Upcoming events
Event Information:
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Fri04Dec20203:30 pmMS-Teams
Melissa Farasyn: Novelties and archaisms: insights in V2 violations in the endangered French-Flemish dialects (via MS-Teams)
Show contentMelissa Farasyn (UGent): "Novelties and archaisms: insights in V2 violations in the endangered French-Flemish dialects".
Abstract: here
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
Past events
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Thu03Oct2024
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Thu13Jun20242:00 pmLokaal 3.30 - Camelot, Blandijn, Campus BoekentorenShow content
The use of corpora in acoustic analyses has become a standard practice in phonetic phonological research, offering high ecological validity (see e.g. Beckman, 1997; Warner, 2012; Tucker & Mukai, 2023 for a discussion on validity). However, compiling corpora and looking for specific phenomena can be time and resource-consuming. In response to this challenge, we developed a program named Pyrlato, which we aim to demonstrate. Pyrlato is a novel tool designed for creating corpora of real-world spoken data from the web. The tool extracts audio files from YouTube, cutting and extracting desired segments such as specific phonemes, syllables, or words found in YouTube videos. This enables the creation of corpora with tens of thousands of tokens within a few computational hours. Pyrlato works across Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese, i.e. those languages for which YouTube provides automatic subtitles. The software searches for the desired string in the subtitles and, upon finding the match, extracts the relevant audio extract containing the string in .mp3 format (other formats are also possible).
The demonstration will showcase Pyrlato's online version and the application of some case studies.
• Beckman, M.E. (1997).A typology of spontaneous speech. In Y. Sagisaka, N. Campbell, & N. Higuchi (Eds.), Computing Prosody: Computational Models for Processing Spontaneous Speech (pp. 7–26). Springer. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2258-3_2.
• Tucker, B.V., & Mukai, Y. (2023). Spontaneous speech. Cambridge University Press. http://doi.org/10.1017/9781108943024.
• Warner, N. (2012). Methods for studying spontaneous speech. In A. Cohn, C. Fougeron, & M. Huffman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Laboratory Phonology (pp. 621–633). Oxford University Press. -
Thu16May20241:00 pmBlandijn Faculteitsraadzaal
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Thu25Apr20241:00 pmBlandijn Room 3.30 (Camelot)
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Thu07Mar2024
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Wed28Feb20244:00 pmCamelot 3.30Show content
Last year, several ΔiaLing members published a monograph:
- Jóhanna Barðdal, Oblique subjects in Germanic: their status, history and reconstruction
- Nelson Goering, Prosody in Medieval English and Norse
- Mihaela Ilioaia, The MIHI EST construction: An instance of non-canonical subject marking in Romanian
We would like to give them the opportunity to present their monographs and we will toast with them on this success. This presentation and celebration will take place on the 28th of February, starting at 4 pm, in room 3.30 (Camelot) of the Blandijn. You are all very welcome to join!
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Tue06Feb20242:00 pmBlandijn Room 3.30 (Camelot)Show content
This presentation discusses recent language documentation and revitalization work among the Mỹky and Manoki nations in Brazilian southern Amazonia, as well as the revitalization of the traditional jakuli genre of dance and music. Mỹky is an isolated indigenous Amazonian language spoken in north-western Mato Grosso, in Brazil, by two communities: the Manoki (Iranxe) and the Mỹky (Monserrat 2010; Bardagil 2023). The two communities went through different contact periods with colonial Brazilian society, which resulted in different sociolinguistic situations. While the Manoki dialect of the language is severely threatened, with only three members of the community (~400) being able to speak it today, it is spoken as a first language by most of the Mỹky group (~100).
Since 2019 I have been working alongside the Manoki community to preserve and reclaim their indigenous language, which led to the creation of the Watjuho Ja'a Collective and the organization of several intensive schools for Manoki language, and to several initiatives to reinforce musical and spiritual community practices that are closely connected with the orally-transmitted heritage of this threatened indigenous nation. -
Tue12Dec20232:00 pmBlandijn room 0.2Show content
In my talk I will discuss some minor deities (demons) of the Indo-Iranian pantheon such as Gandharva(s) and their possible Indo-European parallels outside Indo-Iranian. In particular, I will focus on some features of Njörðr and other Nordic Vanir gods in order to show their structural similarities with the Gandharva(s), foremost, their importance for such issues as sexuality and fertility. Special attention will be paid to the etymology of the names of these gods. I will further demonstrate that this comparison may shed some light on the anthropogonic views of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and to figure out how they envisaged the origin of humankind and the role of (minor) gods in this emergence of humans.
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Tue05Dec20232:30 pmBlandijn Faculteitszaal
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Tue14Nov20232:00 pmBlandijn Room 3.30 (Camelot)Show content
Thanks to the ongoing interest in private letters as sources for reconstructing language variation and change in the past, epistolary formulae have attracted increasing attention cross-linguistically. Studies showing that low-status writers and women relied heavily on formulae when writing their letters have hypothesised that formulae served primarily as aids for little experienced writers. However, other studies have shown that formulae could perform different functions related to group practices and self-representation. I investigate this issue in the context of sixteenth-century Florence, where letter-writing was becoming increasingly codified. Drawing on little-known archival material and focusing on the epistolary closing, I track the use of formulae across the private letters of three women from subsequent generations of one family, the Ricasoli, and compare it to the use of their brothers. These three women differed markedly in their degree of writing experience, in keeping with the increase in female literacy that was affecting the Florentine patriciate. The results show that the woman of the last generation used more formulae, that a writer’s use of formulae throughout their lifetime did not necessarily decrease with an increase in writing experience, and that it was not always the case that women used more formulae than men. This suggests that, in Renaissance Florence, optional epistolary formulae played a role as social conventions and not only, or primarily, as formulation aids for little experienced writers.
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Tue24Oct20232:00 pmBlandijn Faculteitszaal
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Mon23Oct202311:40 amBlandijn Room 1.16Show content
Anne Carlier will be giving a guest lecture about the emergence of articles in the Romance languages as part of the course General Linguistics II. The guest lecture will take place next Monday (October 23) at 11:40 a.m. in classroom 1.16 of Blandijn. You can read her abstract here.
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Tue10Oct20232:00 pmBlandijn Room 3.30 (Camelot)Show content
Alexandra Simonenko: A language change approach to probabilistic universals: case and order
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Fri15Sep2023
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Mon12Jun20232:00 pmBlandijn 3.30 Camelot
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Mon15May2023
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Mon17Apr20232:00 pmFaculteitszaal, BlandijnShow content
Joanna Wall (Utrecht University): On the identity of English verbal and plural inflectional -s’s
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Mon20Mar20232:00 pmBlandijn FaculteitszaalShow content
Sampson Korsah (University of Cape Coast, Ghana): "Object drop in language: Theoretical insights from Kwa"
Abstract: here
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Mon13Mar20232:00 pmBlandijn FaculteitszaalShow content
Nelson Goering (UGent): Foot structure in Early North Germanic
Abstract: Foot Structure in Early North Germanic
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Thu16Feb20232:00 pm1.16Show content
Matteo Tarsi (Uppsala): "‘to teach’ and ‘to learn’ in (Indo-)Germanic: lexical typology, morphology, and more"
Abstract: here
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Tue13Dec2022
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Tue06Dec20222:00 pmBlandijn FaculteitszaalShow content
Margherita Fantoli (KU Leuven): “Measuring formulaicity in scientific and technical texts”
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Fri25Nov20223:00 pmBlandijn FaculteitszaalShow content
Mark Janse (UGent): “Axenitika: The history of another Cappadocian dialect still spoken in Greece”
Abstract: here
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Tue15Nov20222:00 pmBlandijn lokaal 3.30 (Camelot)
Get to know your colleagues: Kim Groothuis, Mihaela Ilioaia, Giovanni Leo, Ugo Mondini, Joanne Stolk
Show contentGet to know your colleagues: Kim Groothuis, Mihaela Ilioaia, Giovanni Leo, Ugo Mondini, Joanne Stolk
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Tue08Nov20222:00 pmBlandijn FaculteitszaalShow content
William Balla-Johnson: “A ‘More Perfect’ Shift: Semantic change in the history of the Western European Romance pluperfect.”
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Tue25Oct20222:00 pmBlandijn lokaal 3.30 (Camelot)Show content
Marilena De Gregorio (UGent): “The diminuitives in cooking language: some examples from Apicius’ De re coquinaria”
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Mon05Sep2022Fri09Sep2022GentShow content
Please 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.
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Wed11May2022n.t.b.n.t.bShow content
Brian D. Joseph (Ohio State University): “Historical Sociolinguistics and Typological Perspectives on the role of conversation in language contact: ERIC Loans in the Balkans”
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Thu28Apr20223:00 pmn.t.bShow content
Anna Persig (KU Leuven): “Semantic change in the political and religious title conseruator: the ‘saviour’ from Cicero to the Latin New Testament”
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Thu31Mar20223:00 pmBlandijn FaculteitszaalShow content
Mark Janse (UGent): “Girl, you’ll be a woman soon: Grammatical and/or semantic agreement with Greek hybrid nouns of the Mädchen type”
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Mon21Mar20222:00 pmn.t.bShow content
Alex Rehn (Universität Konstanz): “Parallel adjectival inflection - a new perspective from Alemannic”
Abstract: here
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Thu24Feb20221:00 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Anne Breitbarth (UGent): "Non-inverted V3: Syntactic change in progress in German"
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Tue07Dec20212:00 pmOnlineShow content
Get to know your colleagues 2: Hannah Booth, Melissa Farasyn, Chiara Monaco, Tim Ongenae and Laurentia Schreiber
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Tue23Nov20213:00 pmBlandijn lokaal 3.30 (Camelot)Show content
Mihaela Ilioaia (UGent): “Alternating predicates in Romanian”
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Tue09Nov20213:00 pmBlandijn lokaal 2.21Show content
Get to know your colleagues 1: Simon Aerts, Andrea Cuomo, Eleonora Serra
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Tue26Oct20213:00 pmOnlineShow content
Tadjou-N'Dine Mamadou Yacoubou & Mariapaola D’Imperio (Rutgers University): title tbc
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Thu14Oct20213:00 pmBlandijn FaculteitszaalShow content
Miguel Gutiérrez Maté (Augsburg University): “Towards a better understanding of Creoles through their comparison with fossilized learner varieties. The case of Palenquero Creole and Cabindan Portuguese”
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Fri07May20213:30 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Giacomo Bucci: “Genitives under Negation: (Re)surfacing non-canonical Case Assignment Strategies under Negation in Ancient Germanic Languages"
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Fri30Apr20213:00 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Mark Janse (UGent): “Modern Greek Verbal Dvandva Compounds and the Bare-Stem Constraint”
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Mon19Apr20211:30 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Ezra La Roi (UGent): “Tracing the historical replacement of the counterfactual optative mood from Archaic to Classical Greek”
Abstract: here
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Mon29Mar20211:30 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Jóhanna Barðdal & Leonid Kulikov (UGent) (based on joint work with Cynthia A. Johnson, Peter Alexander Kerkhof & Esther Le Mair): ‘How to Succeed in Germanic and Indo-European without even Trying’
Nieuw datum: MAANDAG 29/03/2021 i.p.v. 02/04/2021
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Mon22Mar20211:30 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Guglielmo Inglese (KU Leuven): “The cross-linguistic emergence of middle voice systems: sources and processes”
Abstract: here
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Fri12Mar20213:00 pmMS-TeamsShow content
André Kött (UGent): “Learning (im)polite forms of address through Early Modern dialogue books”
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Fri05Mar20213:00 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Koen Bostoen (UGent): “Epidemic-driven population collapse in Congolese rainforest 1600-1400 years ago urges reassessment of the Bantu Expansion”
Abstract: here
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Fri19Feb20213:00 pmMS-Teams
Claudia Crocco (UGent): Dialects and Italian in Campania: prosodic features of neighboring varieties
Show contentClaudia Crocco (UGent): “Dialects and Italian in Campania: prosodic features of neighboring varieties”
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Mon01Feb20211:30 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Bernat Bardagil (UGent): “The grammar of grammatical relations in Amazonian languages”
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Fri22Jan20214:00 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Anne Breitbarth (UGent): “Syntax, prosody, and discourse function of V>2 in spoken German”
Abstract: here
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Fri11Dec20203:30 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Giuseppe Samo (Beijing): "Movement and Locality in the Cartography of Germanic: a quantitative study with dependency structures".
