Dialect Data Research Articles

On the grammaticalization of Finnish colorative construction

AbstractThis paper concentrates on the diachronic development of the so-called Colorative Construction (CoC) in Finnish, a two-verb expression consisting of an A-infinitive and an ideophonically based descriptive (or ‘colorative’) finite verb, e.g.susijuos-ta jolkottele-e[wolf run-inf col-prs.3sg] ‘wolf runs trotting’. The paper combines variationist dialectal data, grammaticalization theory, and Construction Grammar formalization. The detailed diachronic description demonstrates that the development from proto-CoC to modern CoC is the epitome of constructionalization, i.e., a gradual process of grammatical changes whereby both the form and the function of an existing construction are altered, creating a new expression type. Major changes in the Balto-Finnic case system were the primary force behind this process. Constructionalization of the CoC itself included the first syntagmatic changes through reanalysis. This gradually created a new paradigmatic expression type, followed by paradigmatic extension through analogy, which widened the frame semantics of the newly coined type.

地方語文献資料としての庶民記録 : 飢饉資料・農事日記・年代記について

地方語文献資料としての庶民記録 : 飢饉資料・農事日記・年代記について

Семантична опозиція горі – долі в говірках південно-західного наріччя української мови

While the lexemes горі and долі express opposite meanings, they mostly retain the identity of a semantic entity. The article analyses more than 300 micro-contexts of the function of these lexemes from dialectological sources. The semantics and grammar of lexemes are studied in the light of the functioning and action of the words in “live” contexts where they act as adverbs and prepositions. This article reviews lexicographical interpretation of words. The semantic structure of lexemes in the South-Western dialects of Ukrainian language is modelled.The analysed units represent the semantics and features typical of the South-Western dialects of the Ukrainian language. The sources of research are dialect dictionaries and texts (from 19th c. until now), regional linguistic atlases, records of the dialectal speech made by the author and other researchers. The dialectal data are provided in comparative tables of the lexemes’ semantics.

"МЕНЯТЬ ШИЛО НА МЫЛО": ДИАЛЕКТОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ КОММЕНТАРИЙ К ФРАЗЕОЛОГИЗМУ

The article refers to the idiom menyat’ (smenyat’) shilo na mylo , which means ‘to make a bad choice; to choose the worst from several bad things’. After having critically evaluated the existing hypotheses about the origin of this idiom, the authors propose their own version, based on the data of Russian folklore and dialects. The authors suggest that the idiom should be considered in a general linguistic context formed around the binomial shilo-mylo . There are several reasons for attraction of these two words. The words awl and soap designate the items which are indispensable for housekeeping and the most common things in small shops selling household goods. Besides this everyday contiguity of the items, there is a phonetic resemblance of the words. They function in the frames of a popular reduplication model, on the basis of which constructions with initial letters sh and m are created (i. e. shury-mury ). A wide range of meanings can be designated by this binomial (semantics of something necessary or, on the contrary, of something useless, meanings of greed, slyness, etc.). The components of this pair create different formal correlations ( shilo-mylo, ot shil’nogo do myl’nogo, shil’tse da myl’tse, shil’e-myl’e, etc.). They function in constructions with predicates, for example, with the verbs perevesti (svesti) and menyat’ (promenyat’) . With these verbs, the two words are part of two phraseological models existing in popular speech: on the one hand, idioms with the verbs perevesti and svesti , meaning futile labor and vain efforts ( svest’ na myl’nyy puzyr’ ), on the other hand, idioms with the verbs menyat’, promenyat’ , meaning useless and inadequate exchange ( promenyat’ byka na indyka ). On the assumption of the authors, the idioms svesti (perevesti) shilo na mylo appeared earlier than the idioms with the semantics of exchange.

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.

Development of the Arabic Loria Automatic Speech Recognition system (ALASR) and its evaluation for Algerian dialect

This paper addresses the development of an Automatic Speech Recognition system for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and its extension to Algerian dialect. Algerian dialect is very different from Arabic dialects of the Middle-East, since it is highly influenced by the French language.In this article, we start by presenting the new automatic speech recognition named ALASR (Arabic Loria Automatic Speech Recognition) system. The acoustic model of ALASR is based on a DNN approach and the language model is a classical n-gram. Several options are investigated in this paper to find the best combination of models and parameters. ALASR achieves good results for MSA in terms of WER (14.02%), but it completely collapses on an Algerian dialect data set of 70 minutes (a WER of 89%). In order to take into account the impact of the French language, on the Algerian dialect, we combine in ALASR two acoustic models, the original one (MSA) and a French one trained on ESTER corpus. This solution has been adopted because no transcribed speech data for Algerian dialect are available. This combination leads to a substantial absolute reduction of the word error of 24%.

