Igor Yanovich
Biographic Data
| ID | 3592369 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Igor Yanovich |
| GIVEN NAMES | Igor |
| FAMILY NAME | Yanovich |
| SIGNATURE | YANOVICH I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tübingen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6551-9239 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Reconstructing the Historical Structure of the Bantu Language Family: Old Challenges, New Insights
Recent publications in historical linguistics tend to express a near certainty about the structure of the Bantu language family and explicitly draw on archaeological and genetic studies as support for the emerging historical scenario of the Bantu expansion. In this review, I explain that the actual empirical picture is far more complicated and uncertain. A detailed examination of linguistic, archaeological, and genetic data reveals common faulty …
Including Explicit Priors on Phase Duration in Bayesian 14C Dating: Re-Evaluating the Dates for Basal Knossos and for Nea Nikomedeia (Early Aegean Neolithic)
Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon dates directly integrates information obtained through archaeological analysis. Here, I explain how to add known information/reasonable assumptions about the length of a deposition phase, using the example of date sequences from two Early Neolithic communities in the Aegean whose dating has been hotly debated, i.e. basal Knossos (Crete) and Nea Nikomedeia (Northern Greece). The consequences of the re-evaluation o…
Phylogenetic linguistic evidence and the Dene-Yeniseian homeland
Sicoli & Holton (2014) (PLoS ONE 9:3, e91722) use computational phylogenetics to argue that linguistic data from the putative, but likely, Dene-Yeniseian macro-family are better compatible with a homeland in Beringia (i.e., northeastern Siberia plus northwestern Alaska) than with one in central Siberia or deeper Asia. I show that a more careful examination of the data invalidates this conclusion: in fact, linguistic data do not support Beringia a…
Special issue on formal diachronic semantics Introduction
It is a pleasure to present this collection of articles which make up the first-ever special issue dedicated specifically to formal diachronic semantics. This young subfield is in its formative stages, and is concerned with using the apparatus of "formal", that is, logical semantics, for understanding meaning change, particularly of grammatical meaning
Uninterpretable features in learning and alternative grammars
The effect of dictionary omissions on phylogenies computationally inferred from lexical data
Lexical datasets used for computational phylogenetic inference suffer a unique type of data error. Some words actually present in a language may be absent from the dataset at no fault of its curators: especially for lesser-studied languages, a word may be missing from all available sources such as dictionaries. It is thus important to be able to (i) check how robust one’s inferences are to dictionary omission errors, and (ii) incorporate the know…
Analyzing imperfective games
Deo 2015 is the first study applying mathematically explicit evolutionary analysis to a specific semantic-change phenomenon, namely the progressive-imperfective diachronic cycle. However, Deo’s actual results do not match completely the empirical observations about that cycle. Linguistic communities passing through the cycle often employ, in the synchrony, a single common type of progressive-imperfective grammar. In Deo’s modeling results, howeve…
Old English *motan, variable-force modality, and the presupposition of inevitable actualization: Online Appendices
Old English *motan, variable-force modality, and the presupposition of inevitable actualization
Old English *motan and Middle English *moten, the ancestors of modern must, are commonly described as ambiguous between a possibility and a necessity reading. I argue instead that in the Alfredian Old English prose, *motan was a nonambiguous ‘variable-force’ modal, with the modal force different from both possibility and necessity. I propose that *motan's variable-force effect was due to the presupposition of a collapse between possibility and ne…
Accentual Allomorphs in East Slavic: An Argument for Inflection Dependence
This study analyzes a pattern of inflection dependence (Steriade 2008) in the distribution of accentual stem allomorphs in East Slavic, and it explores the significance of this pattern for the analysis of the phonological cycle. Inflected forms in Ukrainian and Russian surface with accented or unaccented stems as a predictable function of their inflectional class, the underlying accent of their root and further phonological factors. The result is…
Standard Contextualism Strikes Back
Journal Article Standard Contextualism Strikes Back Get access Igor Yanovich Igor Yanovich Massachusetts Institute of Technology IGOR YANOVICH MIT Linguistics and Philosophy 77 Massachusetts Avenue Bldg. 32-D808 Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. e-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Semantics, Volume 31, Issue 1, February 2014, Pages 67–114, https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffs022 Publishe…
Old English *motan, variable-force modality, and the presupposition of inevitable actualization
