Anthropological Linguistics (Languages And Linguistics)

Conceptualizing and Conventionalizing Style

by Chris Taylor

A current bibliography of Turkic etymologies 3 (1998-1999 et addenda)

by Marek Stachowski

Review: Pańkin V. M. (ed.:) Kontaktologičeskij ènciklopedičeskij slovar'-spravočnik

by Marek Stachowski

Siberian languages in contact, 2: The nonal counting system in Siberia and Russian devjanosto ‘90’

by Marek Stachowski

RESEARCH PLAN: A School Ethnography: Documenting the process of Standard Language Ideology construction in the classroom and teachers’ values regarding linguistic diversity pedagogy.

by Rebecca Campbell

Palaeolithic Continuity Refugium Theory: A New Approach to the Linguistic Prehistory of Europe. Azken Glaziazio Handiko Babeslekua eta Euskara. Bergara, 2011-10-19

by Roslyn Frank

The following .pdf is a copy of the Power Point presentation that I gave on October 19, 2011, in the Irizar Jauregiko Aretoa, Bergara, Euskal Herria. It is a bilingual presentation. Its title in Basque is Azken Glaziazio Handiko Babeslekua eta Euskara while in Spanish it is “El Refugio de la Última Glaciación y el Euskara”. And the English translation would be “The Last Glacial Maximum: The Franco-Cantabrian Refuge and the Basque Language”.

The talk is an overview of the data, genetic, archaeological and linguistic, which support the Paleolithic Continuity... more The talk is an overview of the data, genetic, archaeological and linguistic, which support the Paleolithic Continuity Refuguim Theory (PCRT) of European prehistory. More specifically, based on the findings of genetics (studies of Y-chromosome and mtDNA), the following hypothesis has been brought forward for testing. It argues that during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the hunter-gatherers of Europe retreated to the south of Europe, settling into three refugia, one in the Balkans, one in the Ukraine and a third in the Franco-Cantabrian zone, a geographic location where the Basque people and their language have survived.

According to the results of various teams of geneticists, at the end of the LGM along with the warming of the climate that ensued, the hunter-gatherers inhabiting this refuge slowly moved north and westward to take advantage of the food resources in the newly opened territories. Studies of Basque DNA (paternally transmitted Y-chromosome and maternally transmitted mtDNA) have shown significant similarities between Basques and populations inhabiting present and former Celtic-speaking zones along the Atlantic Façade. Furthermore, various haplogroups found among the Basques show up in other populations of European descent, leading the geneticists to argue that this situation might best be explained by positing out-migration from this zone over a period of several thousands of years, starting at the end of the LGM.

Moreover, it follows that members of Basque-speaking population of this zone might well trace their descent from the same populations that began to move out of this geographical region as the ice sheets retreated.

In 2006, a multidisciplinary team of researchers –composed of geographers, archaeologists and geneticists, namely, Dr. William Davies, Dr. Paul Pettitt, Dr. Lee Hazelwood and Dr. Martin Richards coordinated by Dr. Clive Gamble– described the situation this way:

“A major population expansion occurred in Western Europe during the Late Glacial (15-11.5ka CAL PB) as the OIS2 ice sheets retreated and unglaciated areas in the north became available for re-settlement. Phlylogeographic analysis using molecular evidence assigns 60% of the European mitochondrial DNA lineages (Richards et al. 2000), and an even higher proportion of West European Y-chromosome lineages (Semino et al. 2000), to a population bottleneck prior to an expansion from southwest to northern Europe (Torroni et al. 1998; Torroni et al. 2001; Achilli et al. 2004; Rootsi et al. 2004; Pereira et al. 2005)” (Gamble et al. 2006: 1-2).

The key question posed by the research concerns the language that was being spoken by the hunter-gatherer populations when they moved out of this refuge. Gamble et al. was the first team of researchers to pose this question explicitly:

“The growing evidence that the major signal in European genetic lineages predates the Neolithic, however, creates serious problems for the agriculturalist perspective. If western Europe was, to a large extent, repopulated from northeast Iberia [Franco-Cantabrian zone] then, since place-name evidence suggests that people in this source region spoke languages related to Basque before the advent of Indo-European, the obvious corollary would seem to be that the expanding human groups should have been Basque speakers” (Gamble et al. 2005: 209).

The presentation lays out the methodology has been developed to test the validity of the corollary that Gamble et al. set forth in 2005. The latter section of the .pdf discusses the methodology and applies it to a concrete data set. The approach is a comparative one. It takes morpho-syntactic elements classified as Proto-Indo-European and compares them to what appear to be their counterparts in Euskara. Tests are then applied to determine the nature of the lineage of the two sets of morphemes in question. The PIE elements are ones recognized as common across IE languages and, therefore, as constituting the most archaic strata of these languages. However, until now IE research model has not sought to explain the origin of the elements themselves.

