Towards a construction-based (areal) typology: The case of the Upper Amazon

Event details

The Philological Society is holding one of its autumn meetings at the University of York, hosted by the Department of Language and Linguistic Science. This talk will be particularly relevant to those interested in typology or languages of the Amazon.

In this paper, Rik van Gijn discusses an approach for performing construction-based areal-typological research, in which languages are regarded as inventories of form-meaning pairings. He introduces several ways to calculate aggregate distance measures between languages, which allow for a comparison of these inventories at the language level and between groups of languages.

The paper focuses on tense-aspect-modality-evidentiality (TAME) constructions in the languages of the Upper Amazon in South America. The linguistic landscape of this area is the result of an intricate and poorly understood series of social processes. Van Gijn will explore the question of how many shared linguistic features are found across family boundaries in this region using his construction-based approach.