Daniel Bunčić | Universität zu Köln (original) (raw)

Books by Daniel Bunčić

Serbs write their language in Cyrillic or Latin letters in seemingly random distribution. Hindi-U... more Serbs write their language in Cyrillic or Latin letters in seemingly random distribution. Hindi-Urdu is written in Nāgarī by Hindus and in the Arabic script by Muslims. In medieval Scandinavia the Latin alphabet, ink and parchment were used for texts ‘for eternity’, whereas ephemeral messages were carved into wood in runes. The Occitan language has two competing orthographies. German texts were set either in blackletter or in roman type between 1749 and 1941. In Ancient Egypt the distribution of hieroglyphs, hieratic and demotic was much more complex than commonly assumed. Chinese is written with traditional and simpliﬁed characters in different countries.

This collective monograph, which includes contributions from eleven specialists in different philological areas, for the ﬁrst time develops a coherent typological model on the basis of sociolinguistic and graphematic criteria to describe and classify these and many other linguistic situations in which two or more writing systems are used simultaneously for one and the same language.

Papers by Daniel Bunčić

Der Sammelband enthält Beiträge der TeilnehmerInnen des XXIX. JungslavistInnen-Treffens 2021 an d... more Der Sammelband enthält Beiträge der TeilnehmerInnen des XXIX. JungslavistInnen-Treffens 2021 an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Zoom). Die Themen reichen von klassischen Fragestellungen aus Morphologie und Syntax über sozio-, schrift- und kontaktlinguistische Studien bis hin zur Quantitativen Toponomastik und Linguistic Landscapes-Forschung. Aus dem Inhalt: Petr Biskup: Deriving Morphological Aspect in Russian: A Matryoshka Way; Christina Clasmeier: Funktionen attributiver Adjektive im Polnischen: Zwei Prototypenmodelle; Julia Golbek: Die russischen Dialekte und die mündliche Standard-Umgangssprache in Deutschland – eine Untersuchung mit Herkunftssprechern; Tobias-Alexander Herrmann: Graphemic gender approaches in Russian and Czech; Nicolas M. Jansens: Insights from quantitative toponomastics: Getting off the ground with open data; Alisa Müller: Designing a Quantitative Linguistic Landscape Study: Unit of Analysis, Variables and Exploratory Analysis; Hagen Pitsch: Fast Perfekt? Zur Struktur mít + N/T-Partizip im Tschechischen; Maria Katarzyna Prenner: Alphabetical pluricentricity, graphematic development, and orthographic tendencies in selected Belarusian newspapers between 1862 and 1915; Veronika Wald, Anna Ritter und Tatjana Kurbangulova: Zweisprachigkeit und Sprachmanagement in russischsprachigen Familien in Deutschland.

Scando Slavica, Apr 1, 2011

The present paper reports the results of an acceptability judgement test designed to test two hyp... more The present paper reports the results of an acceptability judgement test designed to test two hypotheses: first, that the Russian 3pl impersonal construction is affected by agent prominence, i.e. verbs implying a more prominent agent are more acceptable than verbs implying an agent with fewer agentivity features; second, that movement as an agentivity feature should be conceptualized as a gradual category, thus making a fast-moving referent a more prominent agent than one moving slowly. The former hypothesis could be verified, the latter falsified

Zeitschrift Fur Slawistik, Aug 1, 2015

The Polish construction miec ‘have’ + passive participle has recently been discussed as a possibl... more The Polish construction miec ‘have’ + passive participle has recently been discussed as a possible new perfect tense in the process of grammaticalization, but good arguments against this interpretation have been put forward: Semantically it is merely a resultative construction, and diachronically it has been attested with the same semantics since the beginning of literacy. However, a certain group of sentences with miec + passive participle has not been paid sufficient attention so far. In these sentences the participle can be formed from an imperfective verb, it can be combined with a temporal adverbial referring to the time of the event and the subject is never the agent but the beneficiary. These constructions have to be classified as a recipient passive. In parallel with the Polish direct passive, there are three recipient-passive constructions (imperfective, perfective, resultative). Together with the resultative active, the constructions with miec + passive participle fill a gap in the Polish voice system.

Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Jul 20, 2015

Written Language and Literacy, Dec 31, 2020

Research on language contact has so far mainly focused on oral situations, although standardizati... more Research on language contact has so far mainly focused on oral situations, although standardization and language ideologies always have an important influence on multilingualism in both its written and its spoken form. This raises the question of which theoretical models are most suitable for the description of written language contact. The present paper recalls linguistic investigations of written language. Some research on multilingual writing shares concepts with research on oral language contacts, always adapting them for writing. Other research develops new concepts for investigating multilingual writing. Within the framework of research on multilingualism, some concepts approach language contact as a question of systematic interactions between linguistic systems (e.g. borrowing, code-switching, graphematic matrix, schriftdenken), other concepts envisage language contact as a multilingual practice (e.g. translanguaging, multimodal analysis, biliteracy). Written language contact is an especially fruitful field of study for pointing out major differences between these two research traditions and for bridging them.

Ukrainianists and Belarusianists traditionally assumed that “Ukrainian” and “Belarusian” authors ... more Ukrainianists and Belarusianists traditionally assumed that “Ukrainian” and “Belarusian” authors of the middle period of the East Slavic language history wrote essentially in their own respective mother tongues or even native dialects; linguistic features belonging to dialects of the other of the two modern nations were regarded as “foreign” influences due to the close political and cultural ties between “Ukrainians” and “Belarusians”. Nowadays more and more scholars come to acknowledge the existence at that time of a common Ruthenian literary standard. However, the relationship between this standard variety and the diversity of the Ruthenian dialects is still rather unclear. As the Ruthenian questione della lingua, i.e. the problem of choosing a dialect basis for the standard variety, was never discussed explicitly (mainly because of the overwhelming importance of Polish and Church Slavonic in the Ruthenian metalinguistic discourse), the role of intermediate dialects (e.g. Polissian), dialect mixing (e.g. Vilna and Galicia), the acceptability of individual dialect features, and linguistic conservatism (e.g. in orthography) for the standardization of Ruthenian remain to be thoroughly evaluated. This is what this paper tries to do

Scando Slavica, Apr 1, 2011

Zeitschrift Fur Slawistik, Aug 1, 2015

Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Jul 20, 2015

Written Language and Literacy, Dec 31, 2020

The Polish-no/-to construction is an arb, i.e. a human impersonal with a similar meaning as the i... more The Polish-no/-to construction is an arb, i.e. a human impersonal with a similar meaning as the impersonal pronouns man in German or on in French or the 3 impersonal in Russian. The common view that it can be formed from virtually all verbs as long as the referent is human is here contested by an acceptability judgement test. It shows that verbs assigning more agentivity features to the subject are significantly better than verbs assigning fewer agentivity features, and completely un-agentive verbs are just as bad as inanimate referents. This reveals a prominence relation. The details of the findings indicate that the-no/-to construction behaves in a similar but nonetheless different way from other arbs and that the list of agentivity features has to be revised in order to model the prominence relation exactly.

De Gruyter eBooks, Jul 13, 2012

Annual meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society in Bratislava, 2023

Phonemes can be analysed as consisting of distinctive features, and graphemes also consist of sma... more Phonemes can be analysed as consisting of distinctive features, and graphemes also consist of smaller elements. However, while there is a correspondence between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds), the features of letters do not seem to correlate with phonetic features (except for the Korean Han’gŭl script, which Sampson 1985: 120–140 analyses as a “featural” writing system). For example, those letters that contain a right half-circle ɔ (b, o, p, s; B, D, O, P, Q, R, S) do not correspond to any meaningful group of sounds.

However, the late Beatrice Primus (2004) presented an analysis of the modern Latin alphabet in which letters are grouped according to graphic features in such a way that these groups correspond to groups of sounds. For example, she showed that letters for obstruents tend to have ascenders or descenders (p, t, k, b, d, g, q, f, j, h), whereas letters for sonorants are largely constrained to the x-height (a, e, i, o, u, m, n, r; Primus 2004: 252–253; Primus & Wagner 2014: 41–43). Consequently, syllables tend to have a vertically concave ≍ shape (e.g. but, tank, peg, track, etc.; for words like take, see Evertz 2018 for the correspondence between graphemic syllables and phonemic syllables). Such regularities are a consequence of ‘natural’ development of the Latin alphabet over the centuries (Primus 2007).

