Closely-related Languages Research Articles

Feeling through your chest

AbstractThis article explores the expression and conceptualisation of emotions in Anindilyakwa (Gunwinyguan, north-east Arnhem Land). Fundamental to the emotional lexicon of this language is the widespread use of body parts, which frequently occur in figurative expressions. In this article I examine the primary body parts that occur in emotion descriptions in both literal (physical) and figurative expressions. Particular attention is given toyukudhukudha /-werrik- ‘chest’, the body part conceptualised as the primary site of emotion in Anindilyakwa and the most productive body-related morpheme used in emotion compounds. I consider the role of the chest and other productive body parts that occur in emotion compounds, and examine the metonymic and metaphorical devices that contribute to the expression of these emotional states. In doing so, I propose a number of overarching and widespread tropes that hold across different body-part compounds, and briefly contextualise these in relation to the emotion description systems of other closely-related (Gunwinyguan) languages.

Imitative Words in Yakut and Khakass Epic Texts: Lexical and Semantic Features

The article presents a comparative study of the sound and image imitative words incorporated in the Yakut and Khakass languages. The study is based on the analysis of the following epic texts: the Yakut olonkho Kyys Debiliye by N.P. Burnashev and the Khakass alyptyh nymaha Ai-Huuchin by P.V. Kurbizekov. These epic texts were selected specifically due to their similarities in plot composition and Yakut and Khakass languages close genealogical relativeness; both languages almost equally contain an abundance of imitative words. The main objective of the present research is to decipher the lexical and semantic features of imitative words contained in the epic text as well as to define the traditional cultural features and universal features, distinctive for both languages under study. In order to achieve the objective, we have set and fulfilled the following goals: lexical material selection form the epic texts; classification of the imitative words by grouping them into thematic categories and subcategories; distinction of the phonetic and semantic correspondences as well as the singling out of universal tendencies, common for both languages, in terms of their use of imitative words. In order to fulfill the main objective of the research, i.e., to study the two closely-related languages based on the olonkho and alyptyh nymah, the following research methods were applied: the method of lexical and semantic analysis, comparative historical research method; when applied, both of these methods allow defining the general Turkic universals and the specific features of the lexical group in question in the two languages, i.e., Yakut and Khakass. In the course of the study, we discovered that the Yakut language imitative words units prevail in quantity. Moreover, the Khakass imitative words possess universal semantic meanings. The author of the present article points out the similarity in the sound and semantic features of imitative words, thus, confirming that both, the Yakut and Khakass people perceive and produce sounds in a similar manner.

Análisis de errores y retroalimentaciones correctivas en interacciones español-portugués mediante el contexto teletándem

In applied linguistics, teaching/learning of closely-related languages has benefited from the error-analysis model (ea), based on contrastive analysis (ca) and inter-language approaches. This case study aims at analyzing the types of errors made by a Colombian university student in learning Portuguese as a foreign language (pfl), as well as the most common corrective feedback (cf) he received when interacting with a Brazilian student in an institutional-integrated-teletandem-context (ttdii, by its acronym in Portuguese), and at looking at the implications of this method in his learning process. This is an ethnographic exploratory study including the ae approach and its classification. Findings show improved linguisic competence by the student, probably as a result of reflection upon his learning process, particularly his errors, which were gradually decreasing as interactions moved forward.

Vocabulary development in closely-related languages

Abstract This paper investigates vocabulary comprehension and production in 46 bilingual Swedish-German children age 4–6 growing up in Sweden. Using a newly developed tool, the Cross-linguistic Lexical Task (CLT, Haman, Łuniewska & Pomiechowska 2015), the children’s receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge of nouns and verbs is assessed in both their languages, compared to each other and over age. Performance on test items of different word types (nouns/verbs; cognates/non-cognates) is also explored. There are clear vocabulary gains with age for the majority language Swedish, but not for the minority (home) language German. Overall vocabulary scores are higher in Swedish than in German, but this difference only concerns verbs, not nouns. Cognate facilitation occurs both ways in these closely-related languages, but is stronger in the minority language German. We suggest that what at first sight looks like a noun advantage on the German CLT is largely an effect of Swedish/German cognate status.

Modern Russian textbooks for schools in Czech Republic: advantages and disadvantages

The article analyses the current state of the Russian language teaching materials in the Czech secondary and high school. The Russian language is taught at Czech schools as the second and third foreign language. This naturally influences aims, contents and methodological concept of study packs used in the foreign language teaching. The authors point out the requirements for modern Russian language school textbooks, fundamental criteria for assessing them, the particularities of learning Russian in a closely-related language environment. Among the so-called coursebooks of a “new type” the authors determine electronic and interactive versions of textbooks which started to appear in classrooms recently. However, not all of them meet modern requirements. The article analyses the study packs used in Czech Republic in order to reveal their advantages and disadvantages. The conclusions are proved by the results of the survey carried out among Russian language teachers at Czech schools.

