Contemporary dialects of Goranî (a Northwestern Iranic language spoken in Kurdistan) exhibit considerable variation in the formation of tense-aspect-mood categories. It has long been recognized that compatibility of the indicative/imperfective prefix mi- or the subjunctive prefix bi- with present-tense verb stems is phonologically conditioned. However, all attempts to identify the specific conditioning environments have failed. In this article, we reexamine the diachronic development of these affixes, showing that subsequent sound changes have obscured the original conditioning environment for the retention of these affixes. Early work on Hewramî (the main variety of Goranî) shows how the pattern of verbs that have lost the prefixes has begun to be extended to the verbs that take these prefixes for synchronically opaque reasons. The least frequent of these verbs were the first to begin the process of extension, showing inconsistent marking in these early works. Moreover, younger generations continue this process of extension using many more unmarked verbs compared to older speakers. The findings of this paper have implications for cyclic developments in the domain of tense and aspect.
The aim of our study is to investigate possible relevant relationships between declared attitudes toward Spanish borrowing and actual language use among speakers of Nahuatl in the Huasteca Potosina in Mexico. The main source of our quantitative data was a survey collected from 121 speakers, which included questions on attitudes toward borrowing, self-assessed language proficiency, and demographic background, as well as a section inviting respondents to choose between more puristic and more Hispanicised sentence options. Twenty participants of the survey also took part in a visual stimuli-based language proficiency assessment experiment in which we tested for the presence of Spanish loanwords. The results of the quantitative study were confronted with qualitative data involving interviews and participant observation. The analysis of the quantitative data revealed strong negative attitudes toward Spanish borrowing in Nahuatl and a correlation between declared purism, i.e. negative attitudes to borrowing, and preference for puristic sentence options. However, declared purism had little reflection in actual language use in the proficiency assessment experiment. This study demonstrates that use of a variety of materials and careful methodology are needed in order to make advances in this topic.
Incomplete mastery of dialect grammar engenders 'hyperdialectisms' which may be unconscious errors, but which may also be the result of indexical resourcefulness, viz. the profiling of a regional identity. Fifty younger and older speakers from the Brabantish city of Eindhoven (Netherlands) were first administered an acceptability judgment task containing correct forms and three types of hyperdialectisms featuring gender and number constraints. Following the survey, the same respondents participated in a focus group discussion. Regression analysis on the scaled ratings revealed that all three types of hyperdialectisms were rejected, although it was especially the older respondents (almost all L1 dialect speakers) who were weary of the incorrect forms. Analysis of the focus group data demonstrated that older respondents are consciously aware of the rules of their dialect grammar, and hate it when these rules are violated. Younger respondents showed almost no meta-grammatical awareness, and admitted to 'allowing' the incorrect forms in some contexts because they 'sound Brabantish'. Identity construction, in other words, is at the heart of hyperdialectal usage. Methodologically, this paper makes a plea for the confrontation of quantitative data - which provide the backbone of analysis - with qualitative data that offer access to motives for, and constraints on grammatical variation.
This study contributes to a growing body of research on the social meanings of linguistic variation with particular interest in the cognitive processes governing their emergence. Our research follows in the tradition of Labov et al.'s (2011) work on the sociolinguistic monitor, a cognitive mechanism hypothesized to track quantitative linguistic variation and prompt social evaluations (Labov et al. 2011. Properties of the sociolinguistic monitor. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(4). 431-463). Previous research shows that L1 English listeners are sensitive to frequency variation, but it is unclear whether this also applies to L2 listeners. This study thus replicates Labov et al.'s (2011) original experiment in a context where English is primarily acquired through L2 instruction. To test the generality of sociolinguistic monitoring, we investigate L2 listeners' sensitivity to quantitative differences in sociolinguistic variation (ing) as well as proficiency-based variation. Since participants were L1 speakers of (Austrian) German, we tested evaluations of varying realizations of /θ/ ([θ]/[s]), /d/ ([d]/[t]), and /w/ ([w]/[v]). Experiments included 135 participants, who rated several versions of newscaster test passages regarding professionalism. Our data shows that both sociolinguistic and proficiency-based variation are monitored and evaluated by L2 listeners, albeit to different extents. This supports the assumption that the focus of the monitoring process is socially meaningful variation that includes L1 sociolinguistic but also L2 proficiency-based features.
