Language History and Language Diversity

York continues to be a major centre for an approach to historical syntax rooted in the interpretation of variation in historical texts.

Recently our work has introduced the role of information theory into accounts of aspects of the development of English, Icelandic, Yiddish, and the wider Germanic family, and of variation within a single time period. Reference to information theoretic properties has been made possible through the development of our corpora: electronic databases in which historical texts are annotated with syntactic, morphological, and lexical information, so that sets of relevant examples can be rapidly and accurately retrieved, and variation tracked in detail across time.

Our work also investigates diverse voices from the past by drawing on the evidence of short texts, particularly place-names and inscriptions. These short texts preserve the language of people whose language is not well represented in other sources, and thus complement the evidence of longer literary, historical, legal and religious texts.

In the area of language change beyond Germanic, we have research strength in the investigation of global syntactic diversity, based on a parametric approach to grammatical description. We also investigate language diversity from a synchronic perspective in recently-completed and current projects.

We have a substantial tradition of research into morphological systems, particularly the encoding of grammatical information, looking at the range of diversity across the world. In order to enhance our understanding of these systems we have identified a number of ‘edge’ cases, most recently in our work with our partners in the Feast and Famine project on morphological defectiveness and overabundance.

Project spotlights

Publications

Across language families: DNA diversity mirrors linguistic variation within Europe

Longobardi, G., Ghirotto, S., Guardiano, C., Tassi, F., Benazzo, A., Ceolin, A. & Barbujani, G. 2015. Across language families: DNA diversity mirrors linguistic variation within Europe. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 157, 630–640.

Mapping the world’s linguistic diversity: this study, led by Giuseppe Longobardi, showed that language proves a better predictor of genetic differences than the geographical distribution of population. As part of his study he observed significant correlations between genetic and linguistic diversity across the Indo-European and non-Indo-European-speaking populations of Europe.

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At the boundaries of Syntactic Prehistory

Giuseppe Longobardi, Cristina Guardiano, Andrea Ceolin, Monica-Alexandrina Irimia. 2021. At the boundaries of Syntactic Prehistory. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376: 20200197.

Can language relatedness be established without cognate words? This question has remained unresolved since the nineteenth century, leaving language prehistory beyond etymologically established families largely undefined. We address this problem through a theory of universal syntactic characters. We show that not only does syntax allow for comparison across distinct traditional language families, but that the probability of deeper historical relatedness between such families can be statistically tested through a dedicated algorithm which implements the concept of ‘possible languages’ suggested by a formal syntactic theory. Controversial clusters such as e.g. Altaic and Uralo-Altaic are significantly supported by our test, while other possible macro-groupings, e.g. Indo-Uralic or Basque-(Northeast) Caucasian, prove to be indistinguishable from a randomly generated distribution of language distances. These results suggest that syntactic diversity, modelled through a generative biolinguistic framework, can be used to provide a proof of historical relationship between different families irrespectively of the presence of a common lexicon from which regular sound correspondences can be determined; therefore, we argue that syntax may expand the time limits imposed by the classical comparative method.

Morphological Complexity

Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett

Inflectional morphology plays a paradoxical role in language. On the one hand it tells us useful things, for example that a noun is plural or a verb is in the past tense. Yet it may also come across as a gratuitous over-elaboration –especially when morphological structures operate at cross purposes to the general systems of meaning and function that govern a language, yielding inflection classes and arbitrarily configured paradigms. This is what we call morphological complexity. Manipulating the forms of words requires learning a whole new system of structures and relationships.

This book confronts the typological challenge of characterising the wildly diverse sorts of morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world.

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The Scandinavian element in Leicestershire minor names: a study of East Goscote north of the Wreake

Rye, Eleanor (2023)

The Scandinavian element in Leicestershire minor names:a study of East Goscote north of the Wreake.

Journal of the English Place-Name Society. pp. 13-51.

ISSN 1351-3095

The acquisition of demonstratives in a complex noun class system

Sagna, Serge , Vihman, Virve-Anneli, Vihman, Marilyn, Brown, Dunstan (2022)

The acquisition of demonstratives in a complex noun class system.

Word Structure. pp. 226-251.

ISSN 1750-1245

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Research degrees

Study with us – MA or PhD in Linguistics, Language and Communication, and Applied Linguistics

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