Keeping in mind the results of the genetic studies cited above, the Basque language becomes a possible candidate for additional comparative work. Moreover, by focusing on reconstructing morphemic lineages, not languages, the PCRT approach to the data allows for a more fine-grained analysis of the linguistic evidence.

Selected Referencias:
• Achilli, A. et al. 2004. The molecular dissection of mtDNA haplogroup H confirms that the Franco-Cantabrian glacial refuge was a major source for the European gene pool. American Journal of Human Genetics 75 (5): 910-918.
• Brugmann, K 1891. A Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages. Vol. II. Morphology (Stem-formation and inflexion). Part 1. New York: B. Westermann & Co. http://books.google.com/books?id=eWsKAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=brugmann+%22comparative+grammar+of+the+indo+germanic+languages%22#PPR2,M1
• Cardoso Martín, S. 2008. Diversidad del genoma mitocondrial en poblaciones autóctonas de la Cornisa Cantábrica: Huellas de la recolonización postglacial de Europa. Gasteiz: University of the Basque Country.
• Cardoso Martín, S. et al. 2011. The maternal legacy of Basques in Northern Navarre: New Insights into the Mitocondrial DNA diversity of the Franco-Cantabria Area. Journal of Physical Anthrpology 145 (3): 480-488.
• Dupanloup, I., et al. 2004. Estimating the impact of prehistoric admixture on the genome of Europeans. Molecular Biology and Evolution 21 (7): 1361-1372.
• Frank, R. M. 2008. Palaeolithic Continuity Refugium Theory (PCRT): Hamalau and its linguistic and cultural relatives. Part 1. Insula 4 (December): 61-131. Cagliari, Sardinia.
• Frank, R. M. in prep. Rethinking the Linguistic Landscape of Europe: The Indo-European "Homeland" in light of Palaeolithic Continuity Refugium Theory (PCRT).
• Gamble, C. et al. 2005. The archaeological and genetic foundations of the European population during the Late Glacial: Implications for 'agricultural thinking'. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 15 (2): 193-223.
• Gamble, C. et al. 2006. The Late Glacial ancestry of Europeans: Combining genetic and archaeological evidence. Documenta Praehistorica 33: 1-10. http://arheologija.ff.uni-lj.si/documenta/pdf33/gamble33.pdf.
• Haspelmath, M. 2007. Pre-established categories don't exist: Consequences for language description and typology. Linguistic Typology 11 (1): 119-132.
• Haspelmath, M. 2010. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in cross-linguistic studies. Language 86 (3): 663-687.
• Oppenheimer, S. 2006. The Origins of the British - A Genetic Detective Story. Constable and Robinson.
• Tovar A. 1954. El sufijo -ko: Indoeuropeo y circumindoeuropeo. Archivo glottologico italiano 39: 56-64.
• Tovar A. 1970a. The Basque language and the Indo-European spread to the West. In: George Cardona (ed.), Papers Presented at the Third Indo-European Conference at the University of Pennsylvania: Indo-European and Indo-Europeans, 267-278. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Torroni, A., et al. 2001. A signal, from human mtDNA, of postglacial recolonization in Europe. American Journal of Human Genetics. 69:844-852.
• Wilson, J. et al. 2001. Genetic evidence of different male and female roles during cultural transitions in the British Isles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 98(9): 5078-5083.

Revitalisation linguistique: Discours, mythe et idéologie. Approche critique de mouvements de revitalisation en Provence et en Ecosse

by James Costa

Costa, J. (2010). Revitalisation linguistique: Discours, mythe et idéologie. Approche critique de mouvements de revitalisation en Provence et en Ecosse. Ph.D. dissertation: Université de Grenoble.

