Zewi, Tamar & Oren, Mikhal. 2015. “Semitic Languages in Contact - Syntactic Changes in the Verbal System and in Verbal Complementation.” In: Butts, A. M. ed. Semitic Languages in Contact. (Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 82). Leiden: Brill: 405-421. (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
This paper discusses some aspects of the functional competition between nominal morphology and verbal morphology to express low transitivity in different IE languages with respect to other areally contiguous language families. In West and North IE (Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic), experience predicates often select oblique experiencers, which are also common in Finno-Ugric. In West and North IE, the inherited middle conjugation is decaying or lost altogether , replaced by structures based on the reflexive pronoun. By contrast, in South and East IE (Anatolian, Greek, Early Indo-Iranian and Tocharian), the middle inflection is still productive and represents the main strategy to encode experience predicates, in addition to denominal verb formations; in these languages, oblique experiencers are much more rare than in West and North IE. South and East IE languages have striking correspondences with Semitic, which is also poor in oblique experiencers and in impersonal constructions in its earliest varieties. In Ancient Semitic, the experiencer is regularly the subject of the clause, while low transitivity is expressed by a highly articulated verbal morphology. Accordingly, the preferred use of verbal suffixes or of oblique cases to express low transitivity-both inherited from PIE-tend to be reinforced in different IE areas by the contact with different language families where these strategies are also more or less productive.
This article describes and analyzes three situations of linguistic contact in the Ancient Near East, taking as its staring point three theoretical studies on contact languages which have been developed recently: the framework of mixed languages (Bakker and Matras, 2013; Meakins, 2013), the theory of written language contact (Johanson, 2013) and the approach to contact among genetically related languages (Epps, Huehnergard and Pat-El, 2013a). The authors argue that the contact systems selected for this article (Ugaritic-Hurrian, Hurro-Akkadian and Canaano-Akkadian), although distinct from the grammatical and sociolinguistic perspective, can all be viewed as expressions of the same dynamic phenomena, where each variety of mixing corresponds to a different stage of a universal continuum of languages in the situation of merger. Consequently, they can be located along the universal cline of mixing: Ugaritic-Hurrian matches the initial stage of intermin-gling, Hurro-Akkadian reflects gradually more intense blending, and Canaano-Akkadian corresponds to the phase of a profound fusion of the two source codes. By examining and comparing the three cases of mixing, the authors introduce new insights to the general discussion on mixed languages, written language contact and relevance of genetic relation in language intermingling, thus corroborating and/or refining certain hypotheses and propositions that have previously been formulated within the latest theoretical studies.
2019 The Semitic Languages, 2nd ed.
The Semitic Languages, 2nd ed., 2019
The Semitic Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language clusters within this language family, from their origins in antiquity to their present-day forms. This second edition has been fully revised, with new chapters and a wealth of additional material. New features include the following: • new introductory chapters on Proto-Semitic grammar and Semitic linguistic typology • an additional chapter on the place of Semitic as a subgroup of Afro-Asiatic, and several chapters on modern forms of Arabic, Aramaic and Ethiopian Semitic • text samples of each individual language, transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet, with standard linguistic word-byword glossing as well as translation • new maps and tables present information visually for easy reference. This unique resource is the ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics and language. It will be of interest to researchers and anyone with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, linguistic anthropology and language development.