PhilSoc welcomes proposals for papers to be read at meetings. Proposals should be forwarded to the Honorary Secretary (contact details on the Contact page). Papers may be on any topic falling within the scope of PhilSoc's interests, but speakers are asked to bear in mind that the audience will represent a wide range of linguistic interests, and papers should therefore be accessible to non-specialists.
This lecture will be given in hybrid modality, at Jesus College, Cambridge, and via Zoom. For those attending in person, please make your way to the Bawden Room, marked ‘4’ in the bottom left on this map; the entrance that is closest to the room is marked ‘West Court pedestrian entrance’ in red. There will also signs directing you.
Refreshments will be served to members and their guests just outside the Bawden room from 3.30pm onwards.
This lecture will be given online.
Due to unfortunate circumstances, this talk will be held online rather than in person. Members wishing to attend in person can still do so at University College London, as planned; the talk will be live-streamed from 4.15pm onwards, with tea being served at 3.45. Those members who have to travel to the meeting from afar may, however, wish to reconsider their travel arrangements.
Venue details: Wilkins Building South Wing, Institute of Advanced Studies, Common Ground room. Please click here for its location on the UCL campus map.
All things prepositional: argument structure throughout the history of English
This paper investigates changes in prepositional argument structure in the history of English, viz. patterns featuring verb-attached prepositional phrases fulfilling various functions from prototypical adjuncts to complements. I use data from the Penn-Helsinki Corpora of Historical English, covering Middle, Early Modern, and Late Modern English (ca. 1150 to 1900) to assess the general hypothesis that PPs increased in frequency and expanded in functions over time as part of the general shift of English from a more synthetic to a more analytic language (e.g. Baugh & Cable 2002). I do so by zooming in on three particular case studies: (i) the development of prepositional verbs such as insist on, (ii) competition between PPs and NPs in the conative alternation, like in kick (at) the ball, and (iii) competition between PPs and NPs with time expressions as in (on) that day, we left. Overall, the results suggest that the history of English PPs is more complex than often presumed (e.g. Szmrecsyani 2016), and demonstrate an intricate interplay of cognitive factors like complexity and lexical biases in PP-diachrony (e.g. Levshina 2018; Pijpops et al. 2018).
References
Baugh, A. & T. Cable. 2002. A history of the English language, 5th edn. London: Routledge.
Levshina, N. 2018. Anybody (at) home? Communicative efficiency knocking on the Construction Grammar door. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 6, 71-90. https://doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2018-0004.
Pijpops, D., D. Speelman, S. Grondelaers & F. Van de Velde. 2018. Comparing explanations for the Complexity Principle. Language and Cognition 10(3), 514-543. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2018.13.
Szmrecsyani, B. 2016. An analytic-synthetic spiral in the history of English. In E. van Gelderen (ed.), Cyclical change continued, 93-112. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.227.04szm.
The lecture will be given at the University of Manchester, University Place, room 3.204. To see this location on an interactive map, please click here.
Please note that all ordinary meetings commence at 4:15pm. Members are welcome to come for tea at 3:45 pm.
Synchronic and Diachronic Complex Tone in Endangered Tenyi Languages
Savio Meyase (University of York)
The languages in the northeast of India in the eastern Himalayan range are rather poorly documented and the availability of linguistic studies for these languages is next to nothing compared to many other languages of the world. The main reasons for this are geographic isolation and economic backwardness, and historic as well as extant abandonment from authorities in control. Apart from digitally archiving endangered language data, I also study the diachronic changes in both the tones and non-tonal elements of the related languages of Tenyidie and reconstruct a proto-Tenyi language with an attempt to establish the relationship of the languages and variants into a traditional language family tree.
The Tenyi languages are tonal languages employing at least four lexical tones. Any language having more than two tones in the inventory is considered a complex tone system, and only very few languages have been documented to have more than three tones. The phonological study of complex tones itself is still at a nascent stage. My previous work (2021, 2022) showed that Tenyidie tones, while appearing complicated and unpredictable, can be neatly studied with hitherto available phonological tools with the proposition that tones can (and should) be split into smaller units. The tonal model I proposed with these tonal units is shown in the PDF of this abstract (see below).
