Events

Upcoming events

Event Information:

  • Fri
    03
    Oct
    2025

    Lorenzo Maselli (Ghent University) - "Documenting the implosives and labial-velars of the Ubangi River Basin"

    1:30 pmBlandijn 2 1.91
    Documenting the implosives and labial-velars of the Ubangi River Basin

    This contribution reports on a recent field mission carried out in the Ubangi River Basin (Central African Republic). Work focused on 31 varieties belonging to the Bantu, Ubangi, and Central Sudanic subfamilies of Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan. The primary objective was to document implosive and labial-velar consonants. To this end, acoustic, electroglottographic, and aerodynamic (pneumotachographic) data were collected. In the context of this presentation: I will present a detailed report on activities within the framework of this mission; I will illustrate the quality and typology of the data and exemplify the usefulness of integrated phonetic research with instances from Central Sudanic Bagiro; I will present a few general remarks on the merit of instrumental data collection for phonetic typology and phonological theory. The hope is that this will serve as a handy reference for fellow researchers interested in instrumental work in the field.

     

    Joint talk with BantUGent.

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Past events

Event Information:

  • Thu
    18
    May
    2017

    If not ≠ unless - Exceptive clauses in Continental West Germanic

    3:00 pmBlandijn, Grote Vergaderzaal 3de verdieping

    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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