Don Daniels
List of John Benjamins publications for which Don Daniels plays a role.
2024 Diachrony and Diachronica: 40@40 Diachronica: Online-First Articles | Editorial
2024 Semi-embedded clauses in Aisi: Assertion, disengagement, and insubordination Functions of Language: Online-First Articles | Article
This paper examines a construction in Aisi (Trans New Guinea) which consists of a formally subordinate clause that expresses asserted meaning. This construction is called ‘semi-embedding’. The construction is more restricted than subordinate clauses, and serves a specific discourse function: it… read more
2022 The history of tense and aspect in the Sogeram family Development of Tense and Aspect Systems, Gvozdanović, Jadranka (ed.), pp. 21–61 | Chapter
2020 The history of tense and aspect in the Sogeram family Development of tense and aspect systems, Gvozdanović, Jadranka (ed.), pp. 167–208 | Article
This paper presents an overview of the tens-aspect system in the Sogeram languages of Papua New Guinea. Taking the Proto-Sogeram reconstruction in Daniels (2015, 2020) as a starting point, I outline the innovations that have taken place in daughter languages and discuss the patterns of change… read more
2019 Using phonotactics to reconstruct degrammaticalization: The origin of the Sirva pronoun be Diachronica 36:1, pp. 1–36 | Article
The principle of directionality is an important part of the comparative method: in order to arrive at a reconstruction, historical linguists need a robust theory that informs them in what direction linguistic change is likely to proceed. But any such theory will have exceptions. How are these to… read more
2019 Subgrouping the Sogeram languages: A critical appraisal of Historical Glottometry Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model, Kalyan, Siva, Alexandre François and Harald Hammarström (eds.), pp. 92–127 | Article
Historical Glottometry is a method, recently proposed by Kalyan and François (François 2014; Kalyan & François 2018), for analyzing and representing the relationships among sister languages in a language family. We present a glottometric analysis of the Sogeram language family of Papua New… read more
2017 A method for mitigating the problem of borrowing in syntactic reconstruction Studies in Language 41:3, pp. 577–614 | Article
Most scholars agree that grammatical borrowing is a serious obstacle to syntactic reconstruction, but to date there have been few proposed solutions to this methodological conundrum. In this paper I propose a method, couched in a constructional view of language, for mitigating the problem of… read more
2014 Complex coordination in diachrony: Two Sogeram case studies Diachronica 31:3, pp. 379–406 | Article
This paper presents two innovations in the clause chaining system of the Sogeram languages of Papua New Guinea. In the first, chain-final morphology was reanalyzed as chain-medial morphology with different-subject switch reference meaning. In the second, common collocations of two verbs in a… read more
