Laboratoire Lattice - UMR 8094
ENS-CNRS
1 rue Maurice Arnoux, 92120 Montrouge
Alexandre François
Senior Research Scientist
CNRS
Presentation
My main area of research is the description and comparison of Oceanic languages of island Melanesia, particularly those spoken in Vanuatu and in the Solomon Islands. I endeavour to describe these languages both in their grammar and in their lexicon, in the spirit of linguistic typology and the quest for universals.
The recordings I made during several years of fieldwork are archived online. Besides their inherent literary value, these text corpora also form the empirical basis for the linguistic analysis of these languages’ structures.
My work consists in describing these linguistic systems in synchrony; but also in reconstructing the various factors in their dynamics – whether social, anthropological, pragmatic, cognitive, areal or otherwise. One of my main interests is also to use my insights into the particular linguistic landscape of Melanesia, to propose a general reflection on the many forces that bring about language change in the world’s languages.
In 2022-25, I am co-heading the French-German “ComPLETE” project (“Complex Predicates in Languages: Emergence, Typology, Evolution”) on the typology of Complex predicates.
Research topics
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- Description and comparison of languages of the Pacific (Melanesia, Polynesia)
- Grammatical typology; Phonology
- Categorisation of events, referents, spatial relations
- Lexical and semantic typology; Polysemy and semantic change; Colexification
- Areal linguistics; Dialectology
- Processes of language diversification and convergence
- Historical and comparative linguistics
- Anthropological linguistics; ethnomusicology; Verbal art, Oral literature
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Languages
Fieldwork languages
Other languages of special interest
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- Spanish – Catalan – Occitan – Italian – Latin – Classical Greek – Sanskrit – English – German – Russian
- Basque – Classical Arabic – Fulani – Mandarin – Japanese – Tahitian – French sign language
Fieldwork archives
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- 1997–2011. Fonds Alexandre François – Vanuatu. Fieldwork recordings in 18 languages of Vanuatu.
- 2005–2012. Fonds Alexandre François – Solomon Islands. Fieldwork recordings in 4 languages of the Solomon Islands.
Publications
All my publications can be accessed from my personal page — HAL — Academia.edu — Orcid.
Books (selection)
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- 2021. Teanu dictionary (Solomon Islands). Dictionaria 15. 1-1880.
- 2019. Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François & Harald Hammarström (eds), Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model. Special issue of Journal of Historical Linguistics 9/1.
- 2015. Charpentier, Jean-Michel & Alexandre François. Atlas linguistique de la Polynésie française — Linguistic Atlas of French Polynesia, Berlin–Papeete, De Gruyter–UPF, 2562 pp., 2553 maps. [Open access]
- 2015. François, Alexandre; Sébastien Lacrampe, Michael Franjieh & Stefan Schnell (eds). The Languages of Vanuatu: Unity and Diversity . Studies in the Languages of Island Melanesia, 5. Canberra: Asia–Pacific Linguistics Open Access. 271 pp. (ISBN 978-1922185235). [Open access]
- 2003. François, Alexandre. La Sémantique du Prédicat en Mwotlap (Vanuatu). Collection Linguistique de la Société de Linguistique de Paris. Leuven-Paris: Peeters. 408 pp.
Online publications
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- [Alexandre François, Siva Kalyan, Mathieu Dehouck, Martial Pastor & David Kletz]. 2024. EvoSem: A database of semantic change and dialexification. Online database. Paris: CNRS.
- 2023. Online Mwotlap – English – French dictionary. Electronic files. Paris: CNRS. [Presentation]
- 2023. Online Lo-Toga – English dictionary. Electronic files. Paris: CNRS. [Presentation]
- 2021. Online Teanu – English dictionary. Electronic files. Paris: CNRS. [Presentation]
Discography
2013 [A. François & Monika Stern]. Musiques du Vanuatu: Fêtes et Mystères – Music of Vanuatu: Celebrations and Mysteries. Musical recordings (Label INÉDIT). Paris: Maison des Cultures du Monde. 1 CD: 73’39 », with liner notes (24 + 128 pp.).
