Sebastian Fedden | Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (original) (raw)
Videos by Sebastian Fedden
SLE 2021 keynote by Sebastian Fedden, Matías Guzmán Naranjo & Greville G. Corbett. This is a keyn... more SLE 2021 keynote by Sebastian Fedden, Matías Guzmán Naranjo & Greville G. Corbett. This is a keynote presentation at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2021) by Sebastian Fedden, Matías Guzmán Naranjo and Greville G. Corbett: "Typology meets data-mining: the German gender system"
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Books by Sebastian Fedden
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/non-canonical-gender-systems-9780198795438?cc=ch&lang=en&, 2018
Grammatical gender is famously the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. Despite our solid... more Grammatical gender is famously the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. Despite our solid knowledge about the typology of gender systems, exciting and unexpected patterns keep turning up which defy easy classification and straightforward analysis. Some of these question, stretch or even threaten to cross the outer boundaries of the category. These outer boundaries are a largely unexplored territory; yet they are essential for our understanding of gender, besides being interesting in their own right. The purpose of this book is to explore the external borders of the category of gender and discuss their theoretical significance. The ideal framework for this endeavour is provided by Canonical Typology, a cutting-edge approach already successfully applied to a range of linguistic phenomena. In the Canonical approach a linguistic phenomenon, for example a morphosyntactic feature like gender, is established in terms of a canonical ideal: the clearest instance of the phenomenon. The canonical ideal is a clustering of properties that serves as a baseline from which we measure the actual examples that we find. This approach allows us to analyse any gender system and determine for each of its component properties whether it is more or less canonical. The languages discussed in this volume all diverge from the canonical ideal in interesting ways. For each language, we have lined up international experts, all of whom approach their work from a typological perspective. We explore a wide range of typologically different languages drawn from all over the world, from South America to Melanesia, from an Italo-Romance dialect of Central Italy to Mawng of Northern Australia.
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Fedden, Sebastian. 2011. A grammar of Mian. Mouton Grammar Library 55. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. xxv + 604pp
Winner of the 2013 ALT Gabelentz Award --- Mian is a non-Austronesian (‘Papuan’) language of the ... more Winner of the 2013 ALT Gabelentz Award --- Mian is a non-Austronesian (‘Papuan’) language of the Ok family spoken in the Highlands fringe in western Papua New Guinea. Mian has approximately 1,400 speakers and is highly endangered. This grammar is the first comprehensive description of the language. It is based on primary field data consisting of a text corpus that covers different genres of the oral tradition, namely myths and ancestor stories, historical accounts, accounts of the initiation ritual, conversations, and procedural texts. The corpus was recorded by the author during a total of eleven months of field work from 2004 to 2008. The book provides a thorough description of all areas of Mian grammar and gives an in-depth analysis of many points of typological interest, such as the complex system of lexical tone, the interaction between a gender system and a system of classificatory prefixes on verbs of object movement, manipulation or handling, which allows the highlighting of certain characteristics of a referent in a given situation, the complex verbal morphology which allows fine-grained tense-aspect-mood distinctions, and a switch-reference system in which switch-reference suffixes on medial verbs are homophonous with and derived from suffixes functioning as tense and aspect markers in final verbs. The book is rounded off by a collection of traditional and contemporary texts (fully glossed and translated) and a word list comprising some 1,600 items, giving lexical tone, word class and meaning.
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Papers by Sebastian Fedden
Workshop: Cologne, 7-10 March 2023 Call deadline: 26 August 2022 Meeting description: Work on... more Workshop: Cologne, 7-10 March 2023
Call deadline: 26 August 2022
Meeting description: Work on inflectional morphology often starts out from the canonical baseline that it is regular and productive (Corbett 2015). In canonical inflection, all lexemes in a given word class have the same inflectional properties. However, many languages have subsets of lexemes that do not inflect, while the rest of the items in the same word class do. For example, while Russian nouns typically inflect for two numbers and six cases, the noun pal'to 'coat' has the same form for all number and case combinations. Likewise, Italian nouns typically have singular and plural forms, but there are uninflected nouns as well, e.g. gorilla. Examples of uninflectedness can also be found in agreement, where some lexemes may not inflect as targets while others do, for example, in the Nakh-Dagestanian languages Archi, Ingush and Tsez only a subset of verbs agree. Uninflectedness raises (i) systemic, (ii) typological and (iii) diachronic questions: (i) It contributes to the question of partial rules (Spencer 2020). Answering questions such as how and why languages use partial rule systems when it would appear simpler to have general rules will advance our knowledge of the role of grammatical rules in human language. (ii) Uninflectedness has not been investigated from a typological perspective. We need to ask how widespread it is and whether it displays typological distributions. (iii) Languages are systems in flux, and to reduce the cognitive load that a partial rule system entails we might assume that uninflectedness should be ironed out over time and all items become either inflecting or non-inflecting. We need to verify whether this is the case.
