2022
Closest Conjunct Concord – A new approach to DP-internal Closest Conjunct Agreement
This week, George Bennett (UCL London) presents the main points from his MA thesis.
Time and place: Dec. 9, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, HW536
Closest Conjunct Agreement (CCA) refers to the phenomenon whereby a verb agrees in gender/number with the linearly closest/adjacent of two (or more) coordinated subject DP/NPs. The commonly adopted asymmetrical/hierarchical model of coordination is argued to neatly account for post-verbal CCA under the assumption that the first (leftmost) conjunct is structurally higher than following conjuncts, and is therefore the first DP that the verbal Probe encounters during its downward c-command search for phi-valuation. This adjacency effect is also observed in the nominal domain (i.e. DP-internally) in a large number of European languages, in which a determiner and/or adjective agrees in gender with the closest noun. The few existing papers on DP-internal CCA more or less directly apply the Probe/Goal analysis of CCA in the clausal domain to determiner/adjectival agreement. However, in recent years, a growing number of linguists have hypothesized that DP-internal agreement (Concord) involves an entirely different mechanism than that which facilitates subject-predicate agreement, and have proposed instead that Concord is based on domination, rather than c-command. If this is true, then DP-internal CCA requires a new theory. In this presentation, I propose a new approach to DP-internal CCA – namely, Closest Conjunct Concord.
Phonological aspiration in neutralizing context: To deaspirate or to throwback?
This week, Ali H. Birahimani talks about aspiration in Balochi (an Iranian language of western Asia).
Time and place: Nov. 25, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, HW536
This study explores the treatments of phonological aspiration in the neutralizing context of pre-consonantal coda, based on production data elicited experimentally from speakers of Balochi (an Iranian language of western Asia). There are two well known outcomes of aspiration in this context, neutralization (obviously) and regressive transposition of aspiration, in simplified abstract phonological sequences C1VC2H-C3 > C1VC2C3 and C1VC2H-C3 > C1HVC2C3 respectively – the latter of these being a rarity and also an aberration cross-linguistically. Because phonological aspiration in a neutralizing context has not been examined before, especially in synchronic data, it is not certain if the outcomes of deaspiration and throwback are the only treatments; it is possible that in reality these two comprise an end result of more diverse articulatory strategies, one that derives from potential limitations of auditory-perceptual judgments. In analyzing the treatments of C1VC2H-C3 acoustically, with an aim to identify the strategies employed by language users, we want in principle to study the profile of three transitions, C1-V, V-C2, and C2H-C3. In this talk I set forth the Balochi data on aspiration in the said context and discuss the issues related to its analysis, focusing in particular on the problematic C2H-C3 transition.
When children are more pragmatic than adults: The development of understanding imprecision
Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos, Postdoctoral fellow at IFIKK, presents findings from an experiment comparing children and adult's imprecise interpretations of adjectives.
Time and place: Sep. 30, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, HW536
Absolute adjectives like straight can have both a precise (“literal”) (perfectly straight) and an imprecise (“non-literal”) (straight enough) interpretation. Their precise interpretation is generally believed to be part of the adjective’s semantic meaning (Kennedy, 2007; Syrett et al., 2010; Aparicio et al., 2015; i.a.). The imprecise interpretation is seen as a pragmatic phenomenon that arises after setting a contextual threshold for tolerance (see Lasersohn, 1999; Leffel et al., 2016). How and when do we learn to set this threshold in order to decide whether people are speaking precisely or imprecisely?
It could be the case that as a form of pragmatic reasoning, imprecise interpretations develop over time, with young children first showing a preference for literal interpretations, similarly to what has been found for other pragmatic phenomena such as scalar implicatures and irony (e.g., Noveck, 2001). Alternatively, it could be that children show the opposite trajectory: If they have not yet learnt to set a threshold for precision, they might show higher tolerance for imprecise usages of absolute adjectives at a young age.
The current study tests these two hypotheses using a picture selection paradigm based on the study by Syrett et al. (2010). In a pre-registered experiment, we tested 100 native speakers of Norwegian ages 3-8 along with 33 adults. Our findings suggest that children behave more pragmatically than adults when understanding imprecision, and that only with age do they become less tolerant of imprecise interpretations of absolute adjectives.
