The 24^th biennial conference of the International Society for Historical Linguistics will take place July 1-5 at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.

Living Tongues Director Dr. Gregory D. S. Anderson, along with Living Tongues linguists Dr. Luke Horo, Mr. Opino Gomango and Dr. Bikram Jora will be making a joint presentation at the conference on Monday, July 1st at 12:30pm as part of the North Room Workshop: on Reconstructing Austroasiatic Syntax. Their paper is entitled “Munda Historical Syntax: What is inherited, what is innovated, what is copied?” See full abstract at the end of this post.

Continuing and expanding a proud tradition, the upcoming ICHL24 will present both renowned and exciting new voices in the many domains of the field, including methods and practices of reconstruction, formal approaches to change, historical sociolinguistics and contact linguistics.

While featuring languages from across the world, in the International Year of Indigenous Languages, ICHL24 will highlight the very diverse languages and language families of the Pacific region, especially those of Australia, mainland Southeast Asia and New Guinea. With a truly multi-disciplinary focus, the conference will also showcase new advances in computational and phylogenetic approaches to historical linguistics, and new ways of placing the field within trans-disciplinary understandings of the human past.

See conferences details and programming here.

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ABSTRACT

Munda Historical Syntax:
What is inherited, what is innovated, what is copied?

Authors: Gregory D. S. Anderson, Luke Horo,
Opino Gomango and Bikram Jora.
Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.

We argue here for a more nuanced approach to the role of contact vs. inheritance vs. innovation in the historical analysis of the word structure and morphosyntax of Proto-Munda and the modern Munda languages. Some features of Munda syntax such as verb final order clearly reflect secondary developments in Munda aligning these languages with South Asian areal norms syntactically and already took place at the proto-Munda stage, while the GEN N order with nominal possessors marked by a genitive case found in various Munda languages likely postdated that period, taking place separately in individual branches after the breakup of the proto-language. Many other features result from even later contact scenarios. Others reflect inheritances from an earlier period, aligning Munda with their eastern linguistic cousins in the Austroasiatic [AA] phylum.

Also, some features of Munda indeed find analogs in neither the languages in South Asia they are presently in contact with nor in other AA languages, and thus should be considered Munda-internal changes. Shift to Indospheric norms in the morphology, phonology, prosodic domains and the syntax has thus occurred at different times and differently in individual Munda languages, and remains an ongoing process. Thus, the overly facile explanation of South Asian contact effects in the history of Munda languages allegedly triggered by a shift in the fundamental ‘rhythmic holism’ (Donegan & Stampe 1983, 2004) of the proto-Munda language from iambic to trochaic rhythm that completely ‘reset’, as it were, the parameter settings of the language away from its putative ancestral type (ostensibly something akin to the present-day Mainland Southeast Asia [MSEA] type) towards the (present-day) South Asian [SA] areal type, must be replaced by a more nuanced approach that accepts that i) SA features have been accrued at different points in time and thus by different Munda languages individually and differently in some occasions, ii) Munda language can and do offer insights into the earlier history of AA by having better preserved some likely older features later erased in most of the languages remaining in MSEA, and iii) there are features of Munda for which neither analogs in other branches of Austroasiatic nor in other SA genetic units will be found nor should be sought.

As we shed previous constraints on the analysis of the Munda and other AA languages, we can move to a better understanding of what Munda languages are really like and how they really became they way they are, and their role in understanding earlier periods in the history of Austroasiatic. Overall, Munda languages are more similar to the other branches of AA in their prosodic and morphosyntactic structures than has previously been appreciated due to different, competing meta-linguistic filters operative on analysis within both the MSEA and SA linguistic traditions. We consider here that any (non-copied) feature/form found in any three non-adjacent groups should a priori be entertained as a possible proto-language feature/form. This holds for Munda-internal and pan-AA comparisons alike. If a feature/form is found in only two non-adjacent groups, it should still be considered a candidate of a possible inheritance from a proto-language feature/form.

Work on the historical morphotactics and morphosyntax of Munda therefore must be used to inform comparative Austroasiatic studies. Features examined include the history of Munda word/phrase prosody, morphotactics, negation, word order, case marking, referent indexing, nominal derivation and noun incorporation.

References

Donegan, P. J. & D. Stampe.  1983. Rhythm and the holistic organization of language structure. In J. Richardson, et al. (eds.) The Interplay of Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax, 337–353. Chicago: CLS.

Donegan, P. J. & D. Stampe. 2004. Rhythm and synthetic drift of Munda. In R. Singh (ed.) Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2004, 3-36.