Frank Seifart
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 419827 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Frank Seifart |
| PRENOMES | Frank |
| SOBRENOME | Seifart |
| ASSINATURA | SEIFART F |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9909-2088 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 21 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 74 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 21 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2007 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Direct speech, silent pauses, speech verbs, and basic word order
This study investigates cross-linguistically the position of speech verbs and the occurrence of silent pauses relative to direct speech reports in narrative oral texts. We hypothesize that the position of speech verbs depends on the basic word order of verbs and their complements (VO vs. OV), and that the occurrence of speech verbs and pauses exhibit complementarity based on their shared function of marking the onset or end of reported speech. We…
Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages
Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words and other constituents from each other with astonishing precision. The acoustic properties that support this process are not well understood and remain understudied for the vast majority of the world's languages, in particular regarding their potential variation. Here we report cross-linguistic evidence for the lengthening of word-initial consonants across a …
Cross-linguistic patterns in the lexicalisation of bring and take
This study investigates the linguistic expression of bring and take events and more generally of the semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion (‘directed CAM’) across a sample of eight languages of the Pacific and the Americas. Unlike English, the majority of languages in our sample do not lexicalise directed CAM events by simple verbs, but rather encode the defining meaning components – caused motion, accompaniment, and directedness …
Final Lengthening and vowel length in 25 languages
Lengthening of segments at the end of prosodic domains is commonly considered a universal phenomenon, but language-specific variation has also been reported, specifically in languages with a phonological vowel length contrast. This cross-linguistic study uses spontaneous speech data from the DoReCo corpus as a testbed to investigate Final Lengthening (FL) in a diverse sample of 25 mostly understudied languages, thirteen of which have a phonologic…
The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
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, includi…
Optimization of morpheme length
Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation and Menzerath’s Law both make predictions about the length of linguistic units, based on corpus frequency and the length of the carrier unit. Each contributes to the efficiency of languages: for Zipf, units are more likely to be reduced when they are highly predictable, due to their frequency; for Menzerath, units are more likely to be reduced when there are more sub-units to contribute to the structural information of …
Bora
Méénujcátsi Píívye - How Warfare Originated. Annotated Bora Narrative
Language documentation twenty-five years on
This discussion note reviews responses of the linguistics profession to the grave issues of language endangerment identified a quarter of a century ago in the journal Language by Krauss, Hale, England, Craig, and others (Hale et al. 1992). Two and a half decades of worldwide research not only have given us a much more accurate picture of the number, phylogeny, and typological variety of the world's languages, but they have also seen the developme…
Syntactic Sketch
Does Structural-Typological Similarity Affect Borrowability
This study addresses the question whether the borrowability of linguistic forms, in particular affixes, is constrained by structural properties of the donor and recipient languages involved. According to some claims, structural similarity favors affix borrowing. On some accounts, structural compatibility of a certain kind is even a precondition for affix borrowing. This study tests these claims using data from a set of 78 languages that borrowed …
Proto Bora-Muinane
Bora and Muinane are two neighboring, relatively closely related languages spoken in the North-West Amazon. Whether these two languages can be shown to be genealogically related to other languages is still debated. In this paper, we provide a reconstruction of 416 proto Bora-Muinane word forms and of the proto Bora-Muinane phonological system. Our reconstruction confirms an earlier reconstruction by Aschmann (1993), but also differs from it in so…
Tracing social history from synchronic linguistic and ethnographic data
La lengua amazónica resígaro presenta fuertes influencias del bora, lengua vecina con la que no está no relacionada genéticamente. Estas influencias incluyen la asimilación cultural, algunos préstamos léxicos, y numerosos préstamos morfológicos y de estructuras gramaticales. ¿Qué circunstancias sociales condujeron a este tipo de influencias? Este artículo revisa nuestro conocimiento actual acerca de las características culturales y lingüísticas q…
Direct and indirect affix borrowing
A widespread assumption in the language contact literature is that affixes are never borrowed directly, but only indirectly, that is, as part of complex loanwords. From such complex loanwords, affixes may eventually spread to native stems, creating hybrid formations, in a process of language-internal analogical extension. Direct borrowing is the extraction of an affix based on knowledge of the donor language, without the mediation of complex loan…
The principle of morphosyntactic subsystem integrity in language contact
