This book provides a pioneering introduction to heritage languages and their speakers, written by one of the founders of this new field Using examples from a wide range of languages, it covers all the main components of grammar, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, and shows easy familiarity with approaches ranging from formal grammar to typology, from sociolinguistics to child language acquisition and other relevant aspects of psycholinguistics The book offers analysis of resilient and vulnerable domains in heritage languages, with a special emphasis on recurrent structural properties that occur across multiple heritage languages It is explicit about instances where, based on our current knowledge, we are unable to reach a clear decision on a particular claim or analytical point, and therefore provides a much-needed resource for future research

Heritage Languages and their Speakers

Recent History UNESCO's active involvement in fostering the world's language diversity 2 is very recent, but builds upon initiatives of the last two decades. In the 1980s, UNESCO began to highlight language diversity as a crucial element of the cultural diversity of the world. Under the leadership of the late Stephen Wurm, UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage Section launched the programme of the Red Book of Languages in Danger of disappearing. At the time when UNESCO undertook a new project 'Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity' in 1997, language as such was not included. By September 2001, however, participants at the International Jury for the Proclamation of Masterpieces recommended that UNESCO establish an endangered language programme in addition to the Masterpieces Project. In the same year the 31 st Session of the General Conference of UNESCO stressed the importance of linguistic diversity by adopting the Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity and in its action plan.) it became clear that UNESCO and endangered language advocates share the same goal: fostering language diversity. At the conference, Noriko Aikawa (the then Director of the Interna-and Akira Yamamoto agreed that it was high time to initiate a call for coordination and cooperation of language advocates, linguists and their respective organizations. UNESCO has begun a new phase to address the issue of language endangerment. A group of linguists and language advocates worked in collaboration with UNESCO from November 2001 and March 2003 to formulate ways of assessing language vitality and produced a set of guidelines that are given below. One crucial point which is emphasized in this document was for all those involved to work hand in hand with the endangered language communities towards documentation, maintenance and revitalization of their languages. Any work in endangered language communities must be reciprocal and collaborative. In March 2003 UNESCO organized, together with the Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, an International Expert Meeting as part of the programme on 'Safeguarding of Endangered Languages.' 4 The goal was to define and reinforce UNESCO's role in supporting the world's endangered languages; participants included members of endangered language communities, linguists and NGOs (non-governmental organizations). Specifically the meeting aimed to: (1) formulate a definition of language endangerment and establish criteria to assess language endangerment (which resulted in 2 acceptance of the document 'Language Vitality and Endangerment'); (2) review the state of languages in various regions of the world; (3) …

Language Vitality and Endangermentについて

A Typology of Antipassives, with Special Reference to Mayan.

Polysynthesis presupposes the existence of ‘words’, a domain or unit of phonology and syntax that is extremely variable within and across languages: what behaves as a ‘word’ with respect to one phonological or syntactic rule or constraint may not behave as such with respect to other rules or constraints. Here we develop a system of variables that allows cataloguing all verb-based domains in a language in a boom-up fashion and then determining any potential convergence of domains in an empirical way. We apply the system to case studies of Mapudungung and Chintang. ese confirm earlier observations that polysynthetic languages do not operate with unified units of type ‘word’ in either phonology or syntax.

The 'word' in polysynthetic languages: phonological and syntactic challenges

By force of nature, every bit of spoken language is produced at a particular speed. However, this speed is not constant-speakers regularly speed up and slow down. Variation in speech rate is influenced by a complex combination of factors, including the frequency and predictability of words, their information status, and their position within an utterance. Here, we use speech rate as an index of word-planning effort and focus on the time window during which speakers prepare the production of words from the two major lexical classes, nouns and verbs. We show that, when naturalistic speech is sampled from languages all over the world, there is a robust cross-linguistic tendency for slower speech before nouns compared with verbs, both in terms of slower articulation and more pauses. We attribute this slowdown effect to the increased amount of planning that nouns require compared with verbs. Unlike verbs, nouns can typically only be used when they represent new or unexpected information; otherwise, they have to be replaced by pronouns or be omitted. These conditions on noun use appear to outweigh potential advantages stemming from differences in internal complexity between nouns and verbs. Our findings suggest that, beneath the staggering diversity of grammatical structures and cultural settings, there are robust universals of language processing that are intimately tied to how speakers manage referential information when they communicate with one another.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/22/5720.full.pdf

Nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages

A universal cue for grammatical categories in the input to children: frequent frames

