| title: | Lineal and created kinship: a reassessment of language families and relationships |
|---|---|
| reg no: | ETF5066 |
| project type: | Estonian Science Foundation research grant |
| subject: |
6.3. Linguistics |
| status: | accepted |
| institution: | Tallinn University of Educational Sciences |
| head of project: | Martin Ehala |
| duration: | 01.09.2002 - 31.08.2005 |
| description: | Research on language contact, connected with evidence from population genetics has challenged the notion of family tree in historical linguistics. Although alternative models have proposed, they lack a strict method for reconstruction of contact influences in the past. This is probably the reason why these models have been unable to replace the traditional family tree, based on the rigid comparative analysis. The crucial problem here is how to estimate the impact of any given contact to the grammars of the languages involved in this contact. This could be achieved using the theory of self-organisation. According to this theory, a change in the system's state is initiated by random fluctuations at the point of instability. Further, the random direction of change may be affected by the presence of various fields. The field could be defined as any factor (for example a contact influence) that has a potential to affect the linguistic behaviour of speakers. This influence is manifested in changes in the distribution and frequency of different types of fluctuations. As fluctuations can be observed in real time and in experimental conditions, it becomes possible to measure the strength of a field by measuring the changes in the distribution of fluctuations it causes. Thus, the first task of this project is to specify the correlation between the intensity of contact and the level of grammatical convergence, by experimentally creating inter-group communication situations with various degrees of the strength of the influence. In these experiments the distribution of fluctuations in the speech of the subjects is recorded and analysed. It is hoped that this analysis will reveal the threshold at which the contact situation will start to induce effects of grammatical convergence. The results of the experiments are then used to achieve the second task of the project - to model the role of language contact in the development of Germanic and Baltic-Finnic languages. It has been proposed that several consonant shifts in Proto-Germanic were brought into Germanic by an extensive Finno-Ugric substratum in the area of northern Germany and Poland. Using the theory of self-organisation, the results obtained from the experimental research, and from the related subprojects of the joint project Nordic transitions of Languages and Genes, the model of contact situation at the border of Indo-European and Finno-Ugric languages will be created. |
| project group | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| no | name | institution | position | |
| 1. | Martin Ehala | Tallinn Pedagogical University | professor | |
| 2. | Mart Rannut | Tallinn University of Educational Sciences | associate professor | |