Volume 31, Issue 1

Prepositional form and function in Irish, as in other Modern Celtic languages, are topics of much significance. In Modern Irish numerous simple prepositions not only form compounds with possessive forms of personal pronouns but additionally marshal an impressive array of ‘conjugated’ forms corresponding to the various grammatical persons. Prepositions also play a crucial role in indicating aspect and are involved in passive/ reflexive roles with the verbal noun. This paper offers an overview of the functioning of a selection of important prepositions in the language and provides examples by way of illustration.

This paper continues an article devoted to the linguistic description of the local dialect of Vyšneve, cf. DiG 30 (2022), 23–49. The present study, as previously mentioned, completes a piece of a more comprehensive dialectal and sociolinguistic research on the dialects spoken along the Ukrainian-Belarusian and, to a minor extent, Russian borders. This is a territorial segment located in the eastern Polissian macro region and, more precisely, in the north-western part of the Region of Černihiv (Ukraine). In this continuation, the analysed material describes basic verbal morphology, the ways of expressing modality, the most evident syntactic and lexical features of this local dialect.

This paper provides an overview of geographical variation of sibling term systems used in Asia and Africa, which are categorized based on distinctions of (1) relative age, (2) sex, and (3) relative sex. Experts in languages/language groups of Asia and Africa have analyzed and mapped these systems; using their findings, I created summative maps showing the geographical distributions of the system types based on rates (percentages) of each type. Type A (undifferentiated sibling type) is conspicuous in Africa. Type B (relative age type) is used in many languages in Africa and Southeast Asia. Type C (skewed age type) commands an absolute majority in languages of Northeast Asia and is also found in Southeast Asia. The change of Type A > Type B > Type C is inferred from these systems’ distributions. Type D (age/sex type) is the only type in Sinitic, and has affected neighboring languages. Type E (brother/sister type) holds the vast majority in Semitic and South Asian languages and has affected surrounding languages. Type F (relative sex type) and its variations are found in peripheral languages in Asia and Africa; this might be the oldest type. This interpretation is supported by attested changes in Japonic.

Spanish speakers use a great diversity of terms to refer to Pisum sativum , from the better known guisante and arveja , to other less common forms such as chícharo , bisalto , pésol , présules , pitos , titos , pedrolos , mánganos , garavanzos , fréjoles , etc. This work analyzes the great diversity of names that the species Pisum sativum receives in Spanish and it does it through the Spanish geolinguistic atlases and the lexicons of the cultured norms of the main cities of the Hispanic world. Through this analysis we will try to explain the reason for this diversity with the objective of understanding if this variety is due to a question of synonymy or to a confusion between species of legumes or between varieties within the Pisum species itself. We will explain that the history of the denominations of the pea, and of the legumes in general, is marked by its confusion from the beginnings of language; a confusion that comes motivated mainly by the similarity that possess all the species that conform the family Papilionoideae and that causes that the speakers confuse in many occasions some plants with others..

The traditional focus of (German) dialectology has been on spatial patterns observed in phonology. However, dialectometric approaches have generated interest in exploring geographical structures in other linguistic subsystems, including morphology. Building on this research, this study investigates geolinguistic patterns of dialect morphology in contemporary Austrian dialects using aggregative and non-aggregative measures, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), and Cluster Analysis (CA). Data are based on a comprehensive dialect survey with 163 speakers from 40 locations across Austria, examining 120 linguistic variables related to inflection. The results show a clear geographic structuring of morphological variation, which significantly differs from traditional dialect classifications. The analysis of the linguistic basis of the geographical patterns suggests that these differences might be ascribed to methodological factors and language change. Methodologically, it is also demonstrated that the findings of aggregative and non-aggregative methods are complementary, not contradictory. Ultimately, the study underscores the importance of integrating diverse methods to gain a comprehensive understanding of geographical patterns in dialect variation.

This paper has two chief goals: (i) to collate the disparate synchronic evidence for the distribution of ‘daughter’ and ‘son’ from the dialect maps available for the modern Celtic languages, namely: the Gaelic languages (Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx) and Brittonic (Welsh, Cornish and Breton), (ii) to revisit and analyse the distribution of the terms ‘son’ and ‘daughter’ at an early stage of Continental Celtic from two millennia ago in Gaulish and Celt-Iberian with particular reference to the Indo-European lexemes * dʱug̑ʱh 2 ter ‘daughter’ and *suh x nú- ‘son’.

The study of dialectal microvariation in spoken Spanish faces challenges due to the absence of an adequate morpho-syntactically annotated and parsed corpus. Therefore, this article introduces a novel technique, a game-based approach, for creating resources for non-standard Spanish language varieties. The article provides an overview of the progress in designing three Games With A Purpose ( GWAPs ) prototypes, to wit , Agentes, Tesoros , and Anotatlón . These games aim to facilitate the confirmation and correction of the morpho-syntactic tagging task of the COSER-AP ( Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural-Anotado y Parseado , ‘Annotated and Parsed Audible Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish’). First, the article presents the methodology used to build the games. Second, it offers a detailed description of the implemented Game Design Elements ( GDEs ). Finally, the article discusses the results of a pilot evaluation that assesses player enjoyment and the linguistic accuracy. Findings are promising, with Tesoros and Anotatlón demonstrating high levels of enjoyment. Additionally, Agentes proves to be effective in collecting a large number of annotations. The linguistic accuracy also shows potential benefits of gamified approaches in linguistic annotation tasks. However, it also emphasizes the importance of considering regional in player assessment and training them in multidialectal contexts.