Keynote Presentations

Message from Mukalap

In the keynote that Judith Westerveld will present at the TWIST conference she will share and contextualize her film Message from Mukalap (2021). At the core of the film lies a unique sound recording that captures a spoken message from a man named Mukalap, recorded around 1936 in South Africa. Mukalap speaks in !ora, a Khoe language that is now no longer spoken. In his message he calls on an European audience to just for once listen to his beautiful language, and to listen to him. His message is not only an urgent appeal for recognition, he also asks the audience to send a message in return. The film is a response to his request.

Westerveld will specifically focus on the multilingual aspects of the film. Constructed as a dialogue between Mukalap and herself, she replies to Mukalap speaking in Dutch, English and Afrikaans, as well as fragments of !ora. The multitude of languages and translations resound the legacies of colonialism. Another aspect she will focus on is how tracing the sound of Mukalap’s message back to the technology and media that were used to record his message and reproduce his voice, can be seen as a process of media archeology.

Judith Westerveld

Roland Pfau

Grammaticalization in sign languages: Remnants of structure and meaning

It has been shown that many grammaticalization pathways identified for spoken languages are also attested in sign languages (SLs), i.e., these pathways are, for the most part, modality-independent (cf. Pfau & Steinbach 2011; Janzen 2012). Yet, one might expect that the visual nature of SLs also impacts the routes that grammaticalization processes may or may not take. We will address the possible impact of iconicity. While iconicity, the relation between the form and meaning of a linguistic symbol, is attested in spoken languages (e.g., Dingemanse et al. 2015), it is certainly more prevalent in SLs, where handshapes, movements, and locations may iconically represent properties of objects and events (e.g., Taub 2012). We focus on the grammaticalization of auxiliary-like elements, discussing the examples of the verb GIVE in Dutch SL (NGT) and the noun PERSON in German SL. One of our guiding questions will be in how far structural and semantic properties of the underlying signs are lost or maintained during the grammaticalization process. The data show, for instance, that iconicity, while not blocking grammaticalization processes per se, may still block certain extensions attested in spoken languages due to remnants of meaning.

Pfau, Roland & Markus Steinbach. 2011. Grammaticalization in sign languages. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrogs (eds.), The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization, 683–695. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Janzen, Terry. 2012. Lexicalization and grammaticalization. In Roland Pfau, Markus Steinbach & Bencie Woll (eds.), Sign Language: An International Handbook (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 37). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Dingemanse, Mark, Damián E. Blasi, Gary Lupyan, Morten H. Christiansen & Monaghan Padraic. 2015. Arbitrariness, Iconicity, and Systematicity in Language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19(10). 603–615.
Taub, Sarah F. Iconicity and metaphors. 2012. In Roland Pfau, Markus Steinbach & Bencie Woll (eds.), Sign Language: An International Handbook (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 37). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Agreement vs Pluractionality: Grammaticalisation in East Caucasian

Tsova-Tush, an East Caucasian language of the Nakh branch, features many verbs with a prefix slot that contains consonants agreeing in gender and number to the nominative argument in the clause. The same is true for Tsezic and most other East Caucasian languages. Additionally, in Tsova-Tush as well as in East-Tsezic, infixes that are identical in form to the gender-number prefixes mark agreement in some verbs and event plurality, and even aspect and tense, in others. The present study explores whether the East Caucasian data can support a novel grammaticalisation pathway Number Agreement > Participant Plurality > Event Plurality > Aspect > Tense, and aims to identify the lacunae to be filled with targeted fieldwork.

Jesse Wichers-Schreur

Jenny Audring

Remnants in morphological structure

Morphology abounds in remnants: many words contain parts that once made sense, but no longer do. Familiar examples include bound roots (reck-less, pre-fer), cranberry morphemes (cran-berry, Fri-day), and questionable affixes (chatt-er, spark-le), all of which continue to challenge linguistic theory. Similar problems arise with complex words whose meanings are non-compositional or idiomatic (under-stand, hood-wink, lady-bug). Such items occupy an uneasy position between grammar and the lexicon: while clearly stored in lexical memory, they also exhibit some degree of grammatical structure. This results in an apparent paradox — these words seem to be processed holistically, yet the mind still recognizes their internal structure and their similarity to genuinely complex words.

In this talk, I explore the continuum of morphological complexity in individual words, from unquestionably simplex to clearly complex, focussing on the many intermediate cases. I present a theoretical account grounded in the framework of Relational Morphology (Jackendoff & Audring 2020). Central to the account is the acknowledgement that grammar and lexicon form a continuum, that morphological structure is inherently gradient, and that lexical relations are crucial to the perception of structure. Drawing on seemingly disparate phenomena such as folk etymology, back-formation, and phonaesthemes, I argue that understanding morphological structure requires theoretical attention not just to grammatical regularities, but also to lexical quirks.