Diachronic Mapping Research Articles

The Digital Tool Pygmalion and its Interactive Maps: Visualising Modal Verbs in the Classroom

This contribution showcases the free digital tool Pygmalion and its application to the learning/teaching of English modals in both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. This recently developed tool allows users to draw interactive maps of meanings, constructions and semantic relationships without requiring computer skills. While Pygmalion was originally designed to draw diachronic maps of single words (or of etymologically related words), I show how it is possible to draw synchronic maps as well as contrastive maps. After having presented the main features of the tool, I show how Pygmalion can be used to create a synchronic and a diachronic map to compare the modals “can” and “may”, illustrating the procedure step by step. Thanks to its user-friendly design, Pygmalion can be used by teachers, pupils, students not only in a classroom context, but also for autonomous learning.

A grapho-phonologically parsed corpus of medieval Scots: variation across time

This paper presents key aspects of the data, methods and uses of the From Inglis to Scots Corpus (fits; Alcorn et al. [eds], 2021 –), complementing Kopaczyk et al. (2018) and focussing on the diachronic dimension of the resource. The corpus reconstructs sound values for individual Older Scots morphological root elements of Germanic origin as attested in the documentary record in the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (laos). This is done by triangulating the attested spelling, the sound values proposed in the literature for their etymological sources (dialects of Old English, Old Norse and Middle Dutch), and a series of plausible sound changes leading from the latter to the former (the Corpus of Changes). The challenges and possibilities of this approach are highlighted throughout, focussing on the diachronic mapping of Older Scots sounds to their origins and the intervening changes. An overview of the corpus's capabilities is provided in tandem with its limitations.

Down the paths to the past habitual: its historical connections with counterfactual pasts, future in the pasts, iteratives and lexical sources in Ancient Greek

Abstract To complement existing synchronic typological studies of the marking strategies of (past) habituality, this paper details the diachronic paths leading to and from past habitual constructions. The rich corpus evidence from the diachrony of Ancient Greek demonstrates at least four source constructions: (1) past counterfactual mood (in optative and indicative), (2) futures in the past, (3) iteratives (with -sk) and (4) lexical sources with semantic affinity to habituality (volition, habit, love). It is argued that the former two acquire habitual meaning through an invited inference of epistemic certainty of the statement by the speaker: what certainly would have happened in the knowable past is implied to be characteristic of the past. The past forms with the so-called iterative -sk (3) suffix follow the cross-linguistically frequent evolution of pluractional constructions through a form of semantic bleaching: past iterative > frequentative > habitual > habitual imperfective. Lexical sources (4) first acquire habitual meaning in the present after which only the more heavily grammaticalized ones receive past habitual usage through semantic bleaching and generalization of usage (as reflected by host class expansions). The paper is concluded with a diachronic map of these paths into habituality and the paths leading from past habituality into other domains such as genericity.

Diachronic mapping and evaluation of soil erosion rates using RUSLE in the Bouregreg River Watershed, Morocco

Soil erosion has been severely affecting soil and water resources in semi-arid areas like the Mediterranean. In Morocco, this natural process is accelerated by anthropogenic activities, such as unsustainable soil management, overgrazing, and deforestation. With a drainage area of 395,600 ha, the Bouregreg River Watershed extends from the Middle Atlas Range (Jebel Mtourzgane) to the Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah (SMBA) dam reservoir south-east of Rabat. Its contrasted eco-geomorphological landscapes make it susceptible to unprecedented soil erosion due to climate change. Resulting changes in erosive dynamics led to huge amounts of solid loads transported to the catchment outlet and, thus, jeopardised the SMBA dam lifespan due to siltation. The research aims to quantify the average annual soil losses in this watershed using the Revised Universal Equation of Soil Losses (RUSLE) within a GIS environment. To highlight shifts in land use/land cover patterns and their effects on erosional severity, we have resorted to remote sensing through two Landsat 8 satellite images captured in 2004 and 2019. The C factor was combined with readily available local data regarding major erosion factors, e.g. rainfall aggressiveness ( R), soil erodibility ( K), topography ( LS), and conservation practices ( P). The helped to map the erosion hazard and determine erosion prone areas within the watershed where appropriate water and conservation measures are to be considered. Accordingly, from 2004 to 2019, average annual soil losses increased from 11.78 to 18.38 t∙ha –1∙y –1, as the watershed area affected by strong erosion (>30 t∙ha –1∙y –1) evolved from 13.57 to 39.39%.

