Search Results (2)

Compared to neighboring Romance languages, Galician currently maintains a more ubiquitous usage of the construction [haber (present) + (de) + infinitive] as a future marker in variation with the periphrastic construction with ir ‘go’ and the morphological future. We examine this under-studied construction to gain a better understanding of Galician grammar and also contribute new data with which to consider diachronic change regarding the grammaticalization of the future from obligation markers. We conduct a variationist analysis of 1589 tokens of future forms in recorded conversations (CORILGA) in order to determine the frequency of usage, patterns of variation, linguistic conditioning and degree of grammaticalization of the periphrastic forms with haber and ir in contrast to the morphological variant. We find evidence to suggest that the periphrastic construction with haber is highly grammaticalized as a future marker and we identify factors of the production context that modulate the grammaticalization process. Full article

In this paper, we analyse spatial variation in the Japanese dialectal lexicon by assembling a set of methodologies using theories in variationist linguistics and GIScience, and tools used in historical GIS. Based on historical dialect atlas data, we calculate a linguistic distance matrix across survey localities. The linguistic variation expressed through this distance is contrasted with several measurements, based on spatial distance, utilised to estimate language contact potential across Japan, historically and at present. Further, administrative boundaries are tested for their separation effect. Measuring aggregate associations within linguistic variation can contrast previous notions of dialect area formation by detecting continua. Depending on local geographies in spatial subsets, great circle distance, travel distance and travel times explain a similar proportion of the variance in linguistic distance despite the limitations of the latter two. While they explain the majority, two further measurements estimating contact have lower explanatory power: least cost paths, modelling contact before the industrial revolution, based on DEM and sea navigation, and a linguistic influence index based on settlement hierarchy. Historical domain boundaries and present day prefecture boundaries are found to have a statistically significant effect on dialectal variation. However, the interplay of boundaries and distance is yet to be identified. We claim that a similar methodology can address spatial variation in other digital humanities, given a similar spatial and attribute granularity. Full article