Peer-reviewed articles and chapters (selection)
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- f/c a. Negation in Dorig. In Matti Miestamo & Ljuba Veselinova (eds), The Typology of Negation. Language Science Press.
- f/c b. Non-verbal predicates in Oceanic languages. In Denis Creissels, Pier Marco Bertinetto & Luca Ciucci (eds), Non-verbal Predication: A Typological Survey. (Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics.) Berlin: DeGruyter.
- f/c c. Explicit apprehensions, implicit instructions: An indirect speech act in the grammar. In Vuillermet, Marine, Eva Schultze-Berndt & Marina Faller (eds). Apprehensional constructions in a cross-linguistic perspective. (Studies in Diversity Linguistics.) Berlin: Language Science Press.
- f/c d. [Alexandre François & Siva Kalyan] Subgrouping: Trees vs. waves. In Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Second edition. New York: Routledge.
- [Mathieu Dehouck, Alexandre François, Siva Kalyan, Martial Pastor & David Kletz]. 2023b.
EvoSem: A database of polysemous cognate sets. In Nina Tahmasebi et al. (eds), Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 66–75. Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics. - [Daniel Krauße & Alexandre François]. 2023a. The road to opacity: Reflexes of Proto-Oceanic *-akin in northern Vanuatu. Applicatives in Austronesian languages. Special issue of NUSA: Linguistic studies of languages in and around Indonesia 74, 41‒82.
- [Lara R. Arauna, Jacob Bergstedt, Jérémy Choin, Javier Mendoza-Revilla, Christine Harmant, Maguelonne Roux, Alex Mas-Sandoval, Laure Lémée, Heidi Colleran, Alexandre François, Frédérique Valentin, Olivier Cassar, Antoine Gessain, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Étienne Patin]. 2022c.
The genomic landscape of contemporary western Remote Oceanians. Current Biology. [doi:10.1016/j.cub.2022.08.055] - 2022b.
Lexical tectonics: Mapping structural change in patterns of lexification. In Thanasis Georgakopoulos & Stéphane Polis (eds), Semantic maps. Special issue of Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41/1: 89‒123. [doi:10.1515/zfs-2021-2041] - 2022a. Awesome forces and warning signs: Charting the semantic history of *tabu words in Vanuatu. Oceanic Linguistics 61/1 (June 2022): 212-255.
- 2021. Olfactory words in northern Vanuatu: Langue vs. parole. In Łukasz Jedrzejowski & Przemysław Staniewski (eds), The Linguistics of Olfaction: Typological and diachronic approaches to synchronic diversity, 277–304. (Typological Studies in Language 131.) Amsterdam: Benjamins. [doi:10.1075/tsl.131.10fra]
- 2019. Verbal number in Lo-Toga and Hiw: The emergence of a lexical paradigm. In Frans Plank & Nigel Vincent (eds), The life-cycle of suppletion. Special issue of Transactions of the Philological Society. Vol. 117, issue 3 (Dec 2019). 338-371.
- 2019. (Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François & Harald Hammarström) Problems with, and alternatives to, the tree model in historical linguistics. In Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François & Harald Hammarström (eds), Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model. Special issue of Journal of Historical Linguistics 9/1: 1–8.
2019. A proposal for conversational questionnaires. In Aimée Lahaussois & Marine Vuillermet (eds.), Methodological Tools for Linguistic Description and Typology. Special issue of Language Documentation & Conservation 16, 155-196. - 2018. In search of island treasures: Language documentation in the Pacific. In Bradley McDonnell, Andrea Berez-Kroeker & Gary Holton (eds.), Reflections on Language Documentation 20 years after Himmelmann 1998. Special issue of Language Documentation & Conservation 15, 276–294.
