A parsing view on inconsistent word order: Articles in Tigre and its relatives

Tosco, Mauro

doi:10.1515/lity.1998.2.3.355

Cited by 29 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Following Zaborski (1991) on Ethiopian language subareas and my own work (Tosco 1998), I sketch the behavior of a few languages of Northern Eritrea and adjoining border areas of the Sudan, in the Horn of Africa (see Map). They make in my opinion a "good" language area precisely because defined in terms of typologically unusual traits-even more unusual then the already not so usual languages of the Horn.…”

Section: Small Is Good: Northern Eritrea As a Language Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They are therefore, following Hawkins (1983), "Type 18" languages. In Tosco (1998) a major role in the development of this syntactic configuration was acribed to the development of a preposed clitic article in Tigre.…”

Section: Small Is Good: Northern Eritrea As a Language Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I argued in Tosco (1998) that the influence of Tigre (which shifted its sentence word order to verb-final but preserved Head-Modifier at the phrase level) has induced the neighboring languages to partially give up their previous typological consistency and adopt, especially for the genitive, a Head-Modifier order (although following language-specific rules: e.g., Bilin has gender/number marker suffixed to the possessum, while Nera uses a postposition).…”

Section: Arealness From Typological Unnaturalnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What to Do when You are Unhappy with Language Areas but You do not Want to Quit

Tosco¹

2008

J Lang Contact

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The article deals with the concept of "linguistic area" and its problems.Section 1. deals with the history of the concept, as originally formulated by Trubetzkoy in 1923, showing how logical problems were present since the very beginning.In Section 2. a few possible preconditions for a scientifically sound definition of "area" are proposed and discussed, and their application is exemplified in Section 3. with the case of the languages of Northern Eritrea.It is suggested that the concept of "area" is in principle more interesting in linguistics than in social sciences due to the availability in linguistics of two other unrelated and powerful tools: genetic classification and typology. It is in the light of these other tools that language areas will have to be judged – as what lies beyond the range of both genetic and typological linguistics. It is suggested that ideally, in order for a linguistic area to be "proven": its members will have to be as genetically diverse as possible; and it will not be possible to account for the area-defining features on the basis of typological tendencies and regularities. Moreover, language areas described in terms of similar traits should not be overlapping, and attention will have to be paid in keeping language-external facts (such as historical contact and cultural similarities) at bay and not let them guide our search for language areas.It is further argued that, since one cannot expect the members of the area to be maximally different genetically (i.e., totally unrelated), nor the outcome of contact to be maximally irregular typologically (i.e, typologically impossible), real-world areas cannot plausibly meet these strong requirements in toto. The most one can expect is a gradual implementation of these conditions: language areas will have to be defined negatively as a space-based clustering of features which can not be accounted for genetically or typologically, and membership in them will have to be recognized as continuous rather than discrete.

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Section: Small Is Good: Northern Eritrea As a Language Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Small Is Good: Northern Eritrea As a Language Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Arealness From Typological Unnaturalnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What to Do when You are Unhappy with Language Areas but You do not Want to Quit

Tosco¹

2008

J Lang Contact

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“…This generalization holds exceptionlessly for the Expanded Sample of Hawkins (1983: 67-8)'. 11 In the meantime, it turned out that OV & (NGen & AdjN) can also be the product of a language-internal development, as is the case in Tigre (Tosco, 1998). 12 From a typological perspective, this construction is remarkable, because it is double-marking -that is, the locative relation is marked at the head of the relational-noun construction (urut-a) as well as at the dependent (erag-a).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%