A diachronic semantic map of the Optative negative in Beja (North-Cushitic)

Abstract The Optative negative of Beja is a multifunctional paradigm which encodes optative, hortative and jussive grammatical meanings, depending on the person, as well as participant-internal and participant-external modalities of impossibility and unnecessity. It is also the sole paradigm licensed in balanced embedded clauses. Based on a large corpus of naturalistic first-hand data, this study analyses the various uses of the paradigm, provides an account of its evolution from the pre-modal stage to the post-modal stage on the basis of language internal morpho-syntactic cues, and proposes a diachronic semantic map, based on van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) model. It shows that semantic maps are not only useful for typological purposes, but also for language internal studies, helping understand the semantic shifts that occurred in the grammar of unwritten languages with no recorded history.

Lexical tectonics: Mapping structural change in patterns of lexification

AbstractWhether it is based on philological data or on reconstruction, historical linguistics formulates etymological hypotheses that entail changes both in form and in meaning. Semantic change can be understood as a change in “patterns of lexification”, i. e., correspondences between forms and senses. Thus a polysemous word, which once lexified senses s1–s2–s3, evolves so it later encodes s2–s3–s4. Meanings that used to be colexified are now dislexified, and vice versa. Leaning on empirical data from Romance and from Oceanic, this study outlines a general model of historical lexicology, and identifies five types of structural innovations in the lexicon: split, merger, competition, shift, and relexification.The theoretical discussion is made easier by using a visual approach to structural change, in the form of diachronic maps. Semantic maps have already proven useful to represent synchronic patterns of lexification, outlining each language’s emic categories against a grid of etic senses. The same principle can be profitably used when analysing lexification patterns in diachrony: lexical change is then viewed as the reconfiguration of sense clusters in a semantic space. Maps help us visualize the “lexical tectonics” at play as words evolve over time, gradually shifting their meaning, gaining or losing semantic territory, colliding with each other, or disappearing forever.

Diachronic Mapping of Soil Organic Matter in Eastern Croatia Croplands

The spatiotemporal analysis and mapping of soil organic matter (SOM) play a pivotal role for evaluating soil health and for implementing preservation and restoration actions. In this context, the first aim of the study is to furnish a high-resolution mapping of current SOM content in eastern Croatia. The second aim is to perform a diachronic analysis of SOM content, comparing two datasets characterized by an extreme data imbalance. The more recent dataset (SOM2010), representative of 2010s, comprises 19,386 samples and the older dataset (SOM1970), representative of the 1970s, comprises 152 samples. The marked data imbalance and the different modalities in soil sampling and laboratory analysis of the two datasets are taken into consideration in performing the comparison. The study reveals a general depletion trend of SOM from the 1970s to the 2010s, more evident in with regard to Fluvisols and Gleysols. At a regional scale, the SOM2010 is characterized by lower variability compared to SOM1970, indicating a process of homogenization of SOM spatial distribution in recent years. Considering the local scale, there is limited information for the 1970s; for the 2010s the SOM spatial distribution is characterized by a high short-range spatial variability, with a characteristic spotty appearance, likely related to agricultural practices.