Points of Comparison
Chris Kennedy visits from the University of Chicago.
Time and place: Sep. 16, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, HW536
Alrenga, Kennedy and Merchant 2012 (AKM) propose that in English, both the comparative morphology ‘-er/more’ (COMP) and the standard marker ’than’ (STND) introduce the semantics of comparison. AKM’s primary goal is to account for correlations between the scope of the standard phrase and the scope of comparison, but they also point to some potential implications of their analysis for the typology of comparatives, for the morphosyntax of comparatives on the one hand, and for the distinction between “phrasal” and “clausal” comparatives on the other hand. This talk explores these implications, focusing on English, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese.
The perception of German word-final devoicing in natural and synthesized speech
Aleese Block, visiting Oslo from UC Davis, talks about the production and perception of word-final devoicing in German across text-to-speech and naturally-produced utterances.
Time and place: June 17, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, HW536 and Zoom
This study explores the production and perception of word-final devoicing in German across text-to-speech (from technology used in common voice-AI “smart” speaker devices) and naturally-produced utterances. First, the phonetic realization of word-final devoicing in German across the TTS and naturally produced word productions was compared. Acoustic analyses reveal that the cues to word-final devoicing in German were distinct across the speech types. Naturally-produced words with phonologically voiced codas contained partial voicing, as well as longer vowels than words with voiceless codas. However, these distinctions were not present in TTS speech. Next, we had German listeners complete a forced-choice identification task, in which they heard the words and made coda consonant categorizations, in order to examine the intelligibility consequences of the word-final devoicing patterns across speech types. Accuracy was higher for the naturally-produced, than the synthetic speech. Moreover, listeners systematically misidentified voiced codas as voiceless in TTS speech. Overall, this study extends previous literature on speech intelligibility at the intersection of speech synthesis and contrast neutralization. TTS voices tend to neutralize salient phonetic cues present in natural speech. Subsequently, listeners are less able to identify phonological distinctions in TTS speech. We also discuss how investigating which cues are more salient in natural speech can be beneficial in synthetic speech generation to make them not only more natural, but also easier to perceive.
How flexible is our grammatical gender processing?
A guest lecture by Sendy Caffarra.
Time and place: June 3, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, HW421 and Zoom
This talk will explore how our brain deals with the morphosyntactic feature of gender in order to track agreement dependencies and reach a full understanding of a sentence. I will walk you through some electrophysiological studies that examine gender agreement processing in different modalities (auditory and visual) and in a different set of comprehenders (monolinguals and bilinguals). These findings will support the idea that the time course of our parsing is highly dependent on the experiential background of the parser.
Sendy Caffarra is an Assistant professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy) and a visiting scholar at Stanford University (USA). She is interested in how experience changes the way we process and understand spoken and written language. She uses electrophysiological and neuroimaging tools to track how our language brain processes are shaped by learning experience.
This is a joint Multiling/ILN event. Please note the place: HW421!
On the semantics of face emojis
Patrick Georg Grosz.
Time and place: Apr. 22, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, HW536 and Zoom
In recent years, more and more communicative exchanges have moved from physical face-to-face context into the digital realm, with written digital communication (text messages, instant messaging, social media posts, blog posts, emails, etc) being one of the main modes of online communication. By its very nature, the written medium lacks central visual and auditive features of in-person communication, such as facial expressions, gestures and intonation. Such features have been reintroduced in the shape of emojis, and, in particular, face emojis (😊,😔,😒,😩), which have quickly been embraced by internet users around the globe in the decade since they have been introduced to a global market in 2011. In this talk, I discuss current issues in the semantic analysis of face emojis, focusing in particular on the interactions between face emojis and the text that they accompany.
Predicting the f***ing referent: An eye-tracking study on the benefits of negative expressive adjectives during sentence comprehension
Camilo Rodríguez Ronderos talks about words like "fucking" and how it is processed in conversation.
