Papers by Alexandre François
Alexandre François. 2025. Negation in Dorig. In Matti Miestamo & Ljuba Veselinova (eds.), Negation in the world’s languages III: Papunesia, Australia, and the Americas, 73–128. Berlin: Language Science Press., 2025
Dorig, an Oceanic language spoken on Gaua island in northern Vanuatu, shows a wealth of construct... more Dorig, an Oceanic language spoken on Gaua island in northern Vanuatu, shows a wealth of constructions for encoding negative polarity. Verbs contrast 14 positive TAM categories with 9 negative; together, these form a “tamp” [tense–aspect–mood–polarity] system made of 23 portmanteau categories. All negative tamp morphemes are formally discontinuous, and synchronically non-compositional. Standard negation shows several forms of structural asymmetries, both constructional and paradigmatic, across polarities. Besides standard negation, Dorig has separate constructions for negating non-verbal predicates, existentials, locatives, and imperatives. While this study highlights the intricacy of negative structures in this particular language, it places them in their typological and areal contexts. Thanks to comparative tables showing all negative morphemes in the 17 languages of the Torres and Banks islands, it becomes clear that Dorig is mostly representative of regional patterns in north Vanuatu. __________ __________ __________ __________ __________ Alexandre François. 2025. Negation in Dorig. In Matti Miestamo & Ljuba Veselinova (eds.), Negation in the world’s languages III: Papunesia, Australia, and the Americas, 73–128. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Alexandre François. 2026. Explicit apprehensions, implicit instructions: An indirect speech act in the grammar. In Martina Faller, Marine Vuillermet & Eva Schultze-Berndt (eds.), Apprehensional constructions in a crosslinguistic perspective, 423–460. Berlin: Language Science Press., 2026
Among the languages that grammaticalize the apprehensive domain, some use a subordinator like Eng... more Among the languages that grammaticalize the apprehensive domain, some use a subordinator like English lest (‘Don’t run, lest you fall’); others have an apprehensive mood in their verb system (˜‘Don’t run, you might fall!’). The Oceanic languages of north Vanuatu, whose apprehensional strategies are quite diverse, feature both strategies. This study will focus on Mwotlap and its apprehensive mood. This modal marker appears to imply a form of interclausal dependency; yet rather than being due to syntactic subordination, this dependency effect is arguably pragmatic in nature. Indeed, by exposing an event as a risk to be avoided (e.g. ‘you might fall’), the apprehensive clause serves to justify a certain request (‘don’t run’). Sometimes, only the apprehension is made explicit (‘You might fall!’), leading the hearer to reconstruct the intended order. The apprehensive mood thus reflects the grammaticalization of an indirect speech act: one where explicit apprehensions can stand for implicit instructions. The pragmatic effect created by this indirect request is sometimes exploited for politeness strategies, or for its humorous potential. ________________ ________________ ________________ ________________
Alexandre François. 2026. Explicit apprehensions, implicit instructions: An indirect speech act in the grammar. In Martina Faller, Marine Vuillermet & Eva Schultze-Berndt (eds.), Apprehensional constructions in a crosslinguistic perspective, 423–460. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Sandrine Bessis & Alexandre François. 2025. Myths, tales or history? On two storytelling traditions in Vanuatu. Te Reo – The Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand, 68 (3): 185–218, 2025
Vanuatu has preserved a rich heritage of oral literature, in the form of narratives that have bee... more Vanuatu has preserved a rich heritage of oral literature, in the form of narratives that have been passed on, up to this day, by word of mouth. While scholars have been collecting texts since the 1880s, these intangible treasures still remain to be inventoried and analysed in a systematic way. In doing so, we should pay justice to the important diversity internal to the archipelago, by meticulously describing individual traditions before comparing them.
Our study examines two distinct corpora: the Torres–Banks islands in the north, and the Shepherds in central Vanuatu – with respectively 300 and 100 recorded narratives. Not only do these two areas differ in the repertoire of their stories, but they even contrast in the very nature of their storytelling. Northern traditions are dominated by timeless folktales, and ahistorical myths referring to a distant time of origins. Conversely, the Shepherds show a strong preference for reality-anchored accounts, best described as history or “mythistory”.
