The origin of differential object marking in Maltese

Döhla, Hans-Jörg; Puech, Gilbert; Saade, Benjamin

doi:10.1515/9783110496376-007

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Thomason 2001). Döhla (2016), for instance, evaluates the plausibility that differential object marking in Maltese (Semitic) has been borrowed from Sicilian (Romance) and uses several other Semitic languages to assess a likely scenario. If historical data is unavailable, historical‐comparative reconstructions from closely related languages of L i may be used: potential outcomes of contact can then be compared to the reconstructions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing Inferences about Language Contact on Morphosyntax: A Typological Case Study on Alorese–Adang Contact

Sinnemäki,

Ahola

2023

Trans of the Philol Soc

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When linguists make inferences about language contact, control data is required for reliable analysis. Historical data or reconstructions are typically used for that purpose. However, historical data is globally mostly unavailable, and reconstructions are laborious if comparing outcomes of language contact in a typological way. We assess a recent typological proposal (Di Garbo & Napoleão de Souza 2023) that argues that using a single language, called Benchmark language, can serve as a viable control for making inferences about contact. To evaluate this approach, we use as a case study a documented contact situation in Eastern Indonesia between the Austronesian language Alorese and the Papuan language Adang. We sample languages related to Alorese and use computational phylogenetic methods for ancestral reconstruction to analyse if using a single Benchmark produces deviating inferences about contact compared to using Bayesian ancestral reconstructions. Additionally, we test for isolation by distance effects by analysing if the probability of contact effects correlates with increasing geographic distance from the contact region. The results suggest that no isolation by distance effects exist in the data and that none of the single Benchmarks significantly deviate from the ancestral reconstructions.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing Inferences about Language Contact on Morphosyntax: A Typological Case Study on Alorese–Adang Contact

Sinnemäki,

Ahola

2023

Trans of the Philol Soc

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The fine structure of low topics in Najdi Arabic

Alshamari

Jarrah

2022

Linguistics

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This article explores the low IP area of Najdi Arabic, with special reference to a construction involving a post-verbal object that is resumed on the verb (as in ‘The man saw-her the woman’). We provide evidence that the object is a topic in the low IP area in such cases. However, the position of the object in the low IP area is masked by the movement of the verb to T0 or, in some cases (if T0 is lexically filled) to the head of the low Focus Phrase. We also provide evidence that Najdi Arabic low topics exclusively express given, accessible information (i.e., familiar topics), which is found to be a prominent characteristic that distinguishes them from high topics (in the CP domain). High topics are shown to be ambiguous with respect to their specific discourse-informational value (aboutness/shifting vs. contrastiveness vs. familiarity). Additionally, we offer evidence that low topics in Najdi Arabic are recursive, dominated by a low Focus Phrase (FocP > TopP*). At a general level, the study demonstrates that topics in the low IP area are more restrictive in their informational content than previously believed.

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The origin of differential object marking in Maltese

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Testing Inferences about Language Contact on Morphosyntax: A Typological Case Study on Alorese–Adang Contact

Testing Inferences about Language Contact on Morphosyntax: A Typological Case Study on Alorese–Adang Contact

The fine structure of low topics in Najdi Arabic

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