Reassessing Sprachbunds: A View from the Balkans

Friedman, Víctor A.; Joseph, Brian D.

doi:10.1017/9781107279872.005

Cited by 16 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The Balkan peninsula is one of the linguistic areas that was proposed earliest [ 61 ] and received intensive discussion (for a historical overview and critical assessment of the key concepts see [ 62 , 63 ]). It contrasts with the South American case in its much smaller size and the reduced diversity of language families.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: a Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact

Ranacher

Neureiter

Gijn

et al. 2021

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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When speakers of different languages interact, they are likely to influence each other: contact leaves traces in the linguistic record, which in turn can reveal geographical areas of past human interaction and migration. However, other factors may contribute to similarities between languages. Inheritance from a shared ancestral language and universal preference for a linguistic property may both overshadow contact signals. How can we find geographical contact areas in language data, while accounting for the confounding effects of inheritance and universal preference? We present sBayes , an algorithm for Bayesian clustering in the presence of confounding effects. The algorithm learns which similarities are better explained by confounders, and which are due to contact effects. Contact areas are free to take any shape or size, but an explicit geographical prior ensures their spatial coherence. We test sBayes on simulated data and apply it in two case studies to reveal language contact in South America and the Balkans. Our results are supported by findings from previous studies. While we focus on detecting language contact, the method can also be used to uncover other traces of shared history in cultural evolution, and more generally, to reveal latent spatial clusters in the presence of confounders.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: a Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact

Ranacher

Neureiter

Gijn

et al. 2021

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…A case in point is the 'verbal complex' , a string of material ordered in a template-like fashion including markers for negation, tense, modality, argument structure and a verb, as exemplified by the data in (1), adapted from Friedman and Joseph (2017: 56) Miklosich (1861) was the first scholar to identify a series of features common to the Balkan languages, although the number of features to be included in the Balkan sprachbund, often called 'Balkanisms') (cf. Sandfeld, 1930;Joseph, 1983;1992;2010;Friedman and Joseph, 2017;2022) enclitic definite article in Albanian, Daco-Romanian,6 Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian (5), Aromanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and south-eastern (Torlak) Serbian;…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

In and Around the Balkans: Romance Languages and the Making of Layered Languages

2021

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The languages of the Balkans are a rich source of data on contact-induced language change. The result of a centuries long process of lexical and structural convergence has been referred to as a ‘sprachbund’. While widely applied, this notion has, however, increasingly been questioned with respect to its usefulness. Addressing the linguistic makeup of the Balkan languages, the notion of sprachbund is critically assessed. It is shown that a) the Balkan languages and the Balkan linguistic exclaves (Albanian and Greek spoken on the Italian peninsula) share similar contact-induced phenomena, and b) the principal processes underlying the development of the Balkan languages are borrowing and reanalysis, two fundamental and general mechanisms of language change.

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“…We take it for granted that there are a multitude of possible geographical spaces with their specific sociocultural properties formed by historical contingencies, and for every space, the degree of areality can be retrieved empirically. Furthermore, it has repeatedly been highlighted (most recently, for example, in Campbell 2017, Friedman & Joseph 2017) that a proper understanding of linguistic areas hinges on the answer to the question 'What happened? ', that is, on the dynamics of linguistic evolution behind degrees of similarity that are determined by change and maintenance of specifications given historical events.…”

Section: Linguistic Areasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for Britain and Ireland as a linguistic area

2019

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Approaches to linguistic areas have largely focused either on purely qualitative investigation of area-formation processes, on quantitative and qualitative exploration of synchronic distributions of linguistic features without considering time, or on theoretical issues related to the definition of the notion 'linguistic area'. What is still missing are approaches that supplement qualitative research on area-formation processes with quantitative methods. Taking a bottom-up approach, we bypass notional issues and propose to quantify area-formation processes by (i) measuring the change in linguistic similarity given a geographical space, a sociocultural setting, a time span, a language sample, and a set of linguistic data, and (ii) testing the tendency and magnitude of the process using Bayesian inference. Applying this approach to the expression of reflexivity in a dense sample of languages in northwestern Europe from the early Middle Ages to the present, we show that the method yields robust quantitative evidence for a substantial gain in linguistic similarity that sets the languages of Britain and Ireland apart from languages spoken outside of Britain and Ireland and cross-cuts lines of linguistic ancestry.*

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Reassessing Sprachbunds: A View from the Balkans

Cited by 16 publications

References 39 publications

Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: a Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact

Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: a Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact

In and Around the Balkans: Romance Languages and the Making of Layered Languages

Evidence for Britain and Ireland as a linguistic area

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