This spectacular opposition can be explained, in our view, by differences in the social organisation of these two groups, and in what features of their world they pay attention to. Torres–Banks people build their storytelling traditions around the contrast between humans and non-humans – with a special place for the spiritual entities that play a key role in their social practices. By contrast, the narrative system of central Vanuatu revolves around the memory of historical events and human migrations. For social reasons, this area replaced the discourse of myths with a tradition dominated by oral history.
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Sandrine Bessis & Alexandre François. 2025. Myths, tales or history? On two storytelling traditions in Vanuatu. Te Reo (The Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand), 68 (3): 185–218.
La mémoire orale du peuple de Kuwae, île mythique du Vanuatu, 2025
[This paper is a summary of Sandrine Bessis' PhD dissertation, defended Sept 2023] ______________... more [This paper is a summary of Sandrine Bessis' PhD dissertation, defended Sept 2023] _______________________
En 2023, Sandrine Bessis a soutenu à l'université Sorbonne nouvelle sa thèse de doctorat, intitulée «Souvenir des ancêtres et histoire orale au Vanuatu: Les récits de chefferies anciennes aux îles Shepherd». Elle y documente et analyse les traditions orales transmises depuis le xv e siècle au sein des sociétés du Vanuatu central-particulièrement les récits relatant le destin de l'île mythique de Kuwae, détruite par une éruption volcanique vers 1452. Ce projet doctoral est le fruit de 24 mois de terrain accomplis sur les vestiges de l'île volcanique-travail impliquant, au passage, l'apprentissage de trois langues jusqu'alors pas ou peu documentées. Il se matérialise en un document de deux volumes totalisant 1030 pages-dont 460 d'analyse et 570 d'annexes et de corpus. Codirigée par Alexandre François et Christopher Ballard, cette thèse se veut une contribution aux recherches interdisciplinaires en sciences sociales. __________________________
Alexandre François & Sandrine Bessis. 2025. La mémoire orale du peuple de Kuwae, île mythique du Vanuatu. Journal de la Société des Océanistes. 160-161, pp.239–243.
François, Alexandre. 2025. Non-verbal predicates in Oceanic languages. In Pier Marco Bertinetto, Luca Ciucci & Denis Creissels (eds), Non-verbal predication in the world’s languages: A typological survey. Volume 2: Africa, Austronesia, Papunesia, Australia, 1023–1066. (Comparative Handbooks of Li..., 2025
Oceanic languages, much like the rest of Austronesian, show a propensity to do without any copula... more Oceanic languages, much like the rest of Austronesian, show a propensity to do without any copula when encoding their non-verbal predicates. Their typical profile is "omnipredicative": most of their word classes (adjectives, nouns, pronouns, numerals, adverbs ...) can head a predicate directly, with no need to resort to verbal strategies. Many classes are even "tamophoric", i.e. can inflect for Tense-Aspect-Mood.
This overview of Oceanic languages builds around the system of Mwotlap (Vanuatu), a radical example of these grammatical tendencies. Overall, the Oceanic family reminds us that the properties [predicative] and [tamophoric] are not a privilege of verbs, but can be associated, in principle, with just any word class. __________________________
François, Alexandre. 2025. Non-verbal predicates in Oceanic languages. In Pier Marco Bertinetto, Luca Ciucci & Denis Creissels (eds), Non-verbal predication in the world’s languages: A typological survey. Volume 2: Africa, Austronesia, Papunesia, Australia, 1023–1066. (Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics 9.) Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton.
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 2023
Polysemies, or "colexifications", are of great interest in cognitive and historical linguistics, ... more Polysemies, or "colexifications", are of great interest in cognitive and historical linguistics, since meanings that are frequently expressed by the same lexeme are likely to be conceptually similar, and lie along a common pathway of semantic change. We argue that these types of inferences can be more reliably drawn from polysemies of cognate sets (which we call "dialexifications") than from polysemies of lexemes. After giving a precise definition of dialexification, we introduce EvoSem, a cross-linguistic database of etymologies scraped from several online sources. Based on this database (publicly available at http://tiny.cc/EvoSem), we measure for each pair of senses how many cognate sets include them both-i.e. how often this pair of senses is "dialexified". This allows us to construct a weighted dialexification graph for any set of senses, indicating the conceptual and historical closeness of each pair. We also present an online interface for browsing our database, including graphs and interactive tables. We then discuss potential applications to NLP tasks and to linguistic research.
𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem: A database of polysemous cognate sets, Dec 10, 2023
Polysemies, or "colexifications", are of great interest in cognitive and historical linguistics, ... more Polysemies, or "colexifications", are of great interest in cognitive and historical linguistics, since meanings that are frequently expressed by the same lexeme are likely to be conceptually similar, and lie along a common pathway of semantic change. We argue that these types of inferences can be more reliably drawn from polysemies of cognate sets (which we call "dialexifications") than from polysemies of lexemes. After giving a precise definition of dialexification, we introduce EvoSem, a cross-linguistic database of etymologies scraped from several online sources. Based on this database (publicly available at https://tiny.cc/EvoSem), we measure for each pair of senses how many cognate sets include them both-i.e. how often this pair of senses is "dialexified". This allows us to construct a weighted dialexification graph for any set of senses, indicating the conceptual and historical closeness of each pair. We also present an online interface for browsing our database, including graphs and interactive tables. We then discuss potential applications to NLP tasks and to linguistic research. __________________
Mathieu Dehouck, Alexandre François, Siva Kalyan, Martial Pastor & David Kletz. 2023. 𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem: A database of polysemous cognate sets.
In Nina Tahmasebi et al. (conv.), Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 66–75.
Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
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https://tiny.cc/EvoSem
NUSA: Linguistic studies of languages in and around Indonesia, 2023
This paper provides a systematic overview of the modern reflexes of the Proto-Oceanic applicative... more This paper provides a systematic overview of the modern reflexes of the Proto-Oceanic applicative suffix *-akin in the languages of northern Vanuatu. Our three focal languages are Hiw, Vurës, and Mwotlap, but data from neighboring languages are also used to demonstrate the historical development of *-akin in the area. We describe five different development paths of *-akin, namely (1) as a (semi-)productive applicative suffix; (2) as a non-productive suffix attaching to a verb, with recognizable yet irregular semantics; (3) as a non-productive suffix potentially linked to another root, yet with opaque semantics; (4) as a vestigial syllable in certain words, with no language-internal evidence of any suffixation process; and (5) as a preposition, through a process of degrammaticalization or debonding.
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Krauße, Daniel & Alexandre François. 2023. 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.
Awesome forces and warning signs: Charting the semantic history of *tabu words in Vanuatu. Oceanic Linguistics 61/1 (June 2022), 212-255., 2022
The Proto-Oceanic etymon *tabu has hardly been studied outside Polynesian, yet it is attested in ... more The Proto-Oceanic etymon *tabu has hardly been studied outside Polynesian, yet it is attested in other Oceanic languages, albeit with different meanings. This study describes the polysemies observed for modern reflexes of *tabu, with an initial focus on Vanuatu. Sometimes, *tabu words simply refer to the mundane warning signs put up in various locations to fend off unwelcome visitors. But reflexes of *tabu are more often linked with supernatural powers, good or evil, and with the sense of awe and fear they induce upon us. The root may evoke the numinous power of high-ranked dignitaries; or the world of ancestral spirits and ghosts, and the forces of death. The diverse array of meanings attached to *tabu words is best synthesized in the form of a semantic map. This visual tool helps picture the internal organization of the root's polysemy, and can be used as a background as we compare modern languages with each other. By applying principles of the Comparative method, we can reconstruct the meaning of *tabu at the level of Proto-Oceanic: 'forbidden, off limits; sacred, due to a sentiment of awe before spiritual forces.' Finally, semantic maps reveal their full potential as we take a dynamic perspective, and retrace the evolution of *tabu from its original meanings to the various polysemies it has acquired in modern languages. ____________ François, Alexandre. 2022. Awesome forces and warning signs: Charting the semantic history of *tabu words in Vanuatu. Oceanic Linguistics 61/1 (June 2022), 212-255.