Language Revitalisation: Discourse, Myths and Ideologies
A Critical Approach to Revitalisation Movements in... more Language Revitalisation: Discourse, Myths and Ideologies
A Critical Approach to Revitalisation Movements in Provence and Scotland
This thesis seeks to explore theoretical and practical aspects of language revitalisation (LR), an emerging field of investigation which has been described as under-­‐theorised. We approach the question from a sociolinguistic and anthropological point of view, informed by fieldwork in Provence and Scotland, where both Provençal (or Occitan) and Scots are construed as being under threat. This thesis, which treats LR as a social phenomenon arising in contexts of cultural contact, comprises three parts (seven chapters) organised as follows:
Part One explores how the question of LR arose from works on language death in descriptive linguistics, but also from works in sociolinguistics and anthropology. It then examines the way in which LR is conceptualised in academic literature, particularly in sociolinguistics and documentary linguistics. This part concludes that while works on LR have focused on language, much work needs to be conducted on social actors in order to understand this growing and worldwide phenomenon.
Part Two links works on LR with more ancient findings on cultural revitalisation movements in American anthropology, and suggests links with LR in order to propose a conceptual framework for the description and analysis of LR movements. This framework includes central notions such as mazeway, and adds the categories of myth and ideology as central notions for the understanding of LR movements.
Part Three explores how this conceptual framework can be used to describe and interpret some aspects of language revitalisation movements in Provence and Scotland, looking at how LR is construed in the discourses of language experts, activists, ordinary speakers and pupils. It then looks at how discourses circulate in two schools, which represent particular sites of LR in which orders of discourse and social practice meet.
In our conclusion, we suggest links between current works on language revitalisation theory and globalisation studies. Contemporary LR movements can indeed represent ways of dealing with the uncertainty caused by the increasingly globalised world in which we live

”Das bin ich...“: Corporeality and Early German Language Education in (Slovak) Kindergarten

by Ondrej Kaščák

Co-authored with Branislav Pupala and Iveta Kovalcikova
Published in Human Affairs: Postdisciplinary Humanities & Social Sciences Quarterly, 2012, 22 (1): 56-68

This paper, based on ethnographically obtained data, discusses German language acquisition at an early age: the... more This paper, based on ethnographically obtained data, discusses German language acquisition at an early age: the discovery of the interconnection between language and corporeality is the key component of the analysis based on videostudies. The body—conceived as an intermediary and content element of education, becomes an essential base for foreign language acquisition. This will be documented by tangible data and subsequent theoretical analysis with respect to relevant terminology of cultural anthropology (Körper and Leib). The principle of corporeality is further used as a means of perceiving German language education in the sense of the so called language propaedeutic concept and as a means of the legitimisation of particular qualification and the role of foreign language teachers in preschool institutions.

Names That Show Time: Turkish Jews as "Strangers" and the Semiotics of Reclassification

by Marcy Brink-Danan

"Aviáu enveja de transmetre tres causas": transmission familiale de l'occitan et idéologies de militants en Provence

by James Costa

Costa J. (2010) "Aviáu enveja de transmetre tres causas" : transmission familiale de l’occitan et idéologies de militants en Provence Travaux Neuchâtelois de Linguistique 52: 93-107.

(the copy I uploaded is an almost final version. I will upload the final version later, when the next issue of Tranel is out)

This article wishes to explore the way in which both language and language transmission in the home are conceptualised... more This article wishes to explore the way in which both language and language transmission in the home are conceptualised among language activists. While it might seem obvious they would be most likely to pass the language on to their own children, this appears not to be such a frequent enterprise. Looking at several narratives collected among language activists in Provence in 2009, I wish to analyse what ideologies lie behind the decisions to use the language as a medium of everyday life within the family – or not. What seems to emerge is the absence of consensus about what 'transmission' means, and this may be due to the recent emergence of the question among militants in Provence. I finally suggest that the very term "transmission" is a metaphor which may in fact preclude certain attitudes. Those might in turn be detrimental to other forms of minority language socialisation in the home.

Disagreement, Confusion, Disapproval, Turn Elicitation and Floor Holding: Actions as Accomplished by Ellipsis Marks-Only Turns and Blank Turns in Quasisynchronous Chats

by Kenneth Keng Wee Ong

Published in Discourse Studies, 13(2), 211-234, April 2011. Please access the paper at http://dis.sagepub.com/content/13/2/211.abstract

This study evidences turn actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns as employed in quasisynchronous... more This study evidences turn actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns as employed in quasisynchronous chats that are not discussed in prior literature. A brief introduction to the research background of ellipsis marks in online chats is followed by a description of the data collected before delving into the actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns. Data was culled from multi-party chats among tertiary students during a critical reasoning class. A Conversation Analysis-informed approach is applied in this paper to analyze the preference organization of elliptical turns that illustrates responses signaling disagreement, confusion and disapproval besides initial actions of eliciting responses and holding the floor. More than punctuation marks or paralinguistic restitution of silences, their interpersonal meaningfulness in sequential context and differentness/similarity vis-à-vis temporal silences are demonstratively shown in microscopic and interpretive description of chat excerpts.

