Conference | SHESL 2024, Paris, France

SHESL Conference 2024, January, 31ˢᵗ – February, 2ⁿᵈ 2024 :

Ethnolinguistics – Linguistic anthropology : histories and current trends

Paris (amphithéâtre Turing, Université Paris Cité, bâtiment Sophie Germain)

Organized by

Chloé Laplantine, Cécile Leguy et Valentina Vapnarsky

Informations :

shesl.org/colloque-shesl-2024/

Committees and partners

Program and abstracts

Registration (free but compulsory) and further information : shesl2024@listes.u-paris.fr

The conference will be accessible online, please register.

The 14th ISOLA conference | 5th-8th july 2023, Paris, France

 

HUMANS AND NON-HUMANS IN AFRICAN VERBAL ARTS


Narrativity and environmental poetics at the dawn of the climate crisis

The recent reports on the consequences of global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) once again urged industrial societies to change their relationship to the planet. Released in September 2019, August 2021 and February 2022[1], at the same time as the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, these reports reinforce the multiple voices of researchers and environmental activists calling institutions and enterprises to take responsibility for climate change. The data on climate change and the danger for the survival of humans, animals and the environment – which gave rise to the slogan “There is no Planet B” – make us understand the urgency of taking action. It is pivotal to steer contemporary economies towards an ecological and social reconversion, including the drastic reduction in the exploitation of the world and its people, and the recovery of the ecosystems. Legal litigations on the conflicts of economic, environmental and social interests are growing and those responsible for eco-disasters are being challenged. It seems that a turning point has been reached with the condemnation in May 2021 of Shell for polluting the Nigerian Niger-Delta region and that of the French state in February 2021 for inactivity in counteracting climate change. To stick with an animal metaphor, it is important to remember that “a tiger does not change its stripes” and that the conversion to sustainability by industries and states may prove ephemeral and inconclusive, all the more so in a war situation like the one that started in Eastern Europe in 2022.

However, the ‘colonial’ approach to the world, due to those who think they are “masters and possessors of nature” in the words of Descartes and leading to the depletion of resources perceived as unlimited, is neither shared by all nor of all times. The songs of the Lamal ritual among the Samburu of Kenya[2], as well as the tale of the over-skilled hunter of the Serer of Senegal, for example, direct the narrative towards a relationship with living beings and geophysical forces and objects that is distant from the “devouring” attitude towards the world in the Cartesian words. How can such oral narratives make sense in the context of current environmental concerns? Should we rethink the often-allegorical analyses (Iheka 2018) of the past on the geo/zoo/etho/biological elements of oral and written literatures? What inspiration can oral literature provide for the renewal of African literary studies on the relationship between literature and the natural environment? And what inspiration for discourses and practices of industrial societies in Africa and elsewhere in the face of the present climate crisis?

Since the 1990s, ecocriticism and ecopoetics, the latter emphasising the literary aesthetics linked to ecological matters, have focused on environmental issues in literature. We can say that the new directions of criticisms pay increased attention to narratives that question and decentralize anthropocentric thinking. Such narratives rearticulate the nature/culture relationship and the notions of otherness and of the ‘wilderness’ of nature as well, all too firmly posited by previous philosophical thinking as well as by the structuralist approaches of the 1960s-1980s (e.g. Barry 2009, Descola 2011, Garnier 2022, Ijeka 2018, Iovino and Oppermann 2012, Schoentjes 2015, Posthumus 2013, etc.). Though rooted in written productions, ecopoetics is beginning to open up to orality and its functioning in the lived experience of environments: sounds, colours and movements, the sensitive attention paid to places and relationships, and the knowledge that is constructed there (Bourlet, Lorin and Morand 2020). [3]

The theme for the 14th Isola Conference – “Humans and Non-Humans in African Verbal Arts: Narrativity and Environmental Poetics at the Dawn of the Climate Crisis” – proposes to investigate oral literatures in Africa and the Diaspora from the perspective of multiple approaches that place the relationship between the verbal arts and the environment at the centre of the research.

Please visit the conference website for all other information pertaining to the 2023 conference: https://isola-14.sciencesconf.org.