This article presents a case of (non-canonical) optional subject marking observed exclusively in spontaneous speech. Persian is a pro-drop language with obligatory subject agreement marked by verbal suffixes and a set of clitic pronouns serving different functions, e.g., pronominal objects encliticized to the verb. In standard Persian, subject agreement for the 3rd person singular (3SG) is consistently realized by zero in past tenses; however, as shown in this study, in spoken language, speakers occasionally use the 3SG pronominal clitic =eš instead of zero. This non-standard usage is generally neglected, if not ignored, in previous research. Drawing on evidence from historical studies and naturally produced data from spoken and transcribed Persian, this study highlights the empirical shortcomings of previous claims that the subject agreement marker -eš results from grammaticalization of the object clitic =eš as a means of repairing or levelling the verbal agreement paradigm. Instead, it is argued that while written Persian preserves more parsimonious constructions, the redundant use of -eš to index the subject, similar to object clitic doubling, is part of the indexing system of spoken Persian and can be understood in terms of fluid differential subject marking. Differences in indexing between the written (i.e., offline language production) and spoken (i.e., spontaneous language production) modalities are not unusual and may be caused by different factors. Studying these differences in transcribed spoken data, this study identifies distinct patterns of information packaging in the two modalities and offers an explanation in terms of cognitive principles of language processing and production to account for the difference in indexing between spoken and written Persian.
This study investigates the use of predicate reduplication to express aspectual meaning in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). The study focuses on three aspect types that have been found to be encoded by reduplication across sign languages - habitual, continuative, and iterative - and addresses potential phonological restrictions. Naturalistic corpus data and data elicited from six deaf NGT signers were taken into account. The results suggest that (i) predicate reduplication can express all three aspect types, but it is optional; (ii) reduplication expressing habitual and continuative aspect appears to be phonologically constrained; and (iii) such phonological constraints do not apply to iterative reduplication, whose form is different from the other two aspects, in that the reduplication cycles are separated by pauses. Since there is no formal difference between habituals and continuatives in the data, it is suggested that this semantic distinction may not be grammaticalized in the language, and that, possibly, the inflectional system of NGT instead more broadly distinguishes imperfective/perfective viewpoint. While this latter suggestion is in line with findings reported for many spoken languages, the results are different from what has previously been described for NGT as well as for other sign languages. Potential explanations for these differences can be found in both methodological and sociolinguistic factors.
This article offers the first overview of the recent emergence of Tibetan Sign Language (TibSL) in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), China. Drawing on short anthropological fieldwork, in 2007 and 2014, with people and organisations involved in the formalisation and promotion of TibSL, the author discusses her findings within the nine-fold UNESCO model for assessing linguistic vitality and endangerment. She follows the adaptation of this model to assess signed languages by the Institute of Sign Languages and Deaf Studies (iSLanDS) at the University of Central Lancashire. The appraisal shows that TibSL appears to be between "severely" and "definitely" endangered, adding to the extant studies on the widespread phenomenon of sign language endangerment. Possible future influences and developments regarding the vitality and use of TibSL in Central Tibet and across the Tibetan plateau are then discussed and certain additions, not considered within the existing assessment model, suggested. In concluding, the article places the situation of TibSL within the wider circumstances of minority (sign) languages in China, Chinese Sign Language (CSL), and the post-2008 movement to promote and use "pure Tibetan language".
This study examines how the use of rhotics in Santomean Portuguese is becoming enregistered as a feature that marks Santomeans' national identity. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork and semistructured interviews with Santomeans living on São Tomé Island and in Portugal. The qualitative analysis of the data reveals the process that leads to the use and awareness of the rhotic feature among Santomeans. This increasing awareness is analysed in terms of orders of indexicality. The author suggests that awareness of this rhotic feature among Santomeans is contingent on having contact with Portuguese speakers of non-Santomean origin, as they only become aware of their distinctive use of rhotics when they are in contact with speakers of another variety of Portuguese on the island, in the diaspora, or online. Also, even if this feature is perceived negatively by many, it remains available for identity-driven use to express a connection to São Tomé and Príncipe.
