that the sprachbund cannot be as neatly bounded as the traditional language family has led to some calls for abandoning the concept, but it remains a useful heuristic referring to the results of historical and social processes of language contact. Recent conflations of areal linguistics and typology miss these processes, which are themselves grounded in speaker interaction. Issues of causation in the emergence of sprachbunds involve both language shift and language maintenance, influenced by various social factors playing roles. This review examines both the history and the current state of Balkan linguistics as a part of the study of language.