Ikoma and Ngoreme are two closely-related, endangered Bantu languages in northwestern Tanzania. The tense/aspect (T/A) systems in Ikoma and Ngoreme are relatively unusual for Bantu in that tense marking is severely limited. Tense function is shown to be a largely emergent phenomenon in Ikoma and Ngoreme. With this in mind, I argue that perfective and imperfective aspect reflect completion and non-completion of the situation nucleus, respectively (Crane 2011), and form the core of the Ikoma and Ngoreme temporal systems. Ikoma, however, also has a Vká- formative which functions as a pseudo-perfective and progressive. I analyze this form as a nucleative, a form which encodes the situation nucleus itself. Despite being relatively rare on the African continent (Aikhenvald 2004), this nucleative Vká- in Ikoma manifests firsthand/eyewitness evidentiality. The central aim of this dissertation is to provide a description and analysis of aspect in Ikoma and Ngoreme. This work includes data obtained from fieldwork in Musoma with multiple speakers from both languages, collected over the course of three two-week-long trips in 2014, 2016, and 2018. My analysis includes both form and function, and a focus on the interface between lexical and grammatical aspect. Along with the perfective/imperfective contrast, Ikoma and Ngoreme are shown to have a foundational contrast between punctive and durative verbs (Kershner 2002), with canonical stative verbs behaving as transitional punctives. Domains theory (Botne and Kershner 2008) is used to visually model the TAM distinctions. This study is also comparative, demonstrating that even if closely-related Bantu languages have similar T/A morphology (and systems) in form, the functional elements of their lexical and grammatical aspectual interface can still be quite different. Understanding this type of microvariation hopefully leads to a better understanding of the historical evolution of these T/A systems. The historical evidence leads to the possibility that the reduced-tense systems of Ikoma and Ngoreme are not the result of the expansion and later retraction of tense, but are retentions from Proto-Bantu. The fact that Ikoma and Ngoreme are located near Lake Victoria, an area of considerable interest as it relates to the Bantu expansion, is intriguing in this regard.

This thesis addresses the topic of collocations and their behavior based on Russian language data. In the course of four articles, I develop a better understanding of collocations that is based on a corpus-driven approach. Collocations are defined as statistically significant co-occurrences of tokens or lexemes within a syntactic phrase that are extracted by statistics-based automatic analysis tools and are restricted to various extents: from semantically not-idiomatic to full idioms. In the article “Evaluation of collocation extraction methods for the Russian language” (2017), my co-authors and I discuss of the methods used to extract statistical collocations and provide results pertaining to the comparison of five metrics for extracting statistics-based collocations as well as the raw frequency. First, this research has demonstrated that the results of the discussed metrics are often correlated and, second, that the degree of idiomaticity of the extracted units varies significantly. In “What do we get from extracting collocations? Linguistic analysis of automatically obtained Russian MWEs” (2015), I offer a comparison of the empirical and phraseological perspectives on collocations and introduce research where I attempt to position empirical collocations within the scope of a phraseological theory. This research demonstrates that empirical collocations have different tendencies to form idiomatic lexical units and I reveal the shortcomings of describing the idiomaticity of expressions in terms of strict classes. In “Choosing between lexeme vs. token in Russian collocations” (2019), I examine grammatical profiling as a method used to define the optimal level of representation for collocations. I have demonstrated that collocations have different distributional preferences across the corpus. I have also analyzed the relationship between token and lexeme collocations based on the degree to which their grammatical profiles resemble the grammatical profiles of their headwords (although the border between the two types is not clear-cut). I also offered a plausible method of differentiating between these two collocation types. Finally, in “Constructional generalization over Russian collocations” (2016) my co-authors and I present the main concepts of Construction Grammar and introduce the research where a substantial number of automatically extracted collocations were demonstrated to form clusters of words that belong to the same semantic class, even when they are not idiomatic. Such constructional generalizations have shown that there is a more abstract level on which collocations can be stable as a class rather than on the level of single collocations.

With this paper, we aim to summarize linguistic facts on the similarity or the difference between the two Enets lects. Indeed, a full account of the linguistic differences between the two Enets has never been provided. Scholars of Enets have referred to a handful of evident diverging reflexes of Proto-Northern-Samoyed phonemes and a dozen of non-cognate lexemes with identical meanings, without going any further (Prokof’ev 1937; Tereščenko 1966; Helimski 1984/2000). The grammatical features of Forest and Tundra Enets have never been systematically compared.

