One of a group of Indo-European speaking peoples intrusive to Anatolia, the Hittites rose from a modest city state to establish first a kingdom on the central plateau and then an empire that fought with the kings of Babylon and Assyria, the Hurrians, and the pharaohs of Egypt for control of SE Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, and contended with one or more Mycenaean Greek kings over western Asia Minor. One of their many vassal states was Wilusa, certainly to be identified with Troy. The multiethnic Hittite kingdom absorbed heavy cultural influence from many peoples and played a role in transmitting Ancient Near Eastern culture to the Greeks. A combination of factors, including the assaults of the “Sea Peoples”, brought an end to the Hittite Empire shortly after 1200 BCE, but some former subordinate states inherited their name and culture and maintained a degree of independence for several centuries until conquered by the Assyrians. It is these “Neo-Hittite” states that are represented in the “Hittites” of the Old Testament.

Although the functionally unmarked word order in Hittite is robustly SOV, many other word orders are well attested. In addition to some that are syntactically licensed and bear various discourse structure functions, there are also a number of quite puzzling configurations that involve discontinuous constituents and appear unmotivated in terms of discourse structure. Violations of well-known syntactic constraints suggest that these orders are phonologically motivated. Building on previous evidence that Hittite has “phrasal stress”, I will argue that many if not all such orders reflect: (1) that the primary accent in all Hittite phonological phrases (which mostly match syntactic phrases) falls on the leftmost constituent; (2) that some prosodically weak constituents (e.g., indefinite adjectives) require a phonological word as their immediate leftward host, while others (e.g., relative adjectives) require only a phonological phrase; (3) that the last two rules are violable, resulting in some “exceptions” to the dominant patterns. Further study is needed regarding what determines the “prosodically weak” status of some elements.

It is presently received wisdom that the click consonants in various Bantu languages of southern Africa reflect an uptake from a supposedly pre-existing substrate of Khoesan languages. The clicks in the latter very diverse languages are widely assumed to be of longstanding existence, and are postulated as original segments in current reconstructions for certain Khoesan families.

However: this paper reveals the presence throughout the Khoesan language families of click-initial words with a demonstrably Bantu-intrinsic identity. Successive sets are presented, and regularly repeated correlations are identified. Since many of these words have roots reconstructed for Proto-Bantu, it is possible to characterise the pathways by which various clicks have evidently emerged. These formulations even have a predictive power, in that they can in some cases also account for Khoesan words without click counterparts in a Bantu language.

The main discussion suggests various scenarios that might account for this previously unrecognised phenomenon, including the possibility that the various Khoesan language groups have perhaps descended from regional Bantu languages, and are therefore related not only to the latter but also to one another, even if perhaps as cousins rather than as sisters. (There is little evidence to support popular beliefs that the Khoesan languages are ‘ancient’, and that speakers of various early Bantu languages only entered the southern part of Africa in relatively recent times.) Although this paper is largely confined to demonstrating the abstract patterns that suggest these relationships, the evidence nevertheless points towards an actual mechanism likely to have been involved in the generation of clicks in both Bantu and Khoesan languages.

Wider implications of the findings are noted, not only for African linguistics but also for other disciplines such as archaeology and history. Future research directions are identified.

This study discusses perceptions of variation across dialects of Arabic in the Arab world as revealed through a perceptual dialectology map task. On a map of the Arab world, female undergraduate students at Qatar University provided information about boundaries where people speak differently and labels for those boundaries. A correlation analysis of the boundaries showed that participants viewed Arabic dialects as constituting five major dialect groups: the Maghreb, Egypt and Sudan, the Levant, the Gulf, and Somalia. A closer analysis of the content of the labels revealed variation in terms of principal (Goffman 1981) on whom they draw in their judgments, the latter being either individual, regional (intermediate) or wide-scope generic. This analysis not only identifies more granularity in the concept of principal, it also quantifies the different kinds of principal and identifies statistical relationships between them, the labels, and the boundaries.

For decades, many linguists have framed the study of language in terms of a language faculty, a specialized cognitive ‘organ’ unique to humans.  In the last decade, even the most stalwart proponents of this view have come to acknowledge the existence of other factors in the organization of human languages. In this talk, I will concentrate on two of these factors, embodiment and competition, drawing examples from the morphology of spoken and signed languages. Neither is unique to language, nor especially human or cognitive in nature.  Their role in the structuring of languages points to a new research paradigm in the study of language, in which no single factor is privileged and the importance of any one of them is gauged only by the insights it provided, not by its uniqueness to language.