Abstract: here
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Fri04Dec20203:30 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Melissa Farasyn (UGent): "Novelties and archaisms: insights in V2 violations in the endangered French-Flemish dialects".
Abstract: here
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Fri20Nov20203:30 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Kim Groothuis (UGent): Less finite = less structure? Evidence from irrealis clauses in Romanian, Salentino and Southern Calabrian.
Abstract: here
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Fri06Nov20203:30 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Fokelien Kootstra (UGent): "I used to think your administration was better and more successful"; Case marking and scribal practice in the early Arabic documentary papyri (7th-9th century AD)".
Abstract: here
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Fri23Oct20203:30 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Johnatan Bonilla Huerfano (UGent), Rosa Lilia Segundo Díaz (UGent) & Miriam Bouzouita (HU Berlin): "A collaborative game-based approach to building a parsed corpus of European Spanish dialects"
Abstract: here
De vergadering zal via MS-Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
Externen kunnen deelnemen door een e-mail te sturen aan dialing@ugent.be.
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Fri16Oct20203:30 pmMS-TeamsShow content
Algemene vergadering onderzoeksgroep
De vergadering zal via MS Teams plaatsvinden: link te vinden in nieuwsbrief
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Tue09Jun20202:00 pmBongo Virtual ClassroomShow content
Due to the distance measures taken by UGent to prevent the spread of CoViD-19, the next edition of our series "Get to know your colleagues" will take place via Bongo Virtual Classroom.
Christoph Anderl, Suzanne Burdorf, and Shan Bai will introduce themselves and tell us about their projects.
Sign up for ΔiaLing on Ufora to attend: https://ufora.ugent.be/d2l/home/209802.
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Wed29Apr20208:00 pmAuditorium 4 Jaap Kruithof (Blandijnberg 2, 2e verdieping)
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Thu23Apr2020(postponed due to CoViD-19)Show content
Melissa Farasyn (UGent): "V>2 structures in spoken French Flemish".
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Wed15Apr20208:00 pmDienstencentrum Ledeberg (Ledebergplein 30, 9050 Ledeberg)
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Wed18Mar20208:00 pmAuditorium 1 Jan Broeckx (Blandijnberg 2, gelijkvloers)
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Thu05Mar20203:00 pmLok. 1.1 (via Rozier)Show content
Mark Janse (UGent): "External vs. Internal Factors in the Development of Agglutinative Inflections in Cappadocian (Asia Minor Greek)".
Abstract: here
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Wed19Feb20208:00 pmAuditorium 1 Jan Broeckx (Blandijnberg 2, gelijkvloers)
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Tue18Feb20203:00 pmFaculty Room (Blandijnberg 2, 1st floor)Show content
Miriam Bouzouita (UGent): "Crowdsourcing Spanish variation and change through an app".
You can find the abstract here.
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Wed18Dec2019Thu19Dec2019Faculty Room (Blandijnberg 2, 1st floor)Show content
https://www.linghentiandoctorials.ugent.be/
The "LinGhentian Doctorials" conference - by and for PhD students in language studies - creates an opportunity for both seasoned PhD students and those who only just started their PhDs to present (some aspects of) their research to a broad audience of scholars in language studies. This allows for in-depth interaction with and feedback from scholars of various backgrounds and is meant to be complementary to the feedback of their supervisors. It is also a great opportunity to expand their networks to colleagues studying languages in different departments.
This call is directed to PhD students of language studies across different departments of Ghent University:
- Linguistics
- Translation, Interpreting and Communication
- Languages and Cultures
- Psychology
- ....
The aim is to build bridges between theoretical, empirical and applied linguists and to strengthen the bonds between PhD students with somewhat different backgrounds and frameworks, methodologies, objects of study, etc.
Key dates
The LinGhentian Doctorials 2019 will take place on Wednesday 18 and Thursday 19 December in the Faculty room of the Faculty of Arts (Blandijnberg 1, 9000 Gent). All PhD students who would like to participate are kindly requested to submit the following to linghentiandoctorials@ugent.be:
- A provisional title no later than Sunday 10 November 2019;
- An abstract (max. 1 page, references excluded) no later than Sunday 17 November 2019.Participants can freely choose the topic and format of their presentation. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes and will be followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Group presentations (e.g. projects) are eligible for an extended duration.
All presentations will be delivered by PhD students, but of course all academic staff and interested students are most welcome to attend the event and provide feedback or ask questions.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at linghentiandoctorials@ugent.be.
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Wed18Dec20198:00 pmAuditorium 1 Jan Broeckx (Blandijnberg 2, gelijkvloers)
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Thu12Dec201910:00 amLecture room 1.1 Henri Pirenne, Department of Archaeology, UFO Building, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 33, 9000 GentShow content
Prof. Ceri Ashley (British Museum, London): "Pathways through the Forest? Reflecting on the Archaeology of Early Farming Communities in Great Lakes Africa".
On December 12 we have the honour to welcome Prof. Ceri Ashley (British Museum, London) with a talk on "Pathways through the Forest? Reflecting on the Archaeology of Early Farming Communities in Great Lakes Africa". Her talk will be followed by a BantuFirst research pitch on "The New West-Coastal Bantu Homeland: An Archaeological Assessment" by Sara Pacchiarotti & Dirk Seidensticker.
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Tue10Dec20191:00 pmCamelot Room (Blandijnberg 2, 3rd floor)Show content
Lorenzo Maselli (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa): "The importance of integrated articulatory and acoustic analysis for consonant identification: Some preliminary data from Ethiosemitic and Jukunoid".
Abstract:
While it is generally believed that the first step towards the phonological description of a language is the study of minimal pairs and allophonic variation, it is also true that the exact identification of what sounds we deal with in natural languages requires some level of acoustic analysis. There is a variety of spectral phenomena which serve as reliable cues to the phonetic properties of sounds, but a lot of important distinctions are left untouched. A fairly well-known example is that of voicing in English: while VOT is a generally reliable cue for stops, low frequency energy (the so-called “voicing bar”) is a less clear marker for fricatives, although the opposition is arguably just as salient throughout the phonology (Abramson & Whalen 2017). I will take into account some less common from African languages as cases in point. Amharic ejectives are traditionally considered “weak” (i.e. less acoustically salient than, for example, Tigrinya ones; cf. Kingston 1985), but preliminary data from L2 acquisition points in the direction of some categorical restructuring in the absence of clearer articulatory evidence. Likewise, while there is a long-standing notion that functional load plays little phonological role (King 1967), it was recently claimed that “peripheral phonemes” seem to behave in a fairly different way than more common ones (Babel 2017). Even salient oppositions may require different phonological treatment on the basis of, e.g., morphological variation, as is the case for Italian /m/ vs /n/. The exact determination of what sounds take part in an alternation could benefit from more detailed production analysis. An example will be drawn from Win Lau, a poorly described Jukunoid language of Nigeria, where [+back] spread can yield an as yet phonetically undescribed uvular or epiglottal consonant before back vowels. From this angle, closer interaction between articulatory, perceptual and acoustic evidence seems to be desirable, even for field research.References
Abramson, A. S., Whalen, D. H. (2017) “Voice Onset Time (VOT) at 50: Theoretical and Practical Issues in Measuring Voicing Distinctions”, Journal of Phonetics 63, 75–86
Babel, A. M. (2017) “Aspirates and ejectives in Quechua-influenced Spanish”, Spanish in Context 14, n. 2, 159-185
King, R. D. (1967) “Functional load and sound change”, Language 43, n. 4, 831-842
Kingston, J. (1985) “The Phonetics and Phonology of the Timing of Oral and Glottal Events”, PhD dissertation, Berkeley: University of California, BerkeleyHilde Gunnink (UGent): "Contact between Bantu and Khoisan languages in southern Africa: morphological borrowing in Yeyi".
Abstract: In southern Africa, there has been long-standing language contact between between Khoisan languages, some of which have been spoken since time immemorial, and Bantu languages, who arrived in the region in the last two millenia. The Bantu language that has been influenced most extensively by Khoisan contact is Yeyi, spoken in northwestern Botswana and northeastern Namibia. This Bantu language has acquired a large number of clicks, crosslinguistically highly uncommon phonemes that only occur natively in Khoisan languages and are therefore a clear indicator of language contact. In this paper, I investigate the extent of Khoisan influence in the morphology of Yeyi, showing that Yeyi has acquired certain bound affixes from neighbouring Khoisan languages. Such morphological borrowing is relatively uncommon in languages, and suggests that contact between Yeyi and Khoisan must have been fairly intensive, and, unlike many other Bantu-Khoisan contact situation in the subcontinent, may have involved a certain degree of proficiency in Khoisan languages on the part of the Yeyi speech community. As such the contact-induced changes attested in Yeyi can be used to shed light on the contact situation in which they arose, and provide a clearer picture of Bantu-Khoisan interactions.
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Thu05Dec20191:00 pmCamelot Room (Blandijnberg 2, 3rd floor)Show content
Prof. Dr Michal Starke (Masaryk University): "Cutting French verbs and gluing them back together".
Abstract: Descriptively, French has many "irregular" verbs, as well as a mildly complex combination of suffixes on verbs. I aim to show that both irregular verbs and the combination of verbal suffixes follow a regular underlying system, and that this system can be elegantly derived by using phrasal spellout, the elsewhere principle and the functional sequence provided by syntax.
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Thu21Nov201910:00 amLecture room 1.1 Henri Pirenne, Department of Archaeology, UFO Building, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 33, 9000 GentShow content
Dr. Louis Champion (Goethe Universität Frankfurt): "Domestication of Pearl Millet in Africa: Potential Origins and Diffusion".
On November 21 we have the honour to welcome Dr. Louis Champion (Goethe Universität Frankfurt) with a talk on the "Domestication of Pearl Millet in Africa: Potential Origins and Diffusion". His talk will be followed by a BantuFirst research pitch on "Bananas in Early Bantu Speech Communities: Reconsidering Linguistic Evidence" by Sifra Van Acker. More info can be found here.
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Thu21Nov20194:00 pmFaculteitszaal (Blandijnberg 2, 1st floor)Show content
Lengson Ngwasi (University of Gothenburg): "The non-reflexive functions of the reflexive prefix -i- in the Tanzanian Bantu languages Hehe, Nilamba and Nyaturu".
You can find the abstract here.
