Areal feature

In linguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a proto-language, or, common ancestor language. That is, an areal feature is contrasted to genealogically determined similarity within the same language family. Features may diffuse from one dominant language to neighbouring languages (see "Sprachbund").

Characteristics

Resemblances between two or more languages (whether in typology or in vocabulary) can be due to genetic relation (descent from a common ancestor language), to borrowing between languages, to retention of features when a population adopts a new language, or simply by coincidence. When little or no direct documentation of ancestor languages is available, determining whether the similarity is genetic or areal can be difficult. Edward Sapir notably used evidence of contact and diffusion as a negative tool for genetic reconstruction, treating it as a subject in its own right only at the end of his career (e.g., for the influence of Tibetan on Tocharian).[1]

Genetic relationships are represented in the family tree model of language change, and areal relationships are represented in the wave model. William Labov in 2007 reconciled these models in a general framework based on differences between children and adults in their language learning ability. Adults do not preserve structural features with sufficient regularity to establish a norm in their community, but children do. Linguistic features are diffused across an area by contacts among adults. Languages branch into dialects and thence into related languages through small changes in the course of children's learning processes which accumulate over generations, and when speech communities do not communicate (frequently) with each other, these cumulative changes diverge.[2] Diffusion of areal features for the most part hinges on low-level phonetic shifts, whereas tree-model transmission includes in addition structural factors such as "grammatical conditioning, word boundaries, and the systemic relations that drive chain shifting".[3]

In some areas with high linguistic diversity, a number of areal features have spread across a set of languages to form a sprachbund (also known as a linguistic area, convergence area or diffusion area). Some examples are the Balkan sprachbund, the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, and the languages of the Indian subcontinent.

Examples

Phonetics and phonology
  1. The spread of the guttural R from either German or French to several Northern European languages.
  2. Presence of /ɫ/ (dark L), usually contrasting with palatalized /lʲ/ in Slavic, Baltic and Turkic languages of Central Asia.
  3. Possibly the Satem sound change.
  4. Development of a three-tone system with no tones in words ending in -p, -t, -k, followed by a tone split; many other phonetic similarities; a system of classifiers/measure words; etc. in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area.
  5. Retroflex consonants in the Burushaski,[4][5] Nuristani,[6] Dravidian, Munda,[7] and Indo-Aryan families of South Asia.
  6. The occurrence of click consonants in Bantu languages of southern Africa, which originated in the Khoisan languages.
  7. The lack of fricatives in Australian languages.
  8. The use of ejective and aspirated consonants in the languages of the Caucasus.
  9. The prevalence of ejective and lateral fricatives and affricates in the Pacific Northwest of North America.
  10. The development of a close front rounded vowel in the Bearnese dialect of Occitan and the Souletin dialect of Basque.
  11. The absence of [w] and presence of [v] in many languages of Central and Eastern Europe.
  12. The lack of nasal consonants in languages of the Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula.
  13. The absence of [p] but presence of [b] and [f] in many languages of Northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
  14. The presence of a voicing contrast on fricatives e.g. [s] vs [z] in Europe and Southwestern Asia.

Morphophonology
  1. Vowel alternation patterns in reduplicatives.[8]

Syntax
  1. The tendency to use a habeo (transitive, e.g. "I have") construction for possession in much of Europe, instead of a possessive dative construction, such as mihi est (to me is), which is more likely the original possessive construction in Proto-Indo-European, considering the lack of a common root for "have" verbs.[9]
  2. The development of a perfect aspect using "have" + past participle in many European languages (Romance, Germanic, etc.). The Latin habeo and Germanic haben used for this and the previous point are not in fact genetically related.
  3. A perfect aspect using "be" + past participle for intransitive and reflexive verbs (with participle agreement), present in French, Italian, German, older Spanish and Portuguese, and possibly even English, in phrases like "I am become death, destroyer of worlds" and "The kingdom of this world is become".
  4. Postposed article, avoidance of the infinitive, merging of genitive and dative, and superessive number formation in some languages of the Balkans.
  5. The spread of a verb-final word order to the Austronesian languages of New Guinea.

Sociolinguistics
  • The use of the plural pronoun as a polite word for you in much of Europe (the tu-vous distinction).

See also

Notes
  1. Drechsel, Emanuel J. (1988). "Wilhelm von Humboldt and Edward Sapir: analogies and homologies in their linguistic thoughts", in Shipley, William (ed.) (December 1988). In Honor of Mary Haas: From the Haas Festival Conference on Native American Linguistics. the Hague: de Gruyter Mouton. p. 826. ISBN 978-3-11-011165-1.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link) p. 254.
  2. Labov, William (2007). "Transmission and diffusion" (PDF). Language. 83 (2): 344–387. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.705.7860. doi:10.1353/lan.2007.0082. Retrieved 18 Aug 2010.
  3. Labov 2007:6.
  4. Berger, H. Die Burushaski-Sprache von Hunza und Nagar. Vols. I-III. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1988
  5. Tikkanen (2005)
  6. G. Morgenstierne, Irano-Dardica. Wiesbaden 1973
  7. The Munda Languages. Edited by Gregory D. S. Anderson. London and New York: Routledge (Routledge Language Family Series), 2008. ISBN 978-0-415-32890-6
  8. Ido, Shinji (2011). "Vowel alternation in disyllabic reduplicatives". Eesti Ja Soome-ugri Keeleteaduse Ajakiri. 2 (1): 185–193. doi:10.12697/jeful.2011.2.1.12.
  9. Winfred Philipp Lehmann, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, Routledge, 1992, p. 170

References
  • Abbi, Anvita. (1992). Reduplication in South Asian Languages: An Areal, Typological, and Historical Study. India: Allied Publishers.
  • Blevins, Juliette. (2017). Areal sound patterns: From perceptual magnets to stone soup. In R. Hickey (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (pp. 88–121). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Campbell, Lyle (2006). "Areal linguistics: A closer scrutiny". In Matras, Yaron; McMahon, April; Vincent, Nigel (eds.). Linguistic areas: Convergence in historical and typological perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1–31.
  • Campbell, Lyle (2006). "Areal linguistics". In Brown, Keith (ed.). Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 1.455–460.
  • Chappell, Hilary. (2001). Language contact and areal diffusion in Sinitic languages. In A. Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (Eds.), Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics (pp. 328–357). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2005). Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia. Annual Review of Anthropology, 34, 181-206.
  • Haas, Mary R. (1978). Language, culture, and history, essays by Mary R. Haas, selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Haas, Mary R. (June 1978). Prehistory of Languages. The Hague: de Gruyter Mouton. p. 120. ISBN 978-90-279-0681-6.
  • Hickey, Raymond (ed.) (2017). The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  • Kirby, James & Brunelle, Marc. (2017). Southeast Asian Tone in Areal Perspective. In R. Hickey (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (pp. 703–731). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Matisoff, J. A. (1999). Tibeto-Burman tonology in an areal context. In Proceedings of the symposium Crosslinguistic studies of tonal phenomena: Tonogenesis, Japanese Accentology, and Other Topics (pp. 3–31). Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.
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