Papers by Ana Krajinović
Community-Led Documentation of Nafsan (Erakor, Vanuatu)
Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, 2022
We focus on a collaboration between community members and visiting linguists in Erakor, Vanuatu, ... more We focus on a collaboration between community members and visiting linguists in Erakor, Vanuatu, aiming to build the capacity of community-based researchers to undertake and sustain documentation of Nafsan, the local indigenous language. We focus on the technical and procedural skills required to collect, manage, and work with audio and video data, and give an overview of the outcomes of a community-led documentation after initial training. We discuss the benefits and challenges of this type of project from the perspective of the community researchers and the external linguists. We show that community-led documentation such as this project in Erakor, in which data management and archiving are incorporated into the documentation process, has crucial benefits for both the community and the linguists. The two most salient benefits are: a) long-term documentation of linguistic and cultural practices calibrated towards community’s needs, and b) collection of larger quantities of data by community members, and often of better quality and scope than those collected by visiting linguists, which, besides being readily available for research, have a great potential for training and testing emerging language technologies for less-resourced languages, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).
Irrealis is real
Language Volume 98, Number 2, 2022
The question of whether irrealis is a meaningful concept in crosslinguistic comparison has been t... more The question of whether irrealis is a meaningful concept in crosslinguistic comparison has been the subject of long-standing controversy. In this article, we argue that the semantic domain of irreality is split into two domains—the possible and the counterfactual—and that an 'irrealis' marker in a given language may refer either to only one of these domains or to both. A significant part of the crosslinguistic variation in what is referred to by the term irrealis can be traced back to this distinction. Other factors that obscure the realis/irrealis divide include functional subdivisions of the irrealis domain and paradigmatic competition within the TAM system of a language. We conclude that 'irrealis' is a crosslinguistically meaningful notion.*
Proceedings of 9th Language & Technology Conference, May 17-19, 2019, Poznań, Poland, published by Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje
Close collaboration between community members and visiting researchers offers mutual benefits, in... more Close collaboration between community members and visiting researchers offers mutual benefits, including opportunities for new research insights and an expanded scope for supporting language maintenance and developing practical materials. We discuss a collaboration in Erakor, Vanuatu aiming to build the capacity of community-based researchers to undertake and sustain language and cultural documentation projects. We focus on the technical and procedural skills required to collect, manage, and work with audio and video data, and give an overview of the outcomes of a community-led project after initial training. We discuss the benefits and challenges of this type of project from the perspective of the community researchers and the external linguists. We show that the community-led project in Erakor, in which data management and archiving are incorporated into the documentation process, has crucial benefits for both the community and the linguists. Two most salient benefits are: a) long-term documentation of linguistic and cultural practices calibrated towards community's needs, and b) collections of large quantities of data of good phonetic quality, which, besides being readily available for research, have a great potential for training and testing emerging language technologies based on machine learning.
The semantics of perfect in Nafsan and implications for typology , 2018
This paper offers an analysis of the semantics of the perfect in Nafsan (South Efate) and argues ... more This paper offers an analysis of the semantics of the perfect in Nafsan (South Efate) and argues for several implications for the typology of the perfect aspect. I show that all the functions of the perfect in Nafsan can be derived from placing the Topic Time in the posttime of the event in question, equal to Klein (1994) analysis of the English perfect. The main typological implications discussed within this analysis are: a) perfect in a tenseless language can have present, past, and future perfect readings, b) the interpretation of change of state can arise with perfects through aspectual coercion of states, c) duality with negation can arise as a consequence of the aspectual coercion process and not necessarily from the meaning of 'already'. These three points are taken to argue against the proposed typological category of "iamitive" that unites the meanings of the resultative function of the perfect and 'already' (Olsson, 2013).
