Philological Society meeting in Oxford: talk by Yvonne Treis
The Philological Society will meet at St Catherine’s College, Oxford and on line, on 16 March to hear Yvonne Treis (LLACAN, CNRS Paris) on Shared lexicalisation patterns in the Ethiopian linguistic area. The talk will begin at 4:15 p.m.; members and guests are welcome to come for tea at 3:45 p.m.
Those who are not (or not yet) members of the Philological Society are welcome to come as guests. On the benefits of membership, and on how to join, see https://philsoc.org.uk/membership-benefits. For those wishing to tune into Yvonne Treis’ talk on line, details will be made available on the Society’s website (https://philsoc.org.uk/meetings).
Abstract
The Ethiopian Linguistic Area at the Horn of Africa comprises languages of different branches of the Afroasiatic macro-family and, to a lesser extent, of the disputed Nilo-Saharan phylum. The linguistic area was established by Charles A. Ferguson as early as the mid-seventies (Ferguson 1976). The boundaries of the contact zone and the criteria used to define it have ever since been disputed, but it is commonly agreed that languages spoken in the Ethiopian highlands show many signs of convergence. After a brief introduction to the languages in Ethiopia (classification, sociolinguistic situation and interesting typological features), some of the defining criteria that have been proposed (and questioned or refuted) by different authors are critically assessed. While most authors have concentrated on features of the phonology and morphosyntax, I will discuss, in the central part of my presentation, how language contact has influenced the organization of the lexicon of languages in the Ethiopian highlands. I will start with a review of Richard Hayward’s influential work (1991; 2000) and then discuss recent and ongoing research on shared polysemy and shared lexicalization patterns in selected semantic fields. My focus will be on two topics: (i) the use of verb ‘know’ as a means to express the experiental perfect, i.e. ‘have (n)ever verb-ed’, and (ii) the similarities in the inventories of interjections, especially for animal-directed commands, across languages. My talk is based on my own field research on Kambaata (Cushitic) and on published data for other Ethiopian languages.
References
Ferguson, Charles A. 1976. The Ethiopian language area. In M. Lionel Bender, J. D. Bowen, R. L. Cooper & C. A. Ferguson (eds.), Language in Ethiopia, 63–76. London: Oxford University Press.
Hayward, Richard J. 1991. À propos patterns of lexicalization in the Ethiopian language area. In Daniela Mendel & Ulrike Claudi (eds.), Ägypten im afro-orientalischen Kontext. Aufsätze zur Archäologie, Geschichte und Sprache eines unbegrenzten Raumes. Gedenkschrift Peter Behrens (Special Issue of Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere), 139–156. Cologne: University of Cologne, Institute of African Studies.
Hayward, Richard J. 2000. Is there a metric for convergence? In Colin Renfrew, April McMahon & R. L. Trask (eds.), Time depth in historical linguistics, vol. 2: Papers in the prehistory of languages, 621–640. Cambridge: The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
