[Lingtyp] ALT Newsletter No. 53

Fri Nov 10 13:55:28 UTC 2017

Greetings ALT Community. Please find here our Newsletter No. 53. It is my
hope to continue with these newsletters twice a year beginning in 2018, as
appropriate.
--Kristine Hildebrandt (ALT Secretary)

----------------------

*ALT News No. 53*

*November 2017*

*1. Message from the president*

After a several-year hiatus, I am happy to say that ALT is reviving the
tradition of occasional newsletters. Since the beginning of 2016, I have
had the pleasure of serving as President of the Association alongside
Kristine Hildebrandt as Secretary and Dmitry Idiatov as Treasurer. We have
also been fortunate that Ljuba Veselinova has stayed on as webmaster.

The end of the current year will mark a significant transition for the
Association as Frans Plank, the founding Editor of *Linguistic Typology*,
steps down from this position after more than twenty years. His efforts
have established *Linguistic Typology *as a leading international journal
and greatly enhanced the place of typology within linguistics. His
contributions to the success of the journal, and to typology itself, cannot
be overestimated. ALT was exceptionally fortunate to have had an Editor of
his calibre for so many years is equally fortunate that the journal will
remain in excellent hands in the coming years under the direction of the
new Editor, Maria (Masha) Koptjevskaja Tamm, a longtime member of the
journal’s Editorial Board and a well-known figure among typologists. I hope
everyone will join me in wishing her the best of luck as she takes on this
important task. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the
search committee for the new Editor, which consisted of Claire Bowern, Nick
Enfield, Pattie Epps, Guillaume Jacques, and Johan van der Auwera. Claire’s
service as Chair of the committee deserves special recognition here. You
can find brief statements from Frans and Masha in this newsletter, below.

The end of this year will also be the occasion of the Association’s first
meeting in Australia, and I look forward to seeing many of you there. Given
the contribution of Australian linguists—and Australian languages—to the
field of typology, this is an exciting location for the meeting. The local
organizing committee has put together a top-notch program, and it is
certain to be a very memorable event. Please also read more about the
meeting here in the newsletter.

*2. ALT 12 in Canberra*

*2.1. Website*. The date is quickly approaching! Please visit the
conference page for more information:
http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/alt-conference-2017/

*2.2. New Publications for Asia-Pacific Linguistics. *Pacific Linguistics
wishes to announce the following new publications, all freely downloadable
through its A-PL (Asia-Pacific Linguistics) imprint:

- Åshild Næss - A short dictionary of Äiwoo

This is a short dictionary of the Äiwoo or Reefs language, which belongs to
the Reefs-Santa Cruz group spoken in Solomon Islands’ Temotu Province. It
includes around 3,500 words in the Äiwoo language with English translations
and examples of use, as well as an English-Äiwoo reversal list.

Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/112469

- Sonja Riesberg - A Yali (angguruk) - German Dictionary

Yali is a Trans-New Guinea language, spoken in the highlands of Papua,
Indonesia. This book comprises two parts: an introductory section (written
in English) that presents a Yali grammar sketch, and the second part a
Yali-German dictionary.

Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/127381

- John Giacon: Yaluu. A recovery grammar of Yuwaalaraay and Gamilaraay: a
description of two New South Wales languages based on 160 years of
records. This volume builds on a wide range of sources, including materials
from the 19th century and audio recordings from the 1970s to present a
grammatical description of Yuwaalaraay and Gamilaraay, two closely related
languages of northern New South Wales, Australia.

Available from: http:hdl.handle.net/1885/132639

*3. ALT 13 will be in Pavia! Watch for future newsletters for developments
and details*

*4. Jury reports for the ALT awards*

*4.1 Jury report for the Greenberg Award (Sonia Cristofaro, Chair)*

The 2017 *Joseph Greenberg Award,* for the best typological dissertation
defended between 2015-2016, goes to Ksenia Shagal, University of Helsinki,
for her thesis “Towards a typology of participles”. Her advisor was Seppo
Kittilä.

Shagal’s dissertation proposes a typology of participles, defined as
clause-like nominal modifiers. The study has been carried out explicitly in
a Greenbergian spirit, based on an impressive set of 100 languages. The
first two chapters provide a general background to the topic and discuss
several foundational and methodological issues. Chap. 3 discusses
orientation, that is, the range of participant roles that can be
relativized by participles in the language of the sample. In particular, a
distinction is made between inherent orientation (the participial form can
only relativize specific participant roles) and contextual orientation (the
participial form can be used to relativize different participant roles
depending on the context). Chap. 4 describes several parameters that have
been used in the study in order to assess the relative degree of
desententialization of participial clauses, including the encoding of TAM
distinctions, the expression of negation, verbal subject agreement, nominal
agreement with the modified noun (e.g. in terms of gender, number, or
case), and the encoding of participants other than the relativized
participant. Chaps. 5 and 6 provide an overview of the types of participial
clauses that have been identified in the languages of the sample based on
these parameters. Chap. 7 deals with participial systems: whether the
language has one or more participial forms, and the possible types of
functional opposition between different participial forms within the same
language (for example in terms of TAM and orientation). Chap. 8 summarizes
and discusses prospects for future research, with particular regard to the
investigation of the genealogical and geographical distribution of
different participial forms and the status of these forms in terms of parts
of speech distinctions. The study is supplemented with appendixes providing
references and data about the participial constructions attested in each of
the languages taken into account.