Time and place: Apr. 8, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, HW536
Theoretical work on negative expressive adjectives such as “fucking” has argued that these convey a speaker-oriented attitude, which constitutes a separate dimension of
meaning (Potts, 2005, Harris & Potts, 2009, Gutzmann, 2019, i.a.). However, it’s unclear what it means for an expressive to be speaker-oriented during language processing: Can comprehenders automatically and rapidly retrieve a speaker’s perspective via the expressive, or is this a delayed and effortful inferential process? And what role does the expressive’s syntactic flexibility play? To investigate this, we tested two novel hypotheses using an eye-tracking, Visual World Paradigm. Our results suggest that comprehenders can automatically and locally use expressives to anticipate an upcoming referent if they have knowledge of the speaker’s perspective. Further, we suggest that an expressive’s syntactic flexibility allows for even earlier anticipation of a referent, representing an added cognitive benefit for comprehenders.
Talking Tech: How do interactions with voice-AI influence human speech?
by Georgia Zellou (University of California, Davis)
Time and place: Mar. 25, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, Zoom and stream in HW536
It’s a new digital era: humans are now interfacing with technology using spoken language. Many people are regularly talking to voice-activated artificially intelligent (AI) personal assistants, such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, that spontaneously and more naturalistically produce interactive speech. Human speech patterns toward these new voice-AI interlocutors can serve as a “Turing” test for discovering underlying cognitive representations used during production and perception. In this talk, I will discuss recent work from our lab where we are exploring how interactions with voice-AI can influence human speech patterns during short-term interactions, and the potential that this has to lead to sound change within speech communities. Our findings demonstrate that examining people’s speech behavior when interacting with voice-AI can serve as a test to our scientific understanding of speech communication, language use, and even linguistic change.
Building Phonotacticon 1.0, a phonological database of Eurasia
Ian Joo (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), currently a visiting PhD student at Uppsala University, presents a phonological database he and his colleague Yu-Yin Hsu are building.
Time and place: Mar. 18, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, HW536 and Zoom
We present Phonotacticon 1.0, a database in the make that is aimed to contain basic phonological information of around 600 lects spoken in the Eurasian continent. The database includes the following information of each lect:
- segmental phonemes;
- number of tonemes;
- word-initially forbidden consonants;
- word-finally permitted consonants; and
- syllable structure.
Based on these five types of data, we measure the phonological distance between each pair of lects. For example, the normalized phonological distance between English and French is ca. 0.238, which is unsurprisingly shorter than the distance between English and Hindi (ca. 0.328), which is again shorter than the distance between English and Japanese (ca. 0.661). Overall, at the current stage of the database, which is ca. 22% complete, the phonological distances between lects correlate with their geographical distances (p < 0.001).
Using the distance between genealogically different lects, we can visualize the distribution of cross-family convergence throughout Eurasia, as shown in Figure 1. The distribution match some of the commonly accepted linguistic area, such as South Asia or Mainland Southeast Asia, but also reveal some of the previously unknown or less commonly known areal patterns.
Diminutivizing L-reduplication in Norwegian (the guttelutt seminar)
Henrik Torgersen will give a naiselais seminar about a previously undescribed way of diminutivizing process in Norwegian.
Time and place: Feb. 11, 2022 2:00 PM – Jan. 28, 2022 3:00 PM, HW536 og zoom
In this talk, Henrik gives a broad overview of how Norwegian productively makes use of L-reduplication to form diminutives. I argue that this previously undescribed process is a diminutivizing process that copies the lexical root. The construction can be traced back to around the start of the 20th century and its realization varies geographically between two main variants. I show that L-reduplication is restricted phonologically, but applies productively (unlike other echo reduplicative processes) to different parts of speech.
Successes and shortcomings of phonological accounts of Scandinavian Object Shift
Paulina Lyskawa (UiT) presents work from the ExSynOp project. Using automatic phonological alignment of data from the Nordic Word Order Database, she and her colleagues have tested phonological hypotheses explaining object shift in Scandinavian.