This article argues that the [+distal] feature of demonstrative that is also present in complementizer that, and has not bleached away. In particular, we argue that complementizer that is referential: it refers to an element in the Shared Discourse Space (an extension of the Common Ground) that can be seen as distal. This allows us to explain (i) that direct speech patterns with [-distal] (Sue said this/#that: "It is raining") while indirect speech patterns with [+distal] (Sue said *this/that it is raining); (ii) the use of that in exclamatives (That bio industry is still allowed!); and (iii) that optional that is more frequently used when there is some sort of context between Speaker and Addressee. This last phenomenon has parallels in Romance complementizers derived from Latin quod, which can likewise be seen as [+distal]. We propose that [+distal] is a marker of Addressee involvement, which can account for all these phenomena, and can be extended to demonstrative uses of that. In exophoric contexts, [+distal] additionally marks actual distance. The interpretation of Addressee involvement and actual distance depends on context; we propose that it is derived from the interaction between the syntactic DP/CP domain and the pragmatic exophoric/endophoric distinction.
In different languages around the world, morphemes representing the (cooked form of) staple food or food in general tend to begin with a [+labial] phoneme followed by a [+low] phoneme (/pa-/, /ma-/, /fa-/, /wa-/, etc.). This article provides evidence for this phonological similarity by analyzing 66 sample languages' morphemes representing the staple food within the society where each language is spoken. About a fourth of the morphemes referring to staple food begin with a [+labial] first phoneme followed by a [+low] second phoneme, which is a much higher proportion compared to another list of basic morphemes in the same 66 languages. I further argue that the motivation for this crosslinguistic tendency is the iconic association between the mouth-opening gesture and the concept of eating.
Men's participation in antenatal care (ANC) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is shaped by diverse conceptions and experiences of fatherhood. However, most discussions rely on biomedical models that typically view men's participation narrowly as a strategy to increase ANC uptake in mainstream health facilities, often marginalizing culturally specific forms of participation. We aimed to consolidate the existing literature on the complex nuances of how attitudes, knowledge, variations in involvement, and decision-making dynamics influence men's participation in ANC in rural SSA. Following the scoping review methodology developed by Arksey and O'Malley, we searched ten databases (African Index Medicus, Africa Journals Online, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, MEDLINE/PubMed, PsycINFO, Sociology Collection, Social Sciences Abstract, Social Sciences Citation Index) for peer-reviewed articles published between January 1st, 2000, and October 31st, 2024. We included only studies that systematically analyzed primary or secondary data to examine fatherhood and men's participation in ANC in a rural setting in SSA. We applied no language restrictions. We identified 7665 articles, full-text reviewed 797 articles, and included 77 articles that reported 58 qualitative, 6 quantitative, and 13 mixed-methods studies conducted in 15 SSA countries. We identified nine themes under three categories addressing our review's objective: 1) three themes described men's attitudes and knowledge around participating in ANC; 2) four themes depicted variations in men's participation in ANC throughout pregnancy; and 3) two themes described how men's participation in ANC was shaped by largely collaborative communal decision-making structures in rural SSA. While heterogeneous, the existing body of evidence highlights contextually-valid and socioculturally meaningful nuances that reflect the lived realities of fatherhood and men's participation in ANC across rural SSA. Policymakers and practitioners should leverage these nuances as strengths, and further research should employ Afrocentric approaches to better understand these issues.