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Oxford Scholarship Online
Nominal classification remains a fascinating topic. To make further progress in this area we need... more Nominal classification remains a fascinating topic. To make further progress in this area we need greater clarity of definition and analysis. We use canonical gender as an ideal against which we can measure the great variety of the actual gender systems we find in the languages of the world. Starting from previous work on canonical morphosyntactic features, particularly on how they intersect with canonical parts of speech, we establish the distinctiveness of gender, reflected in the Canonical Gender Principle: In a canonical gender system, each noun has a single gender value. We develop three criteria associated with this principle, which together ensure that canonically a noun has exactly one gender value. We give examples of non-canonicity for each criterion, and this establishes a substantial typological space, which accommodates the various non-canonical gender systems in the languages featured in this volume.
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The 'Functional verbs datasets' were obtained through the use of video stimuli designed t... more The 'Functional verbs datasets' were obtained through the use of video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in five non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar (Abui, Adang, Kamang, Teiwa and Western Pantar) of eastern Indonesia. We concentrated on the role of functional verbs in the Alor-Pantar languages, i.e. verbs with the basic meanings 'come', 'hold', 'take', 'be in', and 'be on', where we discovered that different related cognates in the languages lie at different points on a continuum from independent lexical verbs to clitic postpositions. The datasets were created for the project 'Alor-Pantar languages: Origins and theoretical impact', funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through European Science Foundation-EuroBabel.
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This list of elicitation stimuli accompanies a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study... more This list of elicitation stimuli accompanies a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., ...
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This list of elicitation stimuli accompanies a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study... more This list of elicitation stimuli accompanies a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., ...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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The Alor-Pantar languages are particularly interesting for examining the relative importance of r... more The Alor-Pantar languages are particularly interesting for examining the relative importance of referential properties as opposed to lexical stipulation in determining pronominal marking on the verb. In this chapter we take a detailed look at the patterns of pronominal marking on verbs in the existing corpora of three languages, Abui, Kamang and Teiwa. These differ in relation to the importance of these factors. There is a continuum with event properties, such as volitionality and affectedness at one end, and stipulation or arbitrary association of prefixes with verbs at the other end. Abui is located at one end of this continuum, because event semantics play a major role. Teiwa is located at the other end, with the lexical property of object animacy as the major determinant of prefixal marking. Between these two extremes we find Kamang. We also argue that lexical properties such as animacy, as opposed to event properties, create the means for arbitrary classes to develop. We comple...
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SLE 2021 keynote by Sebastian Fedden, Matías Guzmán Naranjo & Greville G. Corbett. This is a keyn... more SLE 2021 keynote by Sebastian Fedden, Matías Guzmán Naranjo & Greville G. Corbett. This is a keynote presentation at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2021) by Sebastian Fedden, Matías Guzmán Naranjo and Greville G. Corbett: "Typology meets data-mining: the German gender system"
58 views
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/non-canonical-gender-systems-9780198795438?cc=ch&lang=en&, 2018
Grammatical gender is famously the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. Despite our solid... more Grammatical gender is famously the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. Despite our solid knowledge about the typology of gender systems, exciting and unexpected patterns keep turning up which defy easy classification and straightforward analysis. Some of these question, stretch or even threaten to cross the outer boundaries of the category. These outer boundaries are a largely unexplored territory; yet they are essential for our understanding of gender, besides being interesting in their own right. The purpose of this book is to explore the external borders of the category of gender and discuss their theoretical significance. The ideal framework for this endeavour is provided by Canonical Typology, a cutting-edge approach already successfully applied to a range of linguistic phenomena. In the Canonical approach a linguistic phenomenon, for example a morphosyntactic feature like gender, is established in terms of a canonical ideal: the clearest instance of the phenomenon. The canonical ideal is a clustering of properties that serves as a baseline from which we measure the actual examples that we find. This approach allows us to analyse any gender system and determine for each of its component properties whether it is more or less canonical. The languages discussed in this volume all diverge from the canonical ideal in interesting ways. For each language, we have lined up international experts, all of whom approach their work from a typological perspective. We explore a wide range of typologically different languages drawn from all over the world, from South America to Melanesia, from an Italo-Romance dialect of Central Italy to Mawng of Northern Australia.