Time and place: Jan. 14, 2022 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM, Zoom
2021
Defrosting frozen metaphors: idiom extensions and the proper representation of idiomatic expressions
Jamie Findlay talks about what idioms really are. Time and place: Dec. 10, 2021 2:00 PM–3:00 PM, Zoom
Idioms are sometimes described as 'frozen metaphors': many have their origins in productive metaphorical language, but are now opaque and conventionalized. Analyses of idioms tend to emphasize either the 'frozen' or the 'metaphor' part of this description, representing their special meanings either as directly encoded or as processed online via a metaphorical mapping. This talk presents evidence from both sides of this debate, and suggests that both are right, since there are actually two distinct modes of idiom usage.
The silence of the slurs: inferences about prejudice under ellipsis
Masha Esipova presents new quantitative data on whether inferences about prejudice contributed by slurs persist under ellipsis in dialogue.
Time and place: Dec. 3, 2021 2:00 PM–3:00 PM, Zoom (link under abstract)
Different types of content behave differently under ellipsis. For instance, not-at-issue inferences that are an inextricable part of the lexical meaning of a given item, like the presupposition of stop, always persist under ellipsis, but inferences contributed by purely performative items (i.e., items whose contributions hinge on the act of uttering them, so there is no use without mention for them), like fucking, never do:
(1) Pam stopped smoking, {but Kim didn't / and Kim did, too / and so did Kim}.
(i) → Pam used to smoke.
(ii) → Kim used to smoke.
(2) A: Did you bring a fucking gun to my house?
B: No, I didn't. / Yes, I did. / Yes, I did so. / Yes, I brought one.
(i) → A is experiencing strong emotions.
(ii) ↛ B is experiencing strong emotions.
Slurs, however, represent a more complex case: (i) the inference about prejudice is part of the lexical meaning of a slur, which can be the head of the antecedent constituent in certain types of ellipsis (like stop, unlike fucking); (ii) despite its sublexical nature, this inference is not crucial for the at-issue content of a given sentence to make sense (unlike stop, like fucking); (iii) slurs can be used performatively deliberately (use via mention) and can have a performative effect of offense by virtue of being uttered even in the absence of such intent on behalf of the speaker (mention without use), but it is unclear to what extent the inference about prejudice can be preserved if the slur itself is not uttered (use without mention). In this talk, I report experimental results for paradigms like (3) aiming to answer this latter question:
(3) Context: We are in a fictional universe where humans co-exist with centaurs, dwarves, elves, orcs, etc. 'Tusky' is a slur for orcs. The following exchange happens in the context of a criminal investigation.
Detective: Did you see a tusky?
Witness: Yes. / Yes, I did. / Yes, I saw one. / Yes, I saw a tusky. / Yes, I saw an orc.
Question: How likely do you think that this witness is prejudiced against orcs?
This talk can only be followed on Zoom.
Is quantitative linguistics credible?
Timo B. Roettger will give you the answer you don't want to hear, but deserve.
Time and place: Nov. 19, 2021 2:00 PM–3:00 PM, HW536
Abstract: Large-scale attempts to replicate published studies across the quantitative sciences have uncovered surprisingly low replication rates. This discovery has led to what is now referred to as the “replication crisis”. Since our understanding of human language is increasingly shaped by quantitative data, there are raising concerns that a similar state of affairs is true for quantitative linguistics because it shares with other disciplines many research practices that decrease the replicability of published findings. In this talk, I will discuss credibility decreasing practices in our field and I will suggest promising ways forward to increase the transparency, reproducibility, and credibility of our work. Moreover, I will offer actionable solutions that can help us create a more robust empirical foundation of quantitative linguistics and aid us in saving time and resources.
The talk can also be followed on Zoom.
Immunolinguistics
Mai Ha Vu talks about her postdoctoral project of applying linguistics to solving questions in immunology.
Time and place: Nov. 5, 2021 2:00 PM–3:00 PM, HW536
When you get a virus, your immune system almost immediately mounts an immune response against the virus. This is possible because your body has myriads of highly diverse immune receptors that are capable of recognizing almost any foreign molecule (antigen). As of now, the 'grammar' of these immune receptors is still unknown, that is we lack precise mapping rules between immune receptors and antigens.
