Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model
Edited by Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François and Harald Hammarström
Special issue of Journal of Historical Linguistics 9:1 (2019) v, 176 pp.
Alexandre François
List of John Benjamins publications for which Alexandre François plays a role.
Title
Subjects Historical linguistics
Articles
2021 Olfactory words in northern Vanuatu: Langue vs. parole The Linguistics of Olfaction: Typological and Diachronic Approaches to Synchronic Diversity, Jędrzejowski, Łukasz and Przemysław Staniewski (eds.), pp. 277–304 | Chapter
This corpus-based study examines the lexical domain of olfaction in the Oceanic languages of northern Vanuatu. While a tropical ecology is sometimes believed to favor elaborate encoding patterns for smells, this does not appear to be the case in Vanuatu. Most languages there show a rather limited… read more
2019 When the waves meet the trees: A response to Jacques and List Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model, Kalyan, Siva, Alexandre François and Harald Hammarström (eds.), pp. 168–177 | Commentary
2019 Problems with, and alternatives to,the tree model in historical linguistics Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model, Kalyan, Siva, Alexandre François and Harald Hammarström (eds.), pp. 1–8 | Introduction
2017 The economy of word classes in Hiw, Vanuatu: Grammatically flexible, lexically rigid Lexical flexibility in Oceanic languages, Lier, Eva van (ed.), pp. 294–357 | Article
The issue of lexical flexibility is best tackled as the articulation of two separate mappings: one that assigns lexical items to word classes; another one that associates these word classes with the syntactic functions they can access. A language may endow its lexemes with more or less… read more
2015 Temperature terms in northern Vanuatu The Linguistics of Temperature, Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria (ed.), pp. 832–857 | Article
Oceanic languages generally have a small set of lexemes encoding temperature predicates – no more than two or three words in each language. Focusing on a sample of languages from northern Vanuatu, this study describes their temperature terms, analyses the syntax of their various case frames, and… read more
2011 Social ecology and language history in the northern Vanuatu linkage: A tale of divergence and convergence Journal of Historical Linguistics 1:2, pp. 175–246 | Article
This study describes and explains the paradox of related languages in contact that show signs of both linguistic divergence and convergence. Seventeen distinct languages are spoken in the northernmost islands of Vanuatu. These closely related Oceanic languages have evolved from an earlier dialect… read more
2010 Pragmatic demotion and clause dependency: On two atypical subordinating strategies in Lo-Toga and Hiw (Torres, Vanuatu) Clause Linking and Clause Hierarchy: Syntax and pragmatics, Bril, Isabelle (ed.), pp. 499–548 | Article
Despite the wealth of subordinators in Hiw and Lo-Toga (Oceanic, north Vanuatu), two of their Tense-Aspect-Mood categories – the Subjunctive and the Background Perfect – can do without them, and encode clause dependency by themselves. A pragmatic hypothesis is proposed to account for this… read more
2008 Semantic maps and the typology of colexification: Intertwining polysemous networks across languages From Polysemy to Semantic Change: Towards a typology of lexical semantic associations, Vanhove, Martine (ed.), pp. 163–215 | Article
Building upon the model of Semantic Maps (Haspelmath 2003), which typologists have designed mainly for grammatical semantics, this chapter discusses methodological issues for a model in lexical typology. By breaking up polysemous lexemes of various languages into their semantic “atoms” or senses,… read more
2007 23. Noun articles in Torres and Banks languages: Conservation and innovation Language Description, History and Development: Linguistic indulgence in memory of Terry Crowley, Siegel, Jeff, John Lynch and Diana Eades (eds.), pp. 313–326 | Article