François, Alexandre. 2022. Lexical tectonics: Mapping structural change in patterns of lexification. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41/1: 89‒123., 2022
Whether it is based on philological data or on reconstruction, historical linguistics formulates ... more Whether it is based on philological data or on reconstruction, historical linguistics formulates etymological hypotheses that entail changes both in form and in meaning. Semantic change can be understood as a change in "patterns of lexification", i. e., correspondences between forms and senses. Thus a polysemous word, which once lexified senses s1-s2-s3, evolves so it later encodes s2-s3-s4. Meanings that used to be colexified are now dislexified, and vice versa. Leaning on empirical data from Romance and from Oceanic, this study outlines a general model of historical lexicology, and identifies five types of structural innovations in the lexicon: split, merger, competition, shift, and relexification. The theoretical discussion is made easier by using a visual approach to structural change, in the form of diachronic maps. Semantic maps have already proven useful to represent synchronic patterns of lexification, outlining each language's emic categories against a grid of etic senses. The same principle can be profitably used when analysing lexification patterns in diachrony: lexical change is then viewed as the reconfiguration of sense clusters in a semantic space. Maps help us visualize the "lexical tectonics" at play as words evolve over time, gradually shifting their meaning, gaining or losing semantic territory, colliding with each other, or disappearing forever. ___________________
François, Alexandre. 2022. Lexical tectonics: Mapping structural change in patterns of lexification. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41/1: 89‒123.
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., 2021
This corpus-based study examines the lexical domain of olfaction in the Oceanic languages of nort... more 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 array of lexemes, whether to refer tu smelling events (active, passive, experiencer-based) or to the odors themselves. That said, sources based on speakers' competence (langue) rather than performance (parole) suggest that languages may in fact possess a latent elaborate olfactory lexicon, even if it surfaces rarely in ordinary speech. The low discourse frequency of specific terms may be explained by cultural factors, as smells appear to play a reduced functional role in traditional social practices of Vanuatu. Finally, my corpus of conversation and oral literature shows that when olfaction is mentioned, it is mostly associated, first, with the islands' natural environment; and second, with the existential contrast between death and life. _______________________________________
François, Alexandre. 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]
Synkrētic, 2022
In 1788, the French explorer Jean-François de Lapérouse and his two frigate ships were navigating... more In 1788, the French explorer Jean-François de Lapérouse and his two frigate ships were navigating across the Pacific, when they went missing. It took 35 years for the rest of the world to understand that the ships had been hit by a hurricane, and wrecked on an island of the Solomons called Vanikoro. After spending months on the island, the last French survivors had tried to return to Europe, but finally perished at sea.
Surprisingly, the memory of those ancient times has survived up to this day in the oral literature of the Vanikoro people. On my first field trip there in 2005, I recorded a dozen narratives from the elders, in the island's four languages (Teanu, Lovono, Tanema, Tikopia). These stories were bringing the indigenous perspective about that early encounter with European sailors — a blend of fear and fascination.
As one examines this “Lapérouse cycle”, one can see how the retelling of the actual events of 1788 has become intertwined with the memories of later periods — like the Blackbirding — but also enriched with elements of the local mythology. This is reminiscent of the way Homer's poems, or the Viking sagas, had been able to transform historical events into epic gold.
The editors of _Synkrētic_, a brand new Australian journal “of Indo-Pacific philosophy, literature and cultures”, wished to feature in their first issue the Vanikoro stories about Lapérouse. Together with the editor Daryl Morini (ANU), we selected seven texts already translated to French, then translated them to English (with notes linking to the original recordings), and wrote a presentation. The result is a short piece titled “The seven lives of Lapérouse”.
