Courses

This course investigates the historical processes that have shaped the linguistic diversity of North America’s California region. During the course we will survey situations of contact and language diversification in this region at multiple spatiotemporal scales. We will focus first on contact within language families and the contributions of convergence and divergence in shaping dialect continua and language splits in multiple small language families of the region. On a broader and deeper scale, we will look at the evidence for macrofamily proposals in the region, along with the associated geographic and historical implications. Finally, we will examine regional linguistic features ascribed to long-term contact or prehistoric language spreads. Throughout we will consider how languages interact with one another, with culture, and potentially with the physical environment in their historical diversification and convergence processes.

This course will focus on the areal typology of the linguistically diverse mountain region of Pamir-Hindukush-Karakorum-Western Himalaya. More than 50 different languages belonging to six phylogenetic groups (Indic, Nuristani, Iranian, Turkic, Tibetan and Burushaski) are spoken in this region, thus providing an ideal setting for studying language contact and areality. Examples will be drawn from a recent - and still ongoing - research project with a strong component of collaborative research, involving local partners and speakers of 60 language varieties in three countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan and India). Apart from discussing a rich data set exemplifying various linguistic domains (phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon), some topics covered are: sampling, collaborative methods and elicitation, feature aggregation, and analytical challenges related to annotation, conflicting evidence and lack of historical data. The course is intended to be interactive and the students will be given opportunities to work with first-hand data.

In this course I will survey four quantitative approaches to dialectology and dialect typology:

1. Calculating linguistic distances between dialects and varieties using aggregate data analysis techniques (also known as dialectometry)

2. Typological profiling: drawing on naturalistic text corpora to calculate usage- and frequency-based measures of grammatical analyticity and syntheticity

3. Variation-based distance and similarity modeling (VADIS): defining linguistic similarity between dialects/varieties as being proportional to the extent to which language users make linguistic choices in similar ways

4. Creating complexity profiles: what is the extent to which some dialects/varieties are more complex than others?

Each session will feature a hands-on component where we engage in actual data analysis. The case studies that we will discuss are drawn from the domain of English-language dialectology.

This course will introduce recent work on the description and analysis of patterns of multilingualism within small communities. The emphasis will be on the diverse kinds of multilingualisms that are present within such communities and the insights that can be revealed by studying them using analytical approaches that are based on the examination of multilingual repertoires at the individual level. Topics to be considered will be: (i) the typologization of multilingualisms and what types of multilingualism are already attested in the existing literature, (ii) variation in multilingual knowledge at the individual level and the importance of social and spatial factors in explaining such variation, (iii) the role of deliberate language change in creating linguistic divergence among small, multilingual communities, and (iv) the relationship between small-scale multilingualism, large-scale areal patterns, and long-term processes of historical change.

Much of the discussion will focus on Sub-Saharan African settings, where societies at all levels have been characterized by widespread individual-level multilingualism for millennia. There will also be consideration of methodological issues, in particular the value of data from disciplines such as anthropology and geography to support the linguistic analysis of patterns of small-scale multilingualism.

Statistical inference about cross-linguistic trends is marred by the fact that languages are not independent data points. Rather, they languages might resemble each other due to common history or to language contact. Controlling for these factors requires advanced statistical techniques such as phylogenetic and spatial autocorrelation models. The course will give an introduction into these methods and their application to questions in linguistic typology.

The course will consist of two parts, one oriented to geospatial data management and visualization, and one on the use of statistical inference methods for this kind of data.

In the first part students are introduced to tools for creating typological and dialectological maps and atlases with the R package Lingtypology (Moroz 2017). The second part will consist of the implementation of geographic regression methods for explaining associations between geographic variables and linguistic features, such as Mantel tests and canonical redundancy analysis (RDA).

All methods will be demonstrated with real fieldwork data from the languages of Daghestan, Russia’s most linguistically dense area, but can be applied to any geographic region and language groups, so having your own data will be great.

