CLASS Distinguished Public Lecture Series

"Linguistic Diversity and Language Contact in Southeast Asia"
by Professor James A. Matisoff, UC Berkeley

10th March 2009, Tuesday
LT 29, South spine academic block
4.30 pm - 5.45 pm

Abstract

The languages of Southeast Asia belong to five great language families: Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, Mon-Khmer, Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao), and Austronesian.  Yet these genetic relationships have been obscured by millennia of intense language contact and multilingualism, so that it is often exceedingly difficult to distinguish between features which are inherited from a common ancestor and those which are due to borrowing.  This is why the wider relationships among these five great families are still highly controversial, with many competing theories having been offered.

What is certain, however, is that the languages of this area of the world have undergone massive convergence in their phonological, grammatical, and semantic structures.  Over a dozen of these "areal features" are discussed, including the development of tone systems, verb serialization, numeral classifiers, elaborate expressions, and psycho-collocations.  These shared phenomena give the languages of Southeast Asia their special flavor, the unity at the heart of their diversity.

Speaker’s biography

James A. Matisoff is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. His chief research interests include Southeast Asian languages (especially Tibeto-Burman and Tai), Chinese, Japanese, field linguistics, Yiddish studies, historical semantics, psychosemantics, language typology, and areal linguistics.

After having first taught at Columbia University (1966-69), he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1970. He has conducted extensive fieldwork on Lahu and other Tibeto-Burman languages in Thailand  and China. He is one of the founders of the International Conferences on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, which have been held annually since 1968.  He is the founder and former editor of the journal, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, and is principal investigator of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT) project, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation and The National Endowment for the Humanities since 1987.  

Matisoff is the author of seven books, as well as many monographs and dozens of articles.  His books include The Grammar of Lahu (1973/1982); Variational Semantics in Tibeto-Burman (1978); Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: psycho-ostensive expressions in Yiddish (1979); The Dictionary of Lahu (1988); Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: system and philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction (2003), English-Lahu Lexicon (2006), and The Tibeto-Burman Reproductive System: toward an etymological thesaurus (2008).  The last three were published after his retirement in 2002.  He is currently working on a comprehensive volume entitled Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, to appear in the Cambridge Language Survey series. 

Professor Matisoff is considered one of the world's foremost authorities on Southeast Asian linguistics.

Registration

To register, please click https://wis.ntu.edu.sg/pls/webexe/REGISTER_NTU.REGISTER?EVENT_ID=OA09022718125720. If you have any queries, please feel free to contact us at 65148382 or email d-class@ntu.edu.sg.