My five coauthors (Teliki Thomas, Rubenson Lono, Emele Mamuli, Kaspa Niu Maketi, Willy Usao) have all passed away in the years since I recorded their voices. This posthumous publication must be seen as a tribute to their talent in telling us the history of their people. ______________________________
Alex François, Teliki Thomas, Rubenson Lono, Emele Mamuli, Kaspa Niu Maketi, Willy Usao. 2022. “The seven lives of Lapérouse”. Ed. & transl. Daryl Morini. Synkrētic № 1 (Feb 2022): 156-171. _______________________ https://www.synkretic.com/issue1/the-seven-lives-of-laperouse
![Research paper thumbnail of Referential hierarchies and ditransitive verbs in Araki [conference presentation]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/78645652/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Since Bossong (1985), referential hierarchies have proven useful in accounting for patterns of di... more Since Bossong (1985), referential hierarchies have proven useful in accounting for patterns of differential object marking (dom) in transitive clauses. More recent studies (Siewierska 1998; Bickel 2008; Haspelmath 2007) and ongoing projects ( Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax , EuroBabel) also show the relevance of such hierarchies in explaining the alignment patterns of ditransitive verbs – namely, the way certain languages treat formally the Theme (T) and the Recipient (R). Araki, a highly endangered Oceanic language of Vanuatu, not only shows dom with its transitive verbs, but is also sensitive to referential properties of arguments in the syntax of ditransitive verbs. Its hierarchy is defined by the combined features [±local] (cf. Andrews 1985) and [±human]: (1) [+local] human > [‑local] human > [‑human] This hierarchy determines the relative ranking of Theme and Recipient: the participant ranking higher will align with Patients – i.e. be treated formally as an objec...
François, Alexandre. 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. 117 (3). 338-371., Nov 2019
Several languages around the world encode number through a regular alternation between verb roots... more Several languages around the world encode number through a regular alternation between verb roots, in a pattern sometimes called "verbal number suppletion" (Veselinova 2006). Lo-Toga and Hiw, two Oceanic languages of Vanuatu (Torres Islands), thus alternate certain verbs according to their absolutive argument's number — e.g. Hiw tō 'go:Sing' vs. vën 'go:Plural'. The pattern affects 17 verb pairs in Lo-Toga, 33 in Hiw. This rich system is a local innovation in the Torres Islands, not found elsewhere in Oceanic. This structure is here analysed for the first time. Verbal number is not just agreement: its principles and categories differ from nominal number. Despite its similarity with suppletion, the structure really involves separate words, organised into a "lexical paradigm" — a structured set of lexical pairs — contrasting individual vs. collective events. The comparative method helps reconstruct the system's development. A former circumfix encoding pluractionality was the source for the number alternation; yet most verbs encoded the contrast lexically, as near-synonyms were harnessed into the emergent paradigm. Crucially, even after it was recruited into the number paradigm, each verb remained an autonomous lexeme. While nominal number belongs to the morphology, the paradigm of verbal number in the Torres languages pertains entirely to the lexicon.
François, Alexandre. (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., 2017
The issue of lexical flexibility is best tackled as the articulation of two separate mappings: on... more 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 multicategoriality, and its word classes with more or less multifunctionality: these are two distinct facets of lexical flexibility, which should be assessed separately. Focusing on Hiw, an Oceanic language of northern Vanuatu, I show that lexical flexibility is there mostly due to the high multifunctionality of its word classes, each of which can regularly access a broad array of syntactic functions. Conversely, Hiw ranks relatively low on the scale of multicategoriality: most of its lexemes are assigned just one word class. This is how a language can be grammatically flexible, yet lexically rigid.
— François, Alexandre. (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.
![Research paper thumbnail of [Kalyan, François] When the waves meet the trees: A response to Jacques & List](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/59993324/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Siva Kalyan & Alexandre François. 2019. When the waves meet the trees: A response to Jacques & List. 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: 167–176., 2019
This special issue of the _Journal of Historical Linguistics_, titled “Understanding language gen... more This special issue of the _Journal of Historical Linguistics_, titled “Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model”, was created with the idea of opening a constructive debate around the issues raised by the Tree model. We (Kalyan and François) had previously published articles highlighting the shortcomings of the tree for representing language history, and promoting an approach – called Historical Glottometry – based on the Wave model (François 2014, 2017; Kalyan & François 2018). We invited two historical linguists, Guillaume Jacques and Johann-Mattis List, as discussants in our volume; their chapter “Save the trees: Why we need tree models in linguistic reconstruction” [doi:10.1075/jhl.17008.mat] argued in favour of the Tree model – and this is our final response.