This paper offers an analysis of the semantics of the perfect in Nafsan (South Efate) and argues ... more This paper offers an analysis of the semantics of the perfect in Nafsan (South Efate) and argues for several implications for the typology of the perfect aspect. I show that all the functions of the perfect in Nafsan can be derived from placing the Topic Time in the posttime of the event in question, equal to analysis of the English perfect. The main typological implications discussed within this analysis are: a) perfect in a tenseless language can have present, past, and future perfect readings, b) the interpretation of change of state can arise with perfects through aspectual coercion of states, c) duality with negation can arise as a consequence of the aspectual coercion process and not necessarily from the meaning of 'already'. These three points are taken to argue against the proposed typological category of "iamitive" that unites the meanings of the resultative function of the perfect and 'already' .
SIL Language and Culture Documentation and Description 41 (Proceedings of COOL 10), 2018
In this paper I offer an analysis of conditional clauses in Nafsan (South Efate) in a comparative... more In this paper I offer an analysis of conditional clauses in Nafsan (South Efate) in a comparative Oceanic perspective. By using the data from the corpus of Nafsan (Thieberger 1995–2018), and more recent fieldwork data (Krajinović 2017), I reanalyze and complete certain aspects of the description of conditional clauses in Nafsan by Thieberger (2006). I describe the attested morphosyntactic and semantic types of conditional clauses, by focusing on the conditional and TMA markers, and combinations thereof, available in conditional clauses. I also report on the newly discovered counterfactual marker mer. Conditional clauses in Nafsan can be marked by conditional and potential markers f and fla, or the canonically conditional expression i=f-wel kin (Thieberger 2006). I argue that the former can be analyzed as paratactic conditionals and the latter as subordinate conditionals. Finally, I compare these findings to similar strategies found in other Oceanic languages.
MelaTAMP storyboards for fieldwork semantics
Language Ecology, 2017
Temporal clauses with the subordinators kandə (< Portuguese quando) and k(w)a in Malabar Indo-Por... more Temporal clauses with the subordinators kandə (< Portuguese quando) and k(w)a in Malabar Indo-Portuguese creole (MIP) are used to express any kind of temporal relation between two clauses, typically sequence or simultaneity. These temporal clauses are ubiquitous in contexts in which Portuguese, the lexifier of MIP, could not employ temporal quando clauses. In this paper, I show that the morphosyntax and semantics of temporal clauses with kandə and k(w)a in MIP differ from corresponding Portuguese strategies, and that these differences can be explained by the influence of Malayalam (Dravidian), the substrate and adstrate language of MIP. One of the most salient properties of Malayalam adverbial subordination present in MIP is clause chaining. I position this study within the debate about creole exceptionalism and show that the South Asian typological profile of MIP can only be explained within the view that language ecology determines the typology of a creole (Ansaldo 2009).
The correspondence between Leonardo di S. Luigi and Hugo Schuchardt
Edited and commented correspondence between Leonardo di S. Luigi and Hugo Schuchardt, containing ... more Edited and commented correspondence between Leonardo di S. Luigi and Hugo Schuchardt, containing information about speakers of Malabar Indo-Portuguese in the end of the 19th century.
The Indo-Portuguese creoles of the Malabar were formed in a situation of language contact between... more The Indo-Portuguese creoles of the Malabar were formed in a situation of language contact between the Portuguese colonisers and the native community of the Malabar Coast in the 16th century; nowadays, they are limited to a few last speakers in Cannanore. This dissertation aims to contribute to their linguistic description, which until now has benefited from Schuchardt’s work (1882, 1883, 1889a, 1889b) and from recent fieldwork-based descriptions by Hugo Cardoso (since 2006). In this study, we will use the linguistic data from the oral corpus available from the latter fieldwork in Cochin and Cannanore and kept at the Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa. Our goal is the description of the verbal system of the creoles of the Malabar (CM), which will amount to the characterisation of its verbal morphology and syntax of the predicate. As we shall see, the verbal morphosyntax is almost exclusively analytic, i.e., preverbal and postverbal markers carry temporal, modal and aspectual values associated with the verb. Besides the synchronic description, by adopting a comparative perspective, grammatical structures will be analysed in comparison with the Malayalam substrate/adstrate as well as with their Portuguese etymology, in order to understand the origin(s) of verbal forms and structures. It will be demonstrated that when it comes to grammatical functions and syntactic structure, the CM have converged with Malayalam on a large scale (e.g. in the SOV order).