This article presents an etymology for the currently unetymologized Kamas kinship term malmi, in older sources manmi, meaning ‘husband of daughter or younger sister’. It is suggested that the term is a compound made up of the two Proto Samoyed in-law terms *wänə̑, meaning ‘in-law’, and *wijə̑, meaning ‘son-in-law’.

The present doctoral dissertation addresses the overarching research question of what motivates majority language users to learn and use minority languages. The individual papers focused on the following aspects: What factors support majority language-speaking high school students’ willingness to communicate (WTC, MacIntyre et al., 1998) in the minority language? How does minority language speakers’ feedback influence majority language speakers’ L2 use? How does the difference in the availability of the minority language in a monolingual vs. bilingual municipality influence majority language speakers’ motivation in learning the minority language? Are there contextual limitations to the utility of central concepts from competing L2 motivation theories? How does L2 motivation unfold among hearing L2 learners who learn and use a sign language? How do L2 attitudes and L2 use influence each other among majority language-speaking learners when learning a minority language? The research was conducted in four substantially different bilingual contexts: among Slovene speakers from the Dolinsko/Lendvavidék region in Slovenia who learn Hungarian as an L2 (Article 1), Finnish speakers who learn Swedish as an L2 (Articles 2 and 3), hearing Finnish speakers who learn Finnish Sign Language (FSL) as an L2 (Article 4), and Italian speakers from the South Tyrol region in Italy who learn German as an L2 (Article 5). All the articles utilised path analysis. Article 1 found, among Slovene-speaking learners of L2 Hungarian (N = 119), that WTC was supported by more positive perceptions regarding the ethnolinguistic vitality (ELV) of the L2 group, and that the effect of ELV on WTC was transmitted through a chain of L2 motivational variables. Article 2 found, among Finnish-speaking learners of L2 Swedish (N = 254), that more frequent and more positive contact with Swedish speakers predicted higher L2 confidence (Clément, 1980) in Swedish, which in turn significantly predicted L2 use. However, the effect of L2 confidence on L2 use was moderated by the quality of the feedback that L2 learners received from Swedish speakers. Article 3 found, among Finnish-speaking learners of L2 Swedish, that in the monolingual setting, the role of practical benefits attached to good L2 skills was salient, whereas in the Finnish-Swedish bilingual setting, SLA was supported by integrativeness. The results indicate that ideal L2 self (Dörnyei, 2005) is a key concept in SLA in both contexts, whereas instrumental and integrative orientation (Gardner, 1985) are more context-dependent concepts. Article 4 found, among hearing learners of FSL (N = 173), that L2 experiences, integrativeness, and instrumental orientation significantly predicted ideal L2 self, and that L2 competence mediated the effect of ideal L2 self on L2 use. In addition, integrativeness significantly moderated the effect of L2 competence on L2 use. Article 5 found, among Italian-speaking leaners of L2 German (N = 315), that L2 attitudes and L2 use mutually influence each other. In addition, L2 related peer norms significantly moderated the effect of L2 attitudes on L2 motivation. Overall, this dissertation confirms the assumption that there are two broad avenues to SLA (MacIntyre, 2010), the integrative/affective and the instrumental/cognitive.The results also indicate that the use of minority languages can also be enhanced at the interactional level.

Tässä artikkelissa pyrin esittämään lintujen merkityksen hanteille mahdollisimman monipuolisesti. Käyttämistäni etnografisista lähteistä ei aina käy kovin hyvin ilmi, mihin etniseen ryhmään tiedot liittyvät. Usein on kyse enemmänkin areaalisista yhteyksistä; asuinpaikan luonto on ratkaiseva tekijä, ei niinkään ihmisten puhuma kieli. Niinpä minäkin kerron myös naapurikansojen, etenkin mansien, komilaisten ja selkuppien suhteista eri lintulajeihin. Varhaisten aikojen tutkijoiden matkakuvauksissa ei juurikaan kerrota heidän Siperiassa näkemistään linnuista lajin tarkkuudella. He keskittyvät kertomaan tutkimuskohteina olevien kansojen nisäkkäiden metsästyksestä ja kalastuksesta tai jopa omista saaliistaan. Monet perin maskuliiniset aiheet ovat viime vuosikymmeninä täydentyneet ahkerien naistutkijoiden aikaansaannoksilla, jotka tuovat paremmin esiin henkistä perintöä ja erilaisia ulottuvuuksia perhe-elämässä ja sosiaalisissa suhteissa.