Ethnogeographical categories in English and Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara

by Helen Bromhead

Published in 'Language Sciences' Volume 33, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 58-75

This study examines the contrastive lexical semantics of a selection of landscape terms in English and the Australian... more This study examines the contrastive lexical semantics of a selection of landscape terms in English and the Australian Aboriginal language, Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara. It argues that languages and cultures categorize the geographical environment in diverse ways. Common elements of classification are found across the languages, but it is argued that different priorities are given to these factors. Moreover, the study finds that there are language-specific aspects of the landscape terms, often motivated by culture and land use. Notably, this study presents ethnogeographical concepts as being anchored in an anthropocentric perspective, based on human vision and experience in space. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) technique of semantic analysis is used throughout, and it is argued that this methodology provides an effective tool in the exploration of ethnogeographical categories.

Avoiding their names - avoiding their eyes. How Kambaata women respect their in-laws.

by Yvonne Treis

Published 2005 in: Anthropological Linguistics 47, 3: 292-320

In the Ethiopian language Kambaata, a special type of name taboo (ballishsha) is traditionally practiced by married... more In the Ethiopian language Kambaata, a special type of name taboo (ballishsha) is traditionally practiced by married women as a sign of respect towards their in-laws. According to this tradition, which is now on the verge of extinction, in-laws' names and any word starting with the same syllable as their names have to be avoided. This article investigates the different conventionalized and individual strategies that are employed to replace the tabooed words as well as the cultural and social contexts in which these strategies are embedded.

A single document containing three published articles: (1) “Recovering European ritual bear hunts: A comparative study of Basque and Sardinian ursine carnival performances”; (2) “Evidence in Favor of the Palaeolithic Continuity Refugium Theory (PCRT): Hamalau and its linguistic and cultural relatives, Part 1”; (3) “Evidence in Favor of the Palaeolithic Continuity Refugium Theory (PCRT): Hamalau and its linguistic and cultural relatives, Part. 2.”

by Roslyn Frank

A document containing three papers in the series “Hunting the European Sky Bears”:

Frank, Roslyn M. 2008. “Recovering European ritual bear hunts: A comparative study of Basque and Sardinian ursine carnival performances.” Insula (Cagliari, Sardinia) 3: 41-97.

Frank, Roslyn M. 2008. "Evidence in Favor of the Palaeolithic Continuity Refugium Theory (PCRT): Hamalau and its linguistic and cultural relatives." Part 1. Insula (Cagliari, Sardinia) 4: 91-131.

Frank, Roslyn M. 2009. "Evidence in Favor of the Palaeolithic Continuity Refugium Theory (PCRT): Hamalau and its linguistic and cultural relatives." Part 2. Insula (Cagliari, Sardinia) 5: 89-133.

The fourth paper in this particular set of articles will appear shortly:

Frank, Roslyn M. 2011. “A tripartite study of ‘seventh son’ healers and Hamalau: The Basque salutariyua, the French marcou and Italian maramao.” Insula (Cagliari, Sardinia) 6. 40 pg. manuscript.

On constructing a research model for historical cognitive linguistics (HCL): Some theoretical considerations

by Roslyn Frank

Full citation reference:

Frank, Roslyn M. & Nathalie Gontier. 2010 "On constructing a research model for historical cognitive linguistics (HCL): Some theoretical considerations." In Winter, M.E., Tissari, H. & Allan, K. (eds). Historical cognitive linguistics, pp. 31-69. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. (Book series: Cognitive Linguistics Research, nr 47)

This paper is the uncorrected proof.

This paper examines how historical cognitive linguistics can benefit methodologically through the application of the... more This paper examines how historical cognitive linguistics can benefit methodologically through the application of the notion of language as a complex adaptive system. The idea that languages are complex adaptive systems (CAS) was introduced initially in computational evolutionary linguistics, a discipline that was and remains inspired by biological, systems theoretical approaches to the evolution of life. Here the way that the CAS approach serves to replace older historical linguistic notions of languages as organisms and languages as species is explained as well as how the CAS approach can be generalized to encompass linguistic domains. Specifically, an overview of the CAS approach and its implementation in linguistics is provided with an emphasis on stigmergic, embodied, usage-based and socio-culturally situated language studies in particular.

Keywords: complex adaptive systems, evolutionary linguistics, historical and computational linguistics, language evolution, stigmergy, social cognitive linguistics, distributed and situated cognition, genes/ memes/linguemes, usage-based models

A Dictionary of Western Mono

by Gregory Reinhardt

On Spanish Loans In Western Mono

by Gregory Reinhardt

Co-authored with Paul V. Kroskrity; International Journal of American Linguistics (1985), 51:231-237.

A Note on Navajo Interlingual Puns

by Anthony Webster

Published in International Journal of American Linguistics. 76 (2): 289-298.

A Note on Plains Apache Warpath Vocabulary

by Anthony Webster

Published in International Journal of American Linguistics. 74(2): 257-261.

Coyote Poems

by Anthony Webster

Published in American Indian Culture and Research Journal