From Static to Interactive Maps: Drawing Diachronic Maps of (Latin) Modality with Pygmalion

In this paper, we present the diachronic maps of a selection of 75 Latin modal markers designed through the tool <em>Pygmalion</em>. Both the maps and <em>Pygmalion</em> were conceived in the framework of the <em>WoPoss</em> project, which aims at analysing the diachronic pathways of modality in Latin. While the description of the tool and its functionalities is beyond the scope of this paper, we focus here on the description of our diachronic modal maps. Using visualisations to represent semantic shifts is a well-known practice in some linguistic fields such as typology and lexicography, and they have already been applied to modality. Though the situation is rapidly evolving, typological semantic maps as well as lexicographic maps are still for the most part static and usually not-interactive visualisations. Our modal maps stand out not only for their interactivity, but also for the richness of the information conveyed: chronology, etymology, semantics, syntax, first attestation and diachronic relationships between the meanings. After presenting our conceptual framework for modality, we illustrate the process of conceptualisation and development of our diachronic maps of modality. More specifically, we explain how we gathered and organised the data in order to transpose it into a visual representation. We then showcase the map of <em>possum</em> as an example of our results. Subsequently, we discuss the results with respect to previous literature concerning both visualisation of modal evolution from a general point of view and the investigation of modality in Latin. Finally, we outline possible applications within and beyond the <em>WoPoss</em> project.

Prospective Mapping of Land Cover and Land Use in The Classified Forest of The Upper Alibori Based on Satellite Imagery

The dynamics of land cover and land use in the classified forest of the upper Alibori (FCAS) in relation to the disturbance of agro-pastoral activities is a major issue in the rational management of forest resources. The objective of this research is to simulate the evolutionary trend of land cover and land use in the FCAS by 2069 based on satellite images. Landsat images from 2009, 2014 and 2019 obtained from the earthexplorer-usgs archive were used. The methods used are diachronic mapping and spatial forecasting based on senarii. The MOLUSCE module available under QGIS remote sensing 2.18.2 is used to simulate the future evolution of land cover and land use in the FCAS. The land cover and use in the year 2069 is simulated using cellular automata based on the scenarios. The results show that natural land cover units have decreased while anthropogenic formations have increased between 2009 and 2014 and between 2014 and 2019. Under the "absence multi-criteria zoning (MZM)" scenario over a 50-year interval, land cover and use will be dominated by crop-fallow mosaics (88%). On the other hand, the scenario "implementation of a multicriteria zoning (MZE)", was issued with the aim of reversing the regressive trend of vegetation types by making a rational and sustainable management of resources.

Metropolis in the Making: A Planning History of Amsterdam in the Dutch Golden Age

Metropolis in the Making: A Planning History of Amsterdam in the Dutch Golden Age

Cloud Computing and Machine Learning for Analyzing Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Mangrove Ecosystems in the Grand Saloum (Senegal and Gambia)

The Grand Saloum is characterized by a vast coastal plain cut by a dense hydrographic network and populated by mangrove plant formations. It is an ecosystem of capital importance in view of its ecological, socio-economic and environmental role. However, the Saloum delta remains a complex and very sensitive environment, particularly in the context of climate change. It therefore deserves special attention for better conservation. The objective of this study is to analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of its mangrove ecosystems in relation to the variability of rainfall. The methodology is based on the exploitation of Landsat satellite images time series using Machine Learning technic from the Google Earth Engine platform to make the diachronic maps of mangrove ecosystems and analyze its relationship with rainfall. The results showed an expansion of mangrove areas in the Gambian part where the surface increased from 9 381 ha in 1988 to 11611 ha in 2020 which represents an overall growth of 23,8%. In the Senegalese part, mangrove surface increased from 52 616 ha to 62 300 between 1988 and 2020 which is +18% growth. The detection of changes showed an important development of mangrove along the Saloum during the first decade and a strong growth in the Gambian part from the 2000s. The vegetation index showed a regeneration of the mangrove between 2000 and 2020. The temporal dynamics of the mangrove is strongly correlated with the rainfall variability.

