The Tungusic language family is comprised of languages spoken in Siberia, the Russian Far East, Northeast China and Xinjiang. There is a general consensus that these languages are genealogically related and descend from a common ancestral language. Nevertheless, there is considerable disagreement… read more
The Farming Language Dispersal Hypothesis makes the radical and controversial claim that many of the world’s major language families owe their present-day distribution to the adoption of agriculture by their early speakers. Especially for regions such as Northern Asia, where farming is only… read more
In this chapter, I investigate how our understanding of insubordination can add to the establishment of genealogical relationship between languages. The particular case that I deal with here is the longstanding affiliation question of the Transeurasian languages. The term “Transeurasian” refers to… read more
In this article, the historical development of sentential negation is compared across the Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages to make inferences about the expression of negation in the common Transeurasian proto-language. Integrating typological considerations, including… read more
Although the genealogical relationship between Japanese and the Transeurasian languages has been a source of contention for nearly two centuries, scholars seem to agree that paradigmatic morphology could substantially help to prove relatedness. Starting from this consensus, this contribution… read more
The present contribution suggests how grammaticalization theory may contribute to establishing remote linguistic relationships, more particularly to distinguishing genealogical residue from the effects of areal influence, universal factors and coincidence. The five different types of shared… read more