Contact address : isola.conference14@gmail.com

Conference will start Wednesday 5th July at 1pm and will end Friday 7th with the gala dinner.

 

ORGANIZING AND SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEES

Organising Committee

Sandra Bornand (LLACAN, CNRS-INALCO)

Hermelind Le Doeuff, PhD student (LACITO, CNRS-Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Philippe Glâtre, PhD student (LACITO, CNRS-Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Cécile Leguy (LACITO, CNRS-Sorbonne Nouvelle-INALCO)

Daniela Merolla (LACNAD, INALCO)

Katell Morand (Université Paris Nanterre, CREM-LESC)

Responsible for the conference for ISOLA: Akintunde Akinyemi, University of Florida, Gainesville (USA), Vice-President.

 

Scientific Committee

Akintunde Akinyemi (University of Florida, United States)

Elara Bertho (LAM, CNRS, France)

Julien Bondaz (Université Lumière Lyon 2, France)

Sandra Bornand (LLACAN, CNRS, France)

Alice Degorce (IMAF, IRD, France)

Xavier Garnier (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle & Institut universitaire de France)

Giovanni Gugg (Université « Federico II », Naples, Italie)

Benoît Hazard (IIAC, CNRS, France)

Éric Jolly (IMAF, CNRS, France)

Maëline Le Lay (THALIM, CNRS, France)

Cécile Leguy (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France)

Christine Le Quellec-Cottier (Université de Lausanne, Suisse)

Tendai Mangena (Great Zimbabwe University, Zimbabwe)

Daniela Merolla (LACNAD, INALCO, France)

Katell Morand (Université Paris Nanterre/CREM-LESC, France)

Ghirmai Negash (Ohio University, United States)

Rose Opondo (Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya)

Annachiara Raia (Leiden University, Netherlands)

Paulette Roulon-Doko (LLACAN, CNRS, France)

Mohand Akli Salhi (Université Mouloud Mammeri, Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria)

Alain Sanou (Université Ki-Zerbo, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso)

Antoinette Tidjani Alou (Université Abdou Moumouni, Niamey, Niger)

Jacomien van Niekerk (University of Pretoria, South Africa)

Felicity Wood (University of Fort Hare, Alice, South Africa)

)

 

GRelSpoC 2023: Grammatical Relations in Spoken Language Corpora | 15-16 juin 2023, Paris, France

Grammatical Relations in Spoken Language Corpora

 

                

 

Scholars with a broadly usage-oriented view on language share the idea that the linguistic structures encountered in human language systems arise from diachronic processes of language evolution that are in turn shaped by considerations of language processing, learning and usage (cf. e.g. Sinnemäki 2014 for an overview). Recent years have seen a steep rise in studies directly addressing issues of processing and learnability in relation to typological distributions of linguistic structures, e.g. in experimental studies from neuro- (Sauppe et al 2021; Bickel et al 2015) and psycholinguistics (Adamou 2017) as well as in artificial language learning experiments (Tal et al 2022; Mansfield et al 2022).

Corpus-based studies (of language usage by adult speakers) related to typological questions have a longer history within the functionalist tradition of linguistics associated with scholars like Wallace Chafe or Talmy Givón (and their associates and successors) as well as Zipf’s (1935) seminal work on frequency distributions and form-frequency correspondences. Larger-scale corpus studies of relevance for typology have examined in particular word order (Greenberg 1963; Dryer 1992; Futrell et al 2015, 2020; Levshina 2019) and marking asymmetries (Greenberg 1966; Levshina 2021; Haspelmath & Karjus 2014), taking efficiency as a core characteristic underlying language use as well as the design of human language systems (cf. Gibson et al 2019 for an overview). Yet, for the most part this work is based on corpora from larger languages (often with a literary tradition and official/standard status in at least one country), and largely on written corpora.