Prerequisites (at least one):

• Basic knowledge of R (vectors, dataframes, bringing data to R);
• Completing a tutorial on basic data management in R, which will be provided in advance.

Computers in the classroom will have all software pre-installed. If you want to use your own computer, please have R and RStudio installed, together with the following packages: lingtypology, rmarkdown, ggplot2, mapedit, overpass, rdaTest, vegan, ape.

The course will consist of several classes devoted to different stages of building a linguistic corpus. First, we will focus on the preparation of corpus data and, in particular, the processes of transcribing and glossing. We will talk about both manual and automated methods of linguistic annotation and different software (ELAN, Praat, FLEx, etc.) by which it can be done. Second, the creation of the corpus interface will be discussed. Two platforms will be presented: the SpoCo (Spoken Corpora) platform, which is predominantly used for varieties of Slavic languages, and the Tsakorpus platform widely used for creation of spoken and written corpora of various languages of Russia and beyond.

Preliminary plan of the course:

Class 1. Preparation of linguistic data: transcribing and glossing in ELAN, FieldWorks (FLEx) and other tools (Alexandre Arkhipov)

Class 2. Preparation of linguistic data: known problems with FieldWorks (FLEx), morphological analyzers, corpus data from social media (Timofey Arkhangelsky)

Class 3. Publishing the corpus: SpoCo platform (Michał Woźniak, Ruprecht von Waldenfels)

Class 4. Publishing the corpus: Tsakorpus platform (Timofey Arkhangelsky)

Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) varieties form a vast cluster of dialects traditionally spoken around the modern borders of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. Following a series of (forced) migrations, a minority of NENA speakers settled in the Southern parts of Russia, including the village of Urmia, in Krasnodar Krai, where they constitute the ethnic majority.

The course will focus on the sociolinguistic as well as areal typological aspects of NENA varieties spoken in Russia. Sociolinguistically, the profile of NENA varieties spoken in Russia is extremely complex. Dialectal variegation is very high; interestingly, it is not straightforwardly conditioned by present-day geography, but reflects complex histories of individual relocations, marriages etc. This situation provides a challenge for traditional dialectology and calls for alternative sociolinguistic models.

Structurally, modern NENA varieties preserve their basic Neo-Aramaic profile, and their inherited Semitic features are unique against the background of other idioms spoken in Russia. These unusual features include templatic TAM morphology, queer patterns of alignment in the domain of verbal indexing, as well as complicated systems of nominal possession and complex sentences. However, many of the NENA grammatical features betray a long history of influences from a wide set of neighboring languages (including Iranian, Turkic, Armenian, Georgian and Russian).

Northwest Caucasian languages (Abkhaz, Abaza, Circassian and the extinct Ubykh) are famous for their phonological systems unusually combining a plethora of consonants with just two or three vowel phonemes as well as for their polysynthetic verbs, exhibiting a degree of complexity not found anywhere else in Eurasia. In my four lectures I shall present a general overview of the Northwest Caucasian family and offer a typologically and theoretically informed discussion of selected outstanding issues in their grammar, such as word-class flexibility and omnipredicativity, morphological and syntactic ergativity, polypersonalism and valency, organization of morphologically complex verbs and nominals, and peculiar patterns and uses of relativization.

The course provides an overview of Eastern Khanty, a Ugric language spoken in the central part of Western Siberia. The aim of the course is to explicate some of topics in the studies of Western Siberian languages from descriptive, general typological and areal perspectives. Starting with establishing the premise by reviewing the general context of the area (geography, ecology, genetic affiliations, individual languages, contact environments, sociolinguistic situations), the course will proceed by highlighting various topics in local micro-typological studies: possessive constructions, voice constructions and differential argument marking, contact-induced changes and grammatical convergence. The Ob-Yenisei linguistic area is a good example for local micro-typology studies, exploring individual phenomena across areally adjacent idioms of various degrees of genetic relationship (from closely related to unrelated), where degrees of intra-“language” variation are comparable to inter-“language” variation across (mostly) structurally similar languages.

