Diachronic Change Research Articles

Homogenisation of Biocultural Diversity: Plant Ethnomedicine and Its Diachronic Change in Setomaa and Võromaa, Estonia, in the Last Century.

Simple SummaryTo understand how healing practices change over time, it is important to recognize the role and extent of external factors affecting the diversity of uses. Our exemplary case study is part of a larger project studying the influence of centralization on the use of medicinal plants. We examined the current and past plant use of two small communities that reside on the border with Russia and speak two dialects of Estonian, namely Seto and Võro. Our results show that within the lifetime of the people we interviewed, many earlier known uses were abandoned and new uses were strongly influenced by knowledge disseminated through centralized channels. Many such uses have also been recorded in geographically distant regions that once belonged to the Soviet Union. This demonstrates the homogenizing influence of centralized knowledge distribution, which has eroded place-based biocultural diversity. In order to secure the survival of knowledge on how to use locally grown plants, we suggest that more attention on the regional level needs to be given to preserving and supporting the distribution of such place-specific knowledge.When studying the evolution of the use of medicinal plants, it is important to identify what role, and to what extent, external factors and local biocultural diversities play in shaping cultural changes. We chose as a case study, which forms part of a larger project, a religiously and linguistically distinct group, the Seto, and compared their current and past plant use with that of the surrounding Võro. Ethnobotanical fieldwork was conducted in the summers of 2018 and 2019. Current uses of plants constituted 34% of the total registered use reports and 41% of those were used to treat general diseases or used as prophylactics. In total, the medicinal use of 86 taxa was recorded, and of these 48 were prevalent. Strong erosion (the abandonment of 43, mainly wild taxa used historically) and valorisation of the uses shared with neighboring as well as distant regions once part of the Soviet Union, were evident, signalling the potential influence of the centralised distribution of knowledge. The results clearly show that the plant medicine-related biocultural diversities of the two groups have been considerably homogenised, eroded and influenced by the knowledge spread through various means during the Soviet era and over the last 30 years.

Liquid polarity, positional contrast, and diachronic change

AbstractApparently disparate sound changes in Latin, involving both vowels and consonants but sensitive to /r/, can be explained by reconstructing a positional clear/dark contrast in /r/, motivated by the seldom-mentioned “liquid polarity” effect. Examining these diachronic processes together allows us to see a larger picture, providing evidence for the reconstruction of successive past synchronic states. Latin /r/ mirrored the behaviour of Latin /l/ up to the first century BC: /l/ was dark and /r/ was clear in codas, and /r/ was dark and /l/ was underspecified for tongue body position in onsets. Darkness in /r/ was partly implemented through the selection of r-type: dark onset approximant and clear coda tap. Later, coda /r/ became an approximant like onset /r/, and subsequently both became trills, resulting in the erosion of the positional contrast and the liquid polarity effect.

Why did hunting weapon design change at Abri Pataud? Lithic use-wear data on armature use and hafting around 24,000-22,000 BP.

Projectile technology is commonly viewed as a significant contributor to past human subsistence and, consequently, to our evolution. Due to the allegedly central role of projectile weapons in the food-getting strategies of Upper Palaeolithic people, typo-technological changes in the European lithic record have often been linked to supposed developments in hunting weaponry. Yet, relatively little reliable functional data is currently available that would aid the detailed reconstruction of past weapon designs. In this paper, we take a use-wear approach to the backed tool assemblages from the Recent and Final Gravettian layers (Levels 3 and 2) of Abri Pataud (Dordogne, France). Our use of strict projectile identification criteria relying on combinations of low and high magnification features and our critical view of the overlap between production and use-related fractures permitted us to confidently identify a large number of used armatures in both collections. By isolating lithic projectiles with the strongest evidence of impact and by recording wear attributes on them in detail, we could establish that the hunting equipment used during the Level 3 occupations involved both lithic weapon tips and composite points armed with lithic inserts. By contrast, the Level 2 assemblage reflects a heavy reliance on composite points in hunting reindeer and other game. Instead of an entirely new weapon design, the Level 2 collection therefore marks a shift in weapon preferences. Using recent faunal data, we discuss the significance of the observed diachronic change from the point of view of prey choice, seasonality, and social organisation of hunting activities. Our analysis shows that to understand their behavioural significance, typo-technological changes in the lithic record must be viewed in the light of functional data and detailed contextual information.