Similar regularities have also been shown for Greek (Primus & Wagner 2014: 43), Arabic, and Tifinagh (ibid. 48–57) but not for Cyrillic. The history of Cyrillic – with its letters derived from two sources, Greek and Glagolitic, Peter I’s alphabet reform of 1708, and the conservative Soviet typography – is complicated and relatively short, so that it is not at all clear whether grapho-phonic correspondences at the level of features can already have developed.

In this talk I present a featural analysis of Cyrillic which shows that:

a) the ‘standard’ Russian print alphabet (whose letters are remarkably uniform, as Kempgen 1993 has shown) is indeed much less featural than the Latin alphabet;

b) Cyrillic cursives as well as the recent Bulgarian variant of Cyrillic (cf. Kempgen 2015) exhibit an astonishing number of correspondences at the level of graphetic and phonetic features.

This demonstrates that the development of the Cyrillic alphabet unequivocally goes in the direction of a ‘featural’ alphabet.

Poster to be printed out in A0 format, containing the Marriage at Cana in 38 Slavic speech forms:... more Poster to be printed out in A0 format, containing the Marriage at Cana in 38 Slavic speech forms: Old Church Slavonic (Glagolitic, Cyrillic), Church Slavonic (East Slavic recension), Synodal Church Slavonic, Russian, Belarusian (Narkamaŭka, Taraškevica, Łacinka), West Polesian, Ruthenian, Ukrainian, North Rusyn, South Rusyn, Polish (Standard, Silesian, Podhalian), Kashubian, Lower Sorbian, Upper Sorbian, Czech, Slovak (Bernolák, Standard ), Slovenian (Standard, Prekmurian, Styrian, Resian), Molise Slavic, Croatian (Kajkavian, Burgenland, Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Standard), Bosnian, Serbian (Ijekavian, Ekavian), Macedonian, and Bulgarian (Standard, Banat).

Poster zum Ausdruck im Format DIN A0, das die Hochzeit zu Kana in 38 slavischen Sprachformen enth... more Poster zum Ausdruck im Format DIN A0, das die Hochzeit zu Kana in 38 slavischen Sprachformen enthält: Altkirchenslavisch (glagolitisch und kyrillisch), Kirchenslavisch (ostslavische Redaktion), Synodalkirchenslavisch, Russisch, Belarussisch (Narkamaŭka, Taraškevica, Łacinka), Westpolessisch, Ruthenisch, Ukrainisch, Nordrussinisch, Südrussinisch, Polnisch (Standard, Schlesisch, Podhalisch), Kaschubisch, Niedersorbisch, Obersorbisch, Tschechisch, Slovakisch (Bernolák, Standard), Slovenisch (Standard, Prekmurje, Steirisch, Resianisch), Moliseslavisch, Kroatisch (Kajkavisch, Burgenland, glagolitisch, kyrillisch, Standard), Bosnisch, Serbisch (ijekavisch, ekavisch), Makedonisch und Bulgarisch (Standard und Banat).

OpenType is a technology by which fonts can handle complex problems of typography. In this presen... more OpenType is a technology by which fonts can handle complex problems of typography. In this presentation I will discuss a few of the more complex typographical problems with historical and contemporary Slavic texts and how OpenType can be used to solve them: diacritics and superscript letters, ligatures in all three Slavic alphabets, Cyrillic and Glagolitic numbers, and diachronic and diatopic variation of glyphs. I will also discuss limitations of OpenType and problems that should not be solved using OpenType.

Vom 11. Jahrhundert bis 1919 trennte die österreichisch-ungarische Grenze den östlich der Mur lie... more Vom 11. Jahrhundert bis 1919 trennte die österreichisch-ungarische Grenze den östlich der Mur liegenden Teil des slovenischen Dialektgebiets vom restlichen Slovenien ab, so dass sich dort eine eigene prekmurische Schriftsprache entwickelte, die jedoch um die Mitte des 20. Jh. vom Standardslovenischen verdrängt wurde. Ein kleines slovenischsprachiges Gebiet an der Raab bei Szentgotthárd ist aber bis heute bei Ungarn verblieben, so dass dort noch gut 3 000 Slovenischsprecher leben, die in Büchern, Zeitschriften und Radiosendungen sowohl das Standardslovenische als auch ihren Porabisch genannten Dialekt benutzen. Die Funktionen, für die dieser verwendet wird, gehen aber über das für einen Dialekt Übliche deutlich hinaus. Daher stellt sich die Frage, ob dieser ›porabische Dialekt‹ nicht in Wirklichkeit die nahtlose Fortsetzung der alten prekmurischen Schriftsprache ist. Um dies beantworten zu können, ist zu klären, woran man sprachliche Kontinuität eigentlich festmachen kann. Insbesondere sind Faktoren der äußeren Sprachgeschichte gegen solche der inneren Sprachgeschichte abzuwägen.