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Fedden, Sebastian. 2011. A grammar of Mian. Mouton Grammar Library 55. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. xxv + 604pp
Winner of the 2013 ALT Gabelentz Award --- Mian is a non-Austronesian (‘Papuan’) language of the ... more Winner of the 2013 ALT Gabelentz Award --- Mian is a non-Austronesian (‘Papuan’) language of the Ok family spoken in the Highlands fringe in western Papua New Guinea. Mian has approximately 1,400 speakers and is highly endangered. This grammar is the first comprehensive description of the language. It is based on primary field data consisting of a text corpus that covers different genres of the oral tradition, namely myths and ancestor stories, historical accounts, accounts of the initiation ritual, conversations, and procedural texts. The corpus was recorded by the author during a total of eleven months of field work from 2004 to 2008. The book provides a thorough description of all areas of Mian grammar and gives an in-depth analysis of many points of typological interest, such as the complex system of lexical tone, the interaction between a gender system and a system of classificatory prefixes on verbs of object movement, manipulation or handling, which allows the highlighting of certain characteristics of a referent in a given situation, the complex verbal morphology which allows fine-grained tense-aspect-mood distinctions, and a switch-reference system in which switch-reference suffixes on medial verbs are homophonous with and derived from suffixes functioning as tense and aspect markers in final verbs. The book is rounded off by a collection of traditional and contemporary texts (fully glossed and translated) and a word list comprising some 1,600 items, giving lexical tone, word class and meaning.
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Workshop: Cologne, 7-10 March 2023 Call deadline: 26 August 2022 Meeting description: Work on... more Workshop: Cologne, 7-10 March 2023
Call deadline: 26 August 2022
Meeting description: Work on inflectional morphology often starts out from the canonical baseline that it is regular and productive (Corbett 2015). In canonical inflection, all lexemes in a given word class have the same inflectional properties. However, many languages have subsets of lexemes that do not inflect, while the rest of the items in the same word class do. For example, while Russian nouns typically inflect for two numbers and six cases, the noun pal'to 'coat' has the same form for all number and case combinations. Likewise, Italian nouns typically have singular and plural forms, but there are uninflected nouns as well, e.g. gorilla. Examples of uninflectedness can also be found in agreement, where some lexemes may not inflect as targets while others do, for example, in the Nakh-Dagestanian languages Archi, Ingush and Tsez only a subset of verbs agree. Uninflectedness raises (i) systemic, (ii) typological and (iii) diachronic questions: (i) It contributes to the question of partial rules (Spencer 2020). Answering questions such as how and why languages use partial rule systems when it would appear simpler to have general rules will advance our knowledge of the role of grammatical rules in human language. (ii) Uninflectedness has not been investigated from a typological perspective. We need to ask how widespread it is and whether it displays typological distributions. (iii) Languages are systems in flux, and to reduce the cognitive load that a partial rule system entails we might assume that uninflectedness should be ironed out over time and all items become either inflecting or non-inflecting. We need to verify whether this is the case.
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Oxford Scholarship Online
Nominal classification remains a fascinating topic. To make further progress in this area we need... more Nominal classification remains a fascinating topic. To make further progress in this area we need greater clarity of definition and analysis. We use canonical gender as an ideal against which we can measure the great variety of the actual gender systems we find in the languages of the world. Starting from previous work on canonical morphosyntactic features, particularly on how they intersect with canonical parts of speech, we establish the distinctiveness of gender, reflected in the Canonical Gender Principle: In a canonical gender system, each noun has a single gender value. We develop three criteria associated with this principle, which together ensure that canonically a noun has exactly one gender value. We give examples of non-canonicity for each criterion, and this establishes a substantial typological space, which accommodates the various non-canonical gender systems in the languages featured in this volume.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The 'Functional verbs datasets' were obtained through the use of video stimuli designed t... more The 'Functional verbs datasets' were obtained through the use of video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in five non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar (Abui, Adang, Kamang, Teiwa and Western Pantar) of eastern Indonesia. We concentrated on the role of functional verbs in the Alor-Pantar languages, i.e. verbs with the basic meanings 'come', 'hold', 'take', 'be in', and 'be on', where we discovered that different related cognates in the languages lie at different points on a continuum from independent lexical verbs to clitic postpositions. The datasets were created for the project 'Alor-Pantar languages: Origins and theoretical impact', funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through European Science Foundation-EuroBabel.
