Alexandre François

List of John Benjamins publications for which Alexandre François plays a role.

Title

Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model

Edited by Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François and Harald Hammarström

Special issue of Journal of Historical Linguistics 9:1 (2019) v, 176 pp.
Subjects Historical linguistics
François, Alexandre 2021 Olfactory words in northern Vanuatu: Langue vs. paroleThe Linguistics of Olfaction: Typological and Diachronic Approaches to Synchronic Diversity, Jędrzejowski, Łukasz and Przemysław Staniewski (eds.), pp. 277–304 | Chapter
This corpus-based study examines the lexical domain of olfaction in the Oceanic languages of northern Vanuatu. While a tropical ecology is sometimes believed to favor elaborate encoding patterns for smells, this does not appear to be the case in Vanuatu. Most languages there show a rather limited… read more
Kalyan, Siva and Alexandre François 2019 When the waves meet the trees: A response to Jacques and ListUnderstanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model, Kalyan, Siva, Alexandre François and Harald Hammarström (eds.), pp. 168–177 | Commentary
Kalyan, Siva, Alexandre François and Harald Hammarström 2019 Problems with, and alternatives to,the tree model in historical linguisticsUnderstanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model, Kalyan, Siva, Alexandre François and Harald Hammarström (eds.), pp. 1–8 | Introduction
The issue of lexical flexibility is best tackled as the articulation of two separate mappings: one that assigns lexical items to word classes; another one that associates these word classes with the syntactic functions they can access. A language may endow its lexemes with more or less… read more
François, Alexandre 2015 Temperature terms in northern VanuatuThe Linguistics of Temperature, Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria (ed.), pp. 832–857 | Article
Oceanic languages generally have a small set of lexemes encoding temperature predicates – no more than two or three words in each language. Focusing on a sample of languages from northern Vanuatu, this study describes their temperature terms, analyses the syntax of their various case frames, and… read more
Koch, Harold, Robert Mailhammer, Robert Blust, Claire Bowern, Don Daniels, Alexandre François, Simon J. Greenhill, Brian D. Joseph, Lawrence A. Reid, Malcolm D. Ross and Paul J. Sidwell 2014 Research priorities in historical-comparative linguistics: A view from Asia, Australia and the PacificDiachronica 31:2, pp. 267–278 | Article
This study describes and explains the paradox of related languages in contact that show signs of both linguistic divergence and convergence. Seventeen distinct languages are spoken in the northernmost islands of Vanuatu. These closely related Oceanic languages have evolved from an earlier dialect… read more
Despite the wealth of subordinators in Hiw and Lo-Toga (Oceanic, north Vanuatu), two of their Tense-Aspect-Mood categories – the Subjunctive and the Background Perfect – can do without them, and encode clause dependency by themselves. A pragmatic hypothesis is proposed to account for this… read more
Building upon the model of Semantic Maps (Haspelmath 2003), which typologists have designed mainly for grammatical semantics, this chapter discusses methodological issues for a model in lexical typology. By breaking up polysemous lexemes of various languages into their semantic “atoms” or senses,… read more