In this response article, we review our apparently conflicting perspectives, but endeavour to find common ground between them – hence the title “when the waves meet the trees”. We show that our differences are partly due to distinct definitions of key concepts (subgroup, shared innovations…). We also show that the argument of “Incomplete lineage sorting”, which they use to defend the tree, could as well defend the wave model, since it can capture the key notion of intersecting innovations that is so prevalent in linkages, and so problematic in the traditional tree approach.
The final part of our response shows how Historical Glottometry (HG) provides a way to reconstruct the historical process of ‘linkage breaking’, whereby a dialect continuum breaks progressively into separate languages. All in all, our two approaches are fundamentally compatible – even though we find the Wave model, ultimately, to be more realistic.
![Research paper thumbnail of [Kalyan, François, Hammarström] Problems with, and alternatives to, the tree model in historical linguistics (Introduction to special issue)](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/59986661/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François & Harald Hammarström. 2019. Problems with, and alternatives to, the tree model in historical linguistics. In S. Kalyan, A. François & H. Hammarström (eds), Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model. Journal of Historical Linguistics 9/1: 1–8., Jul 1, 2019
There are important reasons to be sceptical of the accuracy and usefulness of the family-tree mod... more There are important reasons to be sceptical of the accuracy and usefulness of the family-tree model in historical linguistics. That model assumes that every linguistic innovation applies to a language considered as an undifferentiated whole, a point with no “width”. But this assumption makes it impossible to use a tree to model the partial diffusion of an innovation within a language community (“internal diffusion”), or the diffusion of an innovation across language communities (“external diffusion”). These limitations have long been noticed by historical linguists (Schmidt 1872, Schuchardt 1900); but they become glaringly obvious in the cases discussed by Ross (1988) and François (2014) under the heading of “linkages” – i.e., language families that arise through the diversification, in situ, of a dialect network. The articles in this special issue all contribute towards addressing this problem, from a range of perspectives.
A proposal for conversational questionnaires, 2019
This paper proposes a new approach for collecting lexical and grammatical data: one that meets th... more This paper proposes a new approach for collecting lexical and grammatical data: one that meets the need to control the features to be elicited, while ensuring a fair level of idiomaticity. The method, called conversational questionnaires, consists in eliciting speech not at the level of words or of isolated sentences, but in the form of a chunk of dialogue. Ahead of fieldwork, a number of scripted conversations are written in the area’s lingua franca, each anchored in a plausible real-world situation – whether universal or culture-specific. Native speakers are then asked to come up with the most naturalistic utterances that would occur in each context, resulting in a plausible conversation in the target language. Experience shows that conversational questionnaires provide a number of advantages in linguistic fieldwork, compared to traditional elicitation methods. The anchoring in real-life situations lightens the cognitive burden on consultants, making the fieldwork experience easier for all. The method enables efficient coverage of various linguistic structures at once, from phonetic to pragmatic dimensions, from morphosyntax to phraseology. The tight-knit structure of each dialogue makes it an effective tool for cross-linguistic comparison, whether areal, historical or typological. Conversational questionnaires help the linguist make quick progress in language proficiency, which in turn facilitates further stages of data collection. Finally, these stories can serve as learning resources for language teaching and revitalization. Five dialogue samples are provided here as examples of such questionnaires. Every linguist is encouraged to write their own dialogues, adapted to a region’s linguistic and cultural profile. Ideally, a set of such texts could be developed and made standard among linguists, so as to create comparable or parallel corpora across languages – a mine of data for typological comparison.
François, Alexandre. 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.
Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication, 2018
The Pacific region is home to about 1,500 languages, with a strong concentration of linguistic di... more The Pacific region is home to about 1,500 languages, with a strong concentration of linguistic diversity in Melanesia. The turn towards documentary linguistics, initiated in the 1980s and theorized by N. Himmelmann, has encouraged linguists to prepare, archive and distribute large corpora of audio and video recordings in a broad array of Pacific languages, many of which are endangered. The strength of language documentation is to entail the mutual exchange of skills and knowledge between linguists and speaker communities. Their members can access archived resources, or create their own. Importantly, they can also appropriate the outcome of these documentary efforts to promote literacy within their school systems, and to consolidate or revitalize their heritage languages against the increasing pressure of dominant tongues. While providing an overview of the general progress made in the documentation of Pacific languages in the last twenty years, this paper also reports on my own experience with documenting and promoting languages in Island Melanesia since 1997.
François, Alexandre. 2018. In search of island treasures: Language documentation in the Pacific. In McDonnell, Bradley, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, and Gary Holton (eds.), Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998. Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication no. 15: 276-294. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
François, Alexandre. 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. Louvain : Peeters., 2017
Linguistic diffusion is commonly equated with contact, and contrasted with genealogy. This articl... more Linguistic diffusion is commonly equated with contact, and contrasted with genealogy. This article takes a new perspective, by showing how diffusion lies in fact at the heart of language genealogy itself. Indeed, the Comparative method has taught us to identify genetic subgroups based on sets of shared innovations; but each of these innovations necessarily had to diffuse from speaker to speaker across a network of then mutually intelligible idiolects. Such a diffusionist approach to language genealogy allows us to model language change as it really took place in the social and geographical space of past societies. Crucially, the entangled isoglosses typical of dialect continuums and linkages (Ross 1988) cannot be handled by the Tree model, which is solely based on divergence; but they are easily captured by a diffusionist approach such as the Wave model, where the key process is convergence. After comparing the theoretical underpinnings of these two models, I introduce Historical Glottometry, a new quantitative approach aiming to free the Comparative Method from any cladistic assumption, and to reconcile it with a wave-based analysis. Finally, data from a group of Oceanic languages from Vanuatu illustrate the powerful potential of Glottometry as a new method for linguistic subgrouping.
[The abstract is in English, the paper in French]
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Papers by Alexandre François
Alexandre François. 2026. Explicit apprehensions, implicit instructions: An indirect speech act in the grammar. In Martina Faller, Marine Vuillermet & Eva Schultze-Berndt (eds.), Apprehensional constructions in a crosslinguistic perspective, 423–460. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Our study examines two distinct corpora: the Torres–Banks islands in the north, and the Shepherds in central Vanuatu – with respectively 300 and 100 recorded narratives. Not only do these two areas differ in the repertoire of their stories, but they even contrast in the very nature of their storytelling. Northern traditions are dominated by timeless folktales, and ahistorical myths referring to a distant time of origins. Conversely, the Shepherds show a strong preference for reality-anchored accounts, best described as history or “mythistory”.
This spectacular opposition can be explained, in our view, by differences in the social organisation of these two groups, and in what features of their world they pay attention to. Torres–Banks people build their storytelling traditions around the contrast between humans and non-humans – with a special place for the spiritual entities that play a key role in their social practices. By contrast, the narrative system of central Vanuatu revolves around the memory of historical events and human migrations. For social reasons, this area replaced the discourse of myths with a tradition dominated by oral history.
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Sandrine Bessis & Alexandre François. 2025. Myths, tales or history? On two storytelling traditions in Vanuatu. Te Reo (The Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand), 68 (3): 185–218.
En 2023, Sandrine Bessis a soutenu à l'université Sorbonne nouvelle sa thèse de doctorat, intitulée «Souvenir des ancêtres et histoire orale au Vanuatu: Les récits de chefferies anciennes aux îles Shepherd». Elle y documente et analyse les traditions orales transmises depuis le xv e siècle au sein des sociétés du Vanuatu central-particulièrement les récits relatant le destin de l'île mythique de Kuwae, détruite par une éruption volcanique vers 1452. Ce projet doctoral est le fruit de 24 mois de terrain accomplis sur les vestiges de l'île volcanique-travail impliquant, au passage, l'apprentissage de trois langues jusqu'alors pas ou peu documentées. Il se matérialise en un document de deux volumes totalisant 1030 pages-dont 460 d'analyse et 570 d'annexes et de corpus. Codirigée par Alexandre François et Christopher Ballard, cette thèse se veut une contribution aux recherches interdisciplinaires en sciences sociales. __________________________
Alexandre François & Sandrine Bessis. 2025. La mémoire orale du peuple de Kuwae, île mythique du Vanuatu. Journal de la Société des Océanistes. 160-161, pp.239–243.
