Livonian polar questions in their areal context

Folia Linguistica Historica, 2011

The primary means for expressing polar questions in Estonian are particles positioned at the beginning or the end of a sentence. We trace the development of these question particles from the seventeenth century until to the present day. In the course of time new particles emerged and older ones changed their function. Such functional shifts included, among others, the loss of negative or affirmative polarity, the loss of interrogativity, or the adoption of a focus-marking function. The oldest question particles based on negative particles are ...

2015

In Estonian, as is common in Circum-Baltic languages, polar questions are typically formed by means of particles. The article focuses on question markers in Estonian that originate from several subtypes of conjunctive coordination (additive, contrastive, adversative), and will discuss the genesis and usage dynamics of different question markers. The analysis is based on the corpora of the University of Tartu. The emergence of coordinative interrogative particles could be explained by the interplay of linking clauses in texts and presuppositions of polar questions. The use of coordination markers as polar question markers is based on reanalysis of a part of the presupposition of a potential question to the question itself.

Studies about Languages

This paper discusses the results of the pilot study on intonational patterns of questions and statements in Lithuanian. Special attention is devoted to the tone changes at the end of the intonational phrase, i.e. to the boundary tone and the pitch accent of the last word. In order to identify the main patterns, a corpus of 96 tokens (statements, questions with wh-word ‘kada’ and yes/no questions with and without interrogative word ‘ar’ read by four speakers) has been examined. F0 measurements were extracted using Praat. The audio files were annotated based on the main principles of the autosegmental-metrical phonology: high tone is marked with H, low tone – L, pitch accent – ‘*’ and boundary tone – ‘%.’ In the perception experiment, the participants were asked to identify the statements and questions (the interrogative words were removed). 21 native speakers participated in the experiment.The results have shown that the end of the statements in Standard Lithuanian is described by lo...

7th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2014, 2014

Hungarian prosody is left-headed, as suggested by the placement of the accent on the initial syllable on the level of prosodic words and the placement of the strongest pitch accent on the first accented word of the prosodic phrase. Earlier studies have pointed out that the left edge of the intonational phrase can bear a phrase-initial boundary tone that distinguishes between stringidentical wh-interrogatives and wh-exclamatives. In this paper, two other string-identical sentence types, polar questions and declaratives, are investigated with respect to their prosodic features. Polar questions were characterised by a higher f0 maximum and a lower sentence-initial f0 than declaratives. The only pitch accent within the sentence was low, whereas declaratives had falling pitch accents. Sentence-final f0 and the pitch level of the accented syllable did not show a consistent pattern across speakers. It is concluded that low sentence-initial f0 together with the high t! one on the penultimate syllable is a relevant marker of polar questions in Hungarian.

Review on Multiple Perspectives in Linguistic Research on Baltic Languages, 2012

JLLLS: Journal of Languages, Linguistics and Literary Studies, 2025

This study investigates polar questions in Olùkùmi, an island dialect of Yorùbá. Clauses have unique peculiarities that distinguish one clause type from another in every language. This informs why a question construction can be differentiated from any other construction type. Question construction is of various types one of which is the polar question that is the focus of this paper. A polar question is the question type that expects affirmation or rejection. Studies on Olùkùmi have paid little attention to question types. Hence, this study aims to fill this gap in language documentation by illustrating the derivation, projection, and possible responses to polar questions in Olùkùmi. This study adopts a qualitative method, and the frame technique is used for data collection to get relevant structural samples from competent native speakers in the Ugbódù community, Delta state, Nigeria. Chomsky's Minimalist Program is adopted as the theoretical framework. Findings show that Olùkùmi uses a high-low tone morph under the special intonation pattern which takes the last vocalic anchor of an affirmative construction as a polar particle. The particle surfaces sentence finally changes the status of a declarative construction to a polar construction. Also, It was discovered that polar question derivation in Olùkùmi has a limited overt particle/marker and its response could either be he ̣ he ̣ he ̣ /báà ni ''Yes/It is so'' or he ̣ he ̣ / é è ghò báà ''No/ It is not so''. This study has shown that the form and derivation pattern of the Olùkùmi polar question is different from standard Yorùbá.