This proposal, and the model that I used, is also being borne out by the newer languages that I am looking at the moment, with support especially from Sopvoma [Mao] where the patterns of tone change are different but still bears out the tonal model used for standard Tenyidie. The comparison of tonal data between Tenyidie and Sopvoma also provides evidence of how tone in these languages could have evolved from a simple two-tone system with cues again supporting the atomisation of tones into smaller features.
The comparisons, reconstructions and the archival of these languages are done with a curated version of the Leipzig-Jakarta list (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009).
References
Haspelmath, Martin and Uri Tadmor (eds.), 2009. Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Mouton de Gruyter.
Meyase, Savio, 2021. ‘Polarity in a four-level tone language’. Phonology (38).
Meyase, Savio, 2022. Tenyidie Tone. PenThrill Publications.
Comparative Constructions at the Interface between Syntax and Semantics: Lessons from Malay
Eve Suharwardy (University of Manchester)
The syntactic realisation of the standard of a comparative is either phrasal or clausal. In the case of English, it is typically assumed that both are possible, see the contrast between (1a) vs (1b/c).
However, the availability of both comparative standards is in fact a point of variation crosslinguistically. Where Russian and Greek display the same pattern as English (Pancheva 2006; Merchant 2009), there are many languages which lack clausal standards altogether, e.g. Hindi, Turkish and Samoan (Bhatt & Takahashi 2011; Hofstetter 2009; Hohaus 2015).
In order to determine the syntactic status of the standard phrase, we can use various diagnostics. For example, the availability of constructions subcomparatives (e.g. ‘the desk is longer than the door is wide’) indicates clausal standards, whilst the availability of a reflexive remnant in the standard (e.g. ‘no star shines brighter than itself’) indicates phrasal ones. In this talk, I present original fieldwork data regarding the application of these diagnostics to the Austronesian language, Malay, the results of which have significant implications for the semantic analysis.
The lecture will be given at University College London, Institute of Advanced Studies Common Ground (G11), Ground Floor, South Wing.
Please note that all ordinary meetings commence at 4:15pm. Members are welcome to come for tea at 3:45 pm.
In this talk I will be introducing the concept of lexical sociolinguistics: as a word, or a new meaning of a word, or a new soundshape of a word, enters the language, it always does so in the language of a speaker anchored in space, time, and in a social situation, talking to another person similarly sited. For a new word or pronunciation to spread, the innovation has to move from the initial group of similarly-sited speakers to speakers in other places and other social situations. Therefore, all word-change has the potential to become sociolinguistically marked – that is, to gain the quality of being associated with the kind of person who first or typically used it, or went on to use it – and it is sometimes possible to recover what these sociolinguistic qualities might have been. The research question is thus ‘what type of person used this word when, where, and in what kind of social situation’, and the sociolinguistic focus is on recovering historical social situations and affiliations. I will introduce the concept of communities of spatial practice, and I will demonstrate with some words that historical dictionaries usually omit, such as streetnames, brand-names and numbers.
The lecture will be given in hybrid modality, online and in person at St Catharine's College, Cambridge; details TBD.
If you wish to attend via Zoom, please register using this simple registration form.
The lecture will be preceded by the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Society.
Please note that all ordinary meetings commence at 4:15pm. Members are welcome to come for tea at 3:45 pm.