In this workshop we focus on the interrelation of grammatical relations as reflected in the structure of individual languages and their communicative underpinnings in discourse production, and we seek to bring together scholars with a primary focus on corpus-based work. We intend to broaden the perspective on the usage-oriented rationale behind specific structural aspects of grammatical relation systems. We hence seek corpus-based research that includes not only classic discourse-functional factors like topic marking and topic continuity (Givón 1976, 1983; Shibatani 1991) or the converse function of reference establishment (DuBois 1987; cf. Evans & Levinson 2009:440), but also structural (e.g. the interplay of person agreement and pronoun use, cf. Taraldsen 1980; Rosenkvist 2009, 2018; Schnell & Barth 2020), cultural, and social factors (e.g. use of ergative constructions in relation to the social role of speakers in Samoan, cf. Duranti 1994).

We furthermore restrict the purview of this workshop to spoken-language discourse as we see spoken language usage not only as the primary seedbed for the emergence of grammatical relations generally speaking (by way of its primordial form of usage of human languages) and specifically as containing those interactions between prosodic, syntactic and morphological structure that lie behind processes of univerbation and morphologization (Lehmann 2015 [1982]; Bybee 1985).

 

Invited speakers:

Linda Konnerth (University of Bern)

Henrik Rosenkvist (University of Gothenburg)

 

Organisers: Katharina Haude (Sedyl, CNRS), Eva van Lier (University of Amsterdam), Sonja Riesberg (LaCiTO, CNRS), Stefan Schnell (University of Zurich)

Please visit the workshop website for all other information : https://grelspoc2023.sciencesconf.org/

 

References

Adamou, E. 2017. Subject preference in Ixcatec relative clauses (Otomanguean, Mexico). Studies in Language 41(4), 872–913.

Bickel, B., Witzlack-Makarevich, A., Choudhary, K.K., Schlesewsky, M., & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. 2015. The neurophysiology of language processing shapes the evolution of grammar. Evidence from case marking. PLoS ONE 8(10), DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0132819.

Bybee, J. L. 1985. Morphology: a study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Du Bois, J. W. 1987. The discourse basis of ergativity. Language 63, 805–855.

Duranti, A. 1994. From grammar to politics. Linguistic anthropology in a Western Samoan village. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.

Dryer, M. S. 1992. The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language 68(1), 81–138.

Evans, N. & Levinson, S. C. 2009. The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Science 32, 429–492.

Futrell, R., Mahowald, K., & Gibson, E. 2015. Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(33), 10336–10341.

Futrell, R., Levy, R. P., & Gibson, E. 2020. Dependency locality as an explanatory principle for word order. Language 96(2), 371–412.

Gibson, E., Futrell, R., Piantadosi, S. T., Dautriche, I., Mahowald, K., Bergen, L., Levy, R. 2019. How efficiency shapes human language. Trends in Cognitive Science 23(5), 389–407. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2019.02.003.

Givón, T. 1976. Topic, pronoun, and grammatical agreement. In C. N. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic. 149–188. New York: Academic Press.

Givón, T. 1983. Topic continuity in discourse. An introduction. In T. Givón (Ed.), Topic continuity in discourse. 1–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Greenberg, J. H. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular referent tot he order of meaningful elements. In: J.H. Greenberg (Ed.), Universals of grammar. 73–113. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Greenberg, J. H. 1966. Language universals, with special reference to feature hierarchies. The Hague: Mouton.

Haspelmath, M. & Karjus, A. 2017. Explaining asymmetries in number marking: singulars, plurals, and usage frequencies. Linguistics 55(6), 1213–1235. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling‐2017‐0026

Lehmann, C. 2015 [1982]. Thoughts on grammaticalization. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b88.98 DOI: 10.17169/langsci.b88.99

Levshina, N. 2019. Token-based typology and word order entropy: A study based on Universal Dependencies. Linguistic Typology 23(3), 533–572. DOI: 10.1515/lingty-2019-0025

Levshina, N. 2021. Communicative efficiency and differential case marking: a reverse-engineering approach. Linguistics Vanguard 7(s3).

Mansfield, J., Saldaña, C., Hurst, P., Nordlinger, R., Stoll, S., Bickel, B., Perfors, A. 2022. Category clustering and morphological learning. Cognitive Science 46(2): e13107. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13107.

Mansfield, J., Stoll, S., Bickel, B. 2020. Category clustering. A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking. Language 96(2), 255–293. DOI:10.1353/lan.2020.0021.

