In everyday conversations the use of terms of address indexes “interpersonal and transactional relationships” (Tavakol & Allami 2013: 38). Terms of endearment such as honey, dear, and sweetheart, are common ways to express closeness between interlocutors, such as family members, spouses, or friends. It might be surprising to speakers of English, or speakers of most Germanic languages, however, to hear a grandfather address his granddaughter as дядо (Bulgarian: 'grandpa'), or a mother address her child as Mam (Albanian: 'Mum'), for instance, to express intimacy and affection.

While address inversion is considered common in many languages of the world (Kraska-Szlenk 2018), there has been hardly any research on this pragmatic phenomenon. Tavakol and Allami's study (2013) provides evidence of 'reverse addressing' in Persian, Kraska-Szlenk (2018) has investigated the usage patterns and cultural patterns of address inversion in Swahili. While these studies indicate that address inversion is indeed present in typologically very different languages, further evidence is needed for a more comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon. This study focuses on Albanian and Bulgarian, two languages generally underrepresented in linguistic research and so far, not very well documented in corpora. Based on a qualitative analysis of selected examples from the two languages, this paper proposes a new theoretical framework, showcasing the phenomenon of reciprocating major kindship terms and exploring its functions in a south-eastern European context. The practice of address inversion lends further evidence to the notion of the Balkan Sprachbund, which ties together typologically diverse languages spoken in the area by linguistic similarities. This study thus contributes to our understanding of addressing practices across languages and cultures.

Siona (West-Tukanoan, Ecuador) dependent verbs encode either imperfective or perfective aspect (Bruil 2014). Usually, imperfective aspect signals that the event of the dependent verb is still on-going when the next event happens, whereas perfective aspect signals that the event reaches its end-point before the next event happens.

However, the verb caye ‘to say’ exhibits different behaviour: it often occurs in imperfective aspect, even when the speech act reaches its end-point before the next event occurs (the Siona do not constantly interrupt each other). What is the meaning of imperfective aspect in these cases, and what is the difference with corresponding perfective forms? 

Analysing two Siona narratives shows that the function of aspect in dependent forms has branched out to gain a new meaning on the textual level: imperfective aspect signals that another conversational turn or reaction is expected in reply to the speech act, whereas perfective aspect signals that this is not the case. Thus, Siona aspect illustrates the importance of polysemy for grammatical categories too, which has not always been the point of departure for aspectual categories (Comrie 1976, Klein 1994).  

Recent diachronic studies have greatly furthered our understanding of the Southern Bantu languages, but questions about the internal relationships of the Southern Bantu language groups, as well as the validity of the clade as a whole, still remain. This study attempts to reconstruct one proposed genetic clade, that of Tsonga-Copi (S50-S60). Using published dictionaries and reference works for each language of the subgrouping, a corpus of cognate vocabulary was assembled. Each term was then matched where possible to a reconstruction in the Bantu Lexical Reconstructions 3 (BLR3) database. Sound correspondences were identified and used to reconstruct the consonant inventory of Proto-Tsonga-Copi. In addition to the discovery of several typologically unusual sound changes, the results of this study also lend support to existing and developing hypothesis about language contact in prehistoric southern Africa, particularly the influence of Khoisan as well as other unidentified Bantu languages. 

This paper focusses on the linguistic history of the domestic donkey (equus asinus) in the Cushitic languages in East-Africa. Cushitic languages are spoken in East-Africa and the Horn of Africa and historically contain four main branches: Agaw, Beja, East Cushitic and South Cushitic. The domestication of the donkey also took place in or close to these regions (Todd et al. 2022). However untill now, no in-depth analysis has been conducted in order to find out wether cognates for terms that refer to ‘donkey’ can be reconstructed for Proto-Cushitic.

Therefore, this paper will focus on the reconstruction for a word for ‘donkey’ in Proto-Cushitic. Methodological issues that arise herein will be discussed. The basis of this article is to be found in Cohen where a possible link between several terms for ‘donkey’, ‘fool’ and ‘deaf (person)’ is somehow suggested. This paper focusses on cognates for these words within the Cushitic language family. In his reconstruction for Proto-Cushitic, Ehret reconstructs the root *dikw’ on the strength of two reconstructed roots in Proto South-Cushitic and Proto Central-Cushitic (1987). However, merely on the basis of the existence of a similar reconstructed forms in two of the five commonly accepted subbranches of Cushitic, a root would normally not be reconstructable. Moreover, among the East-Cushitic languages, this root does not occur at all for the term for ‘donkey’ because the in Proto East-Cushitic a root *ħarr can be reconstructed (Sasse 1979). However, there may be a connection in words that have words that mean ‘fool’, ‘zebra’ or ‘deaf (person)’ in Cushitic languages from the same historical root. Similarly, the Proto East-Cushitic root *ħarr for ‘donkey’ be connected to words for ‘zebra’ and ‘camel’ in other Cushitic languages, including Beja. This paper will explore these possibilities and the challenges comparative historical linguistics pose and will analyse the existence of several roots that in modern Cushitic languages came to mean ‘donkey’ and the cultural and historical implicacions thereof. 