Population Size and the Rate of Language Evolution: A Test Across Indo-European, Austronesian, and Bantu Languages.

What role does speaker population size play in shaping rates of language evolution? There has been little consensus on the expected relationship between rates and patterns of language change and speaker population size, with some predicting faster rates of change in smaller populations, and others expecting greater change in larger populations. The growth of comparative databases has allowed population size effects to be investigated across a wide range of language groups, with mixed results. One recent study of a group of Polynesian languages revealed greater rates of word gain in larger populations and greater rates of word loss in smaller populations. However, that test was restricted to 20 closely related languages from small Oceanic islands. Here, we test if this pattern is a general feature of language evolution across a larger and more diverse sample of languages from both continental and island populations. We analyzed comparative language data for 153 pairs of closely-related sister languages from three of the world's largest language families: Austronesian, Indo-European, and Niger-Congo. We find some evidence that rates of word loss are significantly greater in smaller languages for the Indo-European comparisons, but we find no significant patterns in the other two language families. These results suggest either that the influence of population size on rates and patterns of language evolution is not universal, or that it is sufficiently weak that it may be overwhelmed by other influences in some cases. Further investigation, for a greater number of language comparisons and a wider range of language features, may determine which of these explanations holds true.

Beyond Pairwise Similarity: Quantifying and Characterizing Linguistic Similarity between Groups of Languages by MDL

We present a minimum description length based algorithm for finding the regular correspondences between related languages and show how it can be used to quantify the similarity between not only pairs, but whole groups of languages directly from cognate sets. We employ a two-part code, which allows to use the data and model complexity of the discovered correspondences as information-theoretic quantifications of the degree of regularity of cognate realizations in these languages. Unlike previous work, our approach is not limited to pairs of languages, does not limit the size of discovered correspondences, does not make assumptions about the shape or distribution of correspondences, and requires no expert knowledge or fine-tuning of parameters. We here test our approach on the Slavic languages. In a pairwise analysis of 13 Slavic languages, we show that our algorithm replicates their linguistic classification exactly. In a four-language experiment, we demonstrate how our algorithm efficiently quantifies similarity between all subsets of the analyzed four languages and find that it is excellently suited to quantifying the orthographic regularity of closely-related languages.

Neural machine translation for low-resource languages without parallel corpora

The problem of a total absence of parallel data is present for a large number of language pairs and can severely detriment the quality of machine translation. We describe a language-independent method to enable machine translation between a low-resource language (LRL) and a third language, e.g. English. We deal with cases of LRLs for which there is no readily available parallel data between the low-resource language and any other language, but there is ample training data between a closely-related high-resource language (HRL) and the third language. We take advantage of the similarities between the HRL and the LRL in order to transform the HRL data into data similar to the LRL using transliteration. The transliteration models are trained on transliteration pairs extracted from Wikipedia article titles. Then, we automatically back-translate monolingual LRL data with the models trained on the transliterated HRL data and use the resulting parallel corpus to train our final models. Our method achieves significant improvements in translation quality, close to the results that can be achieved by a general purpose neural machine translation system trained on a significant amount of parallel data. Moreover, the method does not rely on the existence of any parallel data for training, but attempts to bootstrap already existing resources in a related language.

The Lowland Kenyah posterior implosives

Abstract The Kenyah languages of central Borneo form a distinct unit within the North Sarawak group of Austronesian languages. In northern Sarawak there is a well-defined contrast between types that have been called ‘Highland Kenyah’ and ‘Lowland Kenyah’. A key difference between these sets of closely-related languages is the reflexes of Proto-North Sarawak/Proto-Kenyah *b, *d, *j, *g and *bh, *dh, *jh, *gh, which are distinguished (usually as b, d, j, g vs. p, t, c, k) in Highland Kenyah, but show a complex set of innovations in some varieties of Lowland Kenyah. The most striking of these changes in the dialect spoken by the Lebu’ Vu’ Kenyah at Long Sela’an and Long Ikang, and the Long Tikan Kenyah at Long San, is the shift of voiced aspirates to phonetic implosives that were generalized to the reflexes of *b, *d, *j, *g as final syllable onsets, leading to merger of the two series. Because it was conditioned, this merger produced complementation between [b]/[ɓ], [ɟ]/[ʄ], and [g]/[ɠ] (*d lenited before implosion was generalized, preventing merger). Most remarkably, the reduction of Proto-Kenyah nasal-obstruent clusters in these dialects has begun to produce new instances of [ɟ] and [g], but not [b] and [d], creating contrastive implosives only at palatal and velar positions, a reversal of the distributional preference commonly associated with implosive stops in cross-linguistic perspective.