A Companion to João Paulo Borges Coelho: Rewriting the (Post)Colonial Remains by Elena Brugioni Orlando Grossegesse Paulo de Medeiros

Reviews 259 Elena Brugioni, Orlando Grossegesse and Paulo de Medeiros (eds), A Companion to João Paulo Borges Coelho: Rewriting the (Post)Colonial Remains (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020). vi + 266 pages. Print and ebook. Reviewed by Hilary Owen (University of Oxford) This collection stands out as the first full-length work in English to bring the works of Borges Coelho to the critical reader in the anglosphere, complementing important article-length studies to date by scholars such as Stefan Helgesson. It presents us with an English translation of a short story by the Mozambican author and historian, João Paulo Borges Coelho, followed by nine chapters covering almost all of his published works of fiction. Offering an extremely rich array of themes and approaches, this volume performs a complex and demanding twofold task with efficacy and style. Firstly, the editors make an irrefutable case for regarding Borges Coelho as the talented, transnationally resonant contemporary writer that he is, reaching far beyond Mozambican literature to the interface of Portuguese-language writing with the global, worldliterature scene. Secondly, the nine authors in this work effectively demonstrate how Borges Coelho’s trajectory as a professional historian, a craftsman of creative fiction and a bearer of twentieth-century (post)colonial memory invites ongoing engagement with the trends that have shaped critical and theoretical thinking on (post)colonialism, poststructuralism, world-literature and world capitalist systems over the last thirty years. While a substantial body of highquality research exists on Borges Coelho in Portuguese, there is markedly less available in English. And in terms of translation into English, his work has been far outflanked by his countryman, Mozambique’s most canonical author, Mia Couto. While comparison with Couto might have been one obvious direction in which to take the current project, it is a definite and notable plus that none of the contributors has yielded to this temptation. Borges Coelho is rightly allowed to speak here entirely and brilliantly as his own man. His work is, like Couto’s, highly sensitive to the construction of Africa’s archives through the optic of a European language worldview, and this sensitivity is omnipresent in his work. However, while this affords Couto a rich vein of spontaneous poetic invention through hybridizations of African oral culture and Portuguese scripted sign, Borges Coelho is far less inclined to privilege Portuguese language as national metonym in the transcultural contact zone. The prose style which results is refreshingly readable and highly accessible, without sacrifice of self-reflexivity, political sophistication or ethical rigour. The Introduction to the volume provides a valuable overview not only, as is customary, of the individual chapters but also of the full literary oeuvre of Borges Coelho. This helps to situate what follows and the short plot summaries offer a useful diachronic mapping of the author’s evolving direction. This is followed by a beautiful new English translation by David Brookshaw of Borges Coelho’s short story ‘O pano encantado’. Aside from the obvious delight of having this Reviews 260 inclusion from a master translator of African literature in Portuguese, this serves as an unambiguous endorsement of the fact that we need to see more of Borges Coelho’s work in English, a point to which I will return. Chapter 2, by Paolo Israel, takes the unconventional but useful step of focusing on Borges Coelho’s professional career as a historian in the highly politicized context of knowledge production in Marxist-Leninist Mozambique, starting with his time working for TBARN (Centro de Estudos de Técnicas Básicas para o Aproveitamento dos Recursos Naturais) under the aegis of Aquino de Bragança’s famous Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA) Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. Covering the late 1970s through to the 1990s, this chapter includes a fascinating foray into Borges Coelho’s early experiments with comic strips and ‘graphic novels’. Israel also makes us very aware of the subsequent difficulties which beset preservation, access and retrieval in respect of the material archive, encouraging us to view Borges Coelho’s decision to write postmodern historiographic metafiction in terms of a largely pragmatic choice, driven by his frustration with the archive’s obstructions and limitations. Finally, Israel’s chapter neatly establishes the possibility of...

