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25 января 2018 года в 17:00 на открытом заседании отдела типологии и ареальной лингвистики с докладом «The Northern Hemisphere as a linguistic area» выступит почётный профессор Университета Беркли (США) Джоханна Николс. Заседание состоится в конференц-зале. Приглашаются все желающие.
Аннотация доклада
A number of typological properties, most of them complex or multivariate, have been informally observed to form large-scale clinal pattterns across Eurasia and/or North America. This paper (work in progress) is a first attempt to extend and systematize these observations. I survey six complex variables and one relevant simple one using similar survey designs. The results show that there is indeed a recurrent pattern of clinal distributions with extreme frequencies in western Eurasia and North America, most of them visible chiefly in the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Within this zone, the language families and language areas surveyed so far generally have mean frequencies consistent with their geographical position, but internally they are mixed in their accommodation to the larger clines, indicating that the large clines are considerably older than the known families and areas. All of this suggests that the higher-latitude Northern Hemisphere is a language macroarea formed over a long period of time by some combination of language spread and diffusion of variables, as is consistent with genetic and archaeological evidence. I outline further steps to detect clinal properties more reliably at a local scale and to improve estimates of the ages of clines and other large-scale linguistic geographical distributions.