Scott DeLancey

Scott DeLancey (born 1949) is an American linguist (University of Oregon). His work focuses on typology and historical linguistics of Tibeto-Burman and North American indigenous languages, such as the Penutian family, and in particular the Klamath language. His research is known for its diversity of its thematic and theoretical reach.[1]

He is well known for having developed the concept of mirative,[2] for promoting the study of comparative Penutian[3] and for being a vocal proponent of the idea that a system of agreement should be reconstructed in proto-Tibeto-Burman[4]

He is currently undertaking field research on several Tibeto-Burman languages of North-Eastern India. Sinitic he takes, like others, to be typologically a mainland south east Asian language.[5] The Chinese mainland consensus on Sino-Tibetan theory holds that the Sino-Tibetan language family descends from a single linguistic ancestor that accounts for shared features of monosyllabism, tonal features, and isolating characteristics. Some of these may, however, have arisen from early borrowing between members now included in this language family. The history of Vietnamese, to cite one example, shows how an originally atonal, polysyllabic language can, under Chinese influence, adopt the characteristics of the latter.[6][7]

De Lancey has developed the hypothesis that the growth of the Shang state may have led to the adoption of its language as a lingua franca among the southern Baiyue and the Sino-Tibetan speaking Zhou to the West, creating a common lexical stock. According to this theory, the emergence of the Zhou within the Shang state strengthened a Sino-Tibetan component, which, on the accession of the Zhou to dynastic power, subjected the lingua franca to a process of creolization with a stronger Zhou Sino-Tibetan lexicon while building on a morphology inherited from Shang dynasty speakers. Sinitic in his view fits a mainland south-east Asian typology. The sum effect of this hypothetical Zhou diffusion of their version of the lingua franca was, he argues, one of Tibeto-Burmanization, with a concomitant shift from a SVO morphological substrate to a language with an increasing tendency towards SOV structure.[8] Linguist Paul K. Benedict also proposed that the Shang may have not been Sinitic speakers and that the Zhou invaders from the west were the bearers of proto-Sinitic languages.[9]

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Linda Konnerth, 'Review', in Himalayan Linguistics, Vol.13, No.1 pp.94-99.
  2. ↑ Scott DeLancey, t (1997). "Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information", in Linguistic Typology, 1997, 1: 33–52. doi:10.1515/lity.1997.1.1.33.
  3. ↑ Scott DeLancey & Victor .Golla (1997). 'The Penutian hypothesis: Retrospect and prospect,' in International Journal of American Linguistics, 63, 171–202
  4. ↑ Scott DeLancey, 'Towards a history of verb agreement in Tibeto-Burman.' Himalayan Linguistics Journal,2010 Vol. 9, No.1, pp.1-39.
  5. ↑ Laurent Sagart, The Roots of Old Chinese, John Benjamins Publishing, 1999 p.13:'From a typological point of view, Old Chinese was more similar to modern East Asian languages like Gyarong, Khmer or Atayal than to its daughter language Middle Chinese,'
  6. ↑ Zev Handel, 'The Classification of Chinese (Sinitic (The Chinese Language Family),‘ in William S.Y. Wang, Chaofen Sun, (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, Oxford University Press 2015 pp.35-44.p.38.
  7. ↑ Scott DeLancey, 'Language replacement and the spread of Tibeto-Burman,' Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 20103.1 pp.40-55, pp.43-44:'Sinitic is typologically a Mainland Southeast Asian family. The dramatic typological divergence, most conspicuously the word order realignment, between Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman reflects a massive reorganization of an originally Tibeto-Burman grammar. This must have been a result of intense contact with Tai and other languages which Sinitic encountered when it migrated eastward into China. The original formation of Chinese resulted through contact between invaders, identified with the Chou dynasty, speaking a SOV Tibeto-Burman-type language, and the indigenous SVO language of the Shang (Benedict 1972, Nishida 1976, see also van Driem 1997, 2008). The substantial vocabulary shared by Sinitic, Tai, and Vietnamese, as well as the astonishing degree of phonological and syntactic convergence among these languages, points to a period of intense contact along and south of the Yangzi (Ballard 1984), involving Blench’s (2009ms) “Southern Yunnan Interaction Sphere”. The morphosyntactic profile which Sinitic shares with Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and the Mon-Khmer languages of Vietnam and Cambodia is strikingly similar to the so-called creole prototype.'
  8. ↑ Scott De Lancey, 'The origins of Sinitic,’ in Zhuo Jing-Schmidt (ed.) Increased Empiricism: Recent advances in Chinese Linguistics, John Benjamins Publishing Co. 2013 pp.73-99 pp.91-2, p.91: ‘When Zhou takes over the empire, there is, as on Benedict’s model, a temporary diglossic situation, in which genuine Zhou speech is, for a while, retained in the ruling class, but among the former Shang population, Shang speech is gradually replaced not by “pure” Sino-Tibetan Zhou, but by a heavily Tibeto-Burman influenced version of the lingua franca.’
  9. ↑ George van Driem, Tibeto Burman vs. Indo-Chinese, Routledge 2005 p.88.
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