Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution

This is a working paper of an ongoing research on West Polesian (WP) or Zaharoddzian Morphology, in which special attention is being paid to the marginal members of the paradigm. The aim of the following paper is to point out possible questions for a future research on the vocative across WP varieties. The departure point will be a contrast of the existing old-fashion literature with data from recent fieldwork. After mentioning all the morphological strategies observed up-to-date, two questions will be proposed: 1-the cause of the resilience of some strategies on some nouns over others; 2-and the properties underneath each of those which motivate the choice of one form over another, when there is apparent free-variation.

West Polesian is an understudied Eastern Slavonic variety spoken between Belarus, Ukraine and Poland. The speech community has been geographically isolated for centuries, contributing to the preservation of older forms of Slavonic, but also the development of innovations. Nowadays it is surrounded by several closely related and standardised varieties that cause interference. This work provides a typological approach to the particularities that distinguish West Polesian morphology and syntax from its neighbours. Besides documenting and describing the morphology and syntax, I deal with theoretical questions that arise in the light of the data collected through fieldwork. I devote most of my attention to three phenomena. The first one is the adnumerative form, a morphosyntactic form that only appears when a noun is headed by specific numerals. I start by describing numerals and numeral phrases in West Polesian, and I narrow the focus to the interactions with nouns. The morphosyntactic nature of the adnumerative is complicated: it displays properties of both case and number values, but neither of them fully. Using insights from Canonical Typology I give an analysis of its morphology, syntax and the canonical behaviour of features and values. The second one is suppletion, which
strongly characterises the adnumerative cells of the noun paradigms. I use the suppletive nouns ‘year’ and ‘person’ to see what they can teach us about suppletion in general. Still within the framework of Canonical Typology, I show how these nouns approach the canonical instance of suppletion and how they have the most complex paradigms in the
Slavonic family. And the third one is the surpassingly large inventory of constructions West Polesian has developed to express futurity. I evaluate whether they are all legitimate (i.e. grammaticalised) constructions; and if so, what is their origin and relation to other future tense constructions in Europe.

Data replicability and transparency are becoming a standard in Science and it is slowly reaching Linguistics. As field linguists, we need to be reflecting on ways for implementing these principles, whilst being aware of all the privacy, consent and ethical issues, which are also part of our work. For these reasons, I would like to share with any field researcher working with human participants the template I use for my grammar elicitation sessions. It is very simple, and probably there are more detailed versions available out there. However, its simplicity and systematicity motivate me to fill it in every day, before and after each session. Apart from keeping the data organised and easily tracing its origins, it is intended to be a space for reflecting on one’s performance as a researcher and journal our progress. Most of the templates disregard the human dimension, yet it sometimes has a big influence on the development of the session and the data we obtain as a result. It provides some evidence if we have to make decisions about the reliability or acceptability of different forms in the future. It also sets a basis for acknowledging our possible flaws and inaccuracies in the data for other people checking it (or even ourselves when we review it in 6, 8,… months).

This article presents an overview of the sociolinguistic situation and typological profile of Chamalal, a Nakh-Dagestanian language of the Andic group spoken in Dagestan and Chechnya (Russia). It discusses how the language is retreating under the influence of Russian, with emigration from rural communities in the mountains to larger cities being a major factor. It concludes with a summary of existing resources and current work on the language.

In Slavic languages, as in many other languages, the noun for 'person' has a suppletive paradigm. Yet, as this study shows, in West Polesian (East Slavic) the noun 'person' is a typological outlier not only within Slavic but also cross-linguistically because it combines three stems with a very complex distribution. This paper looks for any regularities in the distribution of these suppletive stems, their cognates among other Slavic languages and how speakers use them in free texts. This survey provides novel insights into suppletion. First, suppletion involving more than two stems is typologically uncommon but the West Polesian noun 'person' combines three. Second, against any expectation of regularity for the sake of learnability, free-text data show that speakers do not distribute the stems homogeneously. Third, notwithstanding the diglossic situation in Western Polesie, the inter-and intra-speaker variation in the choice of stem does not seem particularly conditioned by sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age or social class. In sum, this corpus survey of the suppletive stems of 'person' in West Polesian and Slavic illustrates a rare case in morphological typology where there is a three-stem suppletion combined with overabundance and a vast amount of variation across speakers.

This paper discusses levels of access in language archives and their implications for assessment. In the absence of well-established criteria, part of the evaluation of language archives is often based on accessibility; roughly, the more "unrestricted" or "open access" content, the better the archive. In this paper, I argue that whilst open access may be indicative of good scientific practices, such criteria cannot be extrapolated to documentary linguistics. I start by explaining the differences between those concepts. Then I discuss the dialectic tension in which language depositors frequently find themselves. On the one hand, archives and grant agencies ask them to archive as much as possible with unrestricted access while also gathering a corpus as "naturalistic" and diverse as possible in terms of content, genres, speakers, and so forth. On the other hand, depositors are expected to behave ethically, which involves restricting access to certain materials. I move on to lesser-discussed cases illustrating how ethical decisions concerning accessibility are strongly bound to the needs and situations of the specific communities at a specific time. I finish by proposing new evaluation criteria, which do not penalise depositors for behaving ethically in situations out of their control, and a summary of the discussion.

