Harnessing cognitive abilities of many individuals, a language evolves upon their mutual interactions establishing a persistent social environment to which language is closely attuned. Human history is encoded in the rich sets of linguistic data by means of symmetry patterns that are not always feasibly represented by trees. Here we use the methods developed in the study of complex networks to ...

Many languages show systematic marking for evidentiality, indicating the source of a speaker’s information, the modality by which that information was gained, and the speaker’s stance towards the veracity of the information. Among the meanings expressed through such markings are quotativity, distance, reportedness, surprise, eyevs. ear-witness, and in general any sort of “mediation” by the spea...

This is a study of kin terms and kinship terminologies in Indo-European (IE) languages. There is, of course, no shortage of such studies already (e.g. Delbrück 1889, Hocart 1928, Galton 1957, Friedrich 1966, Szemerényi 1977, Kullanda 2002), which go back to the nineteenth century. By and large, however, most of them are concerned with reconstructing terms historically, right back to proto-IE, a...

Proto-Indo-European had two sentential negation markers, *m , used in prohibitions (negative commands) and *ne/n , used in other sentence-types (e.g. indicative mood statements, subjunctive clauses, etc.). A survey of the reflexes of *m across the family reveals other functions for it, e.g. word-formation, elliptical negation, etc. Interestingly, one function, independent occurrence as a one-wo...