- (Kalyan, Siva & Alexandre François). 2018. Freeing the Comparative Method from the tree model: A framework for Historical Glottometry. In Ritsuko Kikusawa & Lawrence Reid (eds), Let’s talk about trees: Genetic Relationships of Languages and Their Phylogenic Representation (Senri Ethnological Studies, 98). Ōsaka: National Museum of Ethnology. 59–89.
- 2017. Méthode comparative et chaînages linguistiques : Pour un modèle diffusionniste en généalogie des langues. In Jean-Léo Léonard (ed.), Diffusion: implantation, affinités, convergence. Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, XXIV, 43–82. Louvain : Peeters.
- 2017. The economy of word classes in Hiw, Vanuatu: Grammatically flexible, lexically rigid. In Eva van Lier (ed.), Lexical Flexibility in Oceanic Languages. Special issue of Studies in Language. 41 (2): 294-357.
- 2016. The historical morphology of personal pronouns in northern Vanuatu. In Konstantin Pozdniakov (ed.), Comparatisme et reconstruction : tendances actuelles. Faits de Langues. Bern: Peter Lang. 25–60.
2015. [A. François; M. Franjieh; S. Lacrampe & S. Schnell], The exceptional linguistic density of Vanuatu. In The Languages of Vanuatu: Unity and Diversity, ed. by A. François, S. Lacrampe, M. Franjieh & S. Schnell. Studies in the Languages of Island Melanesia, 5. Canberra: Asia Pacific Linguistics Open Access. 1–21. - 2015. The ins and outs of up and down: Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks languages. In The Languages of Vanuatu: Unity and Diversity, ed. by A. François, S. Lacrampe, M. Franjieh & S. Schnell. Studies in the Languages of Island Melanesia, 5. Canberra: Asia Pacific Linguistics Open Access. 137–195.
- 2015. Temperature terms in northern Vanuatu. In Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm (ed.). The Linguistics of Temperature. Amsterdam, New York: John Benjamins. 832–857.
- 2014. [Harold Koch, Robert Mailhammer, Robert Blust, Claire Bowern, Don Daniels, Alexandre François, Simon Greenhill, Brian Joseph, Lawrence Reid, Malcolm Ross & Paul Sidwell], Research priorities in historical-comparative linguistics: A view from Asia, Australia and the Pacific. Diachronica, 31: 2, 267–278.
2014. Trees, Waves and Linkages: Models of Language Diversification. In Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics. New York: Routledge, 161–189. - 2013 [A. François & Maïa Ponsonnet], Descriptive linguistics. In Jon R. McGee & Richard L. Warms (ed.), Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, vol.1, 184-187. SAGE.
- 2013. Shadows of bygone lives: The histories of spiritual words in northern Vanuatu. In Robert Mailhammer (ed.). Lexical and structural etymology: Beyond word histories. Studies in Language Change, 11. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton. 185–244.
- 2012. Ditransitive alignment and referential hierarchies in Araki. In Eva van Lier (ed), Referential Hierarchies in Three-participant Constructions. Special issue of Linguistic Discovery, 10: 3.
- 2012. The dynamics of linguistic diversity: Egalitarian multilingualism and power imbalance among northern Vanuatu languages. In P. Unseth & L. Landweer (eds), Language Use in Melanesia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 214, 85–110.
- 2011. Social ecology and language history in the northern Vanuatu linkage: A tale of divergence and convergence. Journal of Historical Linguistics 1 (2). 175-246.
- 2010. Phonotactics and the prestopped velar lateral in Hiw: Resolving the ambiguity of a complex segment. Phonology 27 (3): 393-434.
- 2010. Pragmatic demotion and clause dependency: On two atypical subordinating strategies in Lo-Toga and Hiw (Torres, Vanuatu). In Isabelle Bril (ed.), Clause hierarchy and Clause linking: The Syntax and Pragmatics interface. Amsterdam, New York: Benjamins, 499-548.