Why byloti dievop ‘speak to God’, but prašyti dieviep ‘ask God’?

The paper aims to investigate the historical usage of two local cases, namely the Allative and the Adessive, governed by verba dicendi in Old Lithuanian. In Mikalojus Daukša’s Postil (1599) the Allative occurs with verbs of address and denotes the Addressee as a Goal of a verbal act. The Adessive, however, is governed by predicates of request and conveys the Source of a desired item. To verify whether this is part of Daukša’s idiolect or a general feature of Lithuanian at the beginning of its written period, the data from DP are compared to the texts of two other varieties of written Lithuanian of the 16th–17th century: Jonas Bretkūnas’ Postil (1591) and Konstantinas Sirvydas’ Punktay sakimu (two parts, 1629 and 1644). In order to explain the motivation for this usage, dialectal and typological data are used.

Települések közti nyelvjárási és névföldrajzi hasonlósági viszonyok összevető elemzése Vas és Zala megyében

Methods of statistical analysis used in dialectometry and place name geography are similar to each other in several aspects; the results of the analyses in both cases are matrices showing the (dis)similarities of data collected in different settlements. Thus, the two types of analysis are comparable. As a result of the fact that both dialect data and the systems of place names are strongly connected to the community of their users, the authors hypothesised a correlation between the results of the two methods. This was tested by examining data from the dialect atlas entitled A magyar nyelvjárások atlasza (‘Atlas of Hungarian Dialects’), which offers the data of 39 settlements in Vas and Zala Counties, and from the volumes of Vas megye földrajzi nevei (‘Geographical Names of Vas County’) (1982) and Zala megye földrajzi nevei (‘Geographical Names of Zala County’) (1964). However, the hypothesis, only proved to be true in the case of a few settlements; most results suggested that there was no significant correspondence between dialectometric and toponymetric similarity matrices. The authors identified only five settlements in the case of which Pearson’s correlation index was around 0.5, when comparing the values of dialectometric and toponymetric matrices. In general, dialectal and name analysis showed greater homogeneity in northern than in southern settlements. In the future, research involving large areas would be advisable, as correlation between large geographical distances, and significant dialectic and onomatic differencesis to be expected; it is also worth considering new methods in onomastic analysis.

An introduction to Basque aspiration: the contribution of onomastics

In this article the authors first of all show the positions in which aspiration can appear within the word in Basque. Hereafter they explain which restrictions this sound is subject to and, after touching on the views of the few linguists for whom aspiration is not etymological and considering its non-random character as established, they make a list of the sources aspiration comes from. Subsequently they discuss its loss and consider to what extent the major Alavese toponymy, which is rich in hs, agrees or disagrees with the current data and with the various authors’ claims. A number of historical toponyms from Gipuzkoa and La Rioja that bear the grapheme <h> are likewise taken into consideration. Finally, as a conclusion, the possibility is referred to of encompassing most of the developments that converge in aspiration in Basque into one and only phenomenon, as well as pointing out the importance of the use of onomastic, dialectal and typological data for the study of our language.

Taalgebruik vs. taalsysteem in de generatieve variatielinguïstiek

Abstract The past thirty years or so have seen an increased interest from the part of generative syntacticians in dialect data. The article addresses the question to what extent generative methods in studying dialect syntax depart from traditional dialectological methods, and whether both disciplines have been integrated successfully. Despite earlier pessimistic accounts like De Schutter (2005) and Goossens & Van Keymeulen (2006), Hans Bennis’ recent work shows that generative syntacticians are indeed adopting methods from dialect geography to tackle research questions that are still predominantly generative in nature.

The Romanian alternating gender in diachrony and synchrony

AbstractRomanian has a large class of nouns characterized by masculine agreement in the singular and feminine agreement in the plural. This phenomenon ofalternatinggender is frequently argued by traditional grammarians of Romanian, Romance linguists, and linguist typologists to constitute aneuterorthirdgender, distinct frommasculineandfeminine. The present study argues, from close analysis of a wide range of diachronic and comparative dialectal data, that theneuteris in fact an epiphenomenon of agreement behaviour that depends crucially on the inflexional identity of the singular and plural forms of the nouns. Hypostatization of athirdgender is dangerously liable to obfuscate the true mechanisms at work. Principled explanations of some apparent exceptions to my overall claim will be offered. I also investigate, however, some ways in which the emergence of a third gender of the type so widely assumed already to exist might be latent in Romanian, and speculate in general on howalternating gendermight emerge diachronically.

