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Untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in Pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization

Although language-family specific traits which do not find direct counterparts outside a given language family are usually ignored in quantitative phylogenetic studies, scholars have made ample use of them in qualitative investigations, revealing their potential for identifying language relationship...

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Autores principales: Zariquiey, Roberto, Vera, Javier, Greenhill, Simon J., Valenzuela, Pilar, Gray, Russell D., List, Johann-Mattis
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9732641/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36659979
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0053
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author Zariquiey, Roberto
Vera, Javier
Greenhill, Simon J.
Valenzuela, Pilar
Gray, Russell D.
List, Johann-Mattis
author_facet Zariquiey, Roberto
Vera, Javier
Greenhill, Simon J.
Valenzuela, Pilar
Gray, Russell D.
List, Johann-Mattis
author_sort Zariquiey, Roberto
collection PubMed
description Although language-family specific traits which do not find direct counterparts outside a given language family are usually ignored in quantitative phylogenetic studies, scholars have made ample use of them in qualitative investigations, revealing their potential for identifying language relationships. An example of such a family specific trait are body-part expressions in Pano languages, which are often lexicalized forms, composed of bound roots (also called body-part prefixes in the literature) and non-productive derivative morphemes (called here body-part formatives). We use various statistical methods to demonstrate that whereas body-part roots are generally conservative, body-part formatives exhibit diverse chronologies and are often the result of recent and parallel innovations. In line with this, the phylogenetic structure of body-part roots projects the major branches of the family, while formatives are highly non-tree-like. Beyond its contribution to the phylogenetic analysis of Pano languages, this study provides significative insights into the role of grammatical innovations for language classification, the origin of morphological complexity in the Amazon and the phylogenetic signal of specific grammatical traits in language families.
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spelling pubmed-97326412023-01-18 Untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in Pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization Zariquiey, Roberto Vera, Javier Greenhill, Simon J. Valenzuela, Pilar Gray, Russell D. List, Johann-Mattis Interface Focus Articles Although language-family specific traits which do not find direct counterparts outside a given language family are usually ignored in quantitative phylogenetic studies, scholars have made ample use of them in qualitative investigations, revealing their potential for identifying language relationships. An example of such a family specific trait are body-part expressions in Pano languages, which are often lexicalized forms, composed of bound roots (also called body-part prefixes in the literature) and non-productive derivative morphemes (called here body-part formatives). We use various statistical methods to demonstrate that whereas body-part roots are generally conservative, body-part formatives exhibit diverse chronologies and are often the result of recent and parallel innovations. In line with this, the phylogenetic structure of body-part roots projects the major branches of the family, while formatives are highly non-tree-like. Beyond its contribution to the phylogenetic analysis of Pano languages, this study provides significative insights into the role of grammatical innovations for language classification, the origin of morphological complexity in the Amazon and the phylogenetic signal of specific grammatical traits in language families. The Royal Society 2022-12-09 /pmc/articles/PMC9732641/ /pubmed/36659979 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0053 Text en © 2022 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Articles
Zariquiey, Roberto
Vera, Javier
Greenhill, Simon J.
Valenzuela, Pilar
Gray, Russell D.
List, Johann-Mattis
Untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in Pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization
title Untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in Pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization
title_full Untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in Pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization
title_fullStr Untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in Pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization
title_full_unstemmed Untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in Pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization
title_short Untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in Pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization
title_sort untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9732641/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36659979
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0053
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