Language variation at home and abroad: the case of P’urhepecha in Mexico and its US diaspora Dr. K. R. Bellamy, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics Heritage speakers display considerable intra-group linguistic variation. By documenting lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns among P’urhepecha speakers in Mexico and the US diaspora, this project will investigate the sources of this variation. The ensuing online dialect atlas will serve as an online resource for speakers, learners and researchers of the language.

Possession is a fundamental concept of human culture. All cultures have a concept of ownership. The boundary between what is yours and what is mine may differ from culture to culture, and from individual to individual. Nevertheless, some things can only be yours or mine, for instance body parts or family members. Human language reflects this basic distinction between things that are intrinsically yours and things that are not. Most human languages make a grammatical distinction between transferable entities such as your car, my watch, or Mary’s money and untransferable entities such as body parts (my hand, your leg, her finger) and kinship relations (my sister, John’s grandfather). The occurrence of this basic distinction in many genetically unrelated languages suggests that it is an inherent part of the human language faculty. The main aim of this project is to investigate the various ways in which language categorizes possession, how these are morphosyntactically encoded across and within languages, and how this distinction should be represented in a model of the language faculty. We operationalize this research program in the following 3 projects: Project 1 (PhD1): Mapping possession onto morphosyntax in the languages of the world An inquiry into crosslinguistic variation: how do the various semantic types of possession map onto morphosyntactic constructions? Project 2 (PhD2): Mapping morphosyntax onto possession in closely related languages An investigation of how different morphosyntactic constructions map onto the same semantic type of possession in Dutch dialects and closely related languages. Project 3 (Postdoc): A theory for mapping possession in the faculty of language. A theoretical account of the relations between the morphosyntax and the semantics of possession. How do the grammatical components of morphology, syntax and semantics interact in the representation of possession?

Multilinguals easily weave their languages together like artists engaged in a colourful painting on a canvas. This process is called code-switching/code-mixing (CSCM). In multilingual communities like in Benin (West Africa) and Belize (Central America), CSCM is the norm in conversations, but we still don’t know how speakers mentally adapt to such multilingual contexts. Using analytic tools of the language sciences, the project seeks to understand how multilingual speakers do it. The findings can impact policies and practices of language use in education in these and similar multilingual communities where language mixing is the daily practice.

During the past decade, revolutionary ancient DNA research has hugely impacted scholarly debates about the origins and dispersals of language families. Now, linguists are asking the question: does linguistic and genetic evidence paint the same picture about the human past? This book sheds new light on an old hypothesis on the relatedness of Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages, by studying unique lexical correspondences of these branches. It argues that their common Indo-Slavic origin supports an emerging picture based on ancient DNA, which shows a genetic relationship between prehistoric populations of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.