Why Does Canadian English Use try to but British English Use try And? Let's Try and/to Figure It Out

This article examines the variation between try to and try and in two major varieties of English, Canadian and British. Embedding our research in earlier studies of corpora, we extend our knowledge of this phenomenon to vernacular community-based dialect data. Comparative sociolinguistic analysis and statistical methods establish the significant mechanisms underlying the alternation. Unexpected social patterns in the United Kingdom point to a change in the social evaluation of try and. Also, despite divergent external influences, there are similar internal constraints of tense and lexical verb. The authors propose that these constraints are a holdover from reanalysis in the seventeenth-century and the semantic fossilization of try and before certain verbs. They conclude that social factors may divide the major varieties of English, but longitudinal linguistic patterns endure.

Dem Herrgott sei Scheenster

AbstractBy integrating dialect data into typological theses on dative-marked nominal possessive constructions of the typedem Vater sein Hut, this article will continue recent approaches of both dialectological and typological research. By means of an empirical study, this article intends to not only describe the surface phenomena, but to uncover the underlying structure of this construction in East Franconian dialects. Language maps illustrate that instances of microvariation concerning the case-marking of the possessor (Wemvs.Wenvs.Wer seine Weiden sind das?) and the form of the possessive pronoun (meiner Tante ihrvs.sein Wirsing) are diatopically conditioned.

Crowdsourcing Language Change with Smartphone Applications

Crowdsourcing linguistic phenomena with smartphone applications is relatively new. In linguistics, apps have predominantly been developed to create pronunciation dictionaries, to train acoustic models, and to archive endangered languages. This paper presents the first account of how apps can be used to collect data suitable for documenting language change: we created an app, Dialäkt Äpp (DÄ), which predicts users’ dialects. For 16 linguistic variables, users select a dialectal variant from a drop-down menu. DÄ then geographically locates the user’s dialect by suggesting a list of communes where dialect variants most similar to their choices are used. Underlying this prediction are 16 maps from the historical Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland, which documents the linguistic situation around 1950. Where users disagree with the prediction, they can indicate what they consider to be their dialect’s location. With this information, the 16 variables can be assessed for language change. Thanks to the playfulness of its functionality, DÄ has reached many users; our linguistic analyses are based on data from nearly 60,000 speakers. Results reveal a relative stability for phonetic variables, while lexical and morphological variables seem more prone to change. Crowdsourcing large amounts of dialect data with smartphone apps has the potential to complement existing data collection techniques and to provide evidence that traditional methods cannot, with normal resources, hope to gather. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize a range of methodological caveats, including sparse knowledge of users’ linguistic backgrounds (users only indicate age, sex) and users’ self-declaration of their dialect. These are discussed and evaluated in detail here. Findings remain intriguing nevertheless: as a means of quality control, we report that traditional dialectological methods have revealed trends similar to those found by the app. This underlines the validity of the crowdsourcing method. We are presently extending DÄ architecture to other languages.

On the mechanisms of the grammaticalization of comitative and instrumental categories in Slavic

This article critically assesses probabilistic predictions on the theory of contact-induced grammaticalization of the comitative-instrumental polysemy in those Slavic languages which have had a history of long and intense interaction with either German or Italian. Having provided extensive dialectal data, I argue instead that there are no grounds for positing a direct correlation between the introduction of the comitative preposition to instrumental in “high-contact” Slavic languages and the history of language contact with German or Italian. I propose to distinguish between the grammaticalization of the comitative-instrumental polysemy due to analytic simplification and the grammaticalization of the instrumental-comitative polysemy due to synthetic simplification. The comitative marking for instrumentals in Slavic is likely to develop in places of prolonged multilingual contacts, not necessarily with German or Italian. Under these conditions one can predict the development of convergent analytic features in closely related or even areally contingent languages (dialects), as is the case of the Circum-Baltic area.

VORONOI DIAGRAMS WITHOUT BOUNDING BOXES

Abstract. We present a technique for presenting geographic data in Voronoi diagrams without having to specify a bounding box. The method restricts Voronoi cells to points within a user-defined distance of the data points. The mathematical foundation of the approach is presented as well. The cell clipping method is particularly useful for presenting geographic data that is spread in an irregular way over a map, as for example the Dutch dialect data displayed in Figure 2. The automatic generation of reasonable cell boundaries also makes redundant a frequently used solution to this problem that requires data owners to specify region boundaries, as in Goebl (2010) and Nerbonne et al (2011).