The dissertation deals with a relevant topic that has not so far been
investigated in the way it is done here. While a lot of work has been done
on clause linkage in general, as well as on converbs and relative clauses
in particular, the category of `participle' (in the sense of an adnominal
modifier) has not received the same amount of attention in typological
studies. The study is comprehensive and detailed in its analyses, drawing
out both overall tendencies and exceptions to tendencies. It presents new
information to the field and is overall carefully executed, excellently
organized and well-written, pointing out methodological challenges all the
way through.

This round evaluated four submissions, and thanks are due to the jury
members for their hard work: Denis Creissels, Volker Gast, Jean-Christophe
Verstraete, Bernhard Waelchli, and Doris Payne.

*4.2 Jury report for the Gabelentz Award (Toshihide Nakayama, Chair)*

The *Georg von der Gabelentz Award* encourages and honours achievements in
the field of documenting the world’s linguistic diversity through the
writing of reference grammars. Seven grammars were submitted for
consideration for this round. The quality of these works is generally
excellent, but the committee came to the unanimous conclusion that *A
Grammar of Hinuq* by Diana Forker is the best among the submitted grammars (
https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/203728).

This is the first thorough description of the Nakh-Daghestanian language
Hinuq. The grammar provides a well-balanced coverage of all relevant
structural aspects based on a rich set of data. The data are drawn both
from careful elicitations and from the extensive corpus of texts including
relatively unusual types like poetry. Forker demonstrates excellent control
of the Hinuq data, general understanding and knowledge of Daghestanian
languages, and good scholarship.

This work provides a comprehensive and well-contextualized analysis of
Hinuq grammar with reference to other Nakh-Daghestanian languages, to
Caucasian studies and to typological and general linguistic topics. Forker
effectively addresses problems of particular interest and especially
needing clear argumentation for a Daghestanian language, including gender
agreement, different valence classes, biabsolutive constructions,
logophoric and other anaphora, and long-distance reflexivization.

This grammar is exemplary also in its organization, presentation and
formatting. The data are presented and explained clearly, and the
translations are good and show an excellent balance of literal and
figurative translation. The glosses are consistent with the Leipzig
glossing rules, and the additional glosses are all clear. The approach
builds on existing traditions in Daghestanian descriptions and can serve as
an example for future work on languages of the area. Additional notable
features include: detailed and useful index; discussion on the
orthographical conventions; a list of main derivational affixes and clitics
with cross-referencing to the sections where these affixes and clitics are
addressed.

Overall, this grammar is outstanding in its detail and thoroughness and has
raised the standards for Nakh-Daghestanian grammars.

Thanks are due to the jury members for their hard work: Bernd Heine,
Johanna Nichols, Maria Polinsky, Bernard Comrie, Ekaterina Gruz, Honore
Watanabe.

*5. Linguistic Typology, and a Message from Frans Plank and from Maria
(Masha) Koptjevskaja-Tamm*

*LT 21(3) 2017 Contents*

*Articles*

*Johanna Nichols *

Person as an inflectional category

*Bill Palmer, Alice Gaby, Jonathon Lum, and Jonathan Schlossberg*

How does the environment shape spatial language?  Evidence for
sociotopography

*Language Profile *

*Joanne Yager and Niclas Burenhult *

Jedek: A newly discovered Aslian variety of
Malaysia

*Discussion *

*Randy J. LaPolla*

Causation as a factor and goal in typological
comparisons

*Book Review *

Itamar Francez and Andrew Koontz-Garboden, *Semantics and morphosyntactic *

*variation.  *Reviewed by Frans
Plank

*Obituary*

*Seppo Kittilä, with Anne Feryok and Barry Blake*

Typologist at Otago, Aotearoa: Jae Jung Song
(1958–2017)

************************

It was a pleasure (well, mostly) bringing LT to you for 21 years, and I
hope the feeling is reciprocated among our readers (well, some of them some
of the time).

I’m glad to be able to report that the editorial transition is going
smoothly, and I wish Masha Koptjevskaja-Tamm a long and happy future at the
helm of LT and vice versa.

--Frans Plank

It is a great honour, responsibility and challenge to take over the
editorship of LT after Frans Plank, who both founded (and INSISTED on
founding) the journal and the whole ALT and has led the journal for all
these years. Frans has created a unique warm, collaborative atmosphere among
the members of the Editorial Board and has always ensured that the issues
of LT would make their regular appearance, filled with high-quality
publications, no matter the circumstances. I am looking forward to keeping
on with all this and developing the journal further, making sure that LT
will be filled with interesting, useful, provocative and excellent stuff.
But remember that the journal is for you – not only as readers, but also as
writers, reviewers, and people whose opinions matter! So, we at the
Editorial Board are very much looking towards your submissions, your
assistance and feedback.

--Maria (Masha) Koptjevskaja-Tamm
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