Why is Semantic Change Asymmetric? The Role of Concreteness and Word Frequency and Metaphor and Metonymy

ABSTRACT Metaphors and other tropes are commonly thought to reflect asymmetries in concreteness, with concrete sources being used to talk about relatively more abstract targets. Similarly, originating senses in diachronic semantic change have often been argued to be more concrete than extended senses. In this paper, we use a dataset of cross-linguistically attested semantic changes to empirically test the idea that asymmetries in figurative language are predicted by asymmetries in concreteness. We find only weak evidence for the role of concreteness and argue that concreteness is not a helpful notion when it comes to describing changes where both originating and extended senses are highly concrete (e.g., skin > bark, liver > lungs). Moreover, we find that word frequency data from English and other languages is a stronger predictor of these typologically common semantic changes. We discuss the implications of our findings for metaphor theory and theories of semantic change.

The Evolutionary Pattern of Language in English Fiction Over the Last Two Centuries: Insights From Linguistic Concreteness and Imageability

Fiction has come to play an essential part in human culture and life in recent centuries. Because of its importance, the language or discourse of fiction has been widely studied. Discerning the evolutionary pattern of language in fiction is greatly helpful in understanding the changes in human culture and society. However, most previous studies on literary language that made use of quantitative or computational methods restricted themselves to a few authors or groups and only took into account a relative short span of time. Furthermore, most of the quantitative analysis therein was based on a primary and rather primitive algorithm that summarizes the frequencies of linguistic units in corpora. To overcome these limitations, this study uses semantic similarity as computed by semi-supervised methods to examine diachronic changes. In this study, the three large-scale corpora representing the English language and English fiction were used to investigate the evolutionary patterns concerning diachronic concreteness/imageability. The data from the two measures are well mapped and shown to support the argument that English fiction, as a special genre, exhibits an evolutionary tendency toward increasing concreteness/imageability. This indicates that modern fiction may have become increasingly important in human society, but easier to read and process in words than 19th century English fiction. This study proposed that learnability, genre difference, the changes of population size, and the other factors might have caused the systemic change. The current study is thus an important contribution to understanding the evolutionary trend of language in fiction as well as understanding the development of the English language as a whole. This study creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes of language in literary works.

Diachronic changes in the statistical and stylistic-functional patterns of Armenian dual voice verbs

Diachronic changes in the statistical and stylistic-functional patterns of Armenian dual voice verbs

Ecological Niche Modeling and Diachronic Change in Paleoindian Land Use in the Northwestern Great Basin, USA

Ecological Niche Modeling and Diachronic Change in Paleoindian Land Use in the Northwestern Great Basin, USA

The Comparative Study of Xinjiang’s Tuntian System before and after the Founding of the People’s Republic of China

China’s frontier society is in the process of social transformation. Take Xinjiang as an example, there are two parallel governance modes: local governance and corps governance. The proposal of “the Belt and Road Initiative” strategy reshaped the shape and status of Xinjiang, and made Xinjiang a center of two-way opening to the outside world, which had a far-reaching impact on the stability and development of border areas. In this discourse situation, it is necessary to look at the diachronic changes around “the Belt and Road Initiative” in Xinjiang from the comparison of history and modernity. Taking wasteland as the breakthrough point, this paper discusses the influence of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps on Xinjiang’s modern social transformation in the ways of ethnic communication, regional development, world trade system, social domination, etc. by combing the comparison of Xinjiang’s wasteland and frontier defense, ethnic exchanges, agricultural development, trade and social development before and after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The Diachronic Change of the Practice of Iftā’

The connection between Islamic legal methodologies and practice in the development of Islamic law has been made by the practice of iftā’. Governmental and non-governmental religious institutions, along with individual Muslim scholars, emerged as the sources of legal authority. Although the origin of the practice of iftā’ can be traced back to the time of the Prophet Muḥammad (peace be on him), its nature has changed from individual to collective in the modern age. The contemporary Muslim world has witnessed a rapid proliferation of modern religious institutions of fatwās, which significantly contributed to the dynamism of Islamic law and the regulation of local and regional practices. The practice of iftā’ can be described as a legal formulation produced during the consultation process between a lay Muslim and a Muslim scholar. The product of iftā’ is known as fatwā, which is an Islamic legal opinion that Muslim scholars issue to clarify a legal problem that Muslims face. Since the twentieth century, the practice of iftā’ has begun to be assumed by modern religious institutions. This institutionalization process resulted in the practice of collective iftā’. Contrary to scholars who allege the immutability of Islamic legal methodologies, this change can be interpreted as demonstrating the progressive dimension of Islamic law within the area of legal theories and methodologies. The paper seeks to examine the diachronic transformation of fatwā and explores the driving factors behind the instrumentalization of collective fatwā. After giving a detailed terminological definition of fatwā, the research introduces the differences between fatwā (Islamic legal opinion) and ḥukm (court verdict) to forestall any terminological complexity. The diachronic process is then addressed by referring to key turning points that evidence the transformation of the practice of iftā’ from individual to collective. In the last instance, public, state, and collective fatwās are engaged to adduce the diversification within the end-products of the practice of iftā’.