According to both philological and typological literature, the Polish -no/-to construction (as in... more According to both philological and typological literature, the Polish -no/-to construction (as in Tańczono do białego rana ‘There was dancing until dawn’) implies an arbitrary human subject/agent (e.g. Siewierska 1988: 269–275; Rivero & Sheppard 2001: 140), i.e. the construction is restricted to implicit subjects that are ranked as [human] on Silverstein’s [1976] animacy scale (cf. Jabłońska 2008). Kibort (2008: 270, 272) argues that the default human reference can be overridden in the Polish reﬂexive impersonal passive but not in the -no/-to construction. However, these descriptions are inappropriate in two respects: a) The construction sometimes does occur with non-humans (e.g. animals, machines). b) Even with humans, this construction is not uniformly grammatical for all verbs (e.g. ?Migotano, bo pot pokrył ciała ‘There was shimmering because the bodies were covered in sweat’). My hypothesis therefore is that acceptability and use of the -no/-to construction depend on verb semantics rather than animacy as a nominal category. More specifically, there is a prominence relation based on privative features of agentivity understood as a multi-dimensional space of features (dynamicity, volitionality, control, sentience, self-propelled movement, etc.) in the sense of Dowty (1991) and Primus (2011). This hypothesis is tested using corpus analyses and a questionnaire study among native speakers. It can be compared with results for the German man construction and impersonal passive.

Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67(3). 547–619.
Jabłońska, Patrycja. 2008. Silverstein’s hierarchy and Polish argument structure. In Marc Richards & Andrej Malchukov (eds.), Scales, 221–245. Leipzig: Universität Leipzig, Institut für Linguistik.
Kibort, Anna. 2008. Impersonals in Polish: An LFG perspective. Transactions of the Philological Society 106(2). 246–289.
Primus, Beatrice. 2011. Animacy and telicity: Semantic constraints on impersonal passives. Lingua 121(1). 80–99.
Rivero, Marìa Luisa & Milena Milojević Sheppard. 2001. On impersonal se / sie in Slavic. In Gerhild Zybatow, Uwe Junghanns, Grit Mehlhorn & Luka Szucsich (eds.), Current issues in formal Slavic linguistics, 137–147. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Siewierska, Anna. 1988. The passive in Slavic. In Masayoshi Shibatani (ed.), Passive and voice, 243–289. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In Pieter Muysken & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), Features and projections, 163–232. Dordrecht: Foris.

In the case of the Serbo-Croatian language(s), the importance of ideology is especially obvious, ... more In the case of the Serbo-Croatian language(s), the importance of ideology is especially obvious, since it pervades even the ‘scientiﬁc’ description by linguists: On the one hand, there is a wide-spread notion that the former Serbo-Croatian language has ‘dis¬inte-grated’ into up to four diﬀerent languages (e.g. Katičić 1997, Rehder ³1998). A variant of this point of view is that Serbo-Croatian as such never existed (e.g. Auburger 1999). On the other hand, a few linguists maintain that Serbo-Croatian as a ‘linguistic’ language is still the same today as it was a century ago (e.g. Kordić 2004, Gröschel 2009) and that Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are mere “political” (i.e. non-linguistic – and hence non-existant) languages (Thomas 1994).
In my talk it will become clear that none of these concepts is quite correct. What hap-pened a quarter of a century ago is a good example of the inﬂuence ideologies can have on language as a medium of communication itself. In the Serbo-Croatian case, ideology aﬀects all levels of linguistic expression (the writing system, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and the lexicon). Apart from that, ideol¬o¬gies also determine such socio¬linguistic parameters as the status and area of application of standard varieties. Conse¬quent¬ly, ideologies changing over time bring about language change.
Most of the phenomena observed are caused by political ideas and language policies which I summarize under the cover term of ‘the ideology of separateness’. However, this ideology is opposed both by an ideology of togeth¬er¬ness and by a general inclination to maximize the potential audience of communication in a language. A question to be addressed in this context is whether such ideologies are really something external to lan¬guage or in how far they coincide with such ‘natural’ sociolinguistic requirements of a standard language as the “separatist function” and the “unifying function” proposed by Garvin & Mathiot (1960).

