Annemarie Verkerk

Universität des Saarlandes | UKS · Department of Language Science and Technology

The evolution of basic color terms in language is claimed to be stimulated by technological development, involving technological control of color or exposure to artificially colored objects. Accordingly, technologically “simple” non-industrialized societies are expected to have poor lexicalization of color, i.e., only rudimentary lexica of 2, 3 or...

The question whether main vs. subordinate clauses behave differently in the face of language change has been a concern of historical linguistics for quite some time now (Givón 1979, Hock 1991, Frajzyngier 1996, Bybee 2002). Despite this wealth of research, the fact that different languages have been approached from varying angles and, more importan...

A recurrent claim in the literature on language change concerns the conservativeness of subordinate clauses, i.e., the tendency for innovations to arise in main clauses and only later, if at all, extend to embedded contexts (Lightfoot 1982: 154, Bybee et al. 1994: 230‒231, Crowley & Bowern 2010: 231). A number of cross-linguistic grammatical asymme...

Northwestern Bantu is the most linguistically diverse area of the Bantu-speaking world. Several unusual grammatical gender systems are reported for this area, but there has been a lack of comprehensive comparative studies. This article is a typological investigation of northwestern Bantu gender systems based on a sample of 179 languages. We study t...

This paper investigates the sociolinguistic factors that impact the typology and evolution of grammatical gender systems in northwestern Bantu, the most diverse area of the Bantu-speaking world. We base our analyses on a typological classification of 179 northwestern Bantu languages, focusing on various instances of semantic agreement and their rol...

Linguistic typology is generally characterized by strong data reduction, stemming from the use of binary or categorical classifications. An example are the categories commonly used in describing word order: adjective-noun vs noun-adjective; genitive-noun vs noun-genitive; etc. Token-based typology is part of an answer towards more fine-grained and...

Where in earlier work diachronic change is used to explain away exceptions to typologies, linguistic typologists have started to make use of explicit diachronic models as explanations for typological distributions. A topic that lends itself for this approach especially well is that of negation. In this article, we assess the explanatory value of a...

This paper argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order variability should be regarded as a basic assumption, rather than as something exceptional. Although this approach follows naturally from the emergentist usage-based view of language, w...

Here we present an expanded version of bdproto, a database comprising phonological inventory data from 257 ancient and reconstructed languages. These data were extracted from historical linguistic reconstructions and brought together into a single unified, normalized, accessible, and Unicode-compliant language resource. This dataset is publicly ava...

Recent applications of phylogenetic methods to historical linguistics have been criticized for assuming a tree structure in which ancestral languages differentiate and split up into daughter languages, while language evolution is inherently non-tree-like ( François 2014 ; Blench 2015 : 32–33). This article attempts to contribute to this debate by d...

A puzzle of language is how speakers come to use the same words for particular meanings, given that there are often many competing alternatives (e.g., “sofa,” “couch,” “settee”), and there is seldom a necessary connection between a word and its meaning. The well-known process of random drift—roughly corresponding in this context to “say what you he...

There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world today¹. It has been argued that the natural and social environment of languages drives this diversity2–13. However, a fundamental question is how strong are environmental pressures, and does neutral drift suffice as a mechanism to explain diversification? We estimate the phylogenetic signals o...

The Dravidian language family consists of about 80 varieties (Hammarström H. 2016 Glottolog 2.7) spoken by 220 million people across southern and central India and surrounding countries (Steever SB. 1998 In The Dravidian languages (ed. SB Steever), pp. 1textendash39: 1). Neither the geographical origin of the Dravidian language homeland nor its exa...

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to languages that cannot be adequately described in Leonard Talmy's traditional framework of Satellite-framed and Verb-framed languages, resulting in cline-based and construction-based typologies. In the current paper, we focus on Greek, which has been said to have both Satellite-framed and Verb...

Numerals have fascinated and mystified linguists, mathematicians and lay persons alike for centuries. The productive use of numerals (in languages where this happens) exploits recursivity to give rise to what we call the ‘the number line’. While the smaller numerals 1–10 have enjoyed intense scrutiny, the typological study of the formation of the h...

Explaining the diversity of languages across the world is one of the central aims of typological, historical, and evolutionary linguistics. We consider the effect of language contact-the number of non-native speakers a language has-on the way languages change and evolve. By analysing hundreds of languages within and across language families, region...

The last four decades have seen huge progress in the description and analysis of cross-linguistic diversity in the encoding of motion (Talmy 1985, 1991, Slobin 1996, 2004). Comparisons between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages suggest that satellite-framed languages typically have a larger manner of motion verb lexicon ( swim , dash ), whi...

There have been opposing views on the possibility of a relationship between motion event encoding and the size of the path verb lexicon. Özçalışkan (2004) has proposed that verb-framed and satellite-framed languages should approximately have the same number of path verbs, whereas a review of some of the literature suggests that verb-framed language...

The evolutionary dynamics of motion event encoding This dissertation presents a quantitative study of diachronic change in the typology of motion event encoding in the Indo-European language family. It aims to describe the diverse set of constructions and verb lexicons used to encode motion and analyse their emergence and change using comparative...

There are many different syntactic constructions that languages can use to encode motion events. In recent decades, great advances have been made in the description and study of these syntactic constructions from languages spoken around the world (Talmy 1985, 1991, Slobin 1996, 2004). However, relatively little attention has been paid to historical...

This paper is concerned with the encoding of resultatives and manner predications in Oceanic languages. Our point of departure is a typological overview of the encoding strategies and their geographical distribution, and we investigate their historical traits by the use of phylogenetic comparative methods. A full theory of the historical pathways i...

In recent decades, much has been discovered about the different ways in which people can talk about motion (Talmy, 1985, 1991; Slobin, 1996, 1997, 2004). Slobin (1997) has suggested that satellite-framed languages typically have a larger and more diverse lexicon of manner of motion verbs (such as run, fly, and scramble) when compared to verb-framed...