The Hierarchy of News Values – A Corpus-Based Diachronic and Cross-Cultural Comparison of News Reporting on Epidemics

ABSTRACT This study adopts a comparative keyword analysis to examine a corpus of news reports (N = 1009) published in Chinese and American newspapers on SARS and COVID-19 outbreaks to uncover the hierarchy of news values and potential differences across time and cultures. The results show that the news values of “Impact”, “Superlativeness”, “Proximity”, and “Eliteness” are often prioritized in both newspapers. For cross-cultural differences, the Chinese newspaper prefers a constructive reporting style through emphasizing “Positivity” in terms of agency, proactive measures, and favorable outcomes in fighting the outbreaks. The American newspaper prioritizes “Proximity” in terms of relevance to its audience. For diachronic changes, the Chinese newspaper has developed a unique theme to construct “Positivity” by calling for the solidarity of the international community. The Chinese newspaper also moves away from prioritizing geographic “Proximity” and government actors in constructing “Eliteness”. The American newspaper, however, changes to cover more government actors. The American newspaper also changes its exclusive economic focus in constructing “Impact” to emphasize the epidemic’s impact on various aspects of people’s lives. This study accounts for how the sociocultural context and the different magnitudes of SARS and COVID-19 outbreaks shape newspaper reports in China and the US.

A semantic typology of location, existence, possession and copular verbs: areal patterns of polysemy in Mainland East and Southeast Asia

AbstractThis study is based on a sample of 116 languages from the Mainland East and Southeast Asian linguistic area. Its first objective is to examine four distinct synchronic patterns of areal polysemy, created by the semantic domains of copular, locative, existential and possessive verbs and the constructions they form. As a consequence, its second objective is to model the diachronic change underlying four language types identified on this basis from the data. We argue that there are three grammaticalization pathways which motivate the four synchronic patterns: Type III languages are distinguished by the grammaticalization chain: (Postural verb) > (Dwell) > Locative > Existential > Possessive,while the other two types, Type II and Type IV, show an opposing pathway: (Grasp) > Possessive > Existential. Type I and Type II languages additionally reveal a recurrent polysemy betweenLocativeandCopularverbs. On this basis, an implicational universal is adduced to the effect that no diachronic adjacency exists betweenlocativeandpossessiveconstructions. Crucially, the intervening stage of anexistentialconstruction provides the necessary bridging context forpossessivereanalysis in this first pathway, whilepossessiveverbs are formally distinct fromlocativesin the second, bearing no diachronic relationship to them. The findings on the patterns of polysemy sharing reinforce the notion of a clear typological split between Tibeto-Burman languages on the one hand, and Sinitic, Kra–Dai, Hmong–Mien, and Austroasiatic on the other.

Who’s eating pork? Investigating pig breeding and consumption in Byzantine, Islamic and Norman/Aragonese Sicily (7th-14th c. AD)

This paper investigates the culture of pork consumption in Sicily by examining a number of archaeological faunal assemblages dated to chronological phases spanning from the Byzantine to the Norman/Aragonese period (7th-14th c. AD). Zooarchaeological analyses reveal substantial diachronic changes in the use of the main domesticates, particularly concerning pig frequencies. In the Islamic period (9th-11th c. AD), pig is poorly represented at urban sites; this is likely to reflect a socio-cultural acceptance of the Islamic religious precepts forbidding pork consumption. By contrast, and in continuity with the Roman and Byzantine periods, pigs are well-represented in rural settlements, thus indicating a more resilient attitude of these communities toward newly imported religious traditions. In the later Norman/Aragonese period, the frequency of pig increases at some urban sites, reflecting the fact that that pork prohibition had been lifted and that new food production and consumption practices were developed. Pig continues, however, to be almost absent at a number of urban sites and castles/fortified villages; this may suggest the persistence of Islamised communities in Sicily after the end of Islamic rule.