Rosenkvist, H. 2009. Referential null subjects in Germanic languages–an overview. Working papers in Scandinavian syntax 84, 151–180.

Rosenkvist, H. 2018. Null subjects and distinct agreement in Modern Germanic. In F. Cognola, J. Cassalicchio (Eds.), Nul subjects in generative grammar. A synchronic and diachronic perspective. 285–306. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sauppe, S., Choudhary, K.K., Giroud, N., Blasi, D.E., Norcliffe, E., Bhattamishra, S., Gulati, M., Egurtzegi, A., Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I., Meyer, M., Bickel, B. 2021. Neural signatures of syntactic variation in speech planning. PLoS biology 19(1), e3001038.

Shibatani, M. 1991. Grammaticization of topic into subject. In E. C. Traugott, B. Heine (Eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization. Volume 2. 93-133. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Schnell, S., & Barth, D. 2020. Expression of anaphoric subjects in Vera’a: Functional and structural factors in the choice between pronoun and zero. Language Variation and Change 32(3), 267–291.

Sinnemäki, K. 2014. Cognitive processing, language typology, and variation. Cognitive Science 4(5), 477– 487. DOI:10.1002/wcs.1294.

Tal, S., Smith, K., Culbertson, J., Grossmann, E., Anon, I. 2022. The impact of information structure on the emergence of differential object marking: An experimental study. Cognitive Science 46, e13119.

Taraldsen, T. 1980. On the NIC, vacuous application and the that-trace filter. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.

Zipf, G. K. (1935). The psycho-biology of language. Houghton, Mifflin.

 

Journée d’étude « 40 ans de recherche autour de la notion de pratiques langagières » organisée en l’honneur de Josiane Boutet

Quarante année de recherche autour de la notion de pratiques langagières.

Journée d’étude en l’honneur de Josiane Boutet

Organisation : Isabelle Léglise et James Costa

 

Préinscription, pour permettre d’organiser les pauses café / déjeuner au mieux

 

Programme de la journée d’étude :

affiche journée d'étude pratiques langagières9h15 Accueil, café
9h30 Introduction à la journée (Isabelle Léglise et James Costa)


La notion de pratiques langagières dans le champ du travail


10h00 Yves Schwartz (AMU) : Travailler sur le travail, travailler le langage. Aux origines de l’ergologie.

10h30 Alexandre Duchêne (U. Fribourg) : Etudier les pratiques langagières en situation institutionnelle aujourd’hui

11h00 Réaction de Josiane Boutet

11h30 Discussion


12h Déjeuner

 

La notion de pratiques langagières dans le champ de l’éducation


13h30 Elisabeth Bautier (U. Paris 8) : Comment la prise en compte des pratiques langagières a fait évoluer le champ de l’éducation

14h00 Patricia Lambert (ENS Lyon) : Pratiques langagières dans la formation professionnelle aujourd’hui, aux
frontières du travail et de l’école

14h30 Réaction de Josiane Boutet

15h00 Discussion


15h30 Pause


16h La notion de pratiques langagières : actualités et perspectives futures

17h Cocktail


Maison de la recherche de l’INALCO, 2 rue de Lille 75007, Amphithéâtre Dumézil
avec le soutien financier de l’UMR 8202 SeDyL (CNRS, IRD, INALCO) et de l’Université Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle

Current Trends in Papuan Linguistics

 

 

 

 

10 et 11 décembre 2019 à l’INALCO

Organisation

Sebastian Fedden (Université Paris 3 / Lacito), Sylvain Loiseau (Université Paris 13 / Lacito) et Antoinette Schapper (CNRS / Lacito)
LACITO – Langues et civilisations à tradition orale (UMR 7107)

Programme et informations complémentaires : voir le site

 

Programme en pdf
Résumés en pdf
Lieu : Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, 65 rue des Grands Moulins, Paris (75013), France
10 décembre (salle 3.15) – 11 décembre (salle 3.11)

Présentation

L’objet de ce colloque est de réunir des chercheurs travaillant sur les langues papoues pour faire un bilan des directions de recherche actuelles et pour informer et motiver les étudiants et les chercheurs qui envisagent de commencer des recherches sur les langues papoues.