2016

Since Arnold Toynbee drew a model of civilizations as living entities, more and more phenomena has gained their description within the framework of the notion of different « cultural spheres ». It became an axial concept in social sciences. – The Baltic Area as such, was borrowed from the linguistics when J. Gy. Décsi divided the wide Scando-Baltic language union (the concept had been worked out by R. Jakobson) into three narrow ones. A similar process can be seen in description of the Baltic cultures. Especially in the late eighties of the last century, the Baltic countries (then parts of the former Soviet Union) were addressed as a single and cultural unit as an integral whole. It was very logical in that political situation. Later the investigations on the contemporary folklore in wider sense, and social sciences too, focused on the specific phenomena of particular regions. Thus, the political behavior is to be a subject of comparative researches, too. As for the historical time,...

Since Arnold Toynbee drew a model of civilizations as living entities, more and more phenomena has gained their description within the framework of the notion of different « cultural spheres ». It became an axial concept in social sciences. – The Baltic Area as such, was borrowed from the linguistics when J. Gy. Décsi divided the wide Scando-Baltic language union (the concept had been worked out by R. Jakobson) into three narrow ones. A similar process can be seen in description of the Baltic cultures. Especially in the late eighties of the last century, the Baltic countries (then parts of the former Soviet Union) were addressed as a single and cultural unit as an integral whole. It was very logical in that political situation. Later the investigations on the contemporary folklore in wider sense, and social sciences too, focused on the specific phenomena of particular regions. Thus, the political behavior is to be a subject of comparative researches, too. As for the historical time, the belles-lettres are to be taken into consideration, too, since the realistic novels by Lithuanian Mykolaitis-Putinas or Estonian Tammsaare contain much utilizable matter as sources for the study of the political behavior, too. After the Baltic states retrieved their independence, the free press can be regarded as the main source for this topic. Including media, too, in able-to-be-cited form (internet-accessed files), a survey is to be done in the paper on the local/national features of the political behavior in the three Baltic states. According to the concept of the language areas –which has mainly been treated by Jakobson, Décsy, and Skalička–, two or more non-relative languages constitute a language area (Sprachbund, language union), if and only if the same meaning is to be expressed by very similar means. These means, significant for the same sense, are called isoglosses. For example, the narrative verb mode is an isogloss for the Baltic language union, linking the Estonian with the Latvian and Lithuanian, distinguishing them from the other Finno-Ugric and Indo-European languages, respectively. Therefore, certain cultural areas may be drawn like language areas. For instance, in the field of the political culture, two different social units or nations or geopolitical regions may represent the same cultural area, if and only if the similar kinds of conflicts are to be managed by similar means. Keywords: Areal_linguistic, Baltic_language_areal, Baltic_Identity

This article presents linguistic innovations which are typical of both Courland and Salaca Livonian and are also known in the neighbouring Estonian dialect areas. These innovative features are phonological, morphological, and morphosyntactic. The features are present mainly in western and southwestern Estonia, but also more specifically in areas close to the current western border between Estonia and Latvia. This article discusses the nature and chronology of these linguistic features, taking into account their distribution. Broadly spread common features can be mostly explained as inherent innovations of western Finnic when they are not shown to be caused by contacts with Germanic or Baltic languages. Features which are spread in the immediate vicinity of the former Livonian language area can be classified as a Livonian substrate in sub-dialects of western and insular Estonian.

Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics / Eesti ja soome-ugri keeleteaduse ajakiri, 2021

This article offers a comparative analysis of several morphosyntactic and phonological features in the South Estonian language islands: Leivu, Lutsi, and Kraasna. The objective is to give an overview of the distribution of selected features, their (in)stability over time, and discuss their form and use in a broader areal context. To achieve this goal, comparative information was also included from the closest cognate varieties (Estonian and the South Estonian varieties, Courland Livonian and Salaca Livonian) and the main contact varieties (Latgalian, Latvian, and Russian). The data analysed in this study originated from various sources: text collections, dictionaries, and language corpora. The results reveal a multitude of linguistic patterns and distribution patterns, which means that the studied varieties are similar to / different from one another in various ways and points to multifaceted contact situations and outcomes in this area.