Perpetuation of gender bias in New Headway: a multimodal critical discourse analysis with a diachronic lens

ABSTRACT Framed by MCDA, our study examines diachronic changes in gender representation in five New Headway Elementary (NHE) editions. Our findings demonstrate that NHE’s gender representation is established on heteronormative binaries indicating bias against women in recreational, domestic, professional, and educational spaces despite few important attempts by the coursebook writers to address gender bias. Gender representation in recreational spaces is built on stereotypical discourses. At home, women mostly have nurturing roles while men are depicted as relaxing or playing with their children. At work, men’s professional representation focuses solely on their professional career, whereas women are represented with reference to their domestic and caregiving roles. At school, men are presented as teaching and learning various subjects and sports, while women are mostly associated with teaching and learning languages and art only. In closing, we offer teachers three activities to develop learners’ critical awareness against gender discrimination while using NHE.

De LaurentESE

An increasing amount of sociolinguistic research has been concentrated on diachronic idiolect change: the change of an individual’s dialect over time. This paper adds to this growing topic by analyzing the English idiolect change of Giada De Laurentiis, a heritage speaker of Italian. The study analyzes De Laurentiis’ LOT, START, and GOAT vowels, as well as the voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops [k] and [p] by measuring the utterances of the code-switched word ‘mascarpone’ across 20 seasons on television. The data reflect the influence of L2 US English (rhoticity, diphthongization, lengthened VOTs) on heritage Italian in De Laurentiis’ idiolect.

A Diachronic Analysis of a Changing Landscape on the Duero River Borderlands of Spain and Portugal Combining Remote Sensing and Ethnographic Approaches

The Arribes del Duero region spans the border of both Spain and Portugal along the Duero River. On both sides of the border, the region boasts unique human-influenced ecosystems. The borderland landscape is dotted with numerous villages that have a history of maintaining and managing an agrosilvopastoral use of the land. Unfortunately, the region in recent decades has suffered from massive outmigration, resulting in significant rural abandonment. Consequently, the once-maintained landscape is evolving into a more homogenous vegetative one, resulting in a greater propensity for wildfires. This study utilizes an interdisciplinary, integrated approach of “bottom up” ethnography and “top down” remote sensing data from Landsat imagery, to characterize and document the diachronic vegetative changes on the landscape, as they are perceived by stakeholders and satellite spectral analysis. In both countries, stakeholders perceived the current changes and threats facing the landscape. Remote sensing analysis revealed an increase in forest cover throughout the region, and more advanced, drastic change on the Spanish side of the study area marked by wildfire and a rapidly declining population. Understanding the evolution and history of this rural landscape can provide more effective management and its sustainability.

A sociological study of Howard Goldblatt’s English translations of the ideological markers in Mo Yan’s three Chinese novels

Abstract Over the last two decades, ideology has evolved into a major issue in translation studies. In terms of the ideological explorations of translation, previous studies focused on the explicit or implicit ideological manifestations in translated texts, or how translation was used to serve ideology. Studies on the diachronic changes of translator’s ideology, however, remain scarce. This study of Howard Goldblatt’s English translations of three Chinese novels over three different periods finds that translators’ ideology is dynamic rather than static. In their translations, translators may follow the ideology of the source culture or that of the target culture, depending on the relative status of the source culture and the target culture as well as the capital possessed by the author and the translator. A sociological account is provided to explain the changes in translators’ ideology over time.

Reconstructing social networks of Late Glacial and Holocene hunter-gatherers to understand cultural evolution.

Culture is increasingly being framed as a driver of human phenotypes and behaviour. Yet very little is known about variations in the patterns of past social interactions between humans in cultural evolution. The archaeological record, combined with modern evolutionary and analytical approaches, provides a unique opportunity to investigate broad-scale patterns of cultural change. Prompted by evidence that a population's social connectivity influences cultural variability, in this article, we revisit traditional approaches used to infer cultural evolutionary processes from the archaeological data. We then propose that frameworks considering multi-scalar interactions (from individuals to populations) over time and space have the potential to advance knowledge in cultural evolutionary theory. We describe how social network analysis can be applied to analyse diachronic structural changes and test cultural transmission hypotheses using the archaeological record (here specifically from the Marine Isotope Stage 3 ca 57–29 ka onwards). We argue that the reconstruction of prehistoric networks offers a timely opportunity to test the interplay between social connectivity and culture and ultimately helps to disentangle evolutionary mechanisms in the archaeological record.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.

