Project description
When meaning hides behind a syllable
In the Dinka language, tèm means ‘to cut’. But change the vowel length, tone and voice quality, and it becomes té̤ːm, which means ‘she cuts it for someone’. This single syllable carries multiple layers of meaning through sound alone. The ERC-funded nilomorph project investigates how such dense morphological systems evolved in some East African languages. While most languages lost suffixes over time, West Nilotic languages like Dinka transformed them into subtle phonological features. Combining fieldwork, acoustic analysis and computational modelling, nilomorph will retrace this surprising evolution and strive to understand why it happened here and nowhere else. The project aims to reshape how historical linguistics understands both form and cognitive motivation.
Objective
NILOMORPH sets out to explain how linguistic evolution took a highly unexpected turn in one family of languages spoken in East Africa. They have evolved a morphological system where multiple grammatical categories are expressed simultaneously within a single syllable, through subtle modulations of its phonological properties. For example, in the Dinka language the word tèm, meaning ‘to cut’, can be made to mean ‘she cuts it for someone’ by lengthening the vowel, changing the low tone to high, and pronouncing it with breathy voice quality: té̤ːm, and more than dozen other contrasts can be generated by similar means. A sin-gle monosyllabic word in language like Dinka attains a degree of information density unparalleled else-where in the languages of the world. Surprisingly, comparative evidence suggests that the West Nilotic lan-guages were once much more conventional, using suffixes to mark grammatical categories. As has hap-pened in many other languages, such as English, these suffixes were lost over time. But rather than simply disappearing, they were transformed into suprasegmental phonological properties pronounced concurrently with the word stem. The aim of NILOMORPH is to reconstruct this evolution. But because of the extreme rarity of this morphological type, we need to explain not just how it happened here, we also have to explain why it did not happen in other language families. It is therefore not enough just to retrace the history of linguistic forms. NILOMORPH proposes a transformative step in historical linguistics: the reconstruction not just of external features, but of the cognitive motivation behind them. This will be achieved through the synergy of three teams, DESCRIPTION, MORPHOLOGY and RECONSTRUCTION, employing a combination of field linguistics, acoustic analysis, experimental linguistics, computational simulation, typology, and the historical-comparative method.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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HORIZON-ERC-SYG - HORIZON ERC Synergy Grants
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-SyG
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GU2 7XH Guildford
United Kingdom
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