This study deals with two syntactic alternation patterns found in two languages of Nepal: differential object marking (DOM) in Nepali (Indo-European > Indo-Aryan) and differential object indexing (DOI) linked to differential agent marking in Chintang (Tibeto-Burman > Kiranti). The aim of the study is to conduct in-depth analyses of these two phenomena based on corpus annotations and including necessary methodological innovations, as well as to compare them in order to reach conclusions about alternations conditioned by properties of objects in general. The investigation of Nepali DOM showed that while this phenomenon is formally simple, it is functionally highly complex. It is conditioned by a plethora of properties of the object, many of which had not been noticed before, such as animacy, specificity, quantifiability, topicality, part of speech, focus, affectedness, and role ambiguity. A rule-based approach can neither cover the full range of variation found in this area in natural language nor can it model DOM in a conceptually sound way. For these reasons, a probabilistic analysis was conducted in the form of logistic regression and shown to be superior to the rule-based analysis. By contrast, Chintang DOI turned out to be functionally simple in being basically conditioned by a single factor (specificity) but to be formally intertwined in complex ways with many other areas of morphosyntax such as valency classes, non-finite clauses, raising, and marking of aspect. In addition, it could be shown that quantifiability is a pre-condition for specificity and that these two properties interact in various ways in Chintang. Most of the differences between Nepali DOM and Chintang DOI can be traced back to fundamental differences between case marking and agreement. The general picture emerging is that the main function of DOM is to mark objects with unusual properties, whereas DOI marks objects that are easy to track in discourse.

https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/85666/1/main.pdf

Object-conditioned differential marking in Chintang and Nepali

Interlinear glossing is a type of annotation of morphosyntactic categories and crosslinguistic lexical correspondences that allows linguists to analyse sentences in languages that they do not necessarily speak. Automatising this annotation is necessary in order to provide glossed corpora big enough to be used for quantitative studies. In this paper, we present experiments on the automatic glossing of Chintang. We decompose the task of glossing into steps suitable for statistical processing. We first perform grammatical glossing as standard supervised part-of-speech tagging. We then add lexical glosses from a stand-off dictionary applying context disambiguation in a similar way to word lemmatisation. We obtain the highest accuracy score of 96% for grammatical and 94% for lexi-

/pdf/automatic-interlinear-glossing-as-two-level-sequence-1i5p94nz3e.pdf

Automatic interlinear glossing as two-level sequence classification

A quantitative analysis of a trans-generational, conversational corpus of Chintang (Tibeto-Burman) speakers with community-wide bilingualism in Nepali (Indo-European) reveals that children show more code-switching into Nepali than older speakers. This confirms earlier proposals in the literature that code-switching in bilingual children decreases when they gain proficiency in their dominant language, especially in vocabulary. Contradicting expectations from other studies, our corpus data also reveal that for adults, multi-word insertions of Nepali into Chintang are just as likely to undergo full syntactic integration as single-word insertions. Speakers of younger generations show less syntactic integration. We propose that this reflects a change between generations, from strongly asymmetrical, Chintang-dominated bilingualism in older generations to more balanced bilingualism where Chintang and Nepali operate as clearly separate systems in younger generations. This change is likely to have been triggered by the increase of Nepali presence over the past few decades.

/pdf/syntactic-mixing-across-generations-in-an-environment-of-rgi9z3y86j.pdf

Syntactic mixing across generations in an environment of community-wide bilingualism

Chintang [ˈts̻ ̻h iɳʈaŋ] (ISO639.3: ctn) is a Sino-Tibetan language of Nepal. It is named aer the village where it is mainly spoken. e village lies in the hills of Eastern Nepal, bigger cities within day’s reach being Dhankuṭā and Dharān. ere are no official data on the number of speakers, but we estimate there to be around 4,000 5,000 speakers. Most speakers are bior trilingual, with Nepali (the Indo-Aryan lingua franca of Nepal) as one and Bantawa (a related Sino-Tibetan language) as the other additional language. Monolingual speakers are still to be found mainly among elderly women, whereas a considerable portion of the younger generation is rapidly shiing to Nepali. Genealogically, Chintang belongs to the Kiranti group. e Kiranti languages are generally accepted to belong to the large Sino-Tibetan (or Tibeto-Burman) family, although their position within this family is controversial (cf. e.g. urgood 2003, Ebert 2003). Based on phonological evidence, Chintang belongs to the Eastern subgroup of Kiranti (Bickel et al. 2010). ere are two major dialects (Mulgaũ and Sambugaũ) named aer the areas where they are spoken. e differences between them concernmorphology and the lexicon but, as far as we know, not syntax, and so we will not distinguish between dialects in this chapter. For all examples the source has been marked behind the translation. Wherever possible, we take data from the Chintang Language Corpus (Bickel et al. 2011), limiting ourselves to uerances by fully fluent adults.1

https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/112581/1/9783110338812-022.pdf

Robert Schikowski

Papers

A universal cue for grammatical categories in the input to children: frequent frames

Object-conditioned differential marking in Chintang and Nepali

Automatic interlinear glossing as two-level sequence classification

Syntactic mixing across generations in an environment of community-wide bilingualism

Flexible valency in Chintang