On compte plus de 850 langues dites papoues parlées sur l’île de Nouvelles-Guinée ainsi que dans les îles alentours. Ces langues ne forment pas une famille de langues apparentées ; elles formeraient entre 20 et 40 familles distinctes. Une langue est dite papoue si elle est parlée dans l’archipel centré sur l’île de Nouvelle Guinée et si elle n’est ni austronésienne ni australienne. C’est l’une des zones linguistiques contenant le plus grand nombre de langues complètement inconnues ou à peine décrite, et la seule zone linguistique où on trouve encore des familles linguistes entières (ou des isolats) dont aucune langue n’est décrite. Du fait de leur nombre ainsi que de l’accélération de leur obsolescence les efforts des linguistes ont principalement porté sur la description et la documentation de langue ou de groupes de langues, et non sur l’élaboration de vue d’ensemble ou de synthèse typologique ou génétique.

En dépit de cela, de grands progrès ont été réalisés dans la description des langues papoues et ces progrès ont permis récemment des études de nouveaux aspects dans ce domaine : l’étude de la diffusion géographique de traits aréaux, des reconstructions de familles de langues fondées sur des données solides, des hypothèses sur le peuplement et les migrations humaines de la région, etc.

Ce colloque sera l’occasion de dresser un bilan des recherches actuelles sur les langues papoues et de discuter de l’état d’avancement de ces recherches. Nous souhaitons réunir des chercheurs travaillant sur les langues papoues et représentant différents sous-domaines tels que la l’anthropologie linguistique, l’acquisition, la linguistique historique, etc. Les analyses de langues individuelles sont bienvenues tout comme les travaux proposant des vues synthétiques. Les domaines d’intérêt inclus également (liste non limitative) :
– La contribution des données papoues à la linguistique théorique
– Les synthèses typologiques portant sur les langues papoues
– La question de l’aggrégation de données et de la constitution de base de données pour la recherche dans ce domaine
– etc.

Conférenciers invités

Researching language acquisition and socialization in Papuan languages

Birgit Hellwig, University of Cologne

Language acquisition research is heavily biased towards the major European languages, thereby impacting on the generalizations we can legitimately make about human language and cognitive development. Most empirical research is done on a handful of European languages, and it is estimated that acquisition studies are available for maybe 1-2% of the world’s languages only (including languages with only one or two such studies) (Lieven & Stoll 2010: 144). The 850 or so Papuan languages are no exception here: they have received some attention through early work conducted within the language socialization paradigm in anthropology (see especially Schieffelin 1990 on Kaluli, or Kulick 1992 on Taiap), but we still know very little about their acquisition. Recent years have seen a renewed interest, and longitudinal corpora are now being constructed for a handful of Papuan languages, including Ku Waru (Alan Rumsey, Francesca Merlan and colleagues), Nungon (Hannah Sarvasy), and Qaqet (Birgit Hellwig and colleagues) (see also www.acqdiv.uzh.ch/en.htmlqaqet.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/).

Following a brief overview of language acquisition and socialization research in the Papuan region, this talk will present a case study of Qaqet, built around a salient phenomenon in the language addressed to children: repetitions and varied repetitions. With the help of this phenomenon, I will discuss a) what Qaqet in particular (and Papuan languages more generally) can contribute to debates within language acquisition research, and b) how the study of child language and child-directed language can inform our knowledge of the adult language.

References
–Lieven, Elena and Sabine Stoll. 2010. Language. In Marc H. Bornstein (ed.). The Handbook of Cross-Cultural Developmental Science. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. 143-165.
–Kulick, Don. 1992. Language shift and cultural reproduction: socialization, self, and syncretism in a Papua New Guinean village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1990. The give and take of everyday life: Language socialization of Kaluli children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Languages as passing amalgamations. Linguistic field methods, comparative linguistics and language documentation among Greater Awyu clans

