Evidence for Britain and Ireland as a linguistic area

Abstract

Approaches to linguistic areas have largely focused either on purely qualitative investigation of area-formation processes, on quantitative and qualitative exploration of synchronic distributions of linguistic features without considering time, or on theoretical issues related to the definition of the notion 'linguistic area'. What is still missing are approaches that supplement qualitative research on area-formation processes with quantitative methods. Taking a bottom-up approach, we bypass notional issues and propose to quantify area-formation processes by (i) measuring the change in linguistic similarity given a geographical space, a sociocultural setting, a time span, a language sample, and a set of linguistic data, and (ii) testing the tendency and magnitude of the process using Bayesian inference. Applying this approach to the expression of reflexivity in a dense sample of languages in northwestern Europe from the early Middle Ages to the present, we show that the method yields robust quantitative evidence for a substantial gain in linguistic similarity that sets the languages of Britain and Ireland apart from languages spoken outside of Britain and Ireland and cross-cuts lines of linguistic ancestry.*

Convergence by Shared Ancestry in Romance

“…The reliability of the methods proposed so far (e.g., Freckleton and Jetz, 2009;Nelson-Sathi et al, 2010;Willems et al, 2016;Kelly and Nicholls, 2017;Murawaki and Yamauchi, 2018) has not been thoroughly established yet, and although some of them seem promising, they are not suitable for this study, as they operate on a macro-level. We thus apply the method developed in Dedio et al (2019) for identifying convergence within a group of languages and expand their data collection with data relevant for our purposes.…”

“…Germanic. The method applied in Dedio et al (2019) uses predefined areal groups, i.e., configurations, that are based on geographical, historical and sociological information to infer signals of convergence within these groups contrasted with the developments outside these predefined areas. As the languages of the Romance subphylum of Indo-European cannot in any way be interpreted as belonging to a single coherent area, we depart from their notion of configuration and apply the method also to groups of languages defined by shared ancestry (i.e., Romance and Germanic).…”

“…As Dedio et al (2019), we focus on the expression of reflexivity, i.e., constructions in which the A and P arguments share the same referent (excluding constructions with exclusively reciprocal or passive semantics, and constructions that lack overt marking). The expression of these constructions encompasses a set of morphological, morphophonological, and morphosyntactic devices that can be captured in terms of binary variables as defined in the following list (for a full description, see Dedio et al, 2019; abbreviations in parentheses refer to the variables in Table 2). Note that by taking the construction as a starting point, our perspective differs from approaches that identify reflexivity as one possible function of particular devices, such as pronouns (see Cennamo, 2014for Italian, Fehrmann et al, 2010.…”

“…To get a better understanding of the properties of the genealogical signal in Romance, we propose to compare the change in similarity observed in a sample of Romance varieties to the changes in another lineage, namely Germanic, and to the changes in various configurations (see Dedio et al, 2019), i.e., geographical spaces with their own particular history and socio-cultural and socio-linguistic properties. To evaluate the dynamics of change, we apply the methods introduced by Dedio et al (2019), which are based on the changes in similarity between linguistic varieties over time in predefined groups of languages, and make use of their set of morphosyntactic and morphonological variables used to encode reflexivity, adding Balkan and Romance varieties to their sample. In order to assess the contribution of Latin, the common cultural point of reference, to the change in similarity in Romance we add Classical and Medieval Latin, which remain, and are kept, unchanged during the period of interest.…”

“…In order to get a better sense of the relevance of shared ancestry, we quantify the change in similarity since the late Middle Ages in a sample of Romance and Germanic languages with data from a selected grammatical domain (expression of reflexivity). We compare their dynamics to patterns of change of similarity in two contact zones in Europe, namely the British Isles (Dedio et al, 2019) and the Balkans. Concerning the genealogical signal, the results indicate a maintenance and gain of similarity in Romance as opposed to a loss of similarity in Germanic.…”