This paper describes a case of non-lexical borrowing in the Northwest Amazonian language Resígaro (Arawakan), which has borrowed from the unrelated Bora language entire paradigms of noun class, gender, and number markers, as well as associated bound grammatical roots, while all other morphosyntactic subsystems of Resígaro are virtually unaffected. To account for this case of massive morphological borrowing (and others that have previously been de…
Causative Marking in Resígaro (Arawakan)
The aim of this paper is twofold: The first and major aim is to contribute to the grammatical description of the underdescribed and severely endangered Arawakan language Resígaro, spoken in Colombia and Peru, by providing a description of the intricate morphophonology and of the morphosyntactic patterns of causative marking in this language. In doing so, this paper also treats some general grammatical characteristics of the language, such as tone…
Nominal Classification
Many languages have morphosyntactic systems that impose a classification on their nominal lexicon. The nature of these systems varies widely, ranging from large systems of lexico-syntactic numeral classifiers, as known from East and South East Asian languages, to highly grammaticalized gender agreement systems of, e.g. European languages (seeAikhenvald 2000for a comprehensive overview). These systems are also often internally complex, heterogeneo…
The Bora connector pronoun and tail-head linkage
The Amazonian language Bora systematically uses in narratives a special, paragraph-initial anaphoric "connector pronoun". This pronoun helps to ensure referential coherence through agreement in noun class and number with an antecedent, whose referent is thematic in the new paragraph. Additional morphology in the connector pronoun specifies temporal, causal, and other relations between events. The connector pronoun is syntactically tightly integra…
Aspectos morfosintácticos del ocaina
This paper presents some morphosyntactic features of Ocaina, a seriously endangered, underdescribed language of the Colombian-Peruvian Amazon region. Ocaina has an extensive nominal classification system and number markers—dual and plural—suffixed to both nouns and person markers on verbs. Grammatical relations follow a nominative-accusative pattern and are coded by a relatively rigid constituent order SOV (Subject-Object-Verb); by verbal prefixe…
A Grammar of Hup (review)
Reviewed by: A Grammar of Hup Frank Seifart A Grammar of Hup. Patience Epps. Mouton Grammar Library 43. With accompanying CD-ROM. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. Pp. xxiii + 983. $237.00, €148.00 (cloth). This comprehensive grammar of the Hup language, spoken in the Brazil-Colombia frontier region in northwestern Amazonia, is a highly valuable contribution to the growing number of descriptions of Amazonian languages, as well as to t…
Nominal Classification in the North West Amazon
Este artículo explora la clasificación nominal en las lenguas habladas en el noroeste amazónico, donde las cuencas de los ríos Putumayo, Caquetá y Vaupés se acercan al río Amazonas y donde se encuentran las fronteras de Colombia, Brasil y Perú. Las lenguas provienen de las familias Huitoto, Peba-Yagua, Arawak y Tucano Oriental
The Prehistory of Nominal Classification in Witotoan Languages
This paper discusses the historical development of nominal classification systems in Witotoan languages, using mainly systematic comparison of morphosyntactic structures and classifier forms. These comparisons show that nominal classification systems can be reconstructed for the two main branches of Witotoan but not for the common proto-language proposed by Aschmann (1993). Examination of data from surrounding languages shows that the systems in …
Nominal Classification in the North West Amazon
Este artículo explora la clasificación nominal en las lenguas habladas en el noroeste amazónico, donde las cuencas de los ríos Putumayo, Caquetá y Vaupés se acercan al río Amazonas y donde se encuentran las fronteras de Colombia, Brasil y Perú. Las lenguas provienen de las familias Huitoto, Peba-Yagua, Arawak y Tucano Oriental
Direct and indirect affix borrowing
A widespread assumption in the language contact literature is that affixes are never borrowed directly, but only indirectly, that is, as part of complex loanwords. From such complex loanwords, affixes may eventually spread to native stems, creating hybrid formations, in a process of language-internal analogical extension. Direct borrowing is the extraction of an affix based on knowledge of the donor language, without the mediation of complex loan…
The Prehistory of Nominal Classification in Witotoan Languages
This paper discusses the historical development of nominal classification systems in Witotoan languages, using mainly systematic comparison of morphosyntactic structures and classifier forms. These comparisons show that nominal classification systems can be reconstructed for the two main branches of Witotoan but not for the common proto-language proposed by Aschmann (1993). Examination of data from surrounding languages shows that the systems in …
Final Lengthening and vowel length in 25 languages
Lengthening of segments at the end of prosodic domains is commonly considered a universal phenomenon, but language-specific variation has also been reported, specifically in languages with a phonological vowel length contrast. This cross-linguistic study uses spontaneous speech data from the DoReCo corpus as a testbed to investigate Final Lengthening (FL) in a diverse sample of 25 mostly understudied languages, thirteen of which have a phonologic…
Language documentation twenty-five years on
This discussion note reviews responses of the linguistics profession to the grave issues of language endangerment identified a quarter of a century ago in the journal Language by Krauss, Hale, England, Craig, and others (Hale et al. 1992). Two and a half decades of worldwide research not only have given us a much more accurate picture of the number, phylogeny, and typological variety of the world's languages, but they have also seen the developme…