Keywords: Malabar creoles, Indo-Portuguese creoles, verbal system, linguistic convergence, Malayalam
Conference Presentations by Ana Krajinović
Empirical methods for describing tense, aspect, and mood: the case study of Nafsan
7th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC), University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, held online 4-7 March 2021, 2021
The description of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM) categories is often considered to be one of the ... more The description of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM) categories is often considered to be one of the more difficult tasks in language description, due to the proliferation of TAM categories in the literature and complex relationships between different language-internal processes. In this paper I report on available empirical methods for studying TAM categories and my experience with using them in the study of Nafsan (Vanuatu, Oceanic). By focusing on case studies of relevant categories in Nafsan, such as irrealis mood and perfect aspect, I argue that corpus work, storyboards with targeted TAM contexts (Burton & Matthewson, 2015) and translation-based questionnaires accompanied by meta-linguistic discussions offer different kinds of evidence that are all necessary for a successful description.
A language corpus, if available, is a good start for finding the basic distribution of the grammatical element in question. For Nafsan, I studied the corpus data (Thieberger, 1995–2018) and the grammar of Nafsan (Thieberger, 2006), from where I identified functions of irrealis and perfect found in the corpus and I hypothesized about which functions would be expected from these categories, given their cross- linguistic properties. For instance, perfect is expected to have resultative, experiential, universal, and anterior (past perfect) functions, and be incompatible with temporal adverbs in present perfect (Comrie, 1976; Klein, 1994). Since some of these functions were not attested in the corpus with the Nafsan perfect pe, only the combination of questionnaires (e.g. Dahl, 2000), storyboards (e.g. Matthewson, 2014), and additional elicitation revealed the presence of experiential and universal functions, as well as the incompatibility with temporal adverbs in present perfect meanings (1) and compatibility with temporal adverbs in past perfect meanings (2).
Bad thoughts and heads: Psych expressions in Nafsan
13th International Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics Conference (APLL13), The University of Edinburgh, held online 10-12 June 2021., 2021
The morphosyntactic richness and multifunctionality of the lexicon of psych expressions has often... more The morphosyntactic richness and multifunctionality of the lexicon of psych expressions has often been observed in Oceanic languages. In this paper we focus on the morphosyntactic patterns of psychological expressions in Nafsan, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu. We show that Nafsan uses a range of structural types to express psych meanings, and focus on the frequent pattern of combining sa `bad' with nouns, verbs, and clauses to express negative emotions, which has not been identified in previous descriptions of the language.
Nafsan exhibits a range of structures in its psych domain. Apart from simplex verbs which express some of the most common emotions, for instance semsem `happy', maet `angry', and krokur `shocked', there are a large number of morphosyntactically more complex psycho-collocations and verb compounds. Psycho-collocations typically consist of either a body part or a more abstract person part noun (e.g. namroan `thought') followed by wi `good' or sa `bad' (either as a verb in the predicate position or adjective in NPs) for positive and negative emotions, respectively, as in np̃au-n i=trau sa `his head was really bad', referring to `going mad'.
From iconic pictures to “grammatical” templates: Modeling the evolution of internet memes
Cultural Evolution Society conference 2022, 21-23 September 2022, Aarhus University, 2022
The study of the evolution and emergence of grammar and structure in language has greatly benefit... more The study of the evolution and emergence of grammar and structure in language has greatly benefited from grammaticalization theory, which studies the development from lexical to grammatical forms and from grammatical to even more grammatical forms in the languages of the world. However, since precise data on language transmission is typically not available for a given language, the relationship between transmission patterns and semantic change is not well understood.
In this paper, we argue that the study of image macros or internet memes can contribute to our understanding of language evolution. Image macros, here "memes", are multimodal constructions with text superimposed on an image.
We argue that internet memes follow an evolution pattern akin to grammaticalization, changing from concrete to abstract meanings and developing their own multimodal "grammatical" constructions. We formulate the two following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: Image macros (“memes” in this talk) follow an evolution pattern akin to grammaticalization.
Hypothesis 2: In periods of high transmission (virality), the rate of semantic change is increased, in the direction of higher abstraction.