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Wed20Nov20198:00 pmAuditorium 1 Jan Broeckx (Blandijnberg 2, gelijkvloers)Show content
Het Grieks is een geniale taal – dat weten we sinds Andrea Marcolongo er een boek over schreef. Maar wat vonden de Grieken daar zelf van? En wat was hun houding ten opzichte van andere talen? In deze lezing wordt verkend op wat voor taalkundig onderzoek de Grieken zich hebben toegelegd, en aan welke onderwerpen en vraagstukken ze zich niét hebben gewaagd. Het wordt een breed overzicht: van aspectleer tot taalfilosofie, van taalvergelijking tot de uitvinding van de woordsoorten. Bijzondere aandacht gaat uit naar de culturele context van de Griekse talige exploraties. En we zullen nagaan tot op welke hoogte het grammaticaonderwijs Nederlands in onze lagere scholen nog Grieks gekruid is.
https://www.grieks.ugent.be/griekenlandcentrum/programma/
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Tue19Nov20191:00 pmCamelot room (Blandijnberg 2, 3rd floor)Show content
DiaLing presentation by Prof. Dr. Carme Silva Domínguez (University of Santiago de Compostela): "The Evolution of Possessive Pronouns: Forms and Structures from Latin to Modern Galician and Portuguese."
Abstract: This presentation offers a comparison between possessive pronouns in three varieties proceeding from LAtin: Medieval Galician-Portuguese, Modern Galician and Modern Portuguese. First of all we will explain the morphological evolution of the paradigm through the examination of the main evolutionary phenomena which allow us to contrast the ancient and modern languages. After that we will deal with the constructive changes in the possessive structures: among them, the combination with article, placement strategies and evolution beyond the noun phrase. In addition, the syntactic behavior of the possessive seems to be different in Galician and in Portuguese, although further research about non normative varieties is needed.
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Tue29Oct20191:00 pmCamelot room (Blandijnberg 2, 3rd floor)Show content
ΔiaLing-presentation by Dr. Leonid Kulikov (UGent, ΔiaLing): "Gr. Κένταυρος and his (non-)Indo-European relatives: the Indo-Iranian myth of the primordial incest between twins (Yamī and Yama) and its origins."
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Tue22Oct2019Fri25Oct20198:30 amCamelot room (Blandijnberg 2, 3rd floor)Show content
The Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies (HPIMS) is organizing their 2019 Autumn school in Medieval Languages and Culture on the theme of Multilingualism and language varieties in Europe.
In particular, on Tuesday 22 October, Roger Wright (University of Liverpool) will give a lecture (11.00-12.30) on "The emergence of the vernacular languages in the Middle Ages; Romance in the Iberian Peninsula in the Tenth Century." After lunch, Anna Adamska will give a lecture (15.30-17.00) with the title "A laboratory of multilingual communication? Speaking, writing and reading, in the towns of late medieval East Central Europe."
For more information, please visit https://www.ugent.be/pirenne/en/news-events/events/sociolinguistics.
Attendance for individual lectures, as well as the entire Autumn School, is free for UGent members, but registration is required: please inform the organisers of your attendance for specific lectures, or for the Autumn school as a whole, at Martine.DeReu@ugent.be.
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Tue22Oct201911:00 amAuditorium P Jozef Plateau (Jozef Plateaustraat 22)Show content
Prof. André Motingea Mangulu (UPN Kinshasa) will give a talk with the title "Particularités des langues mongo parlées par les groupes d’anciens chasseurs-collecteurs du bassin central congolais : Une contribution à la linguistique historique et à l’histoire des migrations."
After that, there will be a BantuFirst research pitch on "Dorsal fricatives in West Coastal Bantu: substrate interference from extinct hunter- gatherer languages?", presented by Dr Sara Pacchiarotti.
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Tue15Oct20191:00 pmCameloot room (Blandijnberg 2, 3de verdiepingShow content
The following colleagues will present (themselves and) their projects:
- Giuseppe Magistro (FWO): Prosodic cues to syntactic reanalysis. Experimentally tracking Jespersen's cycle in progress
- Antoine Primerano (FWO): The grammaticalisation of the future and conditionals in the history of Ibero-Romance: a language and dialect contact approach
- André Kött (BOF): Groeten uit het verleden: over het gebruik van interjecties in meertalige vroegmoderne taalmethodes
- Ezra la Roi (FWO): Counterfactuals in the History of Greek: An Enriched Diachronic Typology using a Context-Sensitive Evolutionary Model
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Fri14Jun20199:00 amGrote vergaderzaal (Blandijnberg 2, 3rd floor)Show content
It is a pleasure to invite you to the seminar on Palenquero, a Romance-Bantu creole spoken in Colombia, to be given by Dr Miguel Gutiérrez Maté (University of Augsburg), on Friday 14th of June from 9h to 12h (Grote Vergaderzaal, Blandijn). In this seminar Dr Gutiérrez Maté, who studied under the guidance of the world-renowned creolist Prof. Dr Armin Schwegler, will discuss the historical genesis and parts of the linguistic characterisation of Palenquero, as well as share his personal experiences from doing fieldwork in more remote parts of the world.
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Thu06Jun20192:30 pmroom 110.037 (Blandijnberg 2, ground floor)Show content
Abstract
In my talk, I will discuss my planned research on the Development of Dutch Orthography and I hope to exchange ideas on Data Enrichment for the first stage of the project. This first stage will take place within a research visit at Gent University.
The main scope of the project proposed here is the description of unguided (not-steered) development of writing systems for West Germanic dialects based on the Latin alphabet. It will render this from diatopic and diachronic grapheme research on Middle Dutch local charters.
Dutch diachronic orthography research has been the focus of research in the last decennium, however mostly focusing on Early Modern Dutch and later stages, and usually in the context of standardisation. That means it is limited to how orthographic development of a language operates within the parameters of a society that is aware of and pays lip service to a supra-regional, consciously and unconsciously superimposed or pursued variety. In my proposed research, I will focus on the period before Early Modern Dutch and the standardisation processes, and ask the question: “How do scribes cope in writing with the Latin alphabet in their dialects when there is no prescribed standard?”To answer this, the writings of scribes who operate in local writing systems, i.e. written dialect, need to be considered, and this should be done with manuscripts, e.g. handwritten administrative texts of local importance only, such as local charters.
Preliminary research suggests that in case of vowel grapheme systems, the aptness of singular graphemes is gradable and can be described in terms of the phonological distinctive features they may convey accurately (De Wulf 2019, in preparation). This stems from the fact that some graphemes are used to convey many more historical phonemes (i.e. West Germanic allophones) than others, and which graphemes these are, also varies from dialect to dialect. There is a clear indication that vowel grapheme systems in the Eastern dialects contain less accurate graphemes, since more of the historical vowel phonemes have in fact evolved into separate phonemes. My working hypothesis is that an implicational scale of phonological features can be established (per dialect or maybe more generally, dialect region), which means that certain features are to be prioritised in writing systems. This should be investigated for vowel as well as consonant graphemes.
The here proposed project will have to clarify whether this holds through for all types of graphemes, and whether this variety is maintained throughout medieval writing in the period 1250-1400.
As the main deliverable I will provide an open access and electronically published diachronic grapheme atlas with commentary.
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Thu16May20193:30 pmRozier room 1.4Show content
dr. Francesca Cotugno (University of Nottingham & CSAD, University of Oxford): "Language interplay in the Channel zone: can we map language interactions?"
You can find the abstract here.
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Thu09May20192:30 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (Blandijnberg 2, 3rd floor)Show content
Abstract:
We will describe a speaking atlas that takes the form of a website presenting interactive maps, where it is possible to click on over 300 survey points to listen to speech samples and read a transcript of what is said, in dialects and minority languages of France, Italy and Belgium. We show how an attractive website enables us to collect more data in underresourced and endangered languages and how these data may be used for phonetic analyses and dialectometry purposes. A one-minute story (“The North Wind and the Sun”) was used, phonetically transcribed automatically by grapheme-to-phoneme converters and forced aligned with the audio signal: a methodology which can be applied to other languages and dialects.
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Tue30Apr20192:00 pmFaculteitszaal (Blandijnberg 2, 1e verdieping)Show content
Evie Coussé (University of Gothenburg): "The rise of complex verb constructions in Germanic: A project sketch." Presentation co-organised by GLIMS and ΔiaLing.
You can find the abstract here.
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Mon29Apr20192:30 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (Blandijnberg 2, 3rd floor)Show content
Programme:
- 14:30-15:30 Plenary Talk - Manuel Leonetti Complutense University of Madrid: 'Orden de palabras y estructura informativa en la evolución del español'
- 15:30-16:00 Miriam Bouzouita & Antoine Primerano Ghent University: 'La influencia oriental en la gramaticalización del futuro y condicional en español'
- 16:00-16:30 Rocío Díaz Bravo & Miriam Bouzouita University of Granada & Ghent University: 'Usos innovadores de los clíticos de OD y OI en el Retrato de la Loçana andaluza'
- 16:30-17:00 COFFEE
- 17:00-17:30 Plenary Talk - Javier Rodríguez Molina University of Granada / Ghent University: 'Alomorfia IE - IA en los pluscuamperfectos de indicativo medievales'
- 17:30-18:00 Montserrat Batllori & Ioanna Sitaridou University of Girona & University of Cambridge: 'Fronting in the history of Spanish'
- 18:00-18:30 Álvaro Octavio de Toledo y Huerta Autonomous University of Madrid / Ghent University: 'Dislocaciones y doblados: elementos para un álgebra de los objetos clíticos en el primer español moderno'
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Thu25Apr20199:00 amFaculteitszaal (Blandijnberg 2, 1e verdieping)Show content
Workshop on Clitics on 25 April 2019 (9.00-16.00). More information will follow later.
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Wed24Apr20192:00 pmroom Blandijn 150.009 (5th floor)Show content
Internal Research Seminar – INDOLOGY
Leonid Kulikov: "The Vedic particle ghā̆ and the primordial incest of Yama vs. Yamī: Linguistic and comparative-mythological evidence from Indo-Iranian and beyond."
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Thu21Mar20191:00 pmGrote vergaderzaal (Blandijnberg 2, 3e verdieping)Show content
Project presentations by new DiaLing members:
- Rozenn Guérois: "A typology of the passive voice in Bantu"
- Hilde Gunnink: "Language contact between migrating Bantu speakers and resident Khoisan speakers in southern Africa"
- Minah Nabirye: "Duplication processes in Lusoga morphosyntax"
- Alessandro Papini: "Stylistic and diatopic variation in the 'Vulgar' Latin vowel system. Rome and Italy: a statistical analysis based on inscriptional evidence."
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Wed20Mar201911:00 amGrote Vergaderzaal (Blandijnberg 2, 3e verdieping)Show content
ΔiaLing presentation by Prof. Dr. Antonella Ghignoli (Sapienza – University of Rome): "The NOTAE Project: Reasons for a Research."
You can find the abstract here.
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Fri15Feb201910:00 amFaculteitszaal (Blandijnberg 2, 1e verdieping)Show content
ΔiaLing presentation by Prof. Dr. Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) : "From diachronic observations to synchronic semantic analyses: the case of the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity."
You can find the abstract here.
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Thu06Dec20181:00 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (Blandijnberg 2, 3e verdieping)Show content
Prof. Anne Breitbarth will introduce a new project entitled "Het Gesproken Corpus Nederlandse Dialecten (GCND)."
