Previous Seasons Meetings

Database-oriented approaches to (areal-)typology generally represent languages as a fixed set of feature values (e.g. Dryer and Haspelmath 2013; Skirgård et al. 2023). These feature values often involve high-level generalizations, which may obscure considerable language-internal diversity (e.g. classifying languages on the basis of a basic constituent order ignores the fact that other constituent orders may be perfectly grammatical and even common.

Meanwhile, a different programme linguistics, Construction Grammar (e.g. Goldberg 2006; Croft 2021), regards languages as systems of form-meaning pairings. Here, linguistic properties do not so much apply to the language level, but rather to the level of the construction. Although this approach has given rise to numerous comparative studies, there is, to my knowledge, no standard, agreed-upon way to apply this approach to database-oriented linguistic comparison that involves large samples, and that requires constructions to be comparable.

This paper tries to bridge these two traditions by discussing an approach for performing construction-based areal-typological research, in which languages are regarded as inventories of form-meaning pairings. I also introduce several ways to calculate aggregate distance measures between languages, which allow for a comparison of these inventories at the language level and even between groups of languages.

I will do this by focusing in particular on tense-aspect-modality-evidentiality (TAME) constructions in the languages of the Upper Amazon in South America, an area extremely rich in diversity, connecting the Amazonian plains and the Andean highlands. The linguistic landscape of this area is the result of an intricate and poorly understood series of social processes like migrations, shifts, expansions, contact, and language loss (Arias et al. 2022; van Gijn et al. 2022). One of the consequences of this past is that many linguistic features are shared across family boundaries, creating a mismatch between genealogical and structural diversity. I will explore this question using the construction-based approach.

References 

Arias, Leonardo, Nicholas Q. Emlen, Sietze J Norder, et al. 2022. ‘Interpreting Mismatches between Linguistic and Genetic Patterns among Speakers of Tanimuka (Eastern Tukanoan) and Yukuna (Arawakan).’ Interface Focus 13.

Croft, William. 2021. Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology. Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics. Brill.

Dryer, Matthew S., and Martin Haspelmath, eds. 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info.

Gijn, Rik van, Sietze J Norder, Leonardo Arias, et al. 2022. ‘The Social Lives of Isolates (and Small Languag Families): The Case of the Northwest Amazon.’ Interface Focus 13. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0054.

Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268511.001.0001.

Skirgård, Hedvig, Hannah J. Haynie, Damián E. Blasi, et al. 2023. ‘Grambank Reveals the Importance of Genealogical Constraints on Linguistic Diversity and Highlights the Impact of Language Loss’. Science Advances 9 (16): eadg6175. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adg6175.

Textual agency or voice has been variously assigned to authors, readers, editors, and reviewers in literary studies (Iser1978, Eagleton 1996, Frow 2022), with linguistics adding a focus on the text itself (Fairclough 1992, Matthiessen 2001, Halliday 2002, Steiner 2020). Both disciplines would also consider the situational and cultural context to various extents. Translation theorists (Venuti 2000, Munday 2016, Steiner 2021) have specifically been asking how translators’ agency and choice are influenced, constrained and possibly predicted by these complex variables. How does the situation change with the impact of machine translation (Bernardini et al 2020, Mikros and Boumparis 2024)?

Some debates under the influence of identity politics have insisted on a “match” between the  translator’s social or ethnic background and that of the source-text author. One such debate arose around translations of Amanda Gorman’s (2021) “The Hill We Climb” presidential address of 2020 into Catalan, Dutch and German. I shall argue on the basis of a brief translation-oriented text analysis of the Gorman source text with a view of its translation into German that the key requirements of such a translation are of a contrastive linguistic, translational and intercultural nature. There is no strictly shared social and ethnic background between source text author and translator in most cases, and if there were, it would not be a necessary, nor a sufficient condition for a good translation.

The intrusion of current machine translation technologies into translation activity presents us with a different scenario. As examples, we shall show Google, DeepL and ChatGPT machine translations of the Gorman text into German. Their quality is at this point in time not yet good enough as a serious competitor for human translation (cf. Hadley and Resende 2024), but it is significantly better than it was in former rule-based MT (e.g. Allegranza, Krauwer and Steiner 1991). (How) has agency changed in the process?

