Ingeolinguistics,areal features are elements shared by languages ordialects in a geographic area,[1] particularly when such features are not descended from a common ancestor orproto-language. An areal feature is contrasted withgenetic relationship determined similarity within the samelanguage family. Features may diffuse from one dominant language to neighbouring languages (see "sprachbund").
Genetic relationships are represented in thefamily tree model of language change, and areal relationships are represented in thewave model.
Resemblances between two or more languages (whether in typology or in vocabulary) have been observed to result from several mechanisms, including lingual genealogical relation (descent from a common ancestor language, not principally related to biological genetics);borrowing between languages;retention of features when a population adopts a new language; and chance coincidence. When little or no direct documentation of ancestor languages is available, determining whether the similarity is genetic or merely areal can be difficult.Edward Sapir notably used evidence of contact and diffusion as a negative tool for genetic reconstruction, treating it as a subject in its own right only at the end of his career (e.g., for the influence ofTibetan onTocharian).[2]
William Labov in 2007 reconciled the tree and wave models in a general framework based on differences between children and adults in their language learning ability. Adults do not preserve structural features with sufficient regularity to establish a norm in their community, but children do. Linguistic features are diffused across an area by contacts among adults. Languages branch into dialects and thence into related languages through small changes in the course of children's learning processes which accumulate over generations, and when speech communities do not communicate (frequently) with each other, these cumulative changes diverge.[3] Diffusion of areal features for the most part hinges on low-level phonetic shifts, whereas tree-model transmission includes in addition structural factors such as "grammatical conditioning, word boundaries, and the systemic relations that drive chain shifting".[4]
The tendency in much of Europe to use a transitive verb (e.g. "I have") for possession, rather than apossessive dative construction such asmihi est (Latin: 'to me is') which is more likely the original possessive construction inProto-Indo-European, considering the lack of a common root for "have" verbs.[10]
The development of aperfect aspect using "have" + past participle in many European languages (Romance, Germanic, etc.). (The Latinhabeo and Germanichaben used for this and the previous point are not in fact etymologically related.)
Aperfect aspect using "be" + past participle for intransitive and reflexive verbs (with participle agreement), present in French, Italian, German, older Spanish and Portuguese, and in older stages of English, only surviving in more archaic phrases like "I am become death, destroyer of worlds" and "The kingdom of this world is become".
Abbi, Anvita. (1992).Reduplication in South Asian Languages: An Areal, Typological, and Historical Study. India: Allied Publishers.
Blevins, Juliette. (2017). Areal sound patterns: From perceptual magnets to stone soup. In R. Hickey (Ed.),The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (pp. 88–121). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Campbell, Lyle (2006)."Areal linguistics: A closer scrutiny". In Matras, Yaron; McMahon, April; Vincent, Nigel (eds.).Linguistic areas: Convergence in historical and typological perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1–31. Archived fromthe original on 2011-07-16. Retrieved2016-10-17.
Campbell, Lyle (2006)."Areal linguistics". In Brown, Keith (ed.).Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 1.455–460. Archived fromthe original on 2012-03-13. Retrieved2010-09-25.
Chappell, Hilary. (2001). Language contact and areal diffusion in Sinitic languages. In A. Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (Eds.),Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics (pp. 328–357). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Enfield, N. J. (2005). Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia.Annual Review of Anthropology, 34, 181–206.
Haas, Mary R. (1978).Language, culture, and history, essays by Mary R. Haas, selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Haas, Mary R. (June 1978).Prehistory of Languages. The Hague: de Gruyter Mouton. p. 120.ISBN978-90-279-0681-6.
Hickey, Raymond, ed. (2017).The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kirby, James & Brunelle, Marc. (2017). Southeast Asian Tone in Areal Perspective. In R. Hickey (Ed.),The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (pp. 703–731). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Matisoff, J. A. (1999). Tibeto-Burman tonology in an areal context. InProceedings of the symposium Crosslinguistic studies of tonal phenomena: Tonogenesis, Japanese Accentology, and Other Topics (pp. 3–31). Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.