Dr. Melissa Farasyn will introduce her new FWO-postdoc project in a talk with the title "Nature and origin of V2-violations French Flemish."
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Thu29Nov20181:00 pmRozier 44, Vergaderzaal 0.1 Simon StevinShow content
ΔiaLing presentation by Prof. Dr. Peter Arnold Mumm (LMU München) : "On the Etymology of germ. Seele 'soul'."
You can find the abstract here.
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Mon19Nov2018Fri23Nov2018Campus BoekentorenShow content
Please find all information concerning this conference here.
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Thu08Nov20181:00 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (Blandijnberg 2, 3e verdieping)Show content
Prof. Klaas Bentein will introduce his ERC-project and the members of his new team (Geert de Mol, dr. Yasmine Amory and Emmanuel Roumanis) to the members of DiaLing. The title of the ERC-project is Everyday writing in Graeco-Roman and late antique Egypt (I – VIII AD). A socio-semiotic study of communicative variation.
Dr. Metin Bagriacik will introduce us to his FWO-postdoc project, titled "Relatives and their relatives in Asia Minor Greek: A synchronic micro-comparative analysis."
Laura Bruno, a new member of DiaLing, will also introduce herself and her project, which is titled: "Non-canonical subject marking in Germanic vernaculars."
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Thu18Oct20181:00 pmLeslokaal 1.1 (Rozier 44, 1e verdieping)Show content
PhD student Isabelle de Meyer will introduce herself and her PhD project to the members of DiaLing. The title of her FWO-project is "Recherches de sémantique et d'étymologie sur gr. ἀραρίσκω « adapter » et les mots apparentés."
Dr. Leonid Kulikov will give a talk on “Greek χρόνος, its origin and cognates: An old etymological puzzle in Indo-European perspective." You can find the abstract for his lecture here.
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Thu27Sep20182:00 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (Blandijnberg 2, 3e verdieping)Show content
Prof. dr. Ulrike Vogl and PhD student Nikoleta Vassalou will introduce themselves and their respective research to the members of DiaLing.
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Wed27Jun2018Fri29Jun20188:30 amHet Pand (Onderbergen 1, 9000 Ghent)Show content
The conference is dedicated to the investigation of synchronic and diachronic functioning and variation of possessives from a great variety of perspectives and in any Romance varieties.
Please find the link to the conference page here.
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Mon25Jun20183:00 pmBlandijn room 120.025Show content
ΔiaLing presentation - in cooperation with EVALISA - by Prof. Dr. William Croft (University of New Mexico): "Using models to explore mechanisms of language variation and change."
You can find the abstract here.
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Thu14Jun20183:00 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (3de verdieping, Blandijn)Show content
ΔiaLing presentation - in cooperation with BantUGent - by Dr. Sara Pacchiarotti (Department of Languages and Cultures, BantUGent): "Bantu applicative construction types involving Proto-Bantu *-ɪd: Form, functions and diachrony."
You can find the abstract here.
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Thu31May20183:00 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (3de verdieping, Blandijn)Show content
ΔiaLing presentation by Elisabeth Witzenhausen (UGent): “A syntax of restricting modal domains? Unintegrated event conditionals in German.”
You can find the abstract here.
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Thu24May20183:30 pmlokaal 120.025 (2de verdieping, Blandijn)Show content
ΔiaLing presentation by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang De Melo (Oxford University): "Varro's linguistic theory: etymology, morphology and syntax."
You can find the abstract here.
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Fri18May201810:00 amKANTL (Koningstraat 18, 9000 Gent)Show content
PhD defense Melissa Farasyn:
Fitting in or standing out? Subject agreement phenomena in Middle Low German
Supervisor: prof. dr. Anne Breitbarth
Co-supervisor: prof. dr. Veronique HosteLocation: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde (KANTL, Koningstraat 18, 9000 Gent)
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Thu03May20183:30 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (3de verdieping, Blandijn)Show content
ΔiaLing presentation by Prof. Dr. Anna Volkova (Linguistic Convergence Laboratory – National Research University Higher School of Economics): "Subject encoding in participial relative clauses."
You can find the abstract here.
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Thu26Apr20183:00 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (3de verdieping, Blandijn)Show content
ΔiaLing presentation by Dr. Lisa Bylinina & Alexander Podobryaev (LUCL - Leiden University): "Number-neutrality and DP structure in Buriat."
You can find the abstract here.
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Thu14Dec20171:00 pmBlandijnberg 2, Grote Vergaderzaal (3de verdieping)Show content
ΔiaLing presentation by Prof. dr. Álvaro Octavio de Toledo y Huerta (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München / Madrid Institute of Advanced Studies): "Historical prejudice and linguistic oblivion: on Spanish during the 'Decadence' (ca. 1665-1830)".
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Fri24Nov2017
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Tue07Nov2017
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Thu26Oct20171:30 pmGrote vergaderzaal (3de verdieping)Show content
Matti Marttinen Larsson: korte voorstelling doctoraatsproject
On the morphosyntactic variation in adverbial locative phrases in Spanish diatopic and sociolinguistic varieties
Melissa Farasyn: langere presentatie
Position-dependent agreement in the Middle Low German plural verbal paradigm
This study focuses on a special kind of verbal ending in Middle Low German (MLG) arising in the first and second person plural (1st and 2nd p.pl.). In inversion contexts, the regular unitary inflection ending in the plural (-et/-en) alternates with an ending -e, missing the final consonant (cf. (1a) and (2a) for inversion without and (1b) and (2b) with a topic) (Lasch 19742:227).
(1) a. late wy ene 'Let us leave him alone‘ (Buxtehuder Evangeliar)
b. Nu bekenne wi […] 'Now we confess [...]‘ (Buxtehuder Evangeliar)
(2) a. Wylle gij na dessem leuende myt vrowden syn
‘Do you want to be joyful after this life?‘ (Marienklage)
b. Nu schulle gy horen vnde merken rechte [...]
'Now you will hear and learn truly [...]‘ (Buxtehuder Evangeliar)
A corpus study of 13,500 finite clauses shows that this alternation is robustly attested in all main dialect areas in Middle Low German (i.e. in 95.15% of all inversion cases). Subjunctive and indicative mood are equally affected. As MLG deletion is thus virtually omnipresent, it is difficult to trace whether the alternation originated in one specific environment. Therefore, a closer look at temporarily overlapping or related languages might shed a light on the origin of the structure.
Another difficulty tracing the origins of the structure is that the predecessor of MLG, Old Saxon (OS), has no occurrences of deletion at all (Sehrt 1925). One might argue that deletion is not visible due to the smaller amount of data, and that OS might have had sparse examples of deletion that coincidentally not show up in the small amount of available texts. This hypothesis has been tested statistically by comparison with the OE data: the results showed that the datasets show no significant correlation and thus are completely differently concerning deletion. This could mean that the alternating inversion ending in OS only developed after the 9th century during the time in which there is an attestation gap in which Latin was the writing language in the area, but could also support the criticized position of the attested OS text fragments as representative for the spoken predecessor language of MLG. The last idea is supported by the fact that the closely related Ingvæonic languages Old Frisian (cf. Hoekstra 2001, overlapping in time with MLG) and OE (providing the oldest examples of deletion) do have deletion and by the fact that MLG has it in such a great extent, even in the earliest texts. In other West Germanic languages like Old and Middle Dutch, and Old and Middle High German, deletion happens far less frequent and much later than in OE. The alternating ending in OE in particular suggests that it is a much older phenomenon, which has been present in Ingvæonic even before the the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain.
The large amount of OE data, in which deletion is common – though not as common as in MLG –, can (indirectly) shed a light on the origin and spread of the deletion. I designed queries to search through all clauses with a finite verb followed by a 1st or 2nd p.pl. pronoun in inversion in the YCOE (Taylor et al. 2003). The output shows that person and mood have a statistically significant influence on the possibility of deletion. The deletion clearly spreads from the 2nd p.pl. present tense, probably from the subjunctive mood.
Questions to be addressed for the analysis are (i) why another verb form arises, (ii) why deletion exclusively takes place in inversion, (iii) why it happens only ever in the first and second person plural and (iv) why the ending of the imperative is not affected.
I propose a change that originates in the prosodic phrase of 2nd p.pl. verb in the subjunctive mood followed by the 2nd p.pl. pronoun, following Ackema & Neeleman (2003) who propose deletion to occur within phonological phrases in which readjustment rules can apply. The difference between clauses with inversion and subject initial ones is that subject and verb belong to the same prosodic phrase in inversion (3a), whereas they belong to a different prosodic phrase in clauses without inversion (3b). This results from the fact that the verb takes a different position in inversion (Zwart 1993). In languages with a left-alignment property, the right edges of XP's correspond to the right boundaries of prosodic phrases (cf. (3a) and (3b)).
(3) a. [CP [C bidde [IP [DP gy] […]] → {bidde gy} (phrasing in MLG)
b. [IP [DP gy] [I bidden] […]] → {gy}{bidden} (phrasing in MLG)
The change in the phrase is initially phonologically triggered by adjacency of the consonant in the coda of the verb and the initial velar of the pronoun, accelerated by analogy to the 1st and 3rd sg. (f.i. bidde ick, lit. ‘pray I’). Deletion analogically extends to 1st p.pl., but not to 3rd, as it is blocked by the longer coda -nð, which pre-existed quite long – only in the present, where the change starts – until changing to the Einheitsplural (Gallée 1891:246). Similarly, The old ending -nt can still be found in Westphalian texts from the 13th and 14th century (Lasch 19742:227). The deletion spreads to other moods and tenses by analogical levelling. It remains a feature specific to 1st and 2nd p.pl., even when -nð in the 3rd person is completely lost, consolidating the Einheitsplural. Because of this, the structure early developed a systematic character, as a different ending in 1st and 2nd p.pl. corresponds to a distinction between regular plural markings (3rd p.pl.) and speech act participant markers (participant (Prt)/addressee (Adr)). In this way, the phonological change gets reinterpreted as a systematic one.
The allomorphic rule behind the new systematic change in MLG means that the common morphosyntactic features that are carried by the verb and the pronoun and which are normally only spelled out by the pronoun will be spelled out by the verb as well in this specific environment, if the verb and the pronoun holding a common plural feature are in the same phonological phrase. In non-inversion contexts, only the plural feature is spelled out, resulting in the regular endings of the Einheitsplural.
(5) a. {[V Pl] … [D Pl, Prt]} → {[V Pl, Prt] … [D Pl, Prt]}
b. {[V Pl] … [D Pl, Prt, Add]} → {[V Pl, Prt, Add] … [D Pl, Prt, Add]}
The result of this change is that the modern Low German dialects and the related Eastern Dutch dialects still show this alternation. One particular dialect even distinguishes all persons and numbers in the present tense in its agreement morphology (again), but solely in inversion.