We analyze ten different viral memes (ca. 2000 instances), each consisting of an image with text. We collect information on the date, format, and semantic change over time of a sample of meme instances shared on Know Your Meme (knowyourmeme.com). Our classification of semantic change describes the incremental stages of change of text and picture in memes. These stages are parallel to the stages of grammaticalization, such as use in new contexts (innovation) and semantic bleaching and erosion (change of text and picture). We also show that these stages follow the same temporal ordering across memes (cf. Figure 1), resembling the unidirectionality of grammaticalization. Finally, we show that the rate of growth in abstraction of a meme correlates proportionally to its virality.
In languages with mood prominence (Bhat, 1999), realis and irrealis are usually assumed to be the... more In languages with mood prominence (Bhat, 1999), realis and irrealis are usually assumed to be the basic mood categories. Realis typically refers to past or present realised events, while irrealis can refer to a range of modal values, including future, possibilities, imperatives, and counterfactuals. Nevertheless, the realis and irrealis categories are far from being well-de ned (de Haan, 2012). We can often nd statements in the literature that a certain modal context is marked by realis in a given language. This can refer to directives, future, or even counterfactuals (McGregor and Wagner, 2006; Exter, 2012). In this paper, we will focus on counterfactuals claimed to be marked by realis in Nafsan (Thieberger, 2006), an Oceanic language of Vanuatu also known as South Efate. I argue that the category of ‘realis’ in Nafsan can be analysed as a category of person marking unspecified for mood, and therefore compatible with counterfactual contexts. I will also show that this analysis is applicable to some other mood-prominent languages.
Uploads
Papers by Ana Krajinović
'Haircuts' storyboard for eliciting perfect aspect and duality (negation): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1421227
'Garden' storyboard for eliciting present counterfactual conditional clauses: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1421237
The storyboard should be told to the consultant in a contact language, who should then repeat the story in the targeted language using the version without text (see also Strang Burton and Lisa Matthewson. Targeted construction storyboards in semantic fieldwork. In Ryan Bochnak and Lisa Matthewson, editors, Methodologies in Semantic Fieldwork, pages 135–156. Oxford University Press, 2015).
Keywords: Malabar creoles, Indo-Portuguese creoles, verbal system, linguistic convergence, Malayalam
Conference Presentations by Ana Krajinović
A language corpus, if available, is a good start for finding the basic distribution of the grammatical element in question. For Nafsan, I studied the corpus data (Thieberger, 1995–2018) and the grammar of Nafsan (Thieberger, 2006), from where I identified functions of irrealis and perfect found in the corpus and I hypothesized about which functions would be expected from these categories, given their cross- linguistic properties. For instance, perfect is expected to have resultative, experiential, universal, and anterior (past perfect) functions, and be incompatible with temporal adverbs in present perfect (Comrie, 1976; Klein, 1994). Since some of these functions were not attested in the corpus with the Nafsan perfect pe, only the combination of questionnaires (e.g. Dahl, 2000), storyboards (e.g. Matthewson, 2014), and additional elicitation revealed the presence of experiential and universal functions, as well as the incompatibility with temporal adverbs in present perfect meanings (1) and compatibility with temporal adverbs in past perfect meanings (2).
Nafsan exhibits a range of structures in its psych domain. Apart from simplex verbs which express some of the most common emotions, for instance semsem `happy', maet `angry', and krokur `shocked', there are a large number of morphosyntactically more complex psycho-collocations and verb compounds. Psycho-collocations typically consist of either a body part or a more abstract person part noun (e.g. namroan `thought') followed by wi `good' or sa `bad' (either as a verb in the predicate position or adjective in NPs) for positive and negative emotions, respectively, as in np̃au-n i=trau sa `his head was really bad', referring to `going mad'.
In this paper, we argue that the study of image macros or internet memes can contribute to our understanding of language evolution. Image macros, here "memes", are multimodal constructions with text superimposed on an image.