Nominal Classification
Many languages have morphosyntactic systems that impose a classification on their nominal lexicon. The nature of these systems varies widely, ranging from large systems of lexico-syntactic numeral classifiers, as known from East and South East Asian languages, to highly grammaticalized gender agreement systems of, e.g. European languages (seeAikhenvald 2000for a comprehensive overview). These systems are also often internally complex, heterogeneo…
Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages
Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words and other constituents from each other with astonishing precision. The acoustic properties that support this process are not well understood and remain understudied for the vast majority of the world's languages, in particular regarding their potential variation. Here we report cross-linguistic evidence for the lengthening of word-initial consonants across a …
Proto Bora-Muinane
Bora and Muinane are two neighboring, relatively closely related languages spoken in the North-West Amazon. Whether these two languages can be shown to be genealogically related to other languages is still debated. In this paper, we provide a reconstruction of 416 proto Bora-Muinane word forms and of the proto Bora-Muinane phonological system. Our reconstruction confirms an earlier reconstruction by Aschmann (1993), but also differs from it in so…
Tracing social history from synchronic linguistic and ethnographic data
La lengua amazónica resígaro presenta fuertes influencias del bora, lengua vecina con la que no está no relacionada genéticamente. Estas influencias incluyen la asimilación cultural, algunos préstamos léxicos, y numerosos préstamos morfológicos y de estructuras gramaticales. ¿Qué circunstancias sociales condujeron a este tipo de influencias? Este artículo revisa nuestro conocimiento actual acerca de las características culturales y lingüísticas q…
The Bora connector pronoun and tail-head linkage
The Amazonian language Bora systematically uses in narratives a special, paragraph-initial anaphoric "connector pronoun". This pronoun helps to ensure referential coherence through agreement in noun class and number with an antecedent, whose referent is thematic in the new paragraph. Additional morphology in the connector pronoun specifies temporal, causal, and other relations between events. The connector pronoun is syntactically tightly integra…
Nominal Classification in the North West Amazon
Este artículo explora la clasificación nominal en las lenguas habladas en el noroeste amazónico, donde las cuencas de los ríos Putumayo, Caquetá y Vaupés se acercan al río Amazonas y donde se encuentran las fronteras de Colombia, Brasil y Perú. Las lenguas provienen de las familias Huitoto, Peba-Yagua, Arawak y Tucano Oriental
The Prehistory of Nominal Classification in Witotoan Languages
This paper discusses the historical development of nominal classification systems in Witotoan languages, using mainly systematic comparison of morphosyntactic structures and classifier forms. These comparisons show that nominal classification systems can be reconstructed for the two main branches of Witotoan but not for the common proto-language proposed by Aschmann (1993). Examination of data from surrounding languages shows that the systems in …
A Grammar of Hup (review)
Reviewed by: A Grammar of Hup Frank Seifart A Grammar of Hup. Patience Epps. Mouton Grammar Library 43. With accompanying CD-ROM. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. Pp. xxiii + 983. $237.00, €148.00 (cloth). This comprehensive grammar of the Hup language, spoken in the Brazil-Colombia frontier region in northwestern Amazonia, is a highly valuable contribution to the growing number of descriptions of Amazonian languages, as well as to t…
Nominal Classification
Many languages have morphosyntactic systems that impose a classification on their nominal lexicon. The nature of these systems varies widely, ranging from large systems of lexico-syntactic numeral classifiers, as known from East and South East Asian languages, to highly grammaticalized gender agreement systems of, e.g. European languages (seeAikhenvald 2000for a comprehensive overview). These systems are also often internally complex, heterogeneo…
The Bora connector pronoun and tail-head linkage
The Amazonian language Bora systematically uses in narratives a special, paragraph-initial anaphoric "connector pronoun". This pronoun helps to ensure referential coherence through agreement in noun class and number with an antecedent, whose referent is thematic in the new paragraph. Additional morphology in the connector pronoun specifies temporal, causal, and other relations between events. The connector pronoun is syntactically tightly integra…
Aspectos morfosintácticos del ocaina
This paper presents some morphosyntactic features of Ocaina, a seriously endangered, underdescribed language of the Colombian-Peruvian Amazon region. Ocaina has an extensive nominal classification system and number markers—dual and plural—suffixed to both nouns and person markers on verbs. Grammatical relations follow a nominative-accusative pattern and are coded by a relatively rigid constituent order SOV (Subject-Object-Verb); by verbal prefixe…
The principle of morphosyntactic subsystem integrity in language contact
This paper describes a case of non-lexical borrowing in the Northwest Amazonian language Resígaro (Arawakan), which has borrowed from the unrelated Bora language entire paradigms of noun class, gender, and number markers, as well as associated bound grammatical roots, while all other morphosyntactic subsystems of Resígaro are virtually unaffected. To account for this case of massive morphological borrowing (and others that have previously been de…
Causative Marking in Resígaro (Arawakan)
