Browsing by study line "Yleinen kielitiede"
Now showing items 21-24 of 24
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(2023)According to Malchukov, Haspelmath and Comrie a ditransitive construction is a construction consisting of a ditransitive verb, an agent argument, a recipient-like argument, and a theme argument. The relations between these arguments are coded in languages by different methods, namely flagging, or noun-based marking methods; indexing, or verb-based marking methods; or the relation is determined by word order. Typologically ditransitive construction can be divided into three alignment groups, indirective, secundative or neutral. In indirective alignment the recipient argument is marked using a different marking method from theme and monotransitive patient arguments; in secundative alignment the theme argument is marked using different methods; in neutral alignment all three arguments are marked using the same method. Swahili is a prominent lingua franca spoken in Eastern Africa by approximately 100 million people belonging to the language family of Bantu languages. Swahili is an agglutinative language with rich verbal morphology. The Swahili morphosyntax is based on noun class system, in which each noun belongs to a certain noun class. Briefly, the Swahili verb cluster is constructed by adding subject and object markers, which are determined by the nouns or person affiliated with them, to the verbal root. Swahili verb cluster permits only zero or one object marker. Prior studies on Swahili object marking and ditransitive constructions reveal that the patient argument is marked using indexing. Swahili has no case marking, so no flagging methods are used. In ditransitive constructions the recipient is marked as an object marker to the verb. Because recipient and patient arguments are marked using same method, the alignment type of Swahili ditransitive clauses is secundative. In the early grammars and textbooks, the linear word order of the two overt ditransitive objects is suggested to be recipient first, theme second. Later studies suggest that the order might vary. As a part of this study, a corpus study using the Helsinki Corpus of Swahili was carried out. The findings from the corpus study confirm the later findings, the linear order of the two objects shows variation. The syntactically more heavy objects seems to prefer the position of the later object.
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(2024)Research on negation and evidentiality has seen a significant increase in the last decades, both from a typological perspective and for specific languages. The interaction of both domains with other categories has been investigated (e.g. Aikhenvald 2004, Miestamo 2005). However, the interaction of evidentiality with negation is heavily understudied. Apart from a few mentions (e.g. de Haan 1997) and language-specific analyses, I am not aware of comparative research on the topic. The present study analyses and draws a comparative picture of how clausal negation and grammatical evidentiality interact cross-linguistically. Semantically, there are two possibilities, illustrated in example (1) with a visual source of evidence (expressed lexically due to the characteristics of the English language) and the negator: in (1a), the proposition is negated, and in (1b), the source of evidence is negated. (1) a. ‘I see that it is not raining.’ b. ‘I do not see that it is raining.’ Since negation is a function universally grammaticalized in natural languages (Dahl 1979: 79), but grammatical evidentiality is only found in around a fourth of the world’s languages (Aikhenvald 2004: 1), the typological sample for this study contains languages that are known to have at least one evidential. De Haan’s typological study of evidentiality for the World Atlas of Language Structures (2013a) provides a good basis for sampling: the sample for the present study contains one language per family classified by de Haan as having evidentials, adding up to 70. In order to show maximal variety, languages known to be of interest for this phenomenon are also discussed, such as Akha (Aikhenvald 2004) and Cheyenne (Murray 2016). All in all, this study shows that the interaction of negation and evidentiality is of interest both from semantic as well as morphosyntactic points of view, and as much for language-specific research as for typological studies. It gives an overview of the diversity of interactions between negation and evidentiality, and their frequency in the 70-language sample. In short, it is a typology of not knowing what happened and knowing what did not.
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(2024)This thesis examines the typology and stability of evidentiality in contact settings. The goal is to estimate the stability of evidentiality in different contact scenarios, and to find whether evidential structures are more likely to change in language contact situations than to remain stable. Furthermore, this study aims to develop methodology to approach the typology of evidentiality to examine its contact effects in the first place. Earlier research has described evidentiality as an unstable feature that diffuses easily in contact situations, but systematic research examining evidentiality in multiple contact settings and its stability in contact is yet lacking. Moreover, evidentiality has been studied widely, but there is no previous typological approach on evidentiality or on its contact effects that would be suitable for the purposes of this thesis. This study takes a typological approach to the study of evidentiality and language contact. The examination of contact effects is based on six sampling units of three-language sets across the globe, wherein contact effects are estimated on an external benchmark. The collected linguistic data from the sampling units was analyzed into logical outcomes of contact and turned into probability distributions. This finally resulted in the aggregated probability of convergence. The probability of convergence is contrasted to the stability of evidentiality and in that continuum this study estimates how likely it is that evidentiality has been affected due to contact. Furthermore, this thesis focuses on finding a suitable way to approach the first research goal and therefore presents a typological approach on evidentiality and defines grammatical evidentiality. The primary results of this study suggest high probability of convergence and evidentiality seems to be an unstable linguistic domain that diffuses easily. These findings were further contrasted to some other linguistic domains indicating that evidentiality is among the most unstable domains. This study also suggests that the semantic properties of evidentiality are more unstable than the morphological ones. The findings also highlight the sensitivity of the methodology, and these limitations are demonstrated and reflected upon.
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(2019)This study examines the use of the Latin script in languages where the Latin script is not the official writing system. The aim of the research is to get a general perception of where and why the Latin script is used in those languages. The study concentrates on the use of the Latin script of individual writers, especially in informal writing situations online. The study also examines if the individuals have seen the Latin script used by others. In addition, the study finds out about the keyboard functionality when writing in the Latin and non-Latin scripts. Many case studies have covered the phenomenon of digraphia, which is a situation where one language uses two writing systems. However, a broader crosslinguistic study has not been done on this topic. The Latin script is the dominant script on the Internet which might have an impact on the script choice in online writing. Internet language and chatting are broadly studied but because of the continuously changing nature of the Internet, more research is required on these topics. This study aims to fill in some of the gaps that are left open by previous research. I gathered data by an online questionnaire and by four semi-structured interviews. By means of the questionnaire, I got open question answers and quantitative data from 142 respondents. Additionally, I had four interviews with representative users of different writing systems to get more detailed information about the use of the Latin script. The data was analysed and compared with previous research from the point of view of five groups of different scripts. The general finding of this study is that the respondents choose to write in the Latin script mostly when the non-Latin keyboard in not available or when fast and easy informal writing style is required. The Latin script has many different functions. It is mostly used in online chatting, texting with friends or when one’s personal information needs to be written in travelling documents. However, people prefer to write in the official non-Latin script even though it might sometimes feel difficult or slow to use. The study points out that it cannot be predicted whether a respondent uses the Latin script or not, since the results are mostly very variable. The need or even the eagerness to use the Latin script when it is not the official script, reflects the functions and facilities that are available or unavailable for different scripts.
Now showing items 21-24 of 24