Book chapter
Anatolian
Hittite and Luwian express degrees of comparison with a rather limited range of structures. For the most part, Hittite uses syntactic and pragmatic means to express comparatives and superlatives — indeed, there are no dedicated suffixal markers for expressing comparison that might correspond to Greek -ιων, -ιστος, -τερος, -τατος, Latin -ior, -issimus, or English -er, -(e)st. The structural differences between Anatolian and the core Indo-European languages (Hoffner & Melchert 2008; Molina 2019) suggest that gradation morphosyntax has been formed independently after the separation of the Anatolian branch (cf. the discussion of Proto-Indo-European in Luján 2019; Szeptynski 2019). The general consensus is that the reconstructable morphosyntax of Indo-European developed after the Indo-Hittite split (the division between Proto-Anatolian and core Indo-European).
The paper presents a brief assessment of “Nostratic” – the controversial, but promising hypothesis on deeper linguistic connections of the Indo-European family, as envisaged by Vladislav Illich-Svitych and his contemporaries (particularly Aharon Dolgopolsky). We discuss some of the most important developments of the theory since the 1960s, and explain how emphasis on “quantity over quality” of data in the new huge corpora of “Nostratic” comparanda is less useful for advancing the hypothesis than a narrowly targeted emphasis on identifying the “core” evidence for the macrofamily. Identifying this “core” evidence, consisting of a small, but generally stable layer of the basic lexicon, is necessary to lend a more historically realistic flavor to the hypothesis, and its statistical evaluation will also help better understand the place of Indo-European among the other potential constituents of “Nostratic”. We argue that, in weighing the evidence, typological plausibility of semantic shifts and absence of topological conflicts in the tree are no less important than regularity of sound changes. We also show how the credibility level of various theories on the external connections of Indo-European can be arranged along a gradient – from “Indo-Uralic” to a general “Nostratic”, and indicate implications that such an arrangement may hold for future studies.
In many areas, such as social science, politics or market research, people need to track sentiment and their changes over time. For sentiment analysis in this field it is more important to correctly estimate proportions of each sentiment expressed in the set of documents (quantification task) than to accurately estimate sentiment of a particular document (classification). Basically, our study was aimed to analyze the effectiveness of two iterative quantification techniques and to compare their effectiveness with baseline methods. All the techniques are evaluated using a set of synthesized data and the SemEval-2016 Task4 dataset. We made the quantification methods from this paper available as a Python open source library. The results of comparison and possible limitations of the quantification techniques are discussed.
2018 Global Marketing Conference at Tokyo
Proceedings
- Editor Prof. Jeonghye Choi (Yonsei University) - Assistant Dr. Jeeyeon Kim (Yonsei University)
The paper discusses certain aspects of Indo-Uralic reconstruction, focusing on a comparison of our theoretical expectations from the comparison of Indo-European and Uralic basic lexicon with the actual results of lexicostatistical analysis.
Over thirty specialists in Indo-European linguistics have contributed this elegant volume in honor of Prof. Sasha Lubotsky of Leiden University. Besides giving an excellent snapshot of the research currently being undertaken by his students and colleagues at that institution, Farnah contains contributions from well-known scholars across the world covering topics in Tocharian, Germanic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Anatolian linguistics, to name a few.
In this paper we discuss the results of an automated compari-son between two 50-item groups of the most generally stable elements on the so-called Swadesh wordlist as reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic. Two forms are counted as potentially related if their first two consonantal units, transcribed in simplified consonantal class notation (a rough variant of the Levenshtein distance method), match up with each other. Next to all previous attempts at such a task (Ringe 1998; Oswalt 1998; Kessler & Lehtonen 2006; Kessler 2007), our automated algorithm comes much closer to emu-lating the traditional procedure of cognate search as em-ployed in historical linguistics. “Swadesh slots” for protolan-guages are filled in strict accordance with such principles of reconstruction as topology (taking into consideration the structure of the genealogical tree), morphological transpar-ency, typology of semantic shifts, and areal distribution of particular items. Altogether we have counted 7 pairs where Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic share the same bi-consonantal skeleton (the exact same pairs are regarded as cognates in traditional hypotheses of Indo-Uralic relation-ship). To verify the probability of arriving at such a result by chance we have applied the permutation test, which yielded a positive result: the probability of 7 matched pairs is equal to 1.9% or 0.5%, depending on the constituency of the conso-nantal classes, which is lower than the standard 5% threshold of statistical significance or even lower than the strong 1% level. Standard methodology suggests that we reject the null hypothesis (accidental resemblance) and offer a more plau-sible explanation for the observed similarities. Since the known typology of language contacts does not speak in favor of explaining the observed Indo-Uralic matches as old lexical borrowings, the optimal explanation is seen in the hypothesis of an Indo-Uralic genetic relationship, with the 7 matching pairs in question representing archaic retentions, left over from the original Indo-Uralic protolanguage.
In the paper, the classes of labile verbs (verbs which can be transitive or intransitive without any formal changes) are analyzed on the data of European and North Caucasian languages. The main conclusion is that there is a semantic difference between classes of labile verbs in the two language groups under analysis. In European languages, predicates with low semantic transitivity are labile (for instance, motion verbs and phasal verbs), while in Caucasian languages, lability is more characteristic of verbs with high semantic transitivity (verbs of destruction and similar verb classes).
For a long time one of the most bewildering conundrums of Indo-European linguistics has been the issue of how to reconstruct the alignment system of this ancient language state, given the lack of distinction between S and O marking in the Proto-Indo-European neuters nouns and the problem of the Hittite ergative. An additional complication stems from the existence of argument structure constructions where the subject(-like) argument is marked in a different case than the nominative, like the accusative or the dative. The aim of the present article is to fill two needs with one deed and offer a unified account of this century-long bone of contention. In contribution to the ongoing discussion in the field, we claim that a semantic alignment system, in the terms of Donohue & Wichmann (2008), might not only fit better with the morphological data that are currently reconstructed for the ancestral language, but also with the existence of non-canonically case-marked subjects in general (Barðdal et al. 2013; Danesi, Johnson & Barðdal 2017).