Selected references Ackema, P. / A. Neeleman. Context-sensitive spell-out. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 21, 4 (2003):681-735. Gallée, J.H., ed. Altsächsische Grammatik. Vol. 1. Niemeyer, 1891. Hoekstra, J. Zu einem Problem der Frisistik: der Übergang der Präs. Plur.-Endung-ath zu-a. Vulpis Adolatio. Festschrift für Hubertus Menke zum 60 (2001):341-61. Hogg, R.M. / R.D. Fulk. A grammar of Old English, volume 2: Morphology. John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Höhle, T. Vorangestellte Verben und Komplementierer sind eine natürliche Klasse. Sprache im Fokus. Festschrift für Heinz Vater zum 65 (1997):107-120. Lasch, A. Mittelniederdeutsche Grammatik. Vol. 9. De Gruyter, 19742. Sanders, W. Altsächsische Sprache. Niederdeutsch. Sprache und Literature. Eine Einführung. Ed. J. Goossens. Bd. 1: Sprache. (1973):28-65. Neumünster. Sehrt, E.H. Vollständiges Wörterbuch zum Heliand und zur altsächsischen Genesis. Johns Hopkins, 1925. Taylor et al. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. University of York (2003). Zwart, C.J.W.. Dutch syntax: A minimalist approach. PhD diss., Universiteitsdrukkerij, 1993.
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Thu05Oct2017Fri06Oct20178:30 amBlandijnberg 2, Faculteitsraadzaal (1st floor)Show content
Workshop on V3 and Resumptive Adverbials. More info on http://www.gist.ugent.be/eventsandactivities/v3. Registration is required.
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Tue03Oct201711:30 amBlandijnberg 2, Grote Vergaderzaal (3de verdieping)Show content
Dialect contact, spatial variation, and language change in the morphology of the Basque auxiliary verb (Aaron Ecay, Ghent University)
In this talk, I will focus on two loci of morphological variation among Basque dialects. Basque verbs agree with arguments in the absolutive, ergative, and dative cases; both loci of variation considered in this talk concern the distribution of these morphemes in the auxiliary verb “izan” (to be/to have).
The first locus of variation is called “Differential Object Marking” (DOM). In DOM, what would in non-DOM dialects (including the standard) be an absolutive-marked (direct) object
is marked with dative case and agreement is marked on the verb using a dative-agreement
suffix rather than an absolutive-agreement prefix. The second variable is Dative Displacement (DD), which refers to the use of an absolutive-agreement prefix to mark agreement with a dative (indirect) object. From a the point of view of verbal morphology, then, DD and DOM are exact inverses of each other (they do differ in the effect they have in other morphosyntactic domains such as case-marking).
The talk explores the spatial distribution of varaints of DOM and DD through data from the “Morfologia del verbo auxiliar vasco” dialect atlas. Based on similarity to a Spanish
morphological phenomenon (also called DOM), Basque DOM has usually been analyzed as a
borrowing from that language. The data confirms this analysis and further indicates that there
are two areas in which DOM has been borrowed, apparently independently, into Basque – one
in the West and one in the Southeast.
DD has perhaps a less regular spatial distribution: in addition to a large area of DD dialects in the central northern area (i.e. the province of Lapurdi), it has been noticed in several other seemingly unconnected localities as well. Analysis of the data reveals that these latter occurrences are associated with contact between DOM and non-DOM dialects. In addition to offering an explanation of the distribution of DD, this observation lends support to the
hypothesis that linguistic innovation is (or can be) triggered when learners are faced with
inconsistent or variable input in situations of language contact.
I will also discuss how data on diatopic variation can inform morphosyntactic analysis. Forms that might appear problematic (or at least in need of a specific theoretical explanation) in “syntopic” data can turn out to be an epiphenomenon of variation and change. Finally, Basque displays a variety of morphological patterns beyond those discussed in the bulk of the talk. The data in Basque dialect atlases is a rich source of fine-grained detail on the behavior of these patterns in space and (to some degree) in time. I will briefly point out other areas of the data that (potentially) interact with DD and DOM, and which might give rise to other interesting discoveries.
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Thu22Jun20172:30 pmGrote vergaderzaal 3de verdieping BlandijnShow content
Simon Aerts (BOF): “A synchronic and diachronic systemic functional 'three-dimensional' approach to tense and aspect in the writings of Caesar and Gregory of Tours”
Koen Bostoen (ERC Consolidator Grant): “The First Bantu Speakers South of the Rainforest: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Human Migration, Language Spread, Climate Change and Early Farming in Late Holocene Central Africa”
Abstracts:
A synchronic and diachronic systemic functional 'three-dimensional' approach to tense and aspect in the writings of Caesar and Gregory of Tours
Simon Aerts (Universiteit Gent)
My research deals with the verbal categories of (relative) tense & aspect in a corpus of Latin historiographical texts: the writings of Caesar (first century BC) and Gregory of Tours (sixth century AD). The framework is a Systemic Functional model (with cognitive and other influences), especially in Bache's (2008) version. The texts are divided in narrative episodes and marked for discours mode (Smith 2003), and then subjected to a close reading on three levels of meaning, or metafunctions: ideational/representational (e.g. temporal deixis, grammatical aspect in the sense of terminativity), textual/presentational (e.g. foreground-background, discours cohesion, anticipation) and interpersonal (e.g. internal/external perspective, focalization). It is an important aspect of my investigation to see texts (and verb tenses) as having a metafunctionally diverse meaning potential, of which some meanings are emphasized or excluded by, for instance, the context. Accordingly, Latin examples are never given without the broader context.
By means of this close reading, the texts are annotated for multiple variables in a new database, of which the correlation with the use of the narrative tenses will be statistically computed. In this way, I hope to contribute to the discussion on Latin tense and aspect as the basic meaning of the infectum and perfectum stems, by conducting a modern and comprehensive research. It is, however, important not to take a stance in the debate from the start, as many linguists seem to have done in the past.
The investigation also includes a diachronic element: the language of Caesar is compared to the that of Gregory of Tours, in order to provide an interesting starting point for studies of Romance languages. This excursion is, however, planned for a later phase of my project.
The First Bantu Speakers South of the Rainforest: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Human Migration, Language Spread, Climate Change and Early Farming in Late Holocene Central Africa
Koen Bostoen (Universiteit Gent)
The Bantu Expansion is not only the principal linguistic, cultural and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. It has also become one of the most controversial issues in African History. Several generations of linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, palaeoenvironmentalists, geneticists and many more have tried to answer the question of how the relatively young Bantu language family (ca. 5000 years) could spread over disproportionally large parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa, but have almost always done so from a discipline-specific base.
The prevailing synthesis is a model in which the Bantu language dispersal is conceived as resulting from a single migratory macro-event driven by agriculture. However, many basic questions about the movement and subsistence of ancestral Bantu speakers are still completely open and can only be addressed through genuine interdisciplinary collaboration as proposed here. Through this project, researchers with outstanding expertise in Central African archaeology, archaeobotany and historical linguistics will form a unique cross-disciplinary team to carry out together evidence-based frontier research on the first Bantu-speaking settlements south of the equatorial rainforest.
Archaeological fieldwork will be undertaken in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo and Angola that are as yet still unexplored by archaeologists in order to determine the timing, location and archaeological signature of the earliest Bantu-speaking settlers in that region and to establish how they interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers. To get a better idea of their subsistence, diet and natural habitat, special attention will be paid to archaeobotanical and palaeoenvironmental proxies, whose study is still in its infancy within Central African archaeological contexts. Historical linguistic research will be pushed beyond the boundaries of vocabulary-based phylogenetics that currently prevails in Bantu classification studies and open up new pathways in the field of lexical reconstruction, especially with regard to the subsistence and land use strategies of ancestral Bantu speakers. Through external interuniversity collaboration with expert teams archaeozoological, palaeoenvironmental and genetic data as well as phylogenetic modelling will be brought into the cross-disciplinary approach.
In this way, scholars working on different datasets will collaborate directly and tackle together challenging research questions in order to acquire a new transversal view on the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in Late Holocene Central Africa and to transform the current thinking on the Bantu Expansion.
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Thu15Jun20171:00 pmGrote vergaderzaal, 3de verdieping BlandijnShow content
Dialing talk: Fayssal Tayalati en Lieven Danckaert (Université de Lille 3), "Multiple subjects across categories: Evidence from Modern Standard Arabic"
In this talk we focus on a particular type of tough-construction in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), illustrated in (1)-(2). In these examples we see a DP (bracketed), followed by an adjective (underscored) and a deverbal noun. Attached to this last element is a resumptive pronoun (glossed as ‘RP’) which corefers with the bracketed DP.
(1) [hāḏā l-kitābu]i mumtiʿun qirāʾatu-hui
this the-book.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ pleasant.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ read.f.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ-ʀᴘ.ᴍ.sɢ
‘This book is pleasant to read.’ (= predicative reading, root clause)
(2) [[al-ʿimāratu]i [ṣ-ṣaʿbu bayʿu-hāi]] bīʿat ʾaẖīran
the-building.f.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ the-difficult.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ sell.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ-ʀᴘ.f.sɢ was.sold finally
‘[The building which is difficult to sell] was finally sold.’ (= attributive reading, DP)
A key property of these structures concerns the agreement morphology on the adjective. In MSA, attributive and predicative adjectives canonically agree with their head noun or subject. However, as can be deduced from (2), the adjective in tough-constructions does not agree in number, gender or case with the lefthand DP, but rather it appears with ‘default’ nominative masculine singular morphology.
We will propose a unified analysis of (1)-(2), which crucially incorporates the idea that the relevant structures contain two distinct subject positions. First, to account for the observed lack of agreement between the DP and the adjective, we adopt Mohammad’s (1990, 2000) suggestion that the ‘default’ agreement which can be observed in a number of (impersonal) constructions in MSA is due to the presence of a (phonologically null) expletive subject. We take this expletive pronoun to be located in SpecTP, where it agrees with the adjectival predicate. Next, having discarded the hypothesis that the initial DP sits in an A-bar position, we propose that it occurs in Cardinaletti’s (2004) SubjP, i.e. a high subject position which is associated with an ‘aboutness’ reading. Interestingly, there is independent evidence that in MSA (as well as in many other languages) two clause-mate subject positions can be filled simultaneously by non-coreferring XPs: this is the case in the ‘broad subject’ pattern discussed in e.g. Alexopoulou et al. (2004). -
Fri19May201711:00 amGrote Vergaderzaal (Blandijn, 3de verdieping)Show content
Prof. Dr. Alexander Francis-Ratte (Furman University): "New evidence for the common origin of the Japanese and Korean languages”
Download the abstract here.
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Thu18May20173:00 pmBlandijn, Grote Vergaderzaal 3de verdiepingShow content
Elisabeth 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.
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Thu27Apr20173:00 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (Blandijn, 3de verdieping)Show content
Prof. dr. Nathan Hill & Johann-Mattis List (School of Oriental and African Studies/CNRS):
The reconstruction of proto-Burmish: a case study in the computational implementation of the comparative method
The use of computational methods in comparative linguistics increases ever in popularity. Nonetheless, the fruits of such methods have so far been meagre when compared to the results the traditional comparative method. This paper explores a dataset of Burmish languages as a case study in improving the methodology of computational reconstruction. In particular are aim is not replace or modify the comparative method, but rather to implement the traditional method using computational tools.Our database comprises 400 concepts and their translational counterparts in a dozen Burmish langauges. Concepts are linked to the Concepticon (List et al. 2016), languages are linked to Glottolog. The primary data comes from Huáng et al. (1992.), as digitized by STEDT (Matisoff 2011), but we supplement this with other sources. We employ an iterative workflow combining the absolute rigor of a computer with the insightful intuitions of trained historical linguists. After providing all of the data with unambiguous phonetic interpretations, including the explicit encoding of underdetermined segments, the computer provides a preliminary alignment and reconstruction. These reconstructions are then adjusted with an eye to the relevant literature on proto-Burmish. The adjustments are made inside of the workflow system so that the algorithm and general methodology will be enhanced and made more robust.