Reconstruction of diachronic changes in human fishing activity and marine ecosystems from carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios of archaeological fish remains

Stable isotope analysis is one of the most effective methods of reconstructing human fishing practices and changes in past marine ecosystems. The effectiveness of this method can be further improved when considering diachronic changes in stable isotope ratios of archaeological remains of several different fish species that exhibit different behavioral or ecological traits. In this study, diachronic changes in human fishing practices and marine ecosystems were investigated for Epi-Jomon (299–258 BC) and Okhotsk (489–1200 AD) periods in prehistoric Hokkaido, northern Japan, by utilizing the stable isotope analysis of archaeological fish bone collagen. Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios of 242 fish bone samples, representing 12 taxa, excavated from the site of Hamanaka 2 on Rebun Island revealed significantly lower (p < 0.05) nitrogen isotope ratios in cod from the Okhotsk period than the Epi-Jomon period. This difference could be related to the development of fishing gear and/or to changes in fishing strategies in the Okhotsk period, as well as to changes in the behavior of cod because of the rapid cooling climate event separating the two periods. Our results demonstrate that some aspects of past human fishing practices and marine ecosystem change can be reconstructed by considering diachronic changes in the stable isotope ratios of several fish species together.

The Diachronic Malaysian English Corpus (DMEC): Design, Development and Challenges

Malaysian English (ME) has received much research attention in terms of its linguistic system, and use. In the last two decades, with the development of language corpora and corpus methods, research in ME as an Outer Circle and postcolonial variety increased significantly. These corpus-based studies are important and indeed interesting but they are limited to descriptions and discussions on contemporary ME, as they are based on synchronic ME corpora. Research in diachronic changes in ME, to date, is rare to say the least. To address this gap and facilitate systematic examination of changes in ME necessitates the development of diachronic ME corpora. This article reports on the design and development of the first diachronic Malaysian English corpus (DMEC), comprising Malaysian English written texts from the 1960s until the 2010s. The six decades represent three phases of English in Malaysia, end of colonial era, postcolonial and contemporary ME. The corpus is designed to facilitate research in ME changes in terms of its linguistic system, identity and trajectory. Besides the design and development of the DMEC, three sample analyses based on the existing corpus are discussed to demonstrate the value of the corpus as a resource for diachronic research in ME. The current article, overall, contributes to existing knowledge on the development of language corpora in Malaysia and foregrounds the potential of diachronic research in ME.

Diachronic Changes in the Frequency of Color Designation in Russian Poetic Texts

We propose a statistical-diachronic approach to the description of color designations in poetic texts in Russian. Methods of corpus linguistics and the semantic annotation of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) applied in the research have revealed certain patterns of change in the frequency ` in poetic texts from 1750 to 1999. A quantitative characteristic of the poetic corpus of the RNC is presented by decades of the period under study. We also provide a general description of its poetry corpus (number of texts, number of authors, searching techniques, the semantic annotation, etc.). Also presented is the authors' classification of adjectives with the color tag of the semantic annotation.The study has revealed the RNC inconsistency in the assignment of color tags during the semantic annotation. In the authors’ opinion, this defect could affect the results of the study; however, the spotted tendencies in frequency behavior of color adjectives seem to be reliable.The research method is based on the comparison of statistical indicators for each decade in the specified range. Accordingly, the charts are plotted with reference to the average values for the range, unlike the RNC Charts tool, where a chart is based on the points for each year with a smoothing coefficient. Also, the indicators in the poetic corpus are compared with the corresponding data in the prose corpus. It has been reliably established that in the texts of the poetry corpus the frequency of color designations is higher than in the texts from basic, newspaper and oral corpora regardless of the part of speech the words belong to. The highest frequency (IPM) values of all adjectives that have the color tag of the RNC semantic annotation are observed in the last decades of the 19th - first decades of the 20th centuries. The frequency behavior of adjectives belonging to different classes differs significantly in different periods. In the texts of the 18th century, the analogous adjectives (or the adjectives of secondary nomination, such as златой (golden), янтарный (amber), etc.) prevail. In the texts of the 19th century adjectives – quasi-colors, (such as светлый (light), тёмный (dark), бледный (pale), etc.) are most frequent whereas in the texts of the 20th century the color adjectives per se have the highest frequency. While ranking the data selected from all the periods in the descending order, the first 28 ranks were occupied by the adjectives denoting achromatic colors – black and white. The article also defines prospects for our further research of color designations in Russian: specifying classification of color adjectives, looking at statistical aspects of their polysemy, and comparison of their use frequency by individual authors.