Receptive intelligibility of Turkish to Iranian-Azerbaijani speakers

AbstractAzerbaijani and Turkish are two closely-related languages from Oguz branch of Turkic languages, which are said to be mutually intelligible. Regarding this background, we designed an experiment within the framework of receptive multilingualism to investigate the role of linguistic factors in intelligibility of the Turkish language to Iranian Azerbaijanis. The study was carried out by controlling extra-linguistic factors such as language contact and negative attitude in order to make the findings attributable to only linguistic factors as the main focus of the present study. In the study, 40 native speakers of Azerbaijani in Iran were exposed to the Turkish language through short videos recorded from Turkish TV programs. The participants scored in average 56% of receptive intelligibility in spoken language of Turkish; though this score is not considered a high score of receptive intelligibility of Turkish to the Azeri speakers. It provides some pieces of evidence to show how this half understanding ...

Teletandem within the Context of closely-related languages: a Portuguese-Spanish interinstitutional experience

ABSTRACT This paper is part of an ongoing research project aimed at observing the ways that Brazilian undergraduate students who are majoring in Portuguese and Spanish as part of a Foreign Languages and Literatures (FLL) degree program organize and implement the teaching of Portuguese for Spanish speakers within a teletandem context. We sought to evaluate the organization of the content of Portuguese language that they are teaching and the impact made by teletandem practices on the professional development of these student-teachers in both languages. Methodologically, the study is grounded on critical qualitative research. Data analysis suggests that, because Portuguese an d Spanish are closely related languages with a high level of inter-comprehension, the virtual learning context of teletandem requires the presence of a teacher-mediator to conduct the mediation sessions with focused attention to contrasting linguistic and cultural aspects between both languages.

Linguistic innovation, political centralization and economic integration in the Kongo kingdom

In this article we reconstruct the actuation and transmission of a phonological innovation known as prefix reduction within the Kikongo language cluster situated in the wider Lower Congo region of Central Africa. We argue that this change spread from a focal area coinciding with the heartland of the Kongo kingdom as a classical process of dialectal diffusion. Thanks to a unique Kikongo corpus that starts in the 17th century, we can provide diachronic empirical evidence for different phases of the process, which has been otherwise difficult, if not impossible, in Bantu historical linguistics. What is more, and also quite exceptional in African linguistics, we have fairly good insight into the ‘social ecology’ of this language change and argue that political centralization and economic integration within the realm of the Kongo kingdom facilitated such a contact-induced diffusion between closely-related language varieties.

A bilingual advantage in task switching? Age-related differences between German monolinguals and Dutch-Frisian bilinguals

This study investigated whether lifelong bilingualism can be associated with enhanced executive control, particularly mental flexibility, and with a modulation of an age-related decline in these functions. We compared performance of middle-aged and elderly speakers of German and bilingual speakers of Dutch and Frisian in a cued task-switching paradigm. All bilinguals were fluent in the same, closely-related language pairs. Bilinguals incurred significantly lower switching costs than monolinguals, and elderly bilinguals were less affected by an age-related increase in switching costs than monolinguals. Bilinguals did not differ from monolinguals in the size of the mixing costs. Our findings suggest that lifelong bilingualism correlates with enhanced ability to shift between mental sets, as well as increased resistance to proactive interference. The fact that we found significant group differences – while some previous studies did not – may be attributable to the choice of our task and to the cognateness of the languages involved.

A microparametric analysis of apparent postverbal negation in Taiwanese Southern Min

AbstractThis article investigates the postverbal negation construction in Taiwanese Southern Min. I propose that the construction is derived in a way similar to resultatives and that the postverbal negationboand its affirmative counterpartuare particular kinds of aspectual elements in the resultative complement. Given this, the lack of (apparent) postverbal negation in the closely-related language Mandarin Chinese can be ascribed to the fact that Mandarin Chinese lacks this particular aspectual use of affirmativeyouand negativemei(you) and thus it fails to generate the structure under investigation. It is also shown that the proposed analysis is supported by cross-linguistic correlations among Chinese languages.

Receptive multilingualism and its relevance to translation studies with data from interpreters of the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian languages

This paper examines the phenomenon of receptive multilingualism where speakers of two different languages communicate through each speaking his/her own language and understanding the other’s. Comprehension in such an interaction is aided by the speaker and the listener employing linguistic, discourse-pragmatic and other features which represent strategies of accommodation (i.e. reduction of linguistics dissimilarities). This phenomenon is not presented as an alternative to interpreting, but in the context of interpreters who work from or into a language which is closely related, but not identical to the language spoken by one of the participating clients. Background information is provided from language pairs with a high level of mutual intelligibility and the experiences of interpreters, while the focus of the data sample is on 23 interpreters who have accreditation in one, two or three of the following closely-related languages: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. Responses are elicited on the following: self-reported incidence of accommodation in non-interpreted interactions; linguistic and ethical protocols when a different, but closely-related language is used by a client; comments from clients about interpreters’ proficiency and ethnicity; attitudes on the distinctiveness of the three languages and future intelligibility. Informants’ linguistic behaviour is analysed according to the number of accreditations held and, in general, those with three accreditations report the highest levels of accommodation.