References
Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian (2015): Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology (Available onlie at http://glottolog.org. Accessed on 2016-03-15).
Huáng Bùfán 黄 布 凡 et al. eds. (1992). Zàng-Miǎn yǔzú yǔyán cíhuì 藏缅语族语言词汇. Běijīng: Zhōngyāng mínzú xuéyuàn chūbǎnshè 中央民族学院出版社.
List, Johann-Mattis & Cysouw, Michael & Forkel, Robert (eds.) 2015. Concepticon. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://concepticon.clld.org, Accessed on 2016-03-15.)
Matisoff, James (2011): STEDT. The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus. University of California at Berkeley (available online at: http://stedt.berkeley.edu). -
Fri10Feb201712:00 pmBlandijn, Grote VergaderzaalShow content
ΔiaLing talk by dr. Ángel Jiménez-Fernández (University of Sevile): Subtraction from Datives and Differential Object Accusatives
Subextraction from Datives and Differential Object Accusatives
Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández
University of Seville
ajimfer@us.es
1. Introduction, the problem and our goal. In current research on the structure of DPs in Differential Object Marking and Dative Clitic Constructions, there has been an explosion of proposals suggesting that the preposition a present in both accusative and dative objects is not a true P in Spanish, but a morphological marker (Demonte 1995; Cuervo 2003; Ormazabal & Romero 2013; Pineda 2013, a.o.). Adopting the idea that this P does not project into a PP but rather occupies the K(ase) head above DP, in this talk I analyse subextraction out of both accusative and dative prepositional DPs in psych constructions in Spanish Wh-questions, as illustrated in (1).
(1) a. ¿De qué edificio dices que no conoces [a ningún vecino]?
‘Of what building do you say that you don’t know any neighbours?
b. ¿De qué partido crees que no les ha gustado [a muchos votantes] la nueva normativa?
‘Of what party do you think many voters didn’t like the new regulations?’
However, the Spanish data are far from clear in that by assuming that a P is opaque for extraction (Abels 2003), the prediction follows that Experiencers introduced by P a should induce island effects, contrary to facts. To solve this problem, in line with Haegeman et al. (2014), I argue that island effects in objects introduced by a in Spanish are multifactorial. I extend their analysis by suggesting that one of the factors mitigating islandhood is the functional character of some prepositions (Riemsdijk 1978), and that the P a in dative and accusative DPs is a functional preposition which heads a Kase Phrase, motivated by the case properties of P. Being endowed with an Edge Feature, this KP is a weak phase which allows subextraction.
Keywords: subextraction, dative clitic constructions, Differential Object Marking, Kase Phrase, phases
Selected References
Bianchi, Valentina and Cristiano Chesi. 2014. “Subject Islands, Reconstruction, and the Flow of the Computation.” Linguistic Inquiry 45 (4): 525–569.
Haegeman, Liliane, Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández and Andrew Radford. 2014. “Deconstructing the Subject Condition in Terms of Cumulative Constraint Violation.” The Linguistic Review 31(1): 73–150.
Jiménez-Fernández, Ángel L. 2009. “On the Composite Nature of Subject Islands: A Phase-Based Approach.” SKY Journal of Linguistics 22: 91–138.
Ormazabal, Javier and Juan Romero. 2013. “Differential Object Marking, Case and Agreement.” Borealis 2 (2): 221–239.
Pineda, A. 2013. “Double Object Constructions in Spanish (and Catalan) Revisited.” In Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen, Luisa Meroni and Manuela Pinto (eds.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2011, 193–216. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Riemsdijk, Henk C. van. 1978. A Case Study in Syntactic Markedness: The Binding Nature of Prepositional Phrases. Lisse: The Peter de Ridder Press.
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Thu19Jan20173:30 pmGrote Vergaderzaal (Blandijn, 3de verdieping)Show content
ΔiaLing presentation by dr. Roland Pooth (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History): "Proto-Indo-European alignment: reasons for a change".
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Thu01Dec2016Fri02Dec2016Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- & Letterkunde (KANTL)Show content
For a large part of the twentieth century, linguistic variation has received little attention. With the work of William Labov and others, however, heterogeneity in language again became a topic of interest: within the newly founded discipline of sociolinguistics, scholars have investigated the correlationship between linguistic variants and contextual variables such as age, gender, social class, social distance, etc. In actual language use, however, variants (and to some extent, variables) do not occur in an isolated fashion; rather there is patterned heterogeneity. In this spirit, scholars have described the existence of various lects such as chronolects, dialects, idiolects, ethnolects, genderlects, regiolects, sociolects, technolects, etc. in a great number of languages.
The aim of this conference is to investigate varieties of Post-Classical and Byzantine Greek, a topic of considerable interest among various members of the Greek section at Ghent University. Whereas some research has been done in this area, aspecially when it comes to Post-Classical Greek (e.g. Janse 2007 on New Testament Greek, Horrocks 2007 on levels of writing, Torallas-Tovar 2010 on Greek in Egypt, Nachergaele 2015 on idiolect, Bentein 2015 on register), a more systematic discussion of these varieties has yet to take place – despite the great potential of our Post-Classical and Byzantine sources.
The organisers invite all Greek linguists to submit a one-page English abstract to varieties@ugent.be (please use a Unicode-based font for Greek text) by September 1, 2016 at the latest. Notification of acceptance will be given by the end of September. Next to the discussion of specific varieties, we consider the following issues of particular interest:
- What linguistic models can be used for the description and analysis of varieties?
- What is the relationship between different dimensions of variation, for example between the diachronic and the diastratic dimension?
- What role do idiolects play for the description of language variation?
- To what extent do non-congruent features (i.e. features belonging to different, or even opposed varieties) occur in texts?
- What is the relevance of and relationship between documentary and literary texts as sources of variety?
- At which linguistic levels (phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical) can varieties be described?
Organizing Committee
- Klaas Bentein (UGent)
- Willy Clarysse (KU Leuven)
- Mark Janse (UGent)
- Bruno Rochette (ULg)
Keynote Speakers
- Geoff Horrocks (University of Cambridge)
- Martti Leiwo (University of Helsinki)
More info on the conference website.
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Tue29Nov20165:00 pmBlandijn, Grote Vergaderzaal (3de verdieping)Show content
Dr. Filip De Decker: A Morphosyntactic and Semantic Analysis of the Augment Use and Absence in the Oldest Greek Literary Texts (1300-400 BC)
A Morphosyntactic and Semantic Analysis of the Augment Use and Absence in the Oldest Greek Literary Texts (1300-400 BC)
Dr Filip De DeckerIn Classical Philology and Indo-European linguistics, the term augment is used to refer to the prefix *e that is added to past tense forms of the indicative and is only attested in Indo-Iranian (stretching back until the 2 nd Millennium BC), Greek, Armenian (attested as of the 5 th century AD) and Phrygian (extinct language dating back to the 7 th century BC). In Classical Greek prose (5 th and 4 th century BC), this prefix is mandatory: lúomen means "we loosen" and elúomen "we loosened", but in the earliest Greek texts this marker was more often absent than not: it is almost completely missing in the Mycenaean prose tablets (13 th century BC) and the forms without augment are decidedly more numerous in epic Greek (written down beginning
of the 8 th century BC). For many scholars, the augment use in poetry is only metrically motivated, whereas other studies have focused on morphologic, syntactic and semantic factors, but an overall study has not been performed and most studies have been limited to Homer. My project intends to fill this void. In this presentation, I give an overview of previous scholarship, present preliminary findings (facts and figures, and rules and constraints
governing the augment use) on the augment in epic Greek (Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns) and will analyse some examples. After the Greek of epic, my research will proceed to the elegy and lyric poetry, inscriptions (prose inscriptions until the 5 th century BC and verse inscriptions), non-Attic prose (Herodotos) and the choral passages in Greek tragedy. In a final stage, a selection from the Alexandrinian and Imperial epicists will be analysed. -
Tue29Nov20165:00 pmBlandijn, Grote Vergaderzaal (3de verdieping)Show content
Tim Denecker: Linguistic and Cultural Education in Western Christianity (c.380–735): A study of the content, form, and sociocultural insertion of Latin language manuals
My postdoctoral research project aims to improve our understanding of the linguistic and cultural foundations for education in Late Antique and Early Medieval Western Christianity. In order to do so, it focuses on the corpus of Latin language manuals (grammatical, lexicographical and orthographical works) produced during the period between the manuals of Augustine (c.380) and Bede (d. 735). The project is based on the hypothesis that manuals play a key role in shaping a body of general and propaedeutic knowledge for a particular historical period, and that the language manuals at hand can accordingly be approached as major sources in assessing the status and level of linguistic and cultural knowledge in Late Antique and Early Medieval Western Christianity. More specifically, my research project investigates (1) the conceptual basis and structure of the language manuals in their relation to earlier (pagan and Christian) representatives in the tradition; (2) the formal organization of the linguistic and cultural knowledge the manuals transmit, from the perspective of special language studies (Fachtexte/Fachsprachen); and (3) the manuals’ insertion in their sociocultural context: whom do they teach and in which linguistic and sociocultural circumstances? From the perspective of historical sociolinguistics, the project looks in particular at the attitudes the manuals exhibit towards (a) the evolution of ‘Classical’ to ‘Late’ Latin, and (b) the bi- and multilingual settings in which they were conceived and used. In my presentation, I will deal in some more detail with my corpus, method and research questions, and illustrate all this by means of some first results.
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Wed16Nov20163:30 pmGrote Vergaderzaal, 3de verdieping BlandijnShow content
“Leer je collega’s kennen”:
- Isabelle de Meyer: “Asia Minor as a Linguistic Area: Greek-Turkish-Armenian Language Contacts and the Anatolian Substrate”
- Joanne Stolk: “Scribal Corrections and Language Variation and Change in Greek Documentary Papyri from Egypt (300 BCE – 800 CE)”
- Francesca Cotugno: “A multidisciplinary analysis of non-literary Latin texts from Roman Britain”
- Mark Janse: voorstel HERA-project “MuMiL-EU: Multilingualism and Minority Languages in Ancient Europe”
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Tue08Nov20163:00 pmBlandijn, Grote VergaderzaalShow content
Francesca Cotugno: voorstelling doctoraatsproject "A multidisciplinary analysis of non-literary Latin texts from Roman Britain"
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Thu27Oct201611:00 amHiko b. 001Show content
Lecturer: Dr. Joel Wallenberg (Newcastle University)
In the past, the fields of historical linguistics and synchronic syntax have both largely relied on qualitative data, e.g. the analysis of isolated examples, qualitative judgment data, etc. In the last few years, however, successes in variationist sociolinguistics, quantitative biology, and computer science have begun a revolution in the way both syntax and language change are studied: both fields have begun to use more quantitative data, especially in finding theoretically important statistical patterns in naturalistic production data. These fields have also combined with each other and with quantitative methods to give rise to a new field of quantitative diachronic comparative syntax. However, studying syntactic change in this mathematical way, particularly in a cross-linguistic, comparative approach, presents a number of interesting technical challenges. It requires measuring the frequencies of very abstract objects over very large periods of time, and in order to do this, we need a research infrastructure of diachronic parsed corpora (i.e. treebanks) drawn from a number of language histories. Building and analyzing these treebanks requires considerable technical skill, and a fair amount of collaboration between linguists with various computational, theoretical, and philological skills. Our workshops this week will help students with some background in syntax begin to search parsed corpora of this kind, interpret the results, and if they'd like, help them to contribute to the process of building more diachronic corpora of more languages.