This paper embarks on a comparative study of three kinship systems that are present in the cognitive environments of members in a particular community: L1 Thai speakers who have grown up in the Chinese immigrant community of Phuket. By interviewing an informant from this community, I show that members of this lingua-culture are accustomed to cognitively access, at any given time, the following kinship systems: Chinese terms of address in everyday spoken language within their community, common Thai kinship terms (as part of their Thai education and the broad Thai context) and royal Thai kinship vocabulary (also as part of their Thai schooling and cultural conventions). The similarities and differences in the common Thai and Chinese kinship terms used in Phuket all point towards the same direction: the paramount importance of upholding a hierarchy, as both systems prioritise cognitive complexity for senior members. Along these lines, the mere existence of a distinct royal vocabulary that requires further cognitive complexity for the community again showcases the unparalleled value and sacredness that Thai culture sets on the monarch and his family. In conclusion this study examines the relationship between language and societal structures, revealing how cultural values are embedded within linguistic systems. 

The study of animal communication systems is largely separated into two distinct research fields: linguistics, for all human communication, and behavioural biology, for everything non-human. The clear divide between these fields is reflected in linguists’ definition of “language” as a uniquely human phenomenon, and in the Chomskyan statement that the difference between human and non-human communication is one in kind, not in degree. However, most of the frequently assumed unique characteristics of human language are present in other animal communication systems, such as semanticity in vervet alarm calls and displacement in bee dances. In this talk, I would like to evaluate the uniqueness of human language and show the richness of animal communication systems. By doing so, I hope to narrow the gap between the fields of linguistics and behavioural biology and to stress the importance of viewing language as a biological phenomenon. 

Since the laryngeal theory is now widely accepted, many scholars have attempted to find evidence of consonantal laryngeals in various Indo-European daughter languages outside of Anatolian. The presence of initial fricatives that seem to continue laryngeals in Khotanese and Persian has been noted by a few scholars such as Martin Kümmel, but little has been done to determine the conditions for this alleged retention. From the data presented in this paper, it appears as if Middle Persian initial fricative consonants in place of original laryngeals are most common before front vowels, and possibly before long ō. If prothetic, the presence of these consonants would be irregular, if inter-dialectal borrowing is not at fault. Alternatively, it may be possible that the dialect ancestral to Middle Persian, which was distinct from attested Old Persian, retained some initial laryngeal consonant which is reflected as Middle Persian x- and h- in certain contexts. 

Differential object marking (DOM) has been shown to be variable in contact with other languages. Research on heritage languages in the US shows that DOM weakens, whereas research of Italian languages in contact with South American Spanish has shown that DOM can emerge or expand in microcontact. This presentation reports on my RMA-thesis on DOM in Sarnámi Hindostani. I will propose that DOM can re-enter a heritage language through the left-periphery. It will be argued that especially left dislocation and its reflexes in continental West-Germanic are important factors in the re-introduction of DOM. 

The Hamar word for cloud is unique within the South-Omotic language family of Ethiopia. When we look outward for its potential source, we find that almost identical words exist in Western Nilotic languages, as well as in Kalenjin languages of the Southern Nilotic branch. This is peculiar since the languages of these groups are all spoken in areas far away from the land of the Hamar, in South Sudan and in Kenya. The Eastern Nilotic languages that are spoken in between lack this word for cloud. Moreover, any historical contact between Hamar and Western and Southern Nilotic was hitherto not assumed, given the absence of other borrowings. So why is it solely this word for cloud that seems to have been borrowed? Is there any special significance to this word? And why has this form only been adopted by the Hamar and not by other linguistic groups in Ethiopia? Furthermore, when we look into Cushitic languages, we find vaguely similar words, but the internal as well as external connections are unclear. The picture becomes even more puzzling when we look much further west and find similar words in places as far as Mali. Is it reason to assume any historical connection or are these mere coincidences?

This study documented the realisation of the plosive voicing contrast in terms of VOT and post-plosive f0 in the Afrikaans and Dutch of early bilingual Afrikaans heritage speakers in the Netherlands. In partial replication of Coetzee et al. (2018)’s documentation of the contrast in Afrikaans, where f0 is an increasingly more important cue than VOT, this study found effects of the homeland cue reweighting in heritage speakers’ productions. They were more likely to produce phonologically voiced plosives without prevoicing in Afrikaans than in Dutch, but showed large and systematic f0 differences between the two categories in both languages. Their realisations resembled those of older speakers in the homeland most, pointing to slower spread of language innovations to the heritage language community. Findings also suggest that the representations of similar but distinct phonological contrasts in early bilingual speakers’ different phoneme inventories are distinct, but influence each other and may overlap partially. 

Language prediction has been studied from several perspectives: lexical, prosodic, syntactic, etc. Syntactic adaptation refers to the phenomenon of updating one’s beliefs about the upcoming structure incrementally due to exposure to different types of structures. One consequence of syntactic adaptation is that structures that are less likely to be accepted are more likely to become acceptable following syntactic priming. This effect is reversed for generally more acceptable structures. The research project aims to investigate whether the expectations of Greek speakers concerning the high or low attachment of genitives can be influenced by syntactic adaptation. High attachment of genitives is preferred for native Greek speakers. Hence, we expect that, as a result of syntactic adaptation, and following exposure to both high and low attachment, the speakers will show preference for the less acceptable low attachment rather than the generally more acceptable high attachment. In order to address the research question a self-paced reading paradigm will be employed. The acquired data will be analyzed using linear mixed models and a new method suitable for analyzing how predictor effects unfold through time termed Piece-Wise Additive Mixed Models (PAMMs).