This study uses a matched-guise test to examine attitudes toward informal address in Uruguayan Spanish, which features two competing pronouns (tú, vos), their associated verb forms (tienes 'you haveT' vs. tenés 'idV'), and mixed combinations (TT, VV, TV). The analysis compares perceptions in Montevideo and Rocha. Two Montevideo speakers (one male, one female) were evaluated by raters from Montevideo (N = 82) and Rocha (N = 75) on attributes related to status, solidarity, and perceived national and regional identity. A cumulative link mixed-effects model showed that all variants were perceived as Uruguayan. Montevideo raters judged VV as the most Uruguayan, followed by TV, whereas Rocha raters showed no significant differences among variants for the male guise, but perceived the TT female guise as most Uruguayan. In both locations, TT increased perceptions of speakers as less from Montevideo and more from Rocha. Gender effects emerged: the female speaker was perceived as less from Rocha and more from Montevideo than the male when using VV, indicating heightened sensitivity to women's address choices. Rocha raters evaluated the female VV guise as less proper (correcta) than the male and the female TV guise as more disagreeable (antipática). These patterns suggest intersecting forms of prestige: VV and TV carry metropolitan prestige, while TT holds local covert prestige linked to authenticity, solidarity, and resistance to change. This study demonstrates the enduring role of informal address as a regional marker and the importance of speaker gender in attitudinal research.
In French, Italian, and other Romance languages indefinite nominal phrases can be introduced by what appears to be the conflation of a genitive preposition and a definite article, the so-called "indefinite partitive articles" (e.g., Fr. Je cuisine de la soupe depuis deux jours. 'I've been cooking soup for two days'). This is rather unexpected, since these nominal phrases are neither definite nor in a syntactic position in which we expect to find a genitive preposition. This led part of the literature to consider them as built by lexical items synchronically distinct from the genitive preposition/definite article but homophonous with them. This contribution shows how a constituent-based approach to the lexicon-syntax interface as nanosyntax, paired with a specific take on the sequence of syntactic functions, can capture their apparently conflicting distribution without stipulating multiple homophonous lexical items. The key factor in this proposal is a revised analysis of the Romance lexical item (LI) for (i) definite articles - linked to a constituent containing not only features of definiteness but also lower indefinite features and higher nominative/accusative case features - and (ii) the genitive preposition DE - linked to a constituent containing not only genitive features but also lower nominative/accusative features. Holding these LIs crosslinguistically stable, the variation attested in this domain is modeled as depending on the amount of functional structure lexicalized by the nominal root in the different languages.
We consider two asymmetries reported in the literature on word prosodic systems: the tendency to allow more prosodic contrast in nouns than in verbs and the tendency to avoid stress on functional material. We focus on the interaction between these two tendencies and propose a formal mechanism to handle this interaction couched in Optimality Theory. In a case study on a group of standard Serbo-Croatian varieties that have predictable stress in verbs but contrastive stress in nouns, we develop an analysis of predictable and morphologically conditioned stress assignment. Our analysis features a family of constraints militating against stress on non-lexical material on three different levels: stress on inflection proper (*Infl-Stress-1), stress on non-lexical material in the locality domain of inflection (*Infl-Stress-2), and stress on non-lexical material altogether (*Infl-Stress-3). Analyzing a class of prosodically exceptional denominal and borrowed verbs, we show that lexical-category effects exist between and within categories: denominal verbs allow exceptional preservation of nominal stress, which leads to additional prosodic contrast in this class of verbs. Finally, we explore the option of subsuming exceptionally contrast-preserving borrowed verbs under denominal verbs, offering arguments in favor of the hotly debated view from the literature that verbs are universally borrowed as denominal.
This paper provides an analysis of the 'frustrative' marker séna7 in St'át'imcets (Lillooet Salish), and compares it to similar elements cross-linguistically. Séna7 appears in a range of discourse contexts, including when events have an unexpected outcome, fail to continue, or fail to take place optimally. We argue that séna7 felicitously applies to a proposition p only if there is a salient true proposition q and the speaker did not expect p and q to both be true. Séna7 encodes epistemic modality, refers only to the speaker's epistemic state (ignoring the common ground), and has no effect on at-issue truth conditions (séna7(p) entails p). We show that séna7 provides a diagnostic for distinguishing between entailments and implicatures in the language, and a clear diagnostic for the distinction between futures and prospective aspects. We compare séna7 with similar elements in Tohono O'odham, Kimaragang and Tagalog. We argue that séna7 and the Kimaragang frustrative can be captured by the same analysis once independent features of their tense/aspect systems are taken into account. Following Kroeger (2017. Frustration, culmination and inertia in Kimaragang grammar. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1). 56. 1-29), but pace Copley and Harley (2014. Eliminating causative entailments with the force-theoretic framework: The case of the Tohono O'odham frustrative cem. In Bridget Copley & Fabienne Martin (eds.), Causation in grammatical structures (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 52), 120-151. Oxford: Oxford University Press), we argue that frustratives should not be unified with non-culminating accomplishments, and can be analyzed without appealing to causality or efficacy.