Dinsdag, 25 oktober 2016, 14.00u - 16.30u, PC-lokaal D (PlaRoz): over werken met geparsede corpora, bv. PPCHE en IcePaHC
Donderdag, 27 oktober 2016, 11.00u - 13.00u, Hiko b. 001: over het bouwen van een eigen corpus, het parsen van je eigen gegevens
Deze workshops zijn een initiatief van Prof. Dr. Miriam Bouzouita en Prof. Dr. Anne Breitbarth.
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Tue25Oct20162:00 pmPc-lokaal D (PlaRoz)Show content
Lecturer: Dr. Joel Wallenberg (Newcastle University)
In the past, the fields of historical linguistics and synchronic syntax have both largely relied on qualitative data, e.g. the analysis of isolated examples, qualitative judgment data, etc. In the last few years, however, successes in variationist sociolinguistics, quantitative biology, and computer science have begun a revolution in the way both syntax and language change are studied: both fields have begun to use more quantitative data, especially in finding theoretically important statistical patterns in naturalistic production data. These fields have also combined with each other and with quantitative methods to give rise to a new field of quantitative diachronic comparative syntax. However, studying syntactic change in this mathematical way, particularly in a cross-linguistic, comparative approach, presents a number of interesting technical challenges. It requires measuring the frequencies of very abstract objects over very large periods of time, and in order to do this, we need a research infrastructure of diachronic parsed corpora (i.e. treebanks) drawn from a number of language histories. Building and analyzing these treebanks requires considerable technical skill, and a fair amount of collaboration between linguists with various computational, theoretical, and philological skills. Our workshops this week will help students with some background in syntax begin to search parsed corpora of this kind, interpret the results, and if they'd like, help them to contribute to the process of building more diachronic corpora of more languages.
Dinsdag, 25 oktober 2016, 14.00u - 16.30u, PC-lokaal D (PlaRoz): over werken met geparsede corpora, bv. PPCHE en IcePaHC
Donderdag, 27 oktober 2016, 11.00u - 13.00u, Hiko b. 001: over het bouwen van een eigen corpus, het parsen van je eigen gegevens
Deze workshops zijn een initiatief van Prof. Dr. Miriam Bouzouita en Prof. Dr. Anne Breitbarth.
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Wed29Jun2016Fri01Jul2016Het PandShow content
The 18th Diachronic Generative Syntax conference will be held in Ghent, Belgium, from 29 June to 1 July 2016. The conference is co-organised by the research groups DiaLing and GIST (Department of Linguistics at Ghent University).
DiGS 18 is dedicated to the historical and comparative investigations of syntactic phenomena and language change from a generative perspective.
We will also host a separate workshop on diachronic stability on 28 June 2016.Important dates:
15 January 2016 deadline for abstracts15 March 2016 notification of acceptance15 May 2016 early registration deadline29 June – 1 July 2016 conference
Abstract submission is through EasyChair.
Invited speakers DiGS18:
- Elly van Gelderen
- Cecilia Poletto
- Ioanna Sitaridou
Invited speakers workshop on Diachronic Stability:
- Sheila Watts
- Joel Wallenberg
Organizing Committee:
- Anne Breitbarth
- Miriam Bouzouita
- Lieven Danckaert
- Liliane Haegeman
- Melissa Farasyn
- Elisabeth Witzenhausen
More information under www.digs18.ugent.be or via the organisers.
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Tue28Jun2016Het PandShow content
That human languages are constantly evolving is an undeniable fact. By now, theories have become very apt at dealing with linguistic variation and change. But the reality is that populations are in constant flux, socially and linguistically. Much of what used to be considered “internally caused change” might perhaps more appropriately have to be considered as contact-induced on the level of contact between varieties of a single diasystem. This realization turns the faithful stable transmission of linguistic features where it does occur into an urgent explanandum. Different linguistic subfields have responded to this in different ways, and many questions still need to be addressed.
- Within the field of typology, the question of diachronically and cross-linguistically more stable traits of languages has been put on the agenda mainly by the work of Johanna Nichols (Nichols 1992).
- From a markedness point of view, inflectional classes apparently needlessly complicate morphological systems and lead to the expectation that they should be diachronically unstable (e.g. Wurzel 1989). The fact that this is empirically not confirmed is in need of explanation (e.g. Lass 1990).
- While there is no question that language contact may induce change (e.g. Thomason & Kaufman 1988), it has only more recently been noted that there may also be linguistic stability in spite of language contact, and that it may, in some cases, even be contact-induced (e.g. Trudgill 2011, Braunmüller et al. eds. 2014).
- A further question that has not yet satisfyingly been answered is why, given the same or similar input conditions in different languages, some linguistic changes never happen, or, once initiated, stall (e.g. Weinreich, Labov & Herzog 1968, Labov 1994; 2001).
- More recently, the related question of whether there can be such a thing as stable variation in language, and how it interacts with language change has been added to the research agenda (e.g. Wallenberg 2013, Fruehwald & Wallenberg in prep).
- It is unclear what the influence of type and token frequency is on keeping certain properties diachronically stable. On the one hand, research on grammaticalization has indicated that highly frequent items are more likely to grammaticalize, and therefore, low frequency of usage might be expected to favour stability. On the other hand, highly frequent elements often resist analogical change, so in this sense, ‘low frequency items’ are expected to be more prone to change.
- Finally, the role of extra-linguistic factors such as normative pressure in keeping linguistic phenomena constant should be studied more systematically, and with an eye on interaction with the language internal factors mentioned above.
The workshop takes place on 28 June 2016, the day before the start of DiGS 18. Its goal is to bring together researchers from different areas of linguistics to discuss the determinants of diachronic stability from their individual perspectives, with the aim of fostering dialogue between them.
Keynote speakers:
- Sheila Watts (Cambridge)
- Joel C. Wallenberg (Newcastle)
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Thu09Jun2016
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Thu02Jun2016
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Thu26May2016Blandijnberg 2Show content
Prof. Dr. Giovanna Marotta (Università di Pisa): Historical Sociolinguistics and Latin Language. Data from Inscriptions and Tablets
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Mon23May2016Fri27May2016Blandijnberg 2: room 100.072Show content
Topic and Theme
- The objective of this course is to familiarize students with the linguistic theory and methodology of constructionalization in comparison to those of grammaticalization.
- The course will include as much exercises as time will allow, and will be taught in English.
- Participants are assumed to be acquainted with basic concepts and notions of linguistics, and in particular with the domain of historical linguistics.Lecturer
Prof. Dr Elizabeth Closs Traugott (Stanford University)
Elizabeth Closs Traugott is Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English at Stanford University. She obtained her PhD in English Language at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. After receiving her PhD, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Dar-es-Salaam, and York University before settling at Stanford University in 1970. There she served as chair of the Department of Linguistics and as Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies. She is world renowned for her work on historical linguistics, especially grammaticalization, subjectification and constructionalization. Her current research focuses on (i) ways to bring the theories of construction grammar, grammaticalization and lexicalization together in a unified theory of constructionalization, (ii) the development of pragmatic markers at left and right periphery of the clause and on ways to define “periphery”.She held a Guggenheim fellowship and a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She was President of the International Society for Historical Linguistics in 1979, of the Linguistic Society of America in 1987, and of the International Society for the Linguistics of English in 2007-2008. She is currently a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.Her publications include the following books: A History of English Syntax (1972), Linguistics for Students of Literature (1980; with Mary L. Pratt), On Conditionals (1986; co-edited with Alice ter Meulen, Judith Snitzer Reilly, and Charles A. Ferguson), Approaches to Grammaticalization (1991; co-edited with Bernd Heine, 2 volumes), Grammaticalization (1993, 2nd much revised ed. 2003; with Paul Hopper), Regularity in Semantic Change (2002; with Richard B. Dasher), Lexicalization and Language Change (2005; with Laurel J. Brinton), Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization (2010; co-edited with Graeme Trousdale), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English (2012; co-edited with Terttu Nevalainen), and Constructionalization and Constructional Changes (2013; with Graeme Trousdale). -
Thu12May2016Blandijnberg 2Show content
Prof. Dr. Sara Gómez Seibane (Universidad de La Rioja): Indirect contact-induced pronominal changes in a northern Spanish variety
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Thu21Apr2016Blandijnberg 2
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Mon11Apr2016Blandijnberg 2Show content
Prof. Dr. Craig Melchert (University of California, Los Angeles): Relative Clauses in Indo-European Anatolian Languages (in collaboration with EVALISA)
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Mon21Mar2016Blandijnberg 2Show content
Wolfgang de Melo (University of Oxford): Synchronic Semantic and Siachronic Reconstruction: Latin S-Forms
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Thu10Mar2016
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Thu18Feb2016
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Thu10Dec2015Blandijnberg 2Show content
Jack Lynch (Rutgers University): Shakespeare Forger and Cretan Liar : Puzzling over William Henry Ireland
I discuss the challenges of using bibliographical evidence to tell the truth about someone who was almost always lying. Most of our evidence about the life of William Henry Ireland is books and manuscripts that have passed through his hands -- but he was such a compulsive and pathological liar that anything he said must be doubted and anything he touched is suspect. The result is a strange version of the Cretan Liar's Paradox, in which we're forced to glean the truth from documents that refuse to give it.
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Sat10Oct201513.30-17.30Openbare bibliotheek Gent ZuidShow content
Om de nieuwe website Dialectloket feestelijk te presenteren, organiseert het WVD op zaterdag 10 oktober een Dialectendag in de Openbare Bibliotheek Gent Zuid, waarop we u graag van harte willen uitnodigen!
Sommigen onder jullie hebben er misschien al van gehoord, anderen hebben er als vrijwilliger aan meegewerkt of het is helemaal nieuw, maar het Dialectloket is een feit: een nieuwe website van de Gentse dialectologen over taalvariatie en dialectologie. Op zaterdag 10 oktober, tijdens de Week van het Nederlands, gaat www.dialectloket.be online en dat willen we niet onopgemerkt laten voorbijgaan. Daarom organiseert het WVD in samenwerking met de Openbare Bibliotheek Genteen hele namiddag activiteiten rond onze dialecten, voor jong en oud!
Programma
Alle activiteiten vinden plaats in de Openbare Bibliotheek Gent Zuid (Graaf Van Vlaanderenplein 40, 9000 Gent). Als volwassene kunt u een activiteit volgen terwijl uw kind aan een jeugdactiviteit deelneemt. Maak uw keuze uit het programma:
Voor volwassenen (Achilles Musschezaal):
- 13.30 – 14.00 uur: voorstelling van de website www.dialectloket.be en het project Stemmen uit het verleden (verzameling van meer dan 750 dialectopnames uit de jaren 60 en 70).
- 14.00 – 15.00 uur: lezing van professor J. Van Keymeulen over dialecten
- 15.30 – 16.30 uur: comedy met Piv Huvluv
Voor kinderen (6-12 jaar) (Jeugdafdeling):
- 14.00 – 15.00 uur: workshops over dialecten
- 15.30 – 16.30 uur: meezinguurtje met volkszanger Erik Wille
Alle activiteiten zijn gratis. Inschrijven is niet nodig.