The Diachronic Mapping of Temporal Features Between English Nominals and Verbs, and the Article-Aspect Interplay

The Diachronic Mapping of Temporal Features Between English Nominals and Verbs, and the Article-Aspect Interplay

Ian Rankin : Enquête diachronique sur la ville d’Edimbourg

&lt;p&gt;Ian Rankin’s world-famous crime series features as a main character the city of Edinburgh, where Inspector Rebus relentlessly wanders, drives, drifts, tails and chases suspects. In each novel, the narrative visits a number of referential locations and examines them through the prism of time, slowly building a diachronic map of the city. As the series spans more than thirty years, the urban &lt;em&gt;locus&lt;/em&gt; evolves as the narrative unfolds. Ian Rankin takes stock of new urban developments in real time and draws on them to feed his plots. Piecing a map together therefore remains a work in progress, and the literary geography of Edinburgh gazes out at an endlessly elusive horizon.&lt;/p&gt;

Strontium and oxygen isotopes as indicators of Longobards mobility in Italy: an investigation at Povegliano Veronese

The arrival of the Longobards in Northern Italy in 568 CE marked a period of renewed political stability in the Peninsula after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The trajectory of the spread of Longobards in Italy across the Alps and into the South is known from many literary sources. However, their mobility and residence patterns at a population level remain to be fully understood. Here we present a multi-isotopic analysis (87Sr/86Sr and 18O/16O) of 39 humans and 14 animals buried at the Longobard necropolis of Povegliano Veronese (VR, Italy; 6th—8th century CE), to address mode and tempo of the spread of this population in the Peninsula. The geographical location of Povegliano Veronese plays a key role: the site lies along the Via Postumia, which was one of the main ancient Roman roads of Northern Italy, representing an important route in post-classical Italy. The integration of isotopic data with the archaeological evidence allowed us to determine the presence of individuals from at least three different regions of origin, building a diachronic map of the dynamics of mobility of this group in northern Italy.

Soil Water Content Diachronic Mapping: An FFT Frequency Analysis of a Temperature–Vegetation Index

Among the indirect estimation approaches of soil water content in the upper layer of the soil, the “triangle method” is one of the most common that relies on the simple relationship between the optical and thermal features sensed via Earth Observation. These features are controlled by water content at the surface and within the root zone but also by meteorological forcing including air temperature and humidity, as well as solar radiation. Night- and day-time MODIS composites of land-surface temperature (LST) allowed applying a version of the triangle method that takes into account the temporal admittance of the soil. In this study, it has been applied to a long time-series of pair images to analyze the seasonal influence of the meteorological forcing on a triangle method index (or temperature–vegetation index, TVX), as well as to discuss extra challenges of the diachronic approach including seasonality effects and the variability of environmental forcing. The Imera Meridionale basin (Sicily, Italy) has been chosen to analyze the method over a time-series of 12 years. The analysis reveals that, under these specific environmental and climatic conditions (strong seasonality and rainfall out of phase with vegetation growth), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and LST pairs move circularly in time within the optical vs. thermal feature space. Concordantly, the boundaries of the triangle move during the seasons. Results showed a strong correlation between TVX and rainfall normalized amplitudes of the power spectra (r2 ~0.8) over the range of frequencies of the main harmonics.

The Syriac World

The Syriac World

Estimating Total Open Heliospheric Magnetic Flux

Over the solar-activity cycle, there are extended periods where significant discrepancies occur between the spacecraft-observed total (unsigned) open magnetic flux and that determined from coronal models. In this article, the total open heliospheric magnetic flux is computed using two different methods and then compared with results obtained from in-situ interplanetary magnetic-field observations. The first method uses two different types of photospheric magnetic-field maps as input to the Wang Sheeley Arge (WSA) model: i) traditional Carrington or diachronic maps, and ii) Air Force Data Assimilative Photospheric Flux Transport model synchronic maps. The second method uses observationally derived helium and extreme-ultraviolet coronal-hole maps overlaid on the same magnetic-field maps in order to compute total open magnetic flux. The diachronic and synchronic maps are both constructed using magnetograms from the same source, namely the National Solar Observatory Kitt Peak Vacuum Telescope and Vector Spectromagnetograph. The results of this work show that the total open flux obtained from observationally derived coronal holes agrees remarkably well with that derived from WSA, especially near solar minimum. This suggests that, on average, coronal models capture well the observed large-scale coronal-hole structure over most of the solar cycle. Both methods show considerable deviations from total open flux deduced from spacecraft data, especially near solar maximum, pointing to something other than poorly determined coronal-hole area specification as the source of these discrepancies.

