Kellen Parker van Dam
List of John Benjamins publications in which Kellen Parker van Dam is involved.
2026 De-intensifying intensifiers in North Khiamniungan Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 49:1, pp. 1–17 | Article
This paper investigates the occurrence of ABB modifier patterns in Wolam Ngio (Glottolog: wola1254), a North Khiamniungan variety, along with the closely related standard Thang variety which serves as the standard dialect in India, as well as Kingphu Ngio spoken in neighbouring Myanmar. North… read more
2025 Is there a typological profile of isolates? Investigating Language Isolates: Typological and diachronic perspectives, Salaberri, Iker, Dorota Krajewska, Ekaitz Santazilia and Eneko Zuloaga (eds.), pp. 22–47 | Chapter
Across the linguistic literature, one occasionally encounters claims of typological differences between isolates and non-isolates, but these are often vague, and tend to use isolates as proxies for small community size, hunter-gatherer societies, and/or socially/geographically isolated languages. read more
2025 On the independence of tonogenesis in Patkaian branches Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 48:2, pp. 163–192 | Article
Tonogenesis for Tangsa-Nocte has previously been described as likely derived from phonation distinctions in the proto-language, where aspiration and voicing played no part (van Dam 2018). With newly published Wancho data (Losu & Morey 2023), a direct tone correspondence can be shown between… read more
2023 Revisiting “Eye of the day”: Tibeto-Burman evidence and arguments both for and against contact as the driver of innovation, in response to Urban (2010) & Blust (2011) Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 46:2, pp. 235–264 | Article
A particular lexical construction for “sun” composed of morphemes for “eye” and either “day” or “sky” has been widely reported for Austronesian languages. Urban (2010) made the case for this phenomenon as an areal feature originating in Austronesian, with attestation in Austroasiatic and… read more
2020 The syntax of intensifiers in Muishaung Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 43:1, pp. 19–36 | Article
The Tangsa-Nocte languages of the India/Myanmar border region employ a system of suffixes to modify descriptive words. These may be reduplicated under certain conditions, determined by the stress patterns of the larger utterance. Previously referred to as intensifiers (Morey n.d.; van Dam 2018),… read more