This overview of Oceanic languages builds around the system of Mwotlap (Vanuatu), a radical example of these grammatical tendencies. Overall, the Oceanic family reminds us that the properties [predicative] and [tamophoric] are not a privilege of verbs, but can be associated, in principle, with just any word class. __________________________
François, Alexandre. 2025. Non-verbal predicates in Oceanic languages. In Pier Marco Bertinetto, Luca Ciucci & Denis Creissels (eds), Non-verbal predication in the world’s languages: A typological survey. Volume 2: Africa, Austronesia, Papunesia, Australia, 1023–1066. (Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics 9.) Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton.
Mathieu Dehouck, Alexandre François, Siva Kalyan, Martial Pastor & David Kletz. 2023. 𝓔𝓿𝓸Sem: A database of polysemous cognate sets.
In Nina Tahmasebi et al. (conv.), Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 66–75.
Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
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https://tiny.cc/EvoSem
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Krauße, Daniel & Alexandre François. 2023. 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.
François, Alexandre. 2022. Lexical tectonics: Mapping structural change in patterns of lexification. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41/1: 89‒123.
François, Alexandre. 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]
Surprisingly, the memory of those ancient times has survived up to this day in the oral literature of the Vanikoro people. On my first field trip there in 2005, I recorded a dozen narratives from the elders, in the island's four languages (Teanu, Lovono, Tanema, Tikopia). These stories were bringing the indigenous perspective about that early encounter with European sailors — a blend of fear and fascination.
As one examines this “Lapérouse cycle”, one can see how the retelling of the actual events of 1788 has become intertwined with the memories of later periods — like the Blackbirding — but also enriched with elements of the local mythology. This is reminiscent of the way Homer's poems, or the Viking sagas, had been able to transform historical events into epic gold.
The editors of _Synkrētic_, a brand new Australian journal “of Indo-Pacific philosophy, literature and cultures”, wished to feature in their first issue the Vanikoro stories about Lapérouse. Together with the editor Daryl Morini (ANU), we selected seven texts already translated to French, then translated them to English (with notes linking to the original recordings), and wrote a presentation. The result is a short piece titled “The seven lives of Lapérouse”.
My five coauthors (Teliki Thomas, Rubenson Lono, Emele Mamuli, Kaspa Niu Maketi, Willy Usao) have all passed away in the years since I recorded their voices. This posthumous publication must be seen as a tribute to their talent in telling us the history of their people. ______________________________
Alex François, Teliki Thomas, Rubenson Lono, Emele Mamuli, Kaspa Niu Maketi, Willy Usao. 2022. “The seven lives of Lapérouse”. Ed. & transl. Daryl Morini. Synkrētic № 1 (Feb 2022): 156-171. _______________________ https://www.synkretic.com/issue1/the-seven-lives-of-laperouse
— François, Alexandre. (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.
In this response article, we review our apparently conflicting perspectives, but endeavour to find common ground between them – hence the title “when the waves meet the trees”. We show that our differences are partly due to distinct definitions of key concepts (subgroup, shared innovations…). We also show that the argument of “Incomplete lineage sorting”, which they use to defend the tree, could as well defend the wave model, since it can capture the key notion of intersecting innovations that is so prevalent in linkages, and so problematic in the traditional tree approach.
The final part of our response shows how Historical Glottometry (HG) provides a way to reconstruct the historical process of ‘linkage breaking’, whereby a dialect continuum breaks progressively into separate languages. All in all, our two approaches are fundamentally compatible – even though we find the Wave model, ultimately, to be more realistic.
François, Alexandre. 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.
François, Alexandre. 2018. In search of island treasures: Language documentation in the Pacific. In McDonnell, Bradley, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, and Gary Holton (eds.), Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998. Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication no. 15: 276-294. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
[The abstract is in English, the paper in French]