The primary agent i.e. the speaking voice remains the source text author. The “agent” of the translation process, however, is the MT-system, i.e. a tool managed by the natural language processing (NLP) engineer (van Genabith 2020). The decisive knowledge embedded in this system is engineering kowledge rather than knowledge about language or translation. Crucial properties of the target text such as adequacy, fluency, (possible) bias are consequences of the training materials used in the language models and in the MT-system, and these properties are outside of the control of any translator. In the case of translating with ChatGPT and current generative systems, part of control lies in the prompting mechanisms allowed. Such prompting ideally allows some degree of translational control arising out of pre-translational text analysis, yet automation of this relatively costly process will no doubt be attempted. Likewise, in pre-/post-editing and evaluation, language-based types of competence are involved, but even these are undergoing further automation.

The general tendency is something we currently observe in wider areas involving competencies regarded as typically human, such as doing research (Messeri and Crockett 2024), learning languages, and using language creatively. Our worries should start, when our creative abilities are being substituted and reduced by the technology, rather than being enhanced. And once the original author’s voice is made dispensable (Porter and Machery 2024), which is something ChatGPT and Agentive AI are moving towards, we are left with a rather lonely and dystopic reader.

References

Allegranza Valerio. & Krauwer. Stephen. & Steiner, Erich eds. 1991. Special Issue of MACHINE TRANSLATION on EUROTRA. Vol. 6 No. 2 and 3. Dordrecht : Reidel

Bernardini, Silvia,  Bouillon, P.,  Ciobanu, D.  Genabith, J. Hansen-Schirra, S.,  O’Brien, Sh.  Steiner, E.,  Teich. E. 2020. Language service provision in the 21st century: challenges, opportunities and educational perspectives for translation studies. In: Noorda, Sijbold, Scott Peter and Vocasovic, Martina Proceedings of Bologna Process Beyond 2020. Fundamental Values of the EHEA. Bologna University Press: pp. 297-303

Eagleton, Terry. 1996. Literary Theory. Second edition. London: Blackwell

Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press

Frow, John (ed.) 2022. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Gorman, Amanda 2021. The Hill We Climb - an Inaugural Poem for the Country. Viking; Penguin Random House. German bilingual edition and translation and commentary by Uda Strätling, Hadija Haruna-Oelker and Kübra Gümüsay. 2021

Halliday, M.A.K. (2002). Linguistic studies of text and discourse. Edited by. Jonathan Webster. London and New York: Continuum

Hadley, James and Resende, Natalia. 2024. “The Translator’s Canvas: Using LLMs to Enhance Poetry Translation”. Proceedings of the 16^th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. Vol.1. pp. 178-189.

Iser, Wolfgang 1978. The act of reading: a theory of aesthetic response. London: Routledge

Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. (2001). "The environments of translation" in: Steiner and Yallop. eds. 2001 Exploring Translation and multilingual textproduction. Beyond Content. Berlin: New York De Gruyter: 41-126.

Messeri, Lisa & M. J. Crockett 2024 “Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research”. In: Nature  Vol 627 . 7 March 2024 . 49-58

Mikros, George, and Boumparis, Dimitris. 2024. “Cross-linguistic authorship attribution and gender profiling. Machine translation as a method for bridging the language gap”. In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 39, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 954–967, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqae028. Oxford University Press.

Munday Jeremy 2016 Introducing translation studies. Theories and applications.  (2016 4th edition.) London: Routledge

Porter, B., Machery, E. 2024. “AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably”. Sci Rep 14, 26133 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-76900-1

Steiner, Erich. 2020. “Translation, equivalence and cognition”, in: Alves, Fabio and Jakobsen, Arnt Lykke. Eds. 2020. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition. London, New York: Routledge Taylor and Frances pp. 344-359

Steiner, Erich. 2021. Textual instantiation, the notion of “readings of texts“, and translational agency” In: Kim, M., Munday, J. , Wang, P and Wang. Z. 2021. Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation Studies. London: Bloomsbury 35-64

van Genabith, Josef. 2020. Neural Machine Translation. In (ed.) Jörg Porsiel. Maschinelle Übersetzung für Übersetzungsprofis. BDÜ Fachverlag. ISBN: 978-3-946702-09-2. pp. 59-115.

Venuti, Lawrence. 2000. “Translation, Community, Utopia.” In: Venuti 2000. ed.: The translation studies reader. London: Routledge 468-488

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.

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).

1. a. Jon is taller than [Laura].
   b. Jon is taller than [Laura is].
   c. Jon owns more video games than [Laura owns videogames].

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.

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 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.