Please join us this Friday, February 24th at 1PM in Rosenwald 208 for a joint meeting of LVC and the Morphology & Syntax workshops. Our speaker will be Adam Singerman. “Finite embedding and quotation in Tuparí” Adam Roth Singerman University of Chicago Tuparí (Tupían; Brazil) has innovated a finite embedding construction that bears the structural […]
Continue reading →Please join the Language Variation and Change Workshop this Friday, November 11th at 3:30 PM in Cobb 116, for a talk from our invited speaker, Nicole Rosen. Details below. “Nominal Contact in the Michif Language” Nicole Rosen University of Manitoba Michif is an endangered Metis language with its roots in the Fur Trade in Canada, […]
Continue reading →Friday, December 4th @ 3:00PM in Rosenwald 301 Understanding Basque Differential Object Marking from Typological, Contact and Attitudinal perspectives Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Differential Object Marking (DOM) has enjoyed abundant scholarly interest insomuch as theoretical explanations of its key parameters (Aissen 2003; Malchukov and Swart 2008; Hoop and Swart 2007), language-specific constraints […]
Continue reading →Monday, June 2nd @ 3:00 PM, Cobb 104 Nominal Licensing and vP In this talk, I discuss aspects of nominal distribution patterns in several Bantu languages. While Bantu languages have been claimed to lack case-licensing altogether (e.g. Harford 1985, Diercks 2012, a.o.), I outline a research path for investigating structural licensing of nominals in Bantu. […]
Continue reading →Monday, April 28th @ 3:00 PM, Cobb 104 Processing Difficulty and the Envelope of Variation A longstanding problem in the study of syntactic variation is determining the envelope of variation. That is, what are the variants that speakers choose among when they speak? This problem is usually thought of in terms of semantic equivalency: are […]
Continue reading →Monday, November 4th @ 3 PM, Harper 140 Magical ideologies of language change: Connecting micro-level variation to macro-areal diversification In many respects, historical investigation of the Bantu language family serves as a model application of the Comparative Method to a genealogical unit outside of Indo-European. The close relationship of hundreds of languages occupying the greater part […]
Continue reading →Monday, April 8th @ 3 PM, Wieboldt 408 Backchanneling in Russian: Form, Function and Occurrence Backchannels, otherwise known as listener response tokens, have been shown to occur quite frequently in the course of interactions between two speakers and they are considered to occur universally. However as shown by Tottie, there is some evidence for backchanneling […]
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