The Onomastic Data of the Fourteenth-Century Poll Tax Returns: A Case for Further Dialectological Study of Late Medieval English

Abstract An important source of localisable Middle English dialectological data has recently become widely accessible, thanks to the published transcription of the 1377, 1379 and 1381 poll tax re-turns by Carolyn C. Fenwick (1998, 2001, 2005). As the only collection of onomastic data from the late fourteenth century with national coverage, the name forms in the records can be analysed to further our understanding of Middle English dialect distribution and change. As with many historical records, the poll tax returns are not without damage and so do not cover the country in its entirety, but provided their investigation is carried out with suitable methodological caution, they are of considerable dialectological value. Using the poll tax data, the distributions of two dialect features particular to the West Midlands (specifically rounding of /a/ to /o/ before nasals and /u/ in unstressed positions) are presented and compared with the patterns given for the same features in Kristensson’s (1987) dialect survey of data from 1290-1350. By identifying apparent discrepancies in dialect distribution from these datasets, which represent periods of no more than 100 years apart, it seems that the spread of certain Middle English dialect features may have changed considerably over a short space of time. Other possible reasons for these distribution differences are also suggested, highlighting the difficulties in comparing dialect data from differ-ent sets of records. Through this paper a case for further dialectological study, using the poll tax returns, is made, to add to the literature on Middle English dialect distribution and to improve our knowledge of ME dialect phonologies at the end of the fourteenth century.

"Pero se escondíamos como las ratas": syncretism in the reflexive paradigm in Spanish and Catalan

In this paper I provide a description of the reflexive syncretism found in some Spanish and Catalan neighbouring varieties. In these varieties, the 3rd person reflexive pronoun se can also appear with 1st person plural and 2nd person plural verbs. With dialectal data from the COSER, the ALPI and from works of other scholars I analyse the distribution of the syncretism in order to establish what person (the 1st plural or the 2nd plural) it affected first. I also analyse this syncretism in other Romance languages, in order to see if the person hierarchies previously proposed in the literature are confirmed by these varieties.

The lexeme верх: its phonetic and semantic features, and derivative resources in south-western dialects of Ukrainian

The lexeme верх: its phonetic and semantic features, and derivative resources in south-western dialects of Ukrainian
 The paper is an attempt to analyse the word верх ‘top’, and to construct a derivational nest for the root -верх-. The source material was excerpted from linguistic atlases, dialectal dictionaries, dialectal recordings, and other specialist studies. The focus lies primarily on the phonetic, semantic, and wordformative aspect. The analysed words display phonetic features that are typical for south-western dialects of Ukrainian, as well as their semantic and derivational variation. The resulting derivational nest is a complicated system of cognate words that cover four different levels of word formation (the first level is the base word верх). Dialectal data are provided in tables. The examples show that an analysis of the system of derivatives is able to: identify the most complete phonetic variants of words, find semantic variants of each derivative, compare UD derivatives of the root -верх- (-wierzch-) with PD, describe specific dialectal word-formative patterns which are not characteristic of the standard language, and to record an ancient phenomenon.

CAUSATIVE AND PERCEPTION CONSTRUCTIONS IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE: THE DIALECTAL DATA

ThThis paper deals with the infinitival complements of the causative and perception verbs in European Portuguese (EP) dialects. It is based on the corpus CORDIAL - SIN ( Syntax - Oriented Corpus o f Portuguese Dialects – cf. http://www.clul.ul.pt/en/researcher/225 - description - cordial - sin - syntax - oriented - corpus - of - portuguese - dialects) and its main goal is to describe these constructions and contrast them with the ones described for the standard EP. O n one hand, the constructions identified in the standard variety, such as 1) Inflected Infinitive, 2) Exceptional Case Marking (ECM), 3) Faire - Inf and 4) Gerundial Infinitive (only for perception verbs), can be found in Portuguese dialects ; b y contrast, ot her (dialectal) non identified constructions occur in the dialectal corpus. Additionally , it is also our aim to map these different constructions in an attempt to detect some geolinguistic variation to identify syntactic areas. In what concerns the standa rd variety of EP, the ECM construction seems to be more common. This trend however is not confirmed by this dialectal data. Surprisingly, ECM constructions (as well as the Inflected Infinitive ones) do not show up very often and are not spread over the who le territory. Given the small amount of available data, namely for ECM construction, a parallelism between some EP varieties and other Romance languages can be suggested. In fact, it seems that this construction is not accessible in some EP varieties like it happens in the other Romance languages. In contrast, the Faire-Inf construction, which is the most frequent construction in the corpus and it is spread over the continental territory, is not found on the