The work discussed in this talk is part of the Linguistic DNA research project (linguisticdna.org), whose principal aim was to identify the cultural and intellectual concepts marking early English modernity. To enable the search for an innovative bottom-up method for identifying concepts in discourse, the project developed an automated processor for generating concepts from a corpus of early modern English discourse, Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership. The resulting process, concept modelling, generates billions of ‘quads’ (four lemmas that co-occur within a span of 100 tokens of text) (Mehl, 2022). The immediate problem was how to interpret the strong association between lemmas in a quad; work thus far has focused on developing a theory of discursive meaning and using analytical techniques to map conceptual meaning onto the quads. Although close semantic-pragmatic analysis is a thorough and nuanced approach to identifying the structure of concepts, it is time-consuming and impractical when the datasets are so large. Distant reading, using lexical co-occurrence data and visualisation techniques, has the potential to help us see patterns in the data, to form hypotheses about conceptual structures, and thus dramatically enrich the close semantic-pragmatic inspection of quads. In this talk, we zoom back out from the inspection of manageable sets of quads (as explored in Fitzmaurice 2021, 2022) to tackle quad constellations–namely all of the quads associated with a particular node word–to explore how data visualisation techniques might assist in revealing their conceptual meaning.
References:
Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2021. Looking for Concepts in Early Modern English: Hypothesis building and the uses of encyclopaedic knowledge and pragmatic work. Journal of Historical Pragmatics. 22:2 (2021) 282-300.
Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2022. From Constellations to Discursive Concepts; or: The historical pragmatic construction of meaning in Early Modern English. Transactions of the Philological Society 120:3 (2022) 489-506.
Mehl, Seth. 2022. Discursive quads: New kinds of lexical co-occurrence data with linguistic concept modelling. Transactions of the Philological Society 120:3 (2022) 474-488.
Organised in association with the British Academy, this year's Anna Morpurgo Davies lecture will be held at the Royal Society and broadcast online.
Registration is required for both in-person and online attendance; please register using this link.
Like all ordinary meetings of the Society, the lecture will commence at 4:15pm. Instead of the usual tea before, this lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.
This talk will looks as some of the challenges and discoveries associated with using social media (Twitter/X) as a source for examining dialect variation and change. Messages from social media constitute a fantastic source of evidence for linguistic diversity, much of which is otherwise inaccessible, allowing us to see patterns of linguistic variation across thousands, sometimes even millions, of people. We will look at some of the results of the Tweetolectology project, which has been mapping linguistic variation across various countries, with case studies from Welsh, English and Haitian Creole framed around key research or methodological issues of broad general interest
The lecture will be given in hybrid modality, online and in person at St Catherine's College, Oxford; details TBD.
Please note that all ordinary meetings commence at 4:15pm. Members are welcome to come for tea at 3:45 pm.
As ever, an abstract of the talk can be found below.
The Ethiopian Linguistic Area at the Horn of Africa comprises languages of different branches of the Afroasiatic macro-family and, to a lesser extent, of the disputed Nilo-Saharan phylum. The linguistic area was established by Charles A. Ferguson as early as the mid-seventies (Ferguson 1976). The boundaries of the contact zone and the criteria used to define it have ever since been disputed, but it is commonly agreed that languages spoken in the Ethiopian highlands show many signs of convergence. After a brief introduction to the languages in Ethiopia (classification, sociolinguistic situation and interesting typological features), some of the defining criteria that have been proposed (and questioned or refuted) by different authors are critically assessed. While most authors have concentrated on features of the phonology and morphosyntax, I will discuss, in the central part of my presentation, how language contact has influenced the organization of the lexicon of languages in the Ethiopian highlands. I will start with a review of Richard Hayward’s influential work (1991; 2000) and then discuss recent and ongoing research on shared polysemy and shared lexicalization patterns in selected semantic fields. My focus will be on two topics: (i) the use of verb ‘know’ as a means to express the experiental perfect, i.e. ‘have (n)ever verb-ed’, and (ii) the similarities in the inventories of interjections, especially for animal-directed commands, across languages. My talk is based on my own field research on Kambaata (Cushitic) and on published data for other Ethiopian languages.
References
Ferguson, Charles A. 1976. The Ethiopian language area. In M. Lionel Bender, J. D. Bowen, R. L. Cooper & C. A. Ferguson (eds.), Language in Ethiopia, 63–76. London: Oxford University Press.