History vs. legend: Retracing invasion and spread of Oxalis pes-caprae L. in Europe and the Mediterranean area.

Oxalis pes-caprae L. is a South African geophyte that behaves as an invasive in the eurimediterranean area. According to a long-established hypothesis, O. pes-caprae may have invaded Europe and the Mediterranean area starting from a single plant introduced in the Botanical Garden of Malta at the beginning of the 19th century. The aim of this work was to test this hypothesis, to track the arrival of O. pes-caprae in different countries of the Euro-Mediterranean area and to understand the pathways of spreading and particularly its starting point(s). Historical data attesting the presence of the plant in the whole Euro-Mediterranean region were collected from different sources: herbarium specimens, Floras and other botanical papers, plant lists of gardens, catalogs of plant nurseries and plant dealers. First records of the plant (both cultivated and wild) for each Territorial Unit (3rd level of NUTS) were selected and used to draw up a diachronic map and an animated graphic. Both documents clearly show that oldest records are scattered throughout the whole area, proving that the plant arrived in Europe and in the Mediterranean region more times independently and that its spreading started in different times from several different centers of invasion. Botanical gardens and other public or private gardens, nurseries and plant dealers, and above all seaside towns and harbors seemingly played a strategic role as a source of either intentional and unintentional introduction or spread. A geographic profiling analysis was performed to analyse the data. We used also techniques (Silhouette, Kmeans and Voronoi tessellation) capable of verifying the presence of more than one independent clusters of data on the basis of their geographical distribution. Microsatellites were employed for a preliminary analysis of genetic variation in the Mediterranean. Even if the sampling was insufficient, particularly among the populations of the original area, our data supported three main groups of populations, one of them corresponding to the central group of populations identified by GP analysis, and the other two corresponding, respectively, to the western and the eastern cluster of data. The most probable areas of origin of the invasion in the three clusters of observations are characterized by the presence of localities where the invasive plant was cultivated, with the exception of the Iberian cluster of observation where the observations in the field predate the data about known cultivation localities. Alternative possible reasons are also suggested, to explain the current prevalence of pentaploid short-styled plants in the Euro-Mediterranean area.

Headwater valley response to climate and land use changes during the Little Ice Age in the Massif Central (Yzeron basin, France)

The geomorphological response of valley bottoms in eastern France to climatic fluctuations of the Little Ice Age (LIA) was investigated using sedimentological analysis together with optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and radiocarbon dating. Diachronic mapping of land use since the beginning of the nineteenth century was also carried out. Since A.D. 1500, the valley bottoms experienced three cycles of aggradation and subsequent incision, each characterized by paired periods of high and low detritic activity. While the impact of human activity on the aggradation of the alluvial plain is observed, the vertical dynamics of the valley bottom deposits seemingly were also linked to the hydroclimatic fluctuations during the LIA. The sensitivity to these fluctuations was increased by human activity at the scale of the basin. Variations of the winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and solar activity from the last five centuries correlate with wet and cold phases during which valley bottoms accumulated, and dry and warm phases during which the streams incised into the valley floors. This fluvial sensitivity to the meteorological conditions induced temporal variations in sedimentary supply originating from either direct input from remnants of periglacial alluvial sheets or local rocky outcrops and/or from indirect input from the erosion of alluvial and colluvial deposits. These two components, combined with the sheet runoff over the ploughlands, express the complex coupling between hillslopes and valley bottoms in the headwater catchments. This caused a cascade-shaped transit of the sediments characterized by alternating phases of storage and removal.