Lourens de Vries, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

The paper discusses methodological issues of field linguistics, comparative linguistics and language documentation from the point of view of the role and place of language in very small clan communities in the Digul basin of New Guinea. In these dispersed, politically highly fragmented clan-based communities, with on average around 20 people per patriclan, linguistic ideologies and linguistic practices arise that are often in conflict with linguistic ideologies formed in nation-state societies, ideologies that also influenced assumptions and methods of descriptive linguists, for example that languages universally function as emblems of group identities, that languages are bound, discrete, named entities, usually bound to territorial units, with a relatively time stable set of shared grammatical norms and a shared lexicon, that these languages reflect and are constitutive of ‘cultures’, that isolated, small minority communities far away from urban centers form tight-knit collectives with little room for individualism or residential mobility, with a vast amount of shared contextual and cultural knowledge, that is assumed when speaking to one another in face-to-face communication. The anthropological and ethnolinguistic works of Stasch (2001, 2007, 2008a/b, 2009) and de Vries (2012) present a radically different picture of the place of language, linguistic ideologies and linguistic practices in Greater Awyu clans.

Multilingualism is the default in Greater Awyu clans but it is a type of what van den Heuvel and Fedden (2014: 27) called ‘ego-centered multilingualism’ in their study of Muyu-Mandobo language contact: “As can be deduced from Stasch (2009), Welsch (1994) and de Vries (2008), multilingualism is high but very much centered around individuals, in that each individual has his own repertory of languages. There is no strong link between language and group identity and one cannot speak of, for example, a general Muyu-Mandobo bilingualism”.

Greater Awyu multilingualism indeed cannot be defined and understood at the level of groups such as clans or speech communities. Rather, individuals have a high degree of autonomy to create their own networks of marriage, trade and alliance relations with other people. Notions of personhood are deeply relational and individual, as in many other parts of New Guinea. In the words of Foley (2005: 163) personhood is often “a partitive amalgamation of various substances from the different exchange interactions that one is ultimately built up from. From such a vantage point, the understanding of a speaker, the articulation of personhood through language is also radically different. This has fundamental implications for how New Guineans think about language and questions of language varieties and language purism (the latter notion in fact unintelligible in such a scheme)”.

The men in a Greater Awyu clan often marry women of different language groups, and these women bring their languages to the clan territories of their husbands. Children grow up with the languages of both father and mother since bilateral kinship ties are fundamental: the children develop very strong ties with both their mother’s siblings and their father’s sibling. When the child grows up it develops its own network of friends, partners and relations and expresses the ‘partitive amalgam of relational substances’ by borrowing, code switching, code mixing, acquiring different speech repertoires (de Vries 2012). A single language is never an emblem of clan identity, nor of individual identity. Languages are unnamed and do not correspond to distinctions of groups of people recognized by, or culturally relevant to, clanspeople, precisely because they are clanspeople, with hundreds of clans around them that may speak more or less similar languages, or very different ones but these languages do not determine who is friend or foe, which clans have marriage relation with which other clans, who ‘we’ are versus ‘them’. Languages as named by linguists are exonyms for arbitrary sections from dialect continua, where A understands B who understands C and so on but A will not understand D or E who live even further up- or downriver.

The role and place of language in these clan-based societies, how they talk about languages of themselves and others, how they view multilingualism as a highly valued expression of who you are, what your relational identity is, have important implications for key aspect of language documentation such as documenting dialect chaining, language names, numbers of languages and numbers of speakers, linguistic ideologies, meta-linguistic repertoires but also for fieldwork methods and comparative methodology.

For example, wordlists are a key tool in language surveys, comparative linguistics, and language documentation. But in Greater Awyu contexts wordlists obtained from speakers do not represent specific ‘languages’ in the sense of bounded, discrete entities spoken by groups of people in certain areas. From the point of view of a Greater Awyu speaker, it will be very normal to give words for items on the basis of ‘how I speak’ or ‘how we speak’ and the resulting wordlist will reflect words from different linguistic varieties and languages dependent on the networks of the speaker, his or her clan affiliations, residential histories. Often, several words will be given for one item on the elicitation list in a contact language used by the linguist, and the speaker will add things like ‘where I am from they call it A but my mother’s people call it B and you can also call it C like the downstream people’. Heeschen (1998: 24) characterized the Eipo speech variety that formed the basis for his grammar of Eipomek, of the Mek family, as “perhaps only a passing phenomenon in the history of the Mek languages”.