Statistical machine translation of subtitles for highly inflected language pair

This paper addresses the problem of statistical machine translation between highly inflected languages. Even when dealing with closely-related language pairs, statistical machine translation encounters problems if the parallel corpus is not big enough. To reduce the problem of data sparsity, we use the approach called factored translation, which has proven successful when translating between English and a morphologically rich language. We show that it is even more useful when translating between two highly inflected languages. The main contribution of the paper involves two extensions of the factored translation approach. First, we propose a new, more general asynchronous framework for training translation components, where lemmas in the lemma component and MSD tags in the MSD component are aligned independently of alignment done for surface word forms. The second contribution of the paper is a new technique for efficient use of a bilingual dictionary in the translation process. A dictionary is introduced into the lemma component to improve lexical translation. Dictionary use is based on entropy. We tested our enhanced translation approach on the Slovenian–Serbian language pair. The system was trained on a freely available OpenSubtitle corpus. The results show improvements in automatic scores (BLEU and TER). The approach could be used for other language pairs, especially if one or both are highly inflected.

On the Pre-Columbian Origin of Proto-Omagua-Kokama

Cabral (1995, 2007, 2011) and Cabral and Rodrigues (2003) established that Kokama and Omagua, closely-related indigenous languages spoken in Peruvian and Brazilian Amazonia, emerged as the result of intense language contact between speakers of a Tupí-Guaraní language and speakers of non-Tupí-Guaraní languages. Cabral (1995, 2007) further argued that the language contact which led to the development of Kokama and Omagua transpired in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in the Jesuit mission settlements located in the provincia de Maynas (corresponding roughly to modern northern Peruvian Amazonia). In this paper I argue that Omagua and Kokama were not the product of colonial-era language contact, but were rather the outcome of language contact in the pre-Columbian period. I show that a close examination of 17th and 18th century missionary chronicles, Jesuit texts written in Omagua and Kokama, and modern data on these languages, make it clear that Omagua and Kokama already existed in a form similar to their modern forms by the time European missionaries arrived in Maynas in the 17th century. Moreover, I show that several key claims regarding ethnic mixing and Jesuit language policy that Cabral adduces in favor of a colonial-era origin for Kokama are not supported by the available historical materials. Ruling out a colonial-era origin for Omagua and Kokama, I conclude that Proto-Omagua-Kokama, the parent language from which Omagua and Kokama derive, was a pre-Columbian contact language.

Mapping out the Source domain

This paper takes a strictly empirical approach to the encoding of spatial notions in the four ancient Indo-European languages Ancient Greek, Latin, Gothic and Old Church Slavonic. By generating semantic maps on the basis of parallel corpus data, without any semantic pre-analysis, we use methods well tested in typology to study the basic divisions in the spatial domain in the four closely-related languages, and to determine the finer subdivisions within the Source domain. We find that the four languages are similar, but clearly independent of each other, each carving up the spatial domain in different ways. We also find substantial encoding overlaps between the Source and Location domains.

Wayward daughter: Language contact in the emergence of Pichi (Equatorial Guinea)

Pichi is an Afro-Caribbean English Lexifier Creole (AEC) spoken by some 150,000 people on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. Pichi is an offshoot of Krio (Sierra Leone) and shares many characteristics with its West African sister languages. However, insulation from English and Krio, extensive contact and hybridization with Spanish, language shift involving the Bantu language Bubi, as well as koineization through the prolonged coexistence of Pichi with closely-related languages like Nigerian Pidgin and Cameroonian Pidgin have given the language a character distinct from that of the other English Lexifier creoles of the region. The study of Pichi and its comparison with other West African AECs therefore offers fresh insights into the role that language contact has played in the differentiation of the Afro-Caribbean English lexifier Creoles.

A tradução como atividade contrastiva e de conscientização na aprendizagem de línguas próximas

Este artigo analisa a adequação da tradução como atividade de conscientização contrastiva para minorar as interferências e sua fossilização na aprendizagem de línguas próximas. Após anos de exclusão das aulas de línguas em muitos ambientes, a tradução volta a figurar entre as propostas de pesquisadores como atividade comunicativa com foco no sentido que, dada a alta carga cognitiva, permite trabalhar de forma consciente o contraste entre as línguas. Visto que na aprendizagem de línguas próximas o apagamento das diferenças parece ser a origem de interlínguas com elevado grau de interferências e forte tendência à fossilização, a tradução se apresenta como possível solução.