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Talks by Manuel Widmer

The western Himalayas are an ancient linguistic area in which Indo-European (IE) and Tibeto-Burma... more The western Himalayas are an ancient linguistic area in which Indo-European (IE) and Tibeto-Burman (TB) have been in longstanding contact for more than three millennia (see Masica 1991; van Driem 2001). The region thus constitutes an ideal laboratory for studying the long-term effects of language contact between two typologically very divergent language families. However, detailed investigations of such contact phenomena presuppose detailed knowledge about the history of the languages that are spoken in the region. Unfortunately, our understanding of the linguistic prehistory of the western Himalayas is still very fragmentary. This talk aims at filling this gap and shedding light on the linguistic past of this area based on a historical study of West Himalayish (WH), a group of fifteen endangered minority languages that belong to the TB family and are spoken in remote mountainous areas of the North Indian states Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
In a first part, the internal classification of the WH subgroup will be addressed. Based on lexical and grammatical evidence, it will be demonstrated that WH consists of two main branches, a western branch and an eastern branch. This classification will then be compared with the contemporary distribution of WH languages. It will be shown that closely related WH languages are often separated from each other by territories occupied by Indo-Aryan or Tibetic communities, which corroborates the hypothesis that the WH subgroup was once spread over a wider territory.
In a second part, the former distribution of WH languages will be reconstructed based on both linguistic and non-linguistic evidence. It will be demonstrated that the eastern WH languages bear affinities to the language of Zhangzhung, a polity that once controlled major parts of the Himalayan plateau (see Denwood 2008), and that lexical and morphological borrowings of WH origin can be found in western Tibetic varieties. This suggests that WH languages may once have been spoken across the western half of the Himalayan Plateau. It will further be shown that several WH communities practiced transhumance until the recent past, following an annual migration cycle between winter pastures in the Himalayan foothills and summer pastures in the high mountains (see Zoller 1983; Willis 2007). This suggests that WH communities may once have permanently settled the Himalayan foothills, but were then gradually pushed into the Himalayan range by Indo-Aryan communities, who may have arrived in the area as early as 1,500 BCE (see Masica 1991).
The talk thus offers new insights into the linguistic prehistory of the western Himalayas and the history of the linguistic frontier between the TB and IE language families.

Handout and slides of a talk given at the Transalpine Typology Meeting, DDL, Lyon, October 8 2015

Papers by Manuel Widmer

The present paper describes a transitivity distinction that is attested in some Tibeto-Burman (TB... more The present paper describes a transitivity distinction that is attested in some Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages of the West Himalayish (WH) subgroup. The relevant distinction is encoded by a set of dedicated markers that occur between verb stems and inflectional endings and group verbs into transitivity classes. The paper first offers a synchronic description of transitivity classes in the WH language Bunan, discussing their formal realization and functional motivation. Subsequently, the relevant transitivity classes are discussed from a historical-comparative perspective. It is argued that the transitivity distinction developed when an object agreement marker was reanalyzed as a marker of transitive verbs. The paper thus offers new perspectives on transitivity in TB from both a synchronic and a diachronic point of view and adduces evidence for a hitherto undescribed reanalysis from "object agreement marker" > "marker of transitive verbs".

In this study, we explore typological aspects of egophoricity marking based on selected Tibeto-Bu... more In this study, we explore typological aspects of egophoricity marking based on selected Tibeto-Burman languages. Conceptualizing egophoricity as an autonomous grammatical category that marks access to knowledge, we first discuss how egophoricity marking interacts with evidentiality in the Tibeto-Burman languages Shigatse Tibetan and Bunan. We then go on to explore the differences between the egophoricity systems of Shigatse Tibetan and Bunan, arguing that the variability of egophoricity within and across languages can be captured if we distinguish (i) constructions in which egophoricity markers express privileged access to knowledge due to actional involvement in the role of an event participant from (ii) constructions in which egophoricity markers express privileged access to knowledge due to epistemic involvement in the role of a "knower" whose precise relation to the event is not specified. We additionally introduce a set of five semantic roles to offer a more detailed description of the egophoricity systems of Shigatse Tibetan and Bunan (and also, albeit marginally, Kathmandu Newar and Galo). This study thus offers a new perspective on the variability of egophoricity systems in Tibeto-Burman and propagates an analytical approach that may also be helpful for analyzing egophoricity systems in other language families of the world.