Immunolingo is an interdisciplinary project between life sciences, informatics, statistics and linguistics with the goal of learning these mapping rules. In this talk, I will talk about the challenges we face when applying linguistics to non-language data, a methodological framework we propose for using linguistic and natural language processing methods on biological data, and our next steps forward.
Immunolinguistics project page
Is Stockholm’s argot more 'multi' than ever? A longitudinal analysis of loanwords in hip hop from 1994 to 2020
Our new postdoc Nathan Young talks about loanwords in Swedish, and looks specifically at hip-hop lyrics.
Time and place: Oct. 29, 2021 2:00 PM–3:00 PM, HW536
Much has been written on urban argots and anti-languages – both in global (Halliday, 1976) and local contexts (Thesleff, 1912). But no study has documented real-time longitudinal data that captures their emergence. This project seeks to approximate such a dataset by examining a corpus of Swedish hip hop from 1994 to 2020. Many artists boast of close ties to gang involvement and the criminal underworld, so their lyrics therefore provide a window into otherwise elusive speech practices.
The corpus is self-assembled and contains 1.3 million words from over 2,500 songs by over 500 artists. Lyrics are coded for artist age, gender, ethnicity, "race", city, polarity of sentiment, and year. High-polarity lyrics predict more foreign lexical matter, which reinforces interpreting them as vernacular and oppositional. Year, however, is the most robust predictor of foreign lexical matter – the later the year, the more loanwords.
I discuss one such loanword, 'benim', a first-person pronoun with self-aggrandizing tenor (e.g. "benim gjorde brott innan benim fick moustache"/"I was committing crimes before I got facial hair." Z.e, & Jiggz, 2018, 2:36, cited in Young, 2021). Borrowed from Turkish, it bears striking similarity to its forebear 'mandrom', a Romani loanword in Low Stockholmian (e.g. "det är mandroms tjejja!"/"That's my girl!"; Koch, 1916, p. 98). One hundred years apart, an important commonality is that they both materialized during explosive social and demographic upheaval: 'mandrom' during The Industrial Revolution; 'benim' during Late Modernity. I discuss how this point might have been missed in typical contact-linguistic interpretations of multiethnolects.
Social ecology aside, 'benim' is also a linguistic anomaly by virtue of being a loanword in a highly functional role (Hock, 2009, pp. 381–385). I discuss how this may have come to be, drawing on Traugott's (2015) construction-grammar heuristic in order to shed light on its grammaticalization process into Swedish.
The project is ongoing, but the interim results warrant discussion before moving forward with more data collection and analysis.
References
Halliday, M. A. K. (1976). Anti‐languages. American Anthropologist, 78(3), 570-584.
Hock, H. H. (2009). Principles of historical linguistics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Koch, M. (1916). Guds vackra värld: En historia om rätt och orätt. Del 3. Stockholm: Albert Bonnier.
Thesleff, A. (1912). Stockholms forbrytarspråk och lägre slang, 1910–1912. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag.
Young, N. (2021). Benim – A new pronoun in Swedish. In H. Van de Velde, N. Haug Hilton, & Knooihuizen (Eds.), Studies in Language Variation: Selected Papers of ICLaVE10. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://938ce093-518c-4c47-9adc-21d469c6dc2c.filesusr.com/ugd/5215a0_a46f3fe9a04d4cbf9ca85d3d5353f9ec.pdf
Z.e, & Jiggz. (2018, November). Sverige vet [Sweden knows] [music video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/P1K4wfpVVRM
Clausal organisation in Uruangnirin
Eline Visser (guest researcher and postdoc in Åshild Næss's project) talks about her project. The event is in English and open to everyone. Welcome!
Time and place: Oct. 22, 2021 2:00 PM–3:00 PM, HW609
The Austronesian languages show many different strategies for clausal organisation. Uruangnirin in eastern Indonesia lies in an interesting area, where different systems meet. The language is previously undescribed and is hoped to contribute to understanding how clausal organisation and grammatical relations develop. I will present the background for my project and my plans for investigating Uruangnirin.
Direct and split agreement