Old English *motan and Middle English *moten, the ancestors of modern must, are commonly described as ambiguous between a possibility and a necessity reading. I argue instead that in the Alfredian Old English prose, *motan was a nonambiguous ‘variable-force’ modal, with the modal force different from both possibility and necessity. I propose that *motan's variable-force effect was due to the presupposition of a collapse between possibility and ne…
Standard Contextualism Strikes Back
Journal Article Standard Contextualism Strikes Back Get access Igor Yanovich Igor Yanovich Massachusetts Institute of Technology IGOR YANOVICH MIT Linguistics and Philosophy 77 Massachusetts Avenue Bldg. 32-D808 Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. e-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Semantics, Volume 31, Issue 1, February 2014, Pages 67–114, https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffs022 Publishe…
Accentual Allomorphs in East Slavic: An Argument for Inflection Dependence
This study analyzes a pattern of inflection dependence (Steriade 2008) in the distribution of accentual stem allomorphs in East Slavic, and it explores the significance of this pattern for the analysis of the phonological cycle. Inflected forms in Ukrainian and Russian surface with accented or unaccented stems as a predictable function of their inflectional class, the underlying accent of their root and further phonological factors. The result is…
Old English *motan, variable-force modality, and the presupposition of inevitable actualization: Online Appendices
Old English *motan, variable-force modality, and the presupposition of inevitable actualization
Old English *motan and Middle English *moten, the ancestors of modern must, are commonly described as ambiguous between a possibility and a necessity reading. I argue instead that in the Alfredian Old English prose, *motan was a nonambiguous ‘variable-force’ modal, with the modal force different from both possibility and necessity. I propose that *motan's variable-force effect was due to the presupposition of a collapse between possibility and ne…
Analyzing imperfective games
Deo 2015 is the first study applying mathematically explicit evolutionary analysis to a specific semantic-change phenomenon, namely the progressive-imperfective diachronic cycle. However, Deo’s actual results do not match completely the empirical observations about that cycle. Linguistic communities passing through the cycle often employ, in the synchrony, a single common type of progressive-imperfective grammar. In Deo’s modeling results, howeve…
The effect of dictionary omissions on phylogenies computationally inferred from lexical data
Lexical datasets used for computational phylogenetic inference suffer a unique type of data error. Some words actually present in a language may be absent from the dataset at no fault of its curators: especially for lesser-studied languages, a word may be missing from all available sources such as dictionaries. It is thus important to be able to (i) check how robust one’s inferences are to dictionary omission errors, and (ii) incorporate the know…
Uninterpretable features in learning and alternative grammars
Phylogenetic linguistic evidence and the Dene-Yeniseian homeland
Sicoli & Holton (2014) (PLoS ONE 9:3, e91722) use computational phylogenetics to argue that linguistic data from the putative, but likely, Dene-Yeniseian macro-family are better compatible with a homeland in Beringia (i.e., northeastern Siberia plus northwestern Alaska) than with one in central Siberia or deeper Asia. I show that a more careful examination of the data invalidates this conclusion: in fact, linguistic data do not support Beringia a…
Special issue on formal diachronic semantics Introduction
It is a pleasure to present this collection of articles which make up the first-ever special issue dedicated specifically to formal diachronic semantics. This young subfield is in its formative stages, and is concerned with using the apparatus of "formal", that is, logical semantics, for understanding meaning change, particularly of grammatical meaning
Including Explicit Priors on Phase Duration in Bayesian 14C Dating: Re-Evaluating the Dates for Basal Knossos and for Nea Nikomedeia (Early Aegean Neolithic)
Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon dates directly integrates information obtained through archaeological analysis. Here, I explain how to add known information/reasonable assumptions about the length of a deposition phase, using the example of date sequences from two Early Neolithic communities in the Aegean whose dating has been hotly debated, i.e. basal Knossos (Crete) and Nea Nikomedeia (Northern Greece). The consequences of the re-evaluation o…
Reconstructing the Historical Structure of the Bantu Language Family: Old Challenges, New Insights
Recent publications in historical linguistics tend to express a near certainty about the structure of the Bantu language family and explicitly draw on archaeological and genetic studies as support for the emerging historical scenario of the Bantu expansion. In this review, I explain that the actual empirical picture is far more complicated and uncertain. A detailed examination of linguistic, archaeological, and genetic data reveals common faulty …
Linguistics (9 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works) · History (5 works) · Mathematics (5 works) · Natural language processing (4 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (4 works) · Geography (3 works) · Language and cultural evolution (3 works)