Gerd Carling

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main · Institut für Empirische Sprachwissenschaft

This dictionary aims to cover the whole lexicon of Tocharian A, one of the two Tocharian languages, which form a distinct branch in the Indo-European language family. These languages are documented in manuscripts found mostly in Buddhist monasteries located in the oases of the Tarim Basin, in Xinjiang, China, and dated in the second half of the 1 s...

Introduction: The directionality of semantic change is problematic in traditional comparative models of language reconstruction. Compared to, e.g., phonological and morphological change, the directions of meaning change over time are potentially endless and difficult to reconstruct. The current paper attempts to reconstruct the mechanisms of lexica...

The chapter looks at language variation and change, and the relation of these processes to language reconstruction and classification. The chapter gives an overview of theories, models, methods, and data, describing how diversity and variation is modelled and measured for reconstruction and classification within traditional, comparative and statist...

Languages of diverse structures and different families tend to share common patterns if they are spoken in geographic proximity. This convergence is often explained by horizontal diffusibility, which is typically ascribed to language contact. In such a scenario, speakers of two or more languages interact and influence each other’s languages, and in...

This study addresses gender assignment in six North Scandinavian varieties with a three-gender system: Old Norse, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Old Swedish, Nysvenska, Jamtlandic, and Elfdalian. Focusing on gender variation and change, we investigate the role of various factors in gender change. Using the contemporary Swedish varieties Jamtlandic and Elfdal...

This paper employs phylogenetic modeling to reconstruct the alignment system of Indo-European. We use a data set of categorical morphosyntactic features, which take states such as ‘nominative-accusative’, ‘active-stative’, or ‘ergative’. We analyze these characters with a standard Bayesian comparative phylogenetic method, inferring transition rates...

In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form–meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic l...

Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. However, as previous studies have either been lacking in scope or in phonetic granularity, the present study investigates the phonetic and semantic features involved from a bottom-up perspective. By analyzing the phonemes of 344 near-universal concepts in 24...

All languages borrow words from other languages. Some languages are more prone to borrowing, while others borrow less, and different domains of the vocabulary are unequally susceptible to borrowing. Languages typically borrow words when a new concept is introduced, but languages may also borrow a new word for an already existing concept. Linguists...

In this study, we present an analysis of gender assignment tendencies in Jamtlandic, a language variety of Sweden, using a word list of 1029 items obtained from fieldwork. Most research on gender assignment in the Scandinavian languages focuses on the standard languages (Steinmetz 1985; Källström 1996; Trosterud 2001, 2006) and Norwegian dialects (...

The notion of cultural aspects of language variation and change is a growing fi eld. However, collective works on the current stance within this domain are still scarce. The Mouton Atlas of Languages and Cultures embraces a substantial part of the Eurasian continent and equips the reader to better observe, reconstruct and understand the impact of c...

In this paper, we have investigated, by means of quantitative and statistical methods, stability and change in cultural vocabulary of Indo-European in Europe, with a focus on agriculture. For this purpose we have created a culture vocabulary list with lexical head words, organized into subcategories based on their role and function in a cultural sy...

Feature stability, time and tempo of change, and the role of genealogy versus areality in creating linguistic diversity are important issues in current computational research on linguistic typology. This paper presents a database initiative, DiACL Typology, which aims to provide a resource for addressing these questions with specific of the extende...

List of languages and language metadata. (XLSX)

List of PMI ranks of feature variant pairs. (XLSX)

List of typological grids, and feature variants with description and ID number. (XLSX)

Blocks of interdependent feature variants. (TXT)

This article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 Indo-European languages. We partition types of change (i.e., gain or loss) for each variant according to whether they bring about a simplification in morphosyntactic patterns that must be learned, whether they are neutral (i.e., neither simplifying nor...

The current paper describes the deictic system of Kamaiurá, a language of the Tupí-Guaraní family. The Kamaiurá system of deictic demonstratives and adverbials has a high degree of complexity, including at least 17 different forms, of which several have different functions. The system codes four levels of Participant deixis, with proximal, medial,...

The influence of standard language varieties on rural dialects is an important factor involved in dialect loss, which is widespread in Europe. In this study, we look at how the three-gender system in the Jamtlandic dialect of Sweden is changing under pressure from the two-gender system of Standard Swedish. The Jamtlandic dialect is an understudied...

Romani chib har talats i Sverige i 500 år. Det är inte ett enhetligt, väldefinierat språk, som man kan skriva en enkel grammatik om. Tvärtom, i Sverige talas en stor mängd väldigt olika varianter av romani chib. Några har talats här länge, andra bara en kort tid. Boken fokuserar på de tre varianter som har talats längst i Sverige: skandoromani, kel...

This paper investigates iconicity as a possible driving force behind the rebuilding of deictic systems and forms in individual languages. A comparison of a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European deictic system (based mainly on Beekes, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction, 1995) compared with the systems of attested Indo-European langua...

This paper takes its basis in onomatopoeia and sound symbolism and investigates the processes of language change that create these phenomena. Data have mainly been taken from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family in which the origin of onomatopoeic expressions, as well as sound symbolic clusters, or phonaesthemes, can be traced h...

This paper investigates iconicity as a possible driving force behind the rebuilding of deictic systems and forms in individual languages. A comparison of a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European deictic system (based mainly on Beekes,Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction, 1995) compared with the systems of attested Indo-European languag...

All languages have phonosemantically motivated lexemes, often referred to as sound symbolism. As noticed already by Jespersen (1922), certain semantic domains are more likely to be phonosemantically motivated than others; in particular this concerns semantic qualities closely connected to sensory perception (e.g. size, texture). Motivated form-mean...

S. 103-217: Appendix I, Vocabulary

This paper will give a survey of the Tocharian medical vocabulary as known from fragments of manuscripts preserved in Buddhist monasteries along the Northern route of the Silk Road. The origin of the medical vocabulary reflects the influx of loanwords and cultural influences from neighbouring languages as well as the written lingua franca of the re...