A disclaimer: Although Eastern Khanty dialects feature frequently in the scholarship of Uralic historical linguistics and in proto-Uralic reconstructions, we will not be addressing this topic in detail within the course.

Tungusic languages are spread on a vast area of Siberia and the Russian Far East and in North-Eastern China. In the course, we are going to give a brief overview of Tungusic languages with a special focus on Nanai, Ulch and Uilta. Tungusic languages have been developing in intense contact among each other and with other languages of the area. The first lecture will be dedicated to the history and current distribution of Tungusic languages and peoples, different approaches to the internal classification of the Tungusic family with a special focus on so-called mixed languages Hezhe and Kili. We will also give a general typological profile of Tungusic. In the second lecture, we will describe historical contacts between Tungusic and other languages, a current sociolinguistic situation and the influence of the dominating Russian language on the modern Tungusic languages, which are endangered to a greater or lesser extent. We will also give information on current documentation projects on Tungusic languages. The third and fourth lectures will focus on some grammatical features of Tungusic, which are of interest in a wider areal and / or crosslinguistic perspective: a variable affix order within possessive noun paradigms, the destinative case, rich and heterogeneous negation systems, peculiar verbal affixes, including ‘again’-markers and markers of associated motion, ideophones, clitics with an unstable linear position etc.).

Andic languages form a branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian (East Caucasian) language family. It comprises eight languages which remain largely unwritten and underdescribed, and are spoken by a few thousand people each. In their morphosyntax, Andic languages reproduce some typical features of the Nakh-Daghestanian family (e.g. ergative case alignment, pervasive gender agreement, non-finite subordination, etc.), but they also possess a number of cross-linguistically peculiar structures that we would like to discuss. During the course we will provide  a general overview of the group and zoom in on the following phenomena:

• Agreement, which in case of Andic includes not only gender agreement, but also dedicated strategies of number agreement (e.g. in Andi), dedicated animacy agreement that intersects with the gender system (in Botlikh) and emerging person agreement (in Northern Akhvakh) 

• Finiteness and non-finiteness, with special reference to syncretism between converbs or participles with finite verb forms, and the use of special clitic markers in subordinate contexts 

• Tense and aspect systems, including evidentiality distinctions in the past tense, the domain of future/prospectives, and unusual grammaticalizations like the rise of a  “counterexpectation present” or the use of the verb ‘find’ as auxiliary

• Clitics, including the problem of clitic/affix status of attributivizers, the tense-based distribution of quotatives and a number of other particles and the phenomenon of endoclisis in negative verb forms

Passive voice is a typologically widespread phenomenon whereby the Agent participant of an event is demoted from the Subject position; this demotion is often accompanied by a promotion of some other participant to Subject. Despite the large body of theoretical, typological and language-particular research on passive constructions, little is known about the sources of grammaticalization and further development of derivational passives. The borrowing patterns of passives are likewise underinvestigated. 

Passive in Uralic is peculiar in several respects. First, non-participial passives are found almost exclusively in Eastern Uralic languages located in the Siberian part of Russia (Ob-Ugric and Northern Samoyedic). Second, passives in these languages originate from different diachronic sources and yet appear to converge in their semantic, syntactic and discourse properties. Third, together with verbal conjugation and nominal possession, passive constitutes a highly complex and understudied system of information structure management with no parallels among other languages of Northern Eurasia.

This course will focus on the areal and evolutionary aspects of passive constructions in Ob-Ugric and Northern Samoyedic languages, first of all in Khanty, Mansi and Nganasan. The following topics will be covered:

• General introduction into the area 

• Functional and areal diversity of derivational passives

• Adversative uses of passive constructions

• Diachronic development of passive constructions in Uralic