We argue that internet memes follow an evolution pattern akin to grammaticalization, changing from concrete to abstract meanings and developing their own multimodal "grammatical" constructions. We formulate the two following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: Image macros (“memes” in this talk) follow an evolution pattern akin to grammaticalization.
Hypothesis 2: In periods of high transmission (virality), the rate of semantic change is increased, in the direction of higher abstraction.
We analyze ten different viral memes (ca. 2000 instances), each consisting of an image with text. We collect information on the date, format, and semantic change over time of a sample of meme instances shared on Know Your Meme (knowyourmeme.com). Our classification of semantic change describes the incremental stages of change of text and picture in memes. These stages are parallel to the stages of grammaticalization, such as use in new contexts (innovation) and semantic bleaching and erosion (change of text and picture). We also show that these stages follow the same temporal ordering across memes (cf. Figure 1), resembling the unidirectionality of grammaticalization. Finally, we show that the rate of growth in abstraction of a meme correlates proportionally to its virality.
'Haircuts' storyboard for eliciting perfect aspect and duality (negation): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1421227
'Garden' storyboard for eliciting present counterfactual conditional clauses: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1421237
The storyboard should be told to the consultant in a contact language, who should then repeat the story in the targeted language using the version without text (see also Strang Burton and Lisa Matthewson. Targeted construction storyboards in semantic fieldwork. In Ryan Bochnak and Lisa Matthewson, editors, Methodologies in Semantic Fieldwork, pages 135–156. Oxford University Press, 2015).
Keywords: Malabar creoles, Indo-Portuguese creoles, verbal system, linguistic convergence, Malayalam
A language corpus, if available, is a good start for finding the basic distribution of the grammatical element in question. For Nafsan, I studied the corpus data (Thieberger, 1995–2018) and the grammar of Nafsan (Thieberger, 2006), from where I identified functions of irrealis and perfect found in the corpus and I hypothesized about which functions would be expected from these categories, given their cross- linguistic properties. For instance, perfect is expected to have resultative, experiential, universal, and anterior (past perfect) functions, and be incompatible with temporal adverbs in present perfect (Comrie, 1976; Klein, 1994). Since some of these functions were not attested in the corpus with the Nafsan perfect pe, only the combination of questionnaires (e.g. Dahl, 2000), storyboards (e.g. Matthewson, 2014), and additional elicitation revealed the presence of experiential and universal functions, as well as the incompatibility with temporal adverbs in present perfect meanings (1) and compatibility with temporal adverbs in past perfect meanings (2).
Nafsan exhibits a range of structures in its psych domain. Apart from simplex verbs which express some of the most common emotions, for instance semsem `happy', maet `angry', and krokur `shocked', there are a large number of morphosyntactically more complex psycho-collocations and verb compounds. Psycho-collocations typically consist of either a body part or a more abstract person part noun (e.g. namroan `thought') followed by wi `good' or sa `bad' (either as a verb in the predicate position or adjective in NPs) for positive and negative emotions, respectively, as in np̃au-n i=trau sa `his head was really bad', referring to `going mad'.
In this paper, we argue that the study of image macros or internet memes can contribute to our understanding of language evolution. Image macros, here "memes", are multimodal constructions with text superimposed on an image.
We argue that internet memes follow an evolution pattern akin to grammaticalization, changing from concrete to abstract meanings and developing their own multimodal "grammatical" constructions. We formulate the two following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: Image macros (“memes” in this talk) follow an evolution pattern akin to grammaticalization.
Hypothesis 2: In periods of high transmission (virality), the rate of semantic change is increased, in the direction of higher abstraction.
We analyze ten different viral memes (ca. 2000 instances), each consisting of an image with text. We collect information on the date, format, and semantic change over time of a sample of meme instances shared on Know Your Meme (knowyourmeme.com). Our classification of semantic change describes the incremental stages of change of text and picture in memes. These stages are parallel to the stages of grammaticalization, such as use in new contexts (innovation) and semantic bleaching and erosion (change of text and picture). We also show that these stages follow the same temporal ordering across memes (cf. Figure 1), resembling the unidirectionality of grammaticalization. Finally, we show that the rate of growth in abstraction of a meme correlates proportionally to its virality.