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A database of semantic changes in Pama-Nyungan languages| title | A database of semantic changes in Pama-Nyungan languages |
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| start_date | 2025/01/14 |
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| schedule | 10h30-12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle 510 & en ligne |
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| summary | This presentation explores the motivation, creation, and preliminary results of a database documenting semantic changes in the Pama-Nyungan languages of Australia. The Pama-Nyungan language family, comprising approximately 300 languages, spans ~90% of Australia’s geographic area. This family exhibits a seemingly paradoxical combination of high rates of lexical replacement and very few systematic sound changes. As a result, historical research has largely been confined to forms with minimal semantic divergence, leaving semantic change in this family markedly understudied compared to phonological or grammatical changes. Nevertheless, the limited research on semantic change has yielded significant insights into semantic theory (Evans 1992), especially concerning presumed universals (Evans & Wilkins 2000). However, these studies remain somewhat descriptive and selective, highlighting the need for systematic and quantitative analysis.
In this presentation, I discuss the creation of a cognate database encompassing approximately 1,300 Pama-Nyungan cognate sets and their reflexes. These reflexes display significant semantic variation, illustrating the semantic changes that have occurred from Proto-Pama-Nyungan (PPN) to its modern descendants. This work integrates findings with the EvoSem database (François et al. 2024), which identifies dialexifications – i.e. links between meanings that belong to the same cognate set (Dehouck et al. 2023). For instance, Manjiljarra kuru ‘eye’, Yinytjiparntii kuru ‘round’, and Ngarluma kuru ‘seed’ all derive from PPN *kuru ‘eye.’ Thus, the meanings eye, round, and seed are all ‘dialexified’ in Pama-Nyungan languages.
This approach enables a systematic analysis of semantic diversification in Pama-Nyungan languages and facilitates comparative analyses with other language families. The presentation also examines these findings in light of typologically common changes and highlights semantic changes that appear to be typologically restricted. |
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| responsibles | François |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2024/12/16 15:28 UTC |
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