East Asian ethnolinguistic phylogeography

A polyphyletic understanding of Asian linguistic diversity was first propagated in 1823. Since 1901, various scholars have proposed larger linguistic phyla uniting two or more recognised Asian language families. The most recent proposal in this tradition, Starosta’s 2001 East Asian phylum, comprising the Trans-Himalayan, Hmong-Mien, Austroasiatic, Austronesian and Kradai language families, is reassessed in light of linguistic and non-linguistic evidence. Ethnolinguistically informed inferences based on Asian Y chromosomal phylogeography lead to a reconstruction of various episodes of ethnolinguistic prehistory which lie beyond the linguistic event horizon, i.e. at a time depth empirically inaccessible to historical linguistics. The Father Tongue correlation in population genetics, the evidence for refugia during the Last Glacial Maximum and the hypothesis of language families having arisen as the result of demographic bottlenecks in prehistory are shown to be crucial to an understanding of the ethnogenesis of East Asian linguistic phyla. The prehistory of several neighbouring Asian language families is discussed, and the Centripetal Migration model is opposed to the Farming Language Dispersal theory.

Word Formation in South American Languages

This volume focuses on word formation processes in smaller and so far underrepresented indigenous languages of South America. The data for the analyses have been mainly collected in the field by the authors. The several language families described here, among them Arawakan, Takanan, and Guaycuruan, as well as language isolates, such as Yurakaré and Cholón, reflect the linguistic diversity of South America. Equally diverse are the topics addressed, relating to word formation processes like reduplication, nominal and verbal compounding, clitic compounding, and incorporation. The traditional notions of the processes are discussed critically with respect to their implementation in minor indigenous languages. The book is therefore not only of interest to readers with an Amerindian background but also to typologists and historical linguists, and it is a supplement to more theory-driven approaches to language and linguistics.

Inversion, Obviation, and Animacy in Native Languages of the Americas: Elements for a Cross-linguistic Survey

Native languages of the Americas whose predicate and clause structure reflect nominal hierarchies show an interesting range of structural diversity not only with respect to morphological makeup of their predicates and arguments but also with respect to the factors governing obviation status. The present article maps part of such diversity. The sample surveyed here includes languages with some sort of nonlocal (third person acting on third person) direction-marking system.