The aim of this paper is twofold: The first and major aim is to contribute to the grammatical description of the underdescribed and severely endangered Arawakan language Resígaro, spoken in Colombia and Peru, by providing a description of the intricate morphophonology and of the morphosyntactic patterns of causative marking in this language. In doing so, this paper also treats some general grammatical characteristics of the language, such as tone…
Syntactic Sketch
Does Structural-Typological Similarity Affect Borrowability
This study addresses the question whether the borrowability of linguistic forms, in particular affixes, is constrained by structural properties of the donor and recipient languages involved. According to some claims, structural similarity favors affix borrowing. On some accounts, structural compatibility of a certain kind is even a precondition for affix borrowing. This study tests these claims using data from a set of 78 languages that borrowed …
Proto Bora-Muinane
Bora and Muinane are two neighboring, relatively closely related languages spoken in the North-West Amazon. Whether these two languages can be shown to be genealogically related to other languages is still debated. In this paper, we provide a reconstruction of 416 proto Bora-Muinane word forms and of the proto Bora-Muinane phonological system. Our reconstruction confirms an earlier reconstruction by Aschmann (1993), but also differs from it in so…
Tracing social history from synchronic linguistic and ethnographic data
La lengua amazónica resígaro presenta fuertes influencias del bora, lengua vecina con la que no está no relacionada genéticamente. Estas influencias incluyen la asimilación cultural, algunos préstamos léxicos, y numerosos préstamos morfológicos y de estructuras gramaticales. ¿Qué circunstancias sociales condujeron a este tipo de influencias? Este artículo revisa nuestro conocimiento actual acerca de las características culturales y lingüísticas q…
Direct and indirect affix borrowing
A widespread assumption in the language contact literature is that affixes are never borrowed directly, but only indirectly, that is, as part of complex loanwords. From such complex loanwords, affixes may eventually spread to native stems, creating hybrid formations, in a process of language-internal analogical extension. Direct borrowing is the extraction of an affix based on knowledge of the donor language, without the mediation of complex loan…
Bora
Méénujcátsi Píívye - How Warfare Originated. Annotated Bora Narrative
Language documentation twenty-five years on
This discussion note reviews responses of the linguistics profession to the grave issues of language endangerment identified a quarter of a century ago in the journal Language by Krauss, Hale, England, Craig, and others (Hale et al. 1992). Two and a half decades of worldwide research not only have given us a much more accurate picture of the number, phylogeny, and typological variety of the world's languages, but they have also seen the developme…
The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
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, includi…
Optimization of morpheme length
Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation and Menzerath’s Law both make predictions about the length of linguistic units, based on corpus frequency and the length of the carrier unit. Each contributes to the efficiency of languages: for Zipf, units are more likely to be reduced when they are highly predictable, due to their frequency; for Menzerath, units are more likely to be reduced when there are more sub-units to contribute to the structural information of …
Cross-linguistic patterns in the lexicalisation of bring and take
This study investigates the linguistic expression of bring and take events and more generally of the semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion (‘directed CAM’) across a sample of eight languages of the Pacific and the Americas. Unlike English, the majority of languages in our sample do not lexicalise directed CAM events by simple verbs, but rather encode the defining meaning components – caused motion, accompaniment, and directedness …
Final Lengthening and vowel length in 25 languages
Lengthening of segments at the end of prosodic domains is commonly considered a universal phenomenon, but language-specific variation has also been reported, specifically in languages with a phonological vowel length contrast. This cross-linguistic study uses spontaneous speech data from the DoReCo corpus as a testbed to investigate Final Lengthening (FL) in a diverse sample of 25 mostly understudied languages, thirteen of which have a phonologic…
Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages
Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words and other constituents from each other with astonishing precision. The acoustic properties that support this process are not well understood and remain understudied for the vast majority of the world's languages, in particular regarding their potential variation. Here we report cross-linguistic evidence for the lengthening of word-initial consonants across a …
Direct speech, silent pauses, speech verbs, and basic word order
This study investigates cross-linguistically the position of speech verbs and the occurrence of silent pauses relative to direct speech reports in narrative oral texts. We hypothesize that the position of speech verbs depends on the basic word order of verbs and their complements (VO vs. OV), and that the occurrence of speech verbs and pauses exhibit complementarity based on their shared function of marking the onset or end of reported speech. We…
Linguistics (19 obras) · Computer Science (18 obras) · Philosophy (15 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (9 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (8 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (8 obras) · Natural language processing (7 obras) · History (6 obras) · Philosophy (6 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (5 obras)