Upcoming events
Event Information:
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Mon05Sep2022Fri09Sep2022Gent
14th International Colloquium on Late and Vulgar Latin (Latin vulgaire – latin tardif XIV)
Show contentPlease note: the conference has been postponed again due to the continuing uncertainties related to the covid-19 pandemic and will take place from Monday, September 5th to Friday, September 9th, 2022.
The 14th International Colloquium on Late and Vulgar Latin (Latin vulgaire – latin tardif XIV) will be held at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University (Belgium) from Monday, September 5th to Friday, September 9th, 2022. It will be organized by the Latin section and the research group DiaLing at the Department of Linguistics, under the auspices of the Comité international pour l'étude du latin vulgaire et tardif (www.unibg.it/lvlt).
The colloquium will be held in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Latin. As per tradition, it will be devoted to all linguistic aspects of late, informal, non-standard and colloquial Latin (including the transition from Latin to Romance).
For all further information, please visit the website of the colloquium at https://www.lvlt14.ugent.be. For any additional questions you may have, please contact the organisers at lvlt14@ugent.be.
Past events
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Thu18May20173:00 pmBlandijn, Grote Vergaderzaal 3de verdieping
If not ≠ unless - Exceptive clauses in Continental West Germanic
Show contentElisabeth Witzenhausen: If not ≠ unless - Exceptive clauses in Continental West Germanic
In this talk, I address the difference between negative conditionals (1a) and exceptive clauses (1b).
(1) I will come and help you ...
a) if I don‘t fall into a river
b) unless I fall into a river
It has long been claimed that exceptives and negative conditionals share the same underlying semantic structure, with differences only in the surface structure; however, Geis (1973) and those following him have presented challenges for this view, suggesting rather that the two constructions have different semantics. I present data from Middle Dutch (MD), Middle High German (MHG) and Middle Low German (MLG) that support an analysis of two different semantic structures. In doing so, I discuss some observations regarding conditionals more generally in the modern Germanic languages that are relevant to understanding the historical data from my corpus study. In particular, in MD, MHG and MD, exceptive adverbial clauses appear as subjunctive V2-clauses without any complementizer (2). In the early stages, the preverbal clitic ne is used which expressed sentential negation in Old Saxon (OS) and Old High German (OHG).
(2) dhe scal ome sin wulle loen gheuen he ne hebbe it uerboret mit bosheit
DEM shall him his demanded wage give he NE have.SUBJ it forfeited with mischief
‘who shall give him his demanded wage, unless he has forfeited it with mischief.’
(Westphalian: 1492)
I will provide arguments for analysing MD, MLG and MHG exceptives as peripheral adverbial clauses, while their related OHG and OS structures are central adverbial clauses.