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This list of elicitation stimuli accompanies a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study... more This list of elicitation stimuli accompanies a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., ...
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This list of elicitation stimuli accompanies a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study... more This list of elicitation stimuli accompanies a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., ...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patte... more This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar. All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However, there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance, Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer 2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., 'He is ill', wh...
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The Alor-Pantar languages are particularly interesting for examining the relative importance of r... more The Alor-Pantar languages are particularly interesting for examining the relative importance of referential properties as opposed to lexical stipulation in determining pronominal marking on the verb. In this chapter we take a detailed look at the patterns of pronominal marking on verbs in the existing corpora of three languages, Abui, Kamang and Teiwa. These differ in relation to the importance of these factors. There is a continuum with event properties, such as volitionality and affectedness at one end, and stipulation or arbitrary association of prefixes with verbs at the other end. Abui is located at one end of this continuum, because event semantics play a major role. Teiwa is located at the other end, with the lexical property of object animacy as the major determinant of prefixal marking. Between these two extremes we find Kamang. We also argue that lexical properties such as animacy, as opposed to event properties, create the means for arbitrary classes to develop. We comple...
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Understanding intra-system dependencies: Classifiers in Lao
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Despite the ongoing interest in reciprocal situations, which form a central part of our social, i... more Despite the ongoing interest in reciprocal situations, which form a central part of our social, intellectual and moral lives, and the linguistic encoding of such situations in different languages, studies of reciprocals in Papuan languages remain under-represented in the reciprocal literature. The Trans New Guinea languages Mian, Amele and Hua have a reciprocal construction in which the reciprocal subevents are expressed by individual transitive verbs plus an existential verb expressing that the reciprocal action is done together. Mian goes one step further and fuses this construction into a single verb with a reciprocal suffix -sese. The present paper is an in-depth analysis of the morphology, syntax and semantics of reciprocal constructions in Mian, including a comparison with Amele, and an analysis of the diachronic development of the Mian reciprocal, whose origin presumably lies in a biclausal description in which the reciprocal subevents are spelled out separately and sequentia...
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The Mian and Kilivila Collection contains information pertaining to the nominal classification sy... more The Mian and Kilivila Collection contains information pertaining to the nominal classification systems of two indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea, Mian and Kilivila. Kilivila has a single system of classifiers, with a great number of distinctions, while Mian has a dual system, which combines four genders and six classifiers. The Digital Collection on this website permits users to gain a greater understanding of these systems by exploring images of Mian and Kilivila objects and people. Users are also able to test what they have learnt about the classifications systems of these two languages by taking the online Quiz.
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Typology meets data-mining: the German gender system, 2021
PLEASE CITE AS: Fedden, Sebastian, Matías Guzmán Naranjo & Greville G. Corbett. 2021. Typology me... more PLEASE CITE AS: Fedden, Sebastian, Matías Guzmán Naranjo & Greville G. Corbett. 2021. Typology meets data-mining: the German gender system. Keynote at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2021), Athens/SLE 2021 online platform., 2021
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Errata for the Mian grammar, 2021
This is a collection of errata for my grammar of Mian.
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Categorization is ubiquitous in human thought. The ability to process the continuous stream o... more Categorization is ubiquitous in human thought. The ability to process the continuous stream of information we are confronted with and turn it into manageable units is crucial for dealing both with the world around us and with our fellow human beings. We do this when we think, and we do this when we communicate. And the way we do this reveals interesting differences between different people, languages and cultures, in that the same real-world entities may be treated very differently. For example, the English speaker differentiates between fingers and toes, while for the Spanish speaker they are all referred to by the same word, dedo.
The grammar of a language can also force us to classify. When we use a pronoun in English we have to choose between ‘he’ for males, ‘she’ for females and ‘it’ for inanimates. This type of categorization runs along the lines of biological sex. In a language with a gender system all nouns are treated as either masculine or feminine — even those nouns whose meanings have nothing to do with biological sex.
Quite a different approach is taken by languages with a classifier system. Here categorization is based on fine-grained meaning, involving shape, function, arrangement, place or time interval. One such language is Kilivila (an Oceanic language spoken on the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea), which has at least 177 distinct classifiers.
Mostly a language will have only one system or the other, gender or classifiers, but in a few interesting cases we find both systems together. A key language for this project is Mian, a Papuan language spoken by 1,700 people in Papua New Guinea. Mian has both a gender system and a system of classifiers in the form of prefixes on verbs of object handling or movement (e.g. give, take, put, lift, throw, fall).
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