In this paper, I study the nature of ADNUMERATIVE or NUMERATIVE forms; i.e. morphologically dedicated inflectional forms that can only be used with numerals or quantifiers (e.g. Russian dva cas a 'two o'clock' vs. [GEN SG] c asa). ADNUMERATIVES are cross-linguistically very rare; yet they raise some interesting theoretical discussions. This work is based on the framework of Canonical Typology, which assumes the existence of a handful of discrete and cross-linguistically recurrent morphosyntactic features. Nevertheless, ADNUMERA-TIVE forms present a challenge to that distribution, because, as I argue, ADNUMERATIVES lie between CASE and NUMBER values. This might well represent a theoretically undesirable scenario, and thus, be diachronically unstable. However, the data I have gathered prove that there are ADNUMERATIVE forms that have survived in this penumbra for centuries and one can also adduce more evidence of diachronically stable cross-linguistic phenomena between two feature values (e.g. the ANTERIOR). Therefore, I propose that this theoretical space may not be as dark previously depicted and I ask questions for further exploration.

This paper provides data on Mwakai, a previously undescribed language of Papua New Guinea. It offers information concerning the language's social context, its speakers, and its level of endangerment, as well as description of various aspects of the grammar. Although not a comprehensive grammatical description, the present paper is intended to make more widely available some basic information concerning this severely endangered and otherwise undescribed language.

This paper offers a sketch of the phonology of Ambakich (also known as Aion [aew]), a Papuan language of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. Ambakich is a member of the Keram language family. The paper is mainly concerned with segmental phonology. Since its purpose is to present basic data on an otherwise undescribed language, the paper also provides background information on the language and its speakers, as well as information on its closest relative, Ap Ma. Two appendices are included: an Ambakich word list of 630 items and an Ap Ma word list of 602 items.

This study analyzes the numeral systems of Austronesian and Papuan languages, investigating their areal distribution and considering their most likely ancestral states. The presence or absence of different methods of numeration has often been ascribed to contact-induced change. This can certainly be seen in scholarship pertaining to Melanesia, where Austronesian languages probably first came into contact with Papuan languages around 3,500 years ago. Indeed, since Proto-Austronesian is reconstructed as having employed a decimal (base-10) numeral system (with reflexes occurring throughout the Austronesian world), the presence of quinary (base-5) numeral systems in the Austronesian languages of Melanesia has commonly been attributed to contact with Papuan languages. Relying on a typological survey of 1,825 languages, this paper argues that highly conventionalized quinary systems were probably rare in Melanesia prior to the arrival of Austronesian languages. Rather, it was more likely that Austronesian speakers spread lexicalized quinary systems to Papuan groups, not the other way around. In making this argument, the paper stresses that, while numeration may be something that is linguistically encoded in a systematic fashion, it may also be realized as a cultural feature without strongly conventionalized lexicalized expressions.

This book is a grammatical description of Ulwa, a Papuan language spoken by about 600 people living in four villages in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Ulwa belongs to the Keram language family. This grammatical description is based on a corpus of recorded texts and elicited sentences that were collected during a total of about twelve months of research carried out between 2015 and 2018. The book aims to detail as many aspects of Ulwa grammar as possible, including matters of phonology, morphology, and syntax. It also contains a lexicon with over 1,400 entries and three fully glossed and translated texts. The book was written with a typologically oriented audience in mind, and should be of interest to Papuan specialists as well as to general linguists. It may be useful to those working on the history or classification of Papuan languages as well as those conducting typological research on any number of grammatical features.

This paper provides a sketch of the phonetics and phonology of Tomoip, an Austronesian language of New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Tomoip does not appear to be closely related to the other Austronesian languages of New Britain. Furthermore, it has been in contact with multiple non-Austronesian languages of the island. These two facts suggest that the language may have had a particularly interesting history. As the first publication dedicated to Tomoip, this paper is intended to serve as a starting point for further description, analysis, and classification of the language.

This paper provides description and analysis of the morphology of Tomoip, an Austronesian language spoken on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea. The nominal morphology of Tomoip includes clitics and affixes that designate grammatical number, narrow the semantics of the noun, and indicate possession, among other functions. The verbal morphology includes clitics and affixes that index subject arguments, encode mood, and signal or increase valency. This paper also provides description of adjectives, numerals, quantifiers, pronouns, and several function words and particles in the language.

Numerals are words that refer to exact quantities. In many languages, numerals comprise a large, productive lexical class—a rather unusual one in that they have a conventional order and can be constructed from members of their own class in a cyclical fashion. Numeral systems vary with respect to the bases they use for constructing complex numerals (e.g., base-5, base-10), as well as with respect to the arithmetic operations employed in such constructions (e.g., addition, multiplication, subtraction). Like other lexical classes, numerals can also be analyzed in terms of their morphosyntactic behavior within phrases and clauses.