Conference presentations (selected)
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- 2022. The diverse forms taken by language diversity: What do they tell us about past societies? – In T. Chacon, A. François & F. Lüpke (org.), thematic panel “Multilingualism and Linguistic Diversity: Reconstructing language ecologies of the past”. 11th Historical Sociolinguistics Network Conference (HiSoN 2022), ‘Macro and Micro Perspectives in Historical Sociolinguistics’. Murcia, Spain.
- 2019. Comparative narratology in Oceanic folk traditions: A pilot study from north Vanuatu – 11th Conference On Oceanic Linguistics (COOL11). Université de Nouvelle-Calédonie, Nouméa, Oct 2019.
- 2019. [JB. Lowe, A. François, M. Mazaudon, C. Zhang] Automatic recognition of semantic proximity for cognate detection – Workshop Computer-assisted approaches in historical and typological language comparison, conv. by JM. List. SLE 2019: 52nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. 21‑24 Aug 2019, Universität Leipzig, Germany.
- 2019. Literal and figurative motion in some Oceanic languages. Conference Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description (NAMED). Lattice–CNRS, École normale supérieure, Paris.
- 2018. Lexical travel maps: A spatial view of semantic change. International workshop Semantic maps : Where do we stand and where are we going? Liège, Belgique. [invited speaker]
- 2017. Words from our Ancestors: The art of sung poetry in northern Vanuatu. 10th Conference On Oceanic Linguistics (Cool10). Honiara, Solomon Islands. [Keynote speaker]
- 2017. The economy of word classes in Hiw, Vanuatu: Grammatically flexible, lexically rigid. 9th International Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics Conference (APLL9). LACITO–INALCO, Paris.
- 2016. Building (on) a few dictionaries from Asia & the Pacific. Workshop Challenges of electronic dictionary publication , Univ. Leipzig (conv. Iren Hartmann, M. Haspelmath), 8-9 April 2016. [invited speaker]
- 2016. The coding of (in)definiteness in northern Vanuatu: Anaphora, specificity, topicality, 8th Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics conference (APLL8), School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, 13-14 May 2016.
- 2015. Subgrouping without trees: How the linkage model redefines the way we think of language genealogy – Conference Integrating inferences about our past: New findings and current issues in the peopling of the Pacific and SE Asia, Max Planck Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte, Jena, June 2015.
Videos
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2013. Alexandre François, 1997, Premier voyage au Vanuatu. Film, 8’05 », prod. by Franck Guillemain (UPS2259, CNRS). - 2009. Alexandre François, Enquête linguistique au Vanuatu. Film, 3’03 », from Le Salaire du Poète by Éric Wittersheim.
Scientific collaborations
ANR–DFG project (2022-25) ComPLETE
“Complex Predicates in Languages: Emergence, Typology, Evolution”
[with Martine Vanhove (CNRS–Llacan), Walter Bisang & Andrej Malchukov (Univ. Mainz, Germany)]
Labex EFL “Empirical Foundations of Linguistics”
- RT1 “Reconstruction, genealogy, typology and grammatical description in the world’s two biggest phylums: Niger-Congo and Austronesian” [with Isabelle Bril (LaCiTO), Valentin Vydrin (Llacan)]
- “Lexical typology across time and space” [with Lameen Souag (LaCiTO), Martine Vanhove (Llacan)].
PhD students
I am a doctoral supervisor at École Doctorale ED622 (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne nouvelle), for the following domains: Grammatical description of under-resourced languages. Lexical and grammatical typology. Historical linguistics.
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- (2015– ) Sandrine Bessis “Souvenir des ancêtres et histoire orale au Vanuatu : les récits de chefferies anciennes en Namakura (îles Shepherd)”.
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Misc
Keywords
Vanuatu – Oceanic languages – endangered languages – language documentation and description – morphosyntax – semantics – linguistic typology – lexicology – verbal art – storytelling
Link
Visit my personal webpage: A linguist in Melanesia