Heeschen (1998: 24) writes about grammatical patterns: “When it is stated: ‘the Eipo language has the rule x’, the reader should bear in mind what has been stated here about the smallness of the speech community and its norms. The rule should properly read: the speaker y or the group of men from such or such a clan…say “x” under certain circumstances.”

Greater Awyu people speak about languages with a noun that means ‘sound’, for example the sound of certain species of birds, or of certain people. Dependent on the context of usage, ‘our sound’ (our language, how we speak) may refer to a section of a dialect continuum, to a clan, or to the speaker and his or her bilateral kinsmen and kinswomen. The criteria for ‘our language/sound’ relate to both mutual understandability and the sound systems. Often the emphasis is how people sound, in the sense of different pronunciations. When other people can be understood but they sound differently (e.g. because of regular sound changes between varieties), they may be said to have a different language from ‘us’.

The only boundaries that are sharp and stable are the morphological boundaries between language families of New Guinea: the patterns and matter of bound morphology. And these form the reliable, relatively stable methodological bedrock of descriptive and comparative linguistics of Papuan languages. In the words of Foley (2000: 359): “It would appear that bound morphological forms are the most resistant to borrowing [again, however, not entirely immune (see Donohue 1999, Foley 1991)], so that bound morphological forms that appear cognate are the most reliable guide to genetic relationships between Papuan languages.”

References
— Foley, W.A. 2000. ‘The languages of New Guinea’. Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 357-404.
— Foley, W. A. 2005. ‘Personhood and linguistic identity, purism and variation’. Language Documentation and Description 3. 157-180.
— Heeschen, V. 1998. An ethnographic grammar of the Eipo language. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag.
— van den Heuvel, W. and S. Fedden. 2014. ‘Greater Awyu and Greater Ok: inheritance or contact?’ Oceanic Linguistics 54 (1): 1-35.
— Stasch, R. 2001. “Figures of alterity among Korowai of Irian Jaya. Kinship, mourning and festivity in a dispersed society”. PhD dissertation University of Chicago.
— Stasch, R. 2007. ‘Demon language. The otherness of Indonesian in a Papuan community’. In Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin (eds.), Consequences of contact: Language ideology and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies, 96-124. Oxford University Press.
— Stasch, R. 2008a. ‘Referent-wrecking in Korowai: A New Guinea abuse register as ethnosemiotic protest.’ Language in Society 37(1): 1-25.
— Stasch, R. 2008b. ‘Knowing minds is a matter of authority: political dimensions of opacity statements in Korowai moral psychology’. In: Joel Robbins and Alan Rumsey (eds.), Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds. Anthropological Quarterly 81: 443-453.
— Stasch, R. 2009. Society of others: Kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place. Berkeley: University of California Press.
— de Vries, L. 2012, Speaking of clans. Language in Awyu-Dumut communities of Indonesian Papua. International Journal for the Sociology of Language, 214: 5 – 26. DOI 10.1515/ijsl-2012-0018

A genetic perspective on the complex settlement of the Melanesian world

Nicolas Brucato, Laboratoire d’Evolution et Diversité Biologique (UMR5174), Université Toulouse 3

The exceptional linguistic diversity of Papuan populations is mirrored in their genetic patrimony. A clear example resides on New Guinea Island hosting a genetic diversity equivalent to the entire Indo-European area. From the Papuan genome, inherited from the Out-of-Africa dispersal 60 000 years ago, to the gene flows from Austronesian groups during the Holocene, and even to the high percentage of genetic introgression from an extinct Homo species named Denisova, the biological diversity of New Guineans is unique. While the dynamics of the interaction of Papuan genes and languages remains unsolved, a complex scenario of the genetic dispersal into Melanesia is emerging. Based on genetic data from Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea Island, Remote Oceania and Australia, I will present the most probable model of human migrations that led to the current human genetic landscape of this region.

I will focus on three periods:
1/ the first migration from Sunda into Sahul;
2/ the dispersal within the New Guinean territory and towards the Bismarck Archipelago;
3/ the late admixture events and the arrival of the Austronesians.

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