Meer info op www.dialectendag.ugent.beDialectloket
Op de Dialectendag wordt het wetenschapspopulariseringsproject Dialectloket gepresenteerd aan het grote publiek. Dialectloket is een nieuwe aantrekkelijke website van de dialectologen van de Universiteit Gent, die ontwikkeld werd om de variatie in onze Nederlandse taal te illustreren. Alle vormen van taalvariatie komen daarbij aan bod: dialecten, jongerentaal, tussentaal, Nederlands in België en in Nederland, Nederlands in de wereld enz. Onder een frisse lay-out vind je er onder andere informatieve teksten, digitale woordenboeken, honderden geluidsfragmenten, boeiende video’s en prachtige taalkaarten. Voor leerkrachten Nederlands voorziet de site bovendien een educatief luik vol tips en lesideeën.
Stemmen uit het verleden
De blikvanger van het Dialectloket is ongetwijfeld de collectie Stemmen uit het verleden. Meer dan 750 bandopnames uit de jaren 60 en 70 van spontane gesprekken met goede dialectsprekers werden de voorbije jaren gedigitaliseerd. De banden werden opgenomen in 550 plaatsen verspreid over heel Vlaanderen, bij sprekers geboren rond 1900. Niet alleen taalkundig zijn de opnames interessant; ze vormen ook een erg waardevolle collectie van levensverhalen en unieke getuigenissen uit de vorige eeuw. Om die prachtige verhalen te ontsluiten, zetten meer dan 50 vrijwilligers zich in om van elke opname een korte inhoud te typen. Die maakt het mogelijk om de gesprekken gemakkelijk mee te volgen én om bepaalde thema’s (bv. Eerste Wereldoorlog) op te zoeken in de opnames.
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Tue22Sep2015Blandijnberg 2Show content
Brian D. Joseph (Ohio State University): What speakers know — or don't know — about history and about typology
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Fri18Sep201510:00 amKoninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- & Letterkunde (KANTL)Show content
The conference “The Language(s) of the Papyrus Archives” will be held at the conference center KANTL (Koningstraat, Ghent) on 18 September 2015.
The conference focuses on the linguistic approach of (documentary) papyri, and on papyri preserved in papyrological archives in particular.
It has a multilingual scope with contributions about Greek, Demotic and Latin.
It not only presents scientific results of scholars working within the field of the linguistic study of papyri, but it also aims to discuss the potential of this relatively new subdiscipline.Programme
10.00-10.30 Coffee
10.30-10.45 Welcoming speech (Delphine Nachtergaele, Ghent University)
10.45-11.30 Bilingual documents in Greco-Roman Egypt (Willy Clarysse, KU Leuven)
11.30-12.15 Some Aspects of the Language of Individuals and Social Groups in Zenon Papyri (Trevor Evans, Macquarie University, Sydney)
12.15-13.30 Lunch
13.30-14.15 Further observations on senders, scribes and language (Hilla Halla-aho, University of Helsinki)
14.15-15.00 DIA in the Archive of Basil the Pagarch (VIII AD) (Klaas Bentein, Ghent University)
15.00-15.45 Digital Humanities and the future of linguistic papyrology (Mark Depauw, KU Leuven)Registration
Attendance of the conference is open to the public. A fee of €25 is asked for coffee & tea and lunch; therefore advance registration is necessary. If you plan to attend, please inform the organizers (Delphine.Nachtergaele@UGent.be) -
Wed24Jun2015Thu25Jun2015Blandijnberg 2: room 120.083Show content
It is uncontentious that language lies at the core of human interaction. However, the broad significance of this observation is only beginning to receive due recognition. In the past, the emphasis has been on the precise identification of what an individual speaker’s capacity for language amounts to in terms of a grammar, and/or individual cognitive processes. These approaches usually posit a grammar or cognitive architecture with independent modules whose elements are assigned discrete, identifiable meanings, all attributes being defined independently of other cognitive sub-systems. However, the horizon is shifting in a number of ways. Some see grammar as interfacing with a rich inferential system even though the two systems remain independent (e.g. Asher & Lascarides 2003; Carston 2002; Clark 1996; Sperber & Wilson 1986). Others focus on the need for grammars of dialogue (e.g. Ginzburg 2012). Yet others consider language a system of procedures for licensing communicative interaction (e.g. Gregoromichelaki et al. 2011). However, what most of these approaches have in common is a belief in the interdependence of the grammar system and processes of general cognition.
This shift in perspective has given rise to an array of new developments: cross-linguistic studies developing new synchronic and diachronic accounts of linguistic phenomena reflecting dialogue dynamics; computational models of ongoing dialogue dynamics, and formal grammar learning; cross-disciplinary investigations of foundational issues such as the concepts of individuation and identity that reflect language plasticity; articulation of formal and cognitive constraints on what are possible language processes, the interaction of these with constraints determining effective cross-modular processing in real time, the inter-relation between mechanisms internal to language and other cognitive systems such as for gesture and music, and perception. This workshop seeks to bring together those working within these cross-disciplinary approaches to interaction.
The updated programme and abstract booklet can be consulted here.
Abstracts are welcome relating to:
models of conversational dialogue purporting to model speaker and hearer interaction in jointly developing structures in context;
accounts of how these interactions allow for clarifications, corrections or negotiations through which such development takes place;
accounts of language acquisition in which such interactions are assigned central status;
accounts of how such interactive adaptations consolidate via ongoing use to yield language variation and change;
accounts of how incremental language processing interfaces with other modalities such as gesture.
Abstracts should be anonymous and no longer than one page, including references and examples, in 12-point Times New Roman, with margins of at least 2.5 cm. Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract per author. The deadline for submission is 29 February, 2016. Abstracts are to be submitted in pdf-format via the EasyChair system at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=interaction2016.To submit an abstract, you must follow these steps:To begin, login at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=interaction2016
If you do not have an existing EasyChair account, click on “Sign up for an account”. You will be asked to fill out a simple form to create an account.
Click ”New Submission” at the top of the page.
Select the track relevant for your submission and click “Continue”.
Enter author information in the provided fields. Tick the ”Corresponding Author” box for all authors who wish to receive e-mail correspondences or notifications.
Enter your title in the “Title” field.
In the “Abstract” field, please enter a one sentence summary. Do not paste your full abstract into this field.
Enter at least three keywords.
Upload your abstract in the “Paper” field. Only .pdf files will be accepted. Do not include your name or affiliation in the abstract/file name!
Do not tick the “Abstract only” box, or your .pdf will not be uploaded.
Click “Submit”. You will be taken to a summary page of your submission – this is your confirmation that it has been saved. Abstracts will be reviewed anonymously.
You may make any necessary updates until the deadline by logging in and clicking on “My Submissions”.
For more information, please contact interaction2016@easychair.orgCited referencesAsher, N. & A. Lascarides (2003) Logics of Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Carston, R (2002) Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.Clark, H. (1996) Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press.Ginzburg, J. (2012) The Interactive Stance: Meaning for Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Gregoromichelaki, E., R. Kempson, M. Purver, G.J. Mills, R. Cann, W. Meyer-Viol & P.G.T. Healey (2011) ‘Incrementality and Intention-Recognition in Utterance Processing.’ Dialogue and Discourse2: 199-233.Local organisers:
Miriam Bouzouita
Sol Sansiñena Pascual
Programme committee:Miriam Bouzouita
Hannah Gibson
Ruth Kempson
Jieun Kiaer
Chris HowesAccommodation
HotelsIbis Gent Centrum Opera
Marriott Hotel Ghent
Hotel Harmony
Ghent River Hotel
Novotel
Most hotels have corporate rates for guests of the university.Charm hotels
Hotel Gravensteen
Monasterium Poortackere
Bed & Breakfasts, guesthouseshttp://www.bedandbreakfast-gent.be/_en/home.php
http://www.charmio.com/en/region/ghent
Zebrastraat
PPP Guesthouse
NOTE that you will always have to pay a separate ‘city tax’ of €2,50 per night on top of your normal hotel bill.Travel information
Getting to Ghent (from Brussels National Airport or a Brussels train station)Take a train to Ghent St-Pieters station. For information about train timetables, click here.Getting to the conference venue from the train station (St-Pieters): 15 minutes
Take tram #1 in the direction of Wondelgem/Evergem/Centre from the tram platform (“to city centre”) outside the train station. Get off at Verlorenkost. You are now on the Kortrijksepoortstraat, at the corner turn right onto Sint-Kwintensberg, continue straight till you reach on the left-hand side the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy (Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte), turn left onto Blandijnberg. Enter through the main entrance and take stairs to the second floor. The presentations will be held in room 120.083 (2nd floor).More information on how to get there: www.delijn.be (in Dutch), or more specifically, http://reisinfo.delijn.be/reisinfo/. Getting around in GhentThere is a good bus and tram network throughout the city (see www.delijn.be). Tickets cost 3 euros from the vending machine. A ticket valid for 10 rides costs 14 euros (1,40 cents per ride). You will find the ticket vending machines outside the station, on the tram platform. Ghent is pretty manageable on foot as well, however. All hotels suggested on this website are in the center of town, as is the conference venue. For a map of the city, click here (or many other websites). -
Fri05Jun2015Blandijnberg 2Show content
Prof. Agnes Jäger (University of Cologne): "Comparison constructions in the history of German"
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Thu30Apr2015Blandijnberg 2Show content
Ioanna Sitaridou (Cambridge University): Word order in Old Ibero-Romance: (non-)V2, participle fronting and information structure
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Wed29Apr2015Blandijnberg 2Show content
Ioanna Sitaridou (Cambridge University): Phylogenetic approaches to the evolution of Pontic Greek
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Tue28Apr2015Blandijnberg 2Show content
Prof. Lawrence A. Reid (University of Hawai’i): "Accounting for Variability in Malayo-Polynesian Pronouns: Morphological Instability or Drift?" (Evalisa / ΔiaLing)
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Tue31Mar2015Thu02Apr2015Blandijnberg 2Show content
Specialist course Methods in building and exploiting parsed (historical) corpora.
Lecturers:
- Dr Joel C. Wallenberg (Newcastle)
- Dr Caitlin Light (York)
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Mon16Mar2015Tue17Mar2015Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- & Letterkunde (KANTL)Show content
Info & Organisation:
- Jóhanna Barðdal (UGent)
- Michael Frotscher (UGent)
- Mark Janse (UGent/Oxford)
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Tue13Jan2015Thu15Jan2015Blandijnberg 2Show content
Specialist course Argument structure and the dative. Case studies from Romance languages with special reference to Spanish.
Lecturer:
Prof. Dr. Chantal Melis (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
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Tue16Dec2014Blandijnberg 2Show content
Mark Janse (Ugent/Oxford): Godsdienst, taal en identiteit in Ottomaans Cappadocië; aansluitend: filmvoorstelling “Laatste Woorden”, over de laatste sprekers van het Cappadocisch Grieks
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Mon08Dec2014
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Mon01Dec2014
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Thu16Oct2014Blandijnberg 2Show content
Martijn Wieling (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen): Kwantitatieve Dialectologie/Dialectometrie
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Mon26May2014Blandijnberg 2Show content
Brian D. Joseph (Ohio State University): Infinitival ‘Streamlining’ in the Balkans, Switch Reference and Grammaticalization
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Thu22May2014Blandijnberg 2Show content
Brian D. Joseph (Ohio State University): Can we count on/in Grammaticalization?