References
Auburger, Leopold. 1999. Die kroatische Sprache und der Serbokroatismus. Ulm/Donau.
Garvin, Paul L. & Madeleine Mathiot. 1960. The urbanization of the Guaraní language: A problem in language and culture. In: Men and cultures: Selected papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Philadelphia, September 1 9 1956. Ed. Anthony F. C. Wallace. Philadelphia. 783 790. [Reprinted in: Readings in the sociology of language. Ed. Joshua A. Fishman. The Hague, Paris 1968. 365 374.]
Katičić, Radoslav. 1997. Undoing a “uniﬁed language”: Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian. In: Undoing and redoing corpus planning. Ed. Michael Clyne. Berlin, New York. 165 191.
Gröschel, Bernhard. 2009. Das Serbokroatische zwischen Linguistik und Politik. Mit einer Bibliographie zum postjugoslavischen Sprachenstreit. München.
Kordić, Snježana. 2004. Pro und kontra: „Serbokroatisch“ heute. In: Slavistische Linguistik 2002: Referate des XXVIII. Konstanzer Slavistischen Arbeitstreﬀens, Bochum, 10. 9.−12. 9. 2002. Ed. Marion Krause, Christian Sappok. München. 97 148.
Rehder, Peter (ed.). ³1998. Einführung in die slavischen Sprachen (mit einer Einführung in die Balkan¬philo-logie). Darmstadt.
Thomas, Paul-Louis. 1994. Serbo-croate, serbe, croate…, bosniaque, monténégrin: Une, deux…, trois, quatre langues? Revue des études slaves 66:1. 237 259.

Dies ist die erste Einführung in die slavistische Linguistik, die nicht nur russistisch ist, sond... more Dies ist die erste Einführung in die slavistische Linguistik, die nicht nur russistisch ist, sondern sich an Studierende aller slavischen Sprachen richtet. Dabei berücksichtigt sie sowohl die Synchronie als auch die Diachronie. Die Leseri⃰nnen werden empathisch, mit angemessenen didaktischen Vereinfachungen, aber ohne Komplexität zu negieren, in die Methoden der Sprachwissenschaft und die Besonderheiten der slavischen Sprachen eingeführt. Zahlreiche Übungsaufgaben – von denen viele durch eigenständige Arbeit mit elektronischen Korpora zu lösen sind – und weiterführende Literatur ermöglichen die aktive Beschäftigung mit der Materie.

Der Umfang dieses Buches mit seinen 33 Lektionen kann in seiner Gesamtheit in einem über sechs Semesterwochenstunden laufenden Einführungsmodul behandelt werden und hat sich in einem solchen Kontext gut bewährt. Für kompaktere Einführungsveranstaltungen ist eine Auswahl aus den Lektionen des Buches möglich (Vorschläge für 2 SWS und 4 SWS auf S. xx), so dass die übrigen Lektionstexte ggf. eine einführende Lektüregrundlage für thematische Pro- und Hauptseminare darstellen können.

Durch seine klare Gliederung eignet sich dieses Buch auch als Kompendium zum Nachschlagen für das gesamte Studium.

Entwurf von Barbara Sonnenhauser für Kapitel 9 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavisch... more Entwurf von Barbara Sonnenhauser für Kapitel 9 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Entwurf von Barbara Sonnenhauser für Kapitel 5 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavisch... more Entwurf von Barbara Sonnenhauser für Kapitel 5 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Entwurf von Barbara Sonnenhauser für Kapitel 4 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavisch... more Entwurf von Barbara Sonnenhauser für Kapitel 4 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Entwurf von Daniel Bunčić und Barbara Sonnenhauser für Kapitel 3 für die »Einführung in die Lingu... more Entwurf von Daniel Bunčić und Barbara Sonnenhauser für Kapitel 3 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Entwurf für Kapitel 2 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Entwurf für Kapitel 1 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Entwurf für Kapitel 13 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Entwurf für Kapitel 12 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen

Entwurf für Kapitel 14 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen

Entwurf für Kapitel 6 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen

Entwurf für Kapitel 7 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen

Entwurf für Kapitel 8 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«

Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen, 2021

Entwurf für Kapitel 11 für die »Einführung in die Linguistik der slavischen Sprachen«