Historisch-vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft der trans-eurasiatischen Sprachen mit dem Ziel, Verwandtschaft und Sprachkontakt auszudifferenzieren

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Walter Bisang
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2009 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 107827114

• Final Report Year: 2015

Final Report Abstract

The project aimed at contributing to the understanding of the nature of the historical connections between the “Transeurasian” (traditionally “Altaic”) languages. This term refers to a large group of adjacent languages between Northeast Asia and Europe, including up to five different language families: the Japanic languages, the Koreanic languages, the Tungusic languages, the Mongolic languages and the Turkic languages. The key question of our project was whether all shared forms between these languages were generated by code-copying or whether some of them were the residues of inheritance. In search of an answer, we chose to use the comparative method of historical linguistics as a basic tool and to examine data based on correspondences in verb morphology. We found that the Transeurasian languages indeed share a proportion of verb morphology - derivational as well as inflectional - and that the correspondences can be characterized as paradigmatic. As a result, our study indicated that it is linguistically more reasonable to attribute these commonalities to inheritance than to other factors such as chance, universals or borrowing.

Publications

• 2012. Copies versus cognates in bound morphology. (Brill’s Studies in Language, Cognition and Culture 3.) Leiden: Brill
  Johanson, Lars & Robbeets, Martine (eds.)
  
• Shared Grammaticalization. (Studies in Language Companion Series 132.) Amsterdam: Benjamins
  Robbeets, Martine & Cuyckens, Hubert 2013 (eds.)
  
• 2014. Japanese and the Transeurasian verb system. Habilitationsschrift, Fachbereich Philosophie und Philologie der Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, 2014
  Robbeets, Martine
  
• 2014. Paradigm change. The Transeurasian languages and beyond. (Studies in Language Companion Series 161.) Amsterdam: Benjamins
  Robbeets, Martine & Bisang, Walter (eds.)
  
• 2015. Diachrony of verb morphology in Japanese and the Transeurasian languages. (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs) Berlin: Mouton-De Gruyter
  Robbeets, Martine
  
• 2015. The development of finiteness in the Transeurasian languages. Linguistics, Bd. 55, H. 3, 2017, S. 489–523, ISSN (Online) 1613-396X
  Robbeets, Martine
  
• 2017. Proto-Transeurasian: where and when? Man in India 97 (1): 19–46
  Robbeets, Martine