[Lingtyp] Mainland Northeast Asia (MNEA) as a linguistic area

[Bohnemeyer, Juergen]

Dear Ian — May I ask a small clarification question? When you say "a paper proposing Mainland Northeast Asia (MNEA) as a linguistic area”, I imagine what you really mean is a paper proposing a new areal feature for the MNEA? I’m far from an expert, but as far as I know, MNEA is reasonably well established as a sprachbund. E.g., Matisoff 1991, Enfield 2005, inter alia - there’s even a Wikipedia page on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainland_Southeast_Asia_linguistic_area.

It’s kind of in-your-face: an island of isolating verb-medial languages with complex tone systems and finite subordinate clauses, surrounded by a sea of agglutinative verb-final languages with simple or no tone systems and things like converbs and relative participles. (Oversimplifying as is almost inevitable when talking about linguistic areas: of course exceptions occur both inside and outside the proposed area.)

Best — Juergen

> On Mar 28, 2020, at 5:39 AM, Joo, Ian <joo at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
>  
> I am currently writing a paper proposing Mainland Northeast Asia (MNEA) as a linguistic area, and I would like to know if there are any previous studies that have analyzed this region as a linguistic area.
> The MNEA area I propose includes northern China, Mongolia, Korea, but not Japan, Sakhalin, and Russian Far East. One feature of this area, which I am currently working on with my colleagues, is that the languages spoken there colexify `to put’ and `to release’, as shown in the attached map.
>  
> From Daejeon, South Korea,
> Ian
> <putrelease.pdf>_______________________________________________
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