Determiner spreading, the phenomenon whereby adnominal modifiers carry an 'additional' determiner, has been studied extensively for a variety of languages, most notably Greek, Semitic, and Scandinavian languages. Interestingly, the same phenomenon occurs in the Bantu language Rukiga. We show how the Rukiga augment is parallel to the Greek determiner in the context of modification, and how it triggers a restrictive reading when present on a larger class of modifiers than familiar so far: relative clauses, adjectives, possessives, and certain quantifiers. Considering its morphosyntactic and interpretational properties, we propose that the variation in the presence versus absence of the augment on modifiers is due to different underlying structures, applying an analysis of determiner spreading in terms of a reduced relative clause structure.
Men's participation is critical to improving antenatal care (ANC) utilisation and mother and child health in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Additionally, current reviews typically examine sociocultural determinants narrowly as barriers or facilitators of men's direct involvement in biomedical ANC activities. We aimed to consolidate existing literature on sociocultural factors shaping fatherhood and men's participation in ANC in rural SSA to inform tailored interventions. We conducted a scoping review, searching 10 online databases (African Index Medicus, Africa Journals Online, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, MEDLINE/PubMed, PsycINFO, Sociology Collection, Social Sciences Abstract and Social Sciences Citation Index) for peer-reviewed articles that reported studies on fatherhood and men's participation in ANC in rural SSA, systematically analysed primary or secondary data, employed a qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods design and were published between January 2000 and October 2024 in any language. We included 77 articles reporting 58 qualitative, 6 quantitative and 13 mixed-methods studies conducted in 15 SSA countries. We identified 12 themes demonstrating that local sociocultural conceptions, norms, dynamics and experiences intricately shape fatherhood and men's participation in many different forms of ANC in rural SSA. We recommend interventions that reflect local realities and research that employs Afrocentric approaches to centre marginalised perspectives in rural SSA.
Human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is still among the leading causes of disease burden and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and the world is not on track to meet targets set for ending the epidemic by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Precise HIV burden information is critical for effective geographic and epidemiological targeting of prevention and treatment interventions. Age- and sex-specific HIV prevalence estimates are widely available at the national level, and region-wide local estimates were recently published for adults overall. We add further dimensionality to previous analyses by estimating HIV prevalence at local scales, stratified into sex-specific 5-year age groups for adults ages 15-59 years across SSA. We analyzed data from 91 seroprevalence surveys and sentinel surveillance among antenatal care clinic (ANC) attendees using model-based geostatistical methods to produce estimates of HIV prevalence across 43 countries in SSA, from years 2000 to 2018, at a 5 × 5-km resolution and presented among second administrative level (typically districts or counties) units. We found substantial variation in HIV prevalence across localities, ages, and sexes that have been masked in earlier analyses. Within-country variation in prevalence in 2018 was a median 3.5 times greater across ages and sexes, compared to for all adults combined. We note large within-district prevalence differences between age groups: for men, 50% of districts displayed at least a 14-fold difference between age groups with the highest and lowest prevalence, and at least a 9-fold difference for women. Prevalence trends also varied over time; between 2000 and 2018, 70% of all districts saw a reduction in prevalence greater than five percentage points in at least one sex and age group. Meanwhile, over 30% of all districts saw at least a five percentage point prevalence increase in one or more sex and age group. As the HIV epidemic persists and evolves in SSA, geographic and demographic shifts in prevention and treatment efforts are necessary. These estimates offer epidemiologically informative detail to better guide more targeted interventions, vital for combating HIV in SSA.
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