Browsing by Autor "Swintha Danielsen"

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Differential Subject Marking in Arawakan Languages: Distribution and Origins
(Brill, 2020) Swintha Danielsen; Tom Durand
This paper is a comparison of nine Arawakan languages sharing a rare phenomenon in the Americas: differential subject marking. We argue that the languages involved display a group of predicates with oblique case marking on the subject, similar to the subject-like obliques in Icelandic and Hindi. Comparison with bivalent constructions provides a strong argument for the diachronic process of objects gradually acquiring subject properties. In addition, we discuss the distribution of this oblique marking and object marking in some of the Arawakan languages. This paper shows that these two marking strategies are in fact complementary; the existence of these two markings allows expressing semantico-pragmatics subtleties. Thus, it illustrates a specific realization of the differential marking of the subject in non-accusative languages. Examining the possibilities of language contact with non-Arawakan languages, such as Tukanoan or Witotoan languages, or between Arawakan languages, especially in the North-Western region of Amazonia, we conclude that this phenomenon is inherited in the Arawakan language family, considering the absence of other languages with such differential marking in South America and the attestations of this phenomenon in Arawakan languages as many as 500 years ago.
The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
(De Gruyter, 2021) Frank Seifart; Jan Strunk; Swintha Danielsen; Iren Hartmann; Brigitte Pakendorf; Søren Wichmann; Alena Witzlack-Makarevich; Nikolaus P. Himmelmann; Balthasar Bickel
Words in utterance-final positions are often pronounced more slowly than utterance-medial words, as previous studies on individual languages have shown. This paper provides a systematic cross-linguistic comparison of relative durations of final and penultimate words in utterances in terms of the degree to which such words are lengthened. The study uses time-aligned corpora from 10 genealogically, areally, and culturally diverse languages, including eight small, under-resourced, and mostly endangered languages, as well as English and Dutch. Clear effects of lengthening words at the end of utterances are found in all 10 languages, but the degrees of lengthening vary. Languages also differ in the relative durations of words that precede utterance-final words. In languages with on average short words in terms of number of segments, these penultimate words are also lengthened. This suggests that lengthening extends backwards beyond the final word in these languages, but not in languages with on average longer words. Such typological patterns highlight the importance of examining prosodic phenomena in diverse language samples beyond the small set of majority languages most commonly investigated so far.