Papers by Alena Witzlack-Makarevich
Studies in African Linguistics
This paper describes the morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics of clausal object complemen... more This paper describes the morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics of clausal object complementation in the Great Lakes Bantu Language Ruuli (JE103). In addition to providing an overview of the complementation strategies in Ruuli, parallels will be drawn to constructions described for related languages as well as common cross-linguistic patterns in clausal complementation. Ruuli employs several different complementation strategies, including indicative, subjunctive, and infinitive constructions. Complement clauses can be either unmarked or marked with a complementizer, the most common of which is nti. These two options are also available for direct speech. Other less common complementizers, which cannot be used to introduce direct speech complements include oba, nga and ni. As individual complement-taking predicates do not allow for every complementation strategy, we will explore the semantic and morphosyntactic conditions which predict the choice of complement. To this end, we c...
Linguistics Vanguard
Words in utterance-final positions are often pronounced more slowly than utterance-medial words, ... more Words in utterance-final positions are often pronounced more slowly than utterance-medial words, as previous studies on individual languages have shown. This paper provides a systematic cross-linguistic comparison of relative durations of final and penultimate words in utterances in terms of the degree to which such words are lengthened. The study uses time-aligned corpora from 10 genealogically, areally, and culturally diverse languages, including eight small, under-resourced, and mostly endangered languages, as well as English and Dutch. Clear effects of lengthening words at the end of utterances are found in all 10 languages, but the degrees of lengthening vary. Languages also differ in the relative durations of words that precede utterance-final words. In languages with on average short words in terms of number of segments, these penultimate words are also lengthened. This suggests that lengthening extends backwards beyond the final word in these languages, but not in languages ...
Interspeech 2018
Turn-taking behavior in conversation is reported to be universal among cultures, although the lan... more Turn-taking behavior in conversation is reported to be universal among cultures, although the language-specific means used to accomplish smooth turn-taking are likely to differ. Previous studies investigating turn-taking have primarily focused on languages which are already heavily-studied. The current work investigates the timing of turn-taking in question-response sequences in naturalistic conversations in Ruuli, an under-studied Bantu language spoken in Uganda. We extracted sequences involving wh-questions and polar questions, and measured the duration of the gap or overlap between questions and their following responses, additionally differentiating between different response types such as affirmative (i.e. type-conforming) or negative (i.e. non-type-conforming) responses to polar questions. We find that the timing of responses to various question types in Ruuli is consistent with timings that have been reported for a variety of other languages, with a mean gap duration between questions and responses of around 259 ms. Our findings thus emphasize the universal nature of turn-taking behavior in human interaction, despite Ruuli's substantial structural differences from languages in which turn-taking has been previously studied.
10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020
Journal of Language Contact
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc License at ... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc License at the time of publication.
Linguistics, 2016
Argument marking with trivalent verbs exhibits a much larger variation than argument marking with... more Argument marking with trivalent verbs exhibits a much larger variation than argument marking with bivalent verbs. In many cases, this variation – stemming both from referential and lexical factors – presents a problem when attempting crosslinguistic comparison of alignment patterns of trivalent verbs. Often, this problem results in picking just one of a number of patterns as representative for comparative purposes and thus ignoring the rest of the variation. This paper addresses these general challenges by discussing a case study of trivalent verbs in Yakima Sahaptin, a language with a large amount of alignment variation in indexing and flagging. In doing so, the paper elaborates the recently developed method for alignment typology called
Linguistics, 2016
HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
Benjamins Current Topics, 2016
Based on spontaneous speech data of the Tuu language N|uu, we used the cross-linguistically estab... more Based on spontaneous speech data of the Tuu language N|uu, we used the cross-linguistically established domain-initial strengthening concept in order to examine, if and in which way clicks are subject to speech reduction (lenition) in relation to a reference sample of plosives. Results of combined acoustic and auditory analyses suggest that clicks can be reduced in a gradual fashion and show more reduction phrase-finally than phrase-initially, just like plosives. However, unlike plosives, it seems that the reduction of clicks does not primarily affect the complex articulatory process itself, but rather its effort and coordination with phonation.
Introducing the Framework, and Case Studies from Africa and Eurasia, 2015
Anthropological Linguistics, 2014
A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, 2015
Typological evidence against universal effects of referential scales on case alignment* If a lang... more Typological evidence against universal effects of referential scales on case alignment* If a language develops differential subject or differential object marking by case or adpositions, this is widely hypothesized to result from a universal effect of referential scales. The effect can be understood as a universal correlation between the odds of overt case marking and scale ranks (a negative correlation for subjects, a positive one for objects), or as an implicational universal proposing that, if a language has a split in case marking, this split fits a universal scale. We test both claims with various versions of scale definitions by statistically estimating diachronic biases towards correlations or scale-fitting in an areally stratified sample of over 460 case systems worldwide. For most scales tested, results suggest evidence against universal preferences towards universal scale effects under either a correlational or an implicational model. For binary part-of-speech and information-structure distinction and object marking, the evidence for universal effects is inconclusive. What we do find, by contrast, is highly significant area effects: case-marking splits tend to have developed and spread in Eurasia and the New-Guinea/Australia ('Sahul') macro-areas. This suggests that any replication of scale effects across language families is a side-effect of areal diffusion rather than of universal principles in grammar or cognition. * This research was supported by Grant No. BI 799/3-1 from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Bickel designed the study and wrote the paper, Bickel and Zakharko performed the statistical analyses, and Witzlack-Makarevich did most of the data analysis. All computations were done in R (R Development Core Team 2012), with the added packages vcd (Meyer et al. 2006), MASS (Venables & Ripley 2002), and glmperm (Werft & Potter 2010). We thank an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments.
uni-leipzig.de, 2008
Page 1. Passives, Antipassives and Grammatical Relations Alena Witzlack-Makarevich 18. 06. 2008 P... more Page 1. Passives, Antipassives and Grammatical Relations Alena Witzlack-Makarevich 18. 06. 2008 Page 2. Passive We were annoying him. He was being annoyed (by us). Page 3. Kinyarwanda Kinyarwanda (Bantoid; Kimenyi 1980, 1988) ...
Scales (= Ling. Arbeits …, 2008
Previous empirical results have revealed an interesting correspondence between online language co... more Previous empirical results have revealed an interesting correspondence between online language comprehension strategies and typological distributions, namely a preference for accusative {S,A} alignment over ergative {S,O} alignment. In the processing domain, this preference ...
7th Biennial Meeting of ALT, Paris, …, 2007
... grammatical relations 25-28 September 2007 - Paris Association for Linguistic Typology - 7th ... more ... grammatical relations 25-28 September 2007 - Paris Association for Linguistic Typology - 7th Biennial Meeting Alena Witzlack-Makarevich University of Leipzig http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~ witzlack/ Page 2. Grammatical relations - traditional view GR = Rel (argument, clause) ...
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Papers by Alena Witzlack-Makarevich