The epistemic verbal categories " evidentiality " and " egophoricity " play an important role in ... more The epistemic verbal categories " evidentiality " and " egophoricity " play an important role in the verbal systems of many Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas. In the course of the past decades, our synchronic understanding of those grammatical categories has been considerably enhanced by numerous descriptive studies. However, little is still known about the diachronic processes that give rise to evidentiality and egophoricity. The article addresses this gap by discussing evidence from Bunan, a Tibeto-Burman language for whose past tense system the development of evidentiality and egophoricity can be reconstructed in detail. It is argued that the evolution of the two categories can be explained by reference to two processes: (i) the reanalysis of a resultative construction as an inferential past tense and (ii) the reanalysis of third person agreement markers as allophoric markers. In addition, it is maintained that the concept of Scalar Quantity Implicature is crucial to account for the evolution of the two categories.

Egophoricity is a cross-linguistically rare grammatical phenomenon. While numerous descriptive st... more Egophoricity is a cross-linguistically rare grammatical phenomenon. While numerous descriptive studies have substantially improved our synchronic understanding of the category in recent years, we are still largely ignorant of the diachronic origins of egophoricity systems. In this article, we address this gap and discuss a diachronic process that transforms person agreement markers into egophoricity markers. Based on evidence from three Tibeto-Burman languages, we reconstruct the diachronic transformation and argue that the process starts out in reported speech clauses once the direct construal of the predicate is generalized. This generalization allows for the functional reanalysis of first and third person markers as egophoric and allophoric markers, while second person markers become functionally obsolete. Once person markers have undergone an epistemization in reported speech clauses, the innovative epistemic system is extended to simple declarative and interrogative clauses, where it gradually replaces the conservative person agreement system.

Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas are renowned for their complex epistemic verbal systems.... more Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas are renowned for their complex epistemic verbal systems. In the course of the past decades, a wealth of descriptive studies has considerably enhanced our synchronic understanding of such systems. However, the diachronic processes that give rise to epistemic verbal categories are still poorly understood. The article addresses this research gap and provides evidence for a diachronic link between the grammatical domains of person indexation and conjunct-disjunct marking. Evidence for this diachronic link will be drawn from the Tibeto-Burman languages Dolakha Newar (East Nepal) and Bunan (North India), both of which possess “hybrid verb systems” that display features of person agreement systems and conjunct-disjunct systems. Based on a comparison of Dolakha Newar and Bunan, it will be argued that the two languages bear witness to the functional reanalysis of person indexation as conjunct-disjunct marking. In the course of this process, a ternary person distinction (“first person” vs. “second person” vs. “third person”) is reduced to a binary epistemic distinction (“conjunct” vs. “disjunct”).

Dissertation by Manuel Widmer

Articles in press by Manuel Widmer

Some languages constrain the recursive embedding of NPs to some specific morphosyntactic types, a... more Some languages constrain the recursive embedding of NPs to some specific morphosyntactic types, allowing it for example only with genitives but not with bare juxtaposition. In Indo-European, every type of NP embedding — genitives, adjectivizers, adpositions, head marking, or juxtaposition — is unavailable for syntactic recursion in at least one attested language. In addition, attested pathways of change show that NP types that allow recursion can emerge and disappear in less than 1000 years. The wide-ranging synchronic diversity and its high diachronic dynamics raises the possibility that at many hypothetical times in the history of the family recursive NP embedding could have been lost for all types simultaneously, parallel to what has occasionally been observed elsewhere (Everett 2005, Evans & Levinson 2009). Performing Bayesian phylogenetic analyses on a sample of 55 languages from all branches of Indo-European, we show however that it is extremely unlikely for such a complete loss to ever have occurred. When one or more morphosyntactic types become unavailable for syntactic recursion in an NP, an unconstrained alternative type is very likely to develop in the same language. This suggests that, while diachronic pathways away from NP recursion clearly exist, there is a tendency – perhaps a universal one – to maintain or develop syntactic recursion in NPs. A likely explanation for this evolutionary bias is that recursively embedded phrases are not just an option that languages have (Fitch et al. 2005), but that they are in fact preferred by our processing system.

Handout and slides of a talk given at the Transalpine Typology Meeting, DDL, Lyon, October 8 2015