Hayward, Richard J. 1991. À propos patterns of lexicalization in the Ethiopian language area. In Daniela Mendel & Ulrike Claudi (eds.), Ägypten im afro-orientalischen Kontext. Aufsätze zur Archäologie, Geschichte und Sprache eines unbegrenzten Raumes. Gedenkschrift Peter Behrens (Special Issue of Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere), 139–156. Cologne: University of Cologne, Institute of African Studies.
Hayward, Richard J. 2000. Is there a metric for convergence? In Colin Renfrew, April McMahon & R. L. Trask (eds.), Time depth in historical linguistics, vol. 2: Papers in the prehistory of languages, 621–640. Cambridge: The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
This lecture will be given online (via Zoom) only. Registration is required; please use this simple registration form to do so.
As ever, an abstract of the talk can be found below.
Iambic metrical systems, which have weak-strong feet in contrast to trochaic strong-weak ones, are rare. They represent under 10% of the World Atlas of Language Structures sample and are concentrated in the Americas (Goedemans & van der Hulst 2013). They are generally under-described, and little diachronic research has been conducted on iambic systems. Algonquian, a family of languages stretching over much of northern North America, is one of very few families with a large number of iambic daughters. We provide evidence from this family that can refine our typology of iambic languages. After arguing that Proto-Algonquian was iambic, we investigate how Algonquian languages behave in ways at odds with typological claims about iambic systems. First, iambic lengthening is claimed to be characteristic of iambic systems, but few Algonquian languages have it, while diametrically opposed processes like iambic shortening and change toward typologically dispreferred foot structures are widespread. Second, iambic systems are associated with duration as a cue to prominence while pitch and intensity are typically associated with trochaic systems. However, in Algonquian pitch is a common cue to prominence, which helps motivate the fact that numerous daughters have undergone tonogenesis. Algonquian metrical phonology, diachronic and synchronic, can sharpen our typology of iambic languages in general.
The meeting will be held at the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, Wilkins Building (Main Building), UCL.
Directions: go through the main entrance to UCL on Gower Street, and then find the door furthest to the right into the main building, i.e. to the right of the big portico with the steps. Go through that door, then immediately right through a couple of doorways. Go left up the stairs or take the lift for two floors; this takes you to the lecture theatre entrance. A map is available here.
Please note that all ordinary meetings commence at 4:15pm. Members are welcome to come for tea at 3:45 pm, which will be served in the area outside the lecture theatre.
The purpose of this talk is to celebrate the scholarship of Dr Margaret (Meg) Laing (1953–2023). Meg spent most of her academic career as a Research Fellow in the University of Edinburgh. She and I carried out our activities in a research unit (currently the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics) dedicated to carrying on work begun by Angus McIntosh and M.L. Samuels relating to the dialectology of written Middle English. This had resulted in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English 1350–1450 (LALME), published first in 1986. Meg had contributed to LALME through her PhD thesis on the mediaeval dialectology of Lincolnshire, acquiring knowledge and skills on which she built for her subsequent work in Historical Dialectology. This was centred on A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 1150–1325 (LAEME), published (2008, 2013). This was followed up by the Corpus of Narrative Etymologies (CoNE, 2013), compiled in collaboration with Professor Roger Lass (University of Cape Town) and Dr Rhona Alcorn (University of Edinburgh). CoNE is aimed at explaining the etymology of every orthographic form recorded in the lexico–grammatically tagged corpus which forms the data-base for LAEME. These large-scale works served as the well for a large number of articles dealing with problems of scripts, orthography and textual transmission in manuscripts containing Early Middle English. With Roger Lass, Meg developed the concept of Litteral and Potestatic Substitution Sets for interpreting complex orthographic systems of scribal languages. Meg and Professor Michael Benskin (University of Oslo) also edited a revision of LALME to create a freely available on-line version (eLALME, 2013). She was also an enthusiastic and valued consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, which work she carried on after her retirement in 2013.
I will outline the concepts and methodologies of LALME, LAEME and CoNE, especially how Meg developed the methodologies for the Historical Dialectology of a mediaeval vernacular in the making of LAEME and for interpretation of complex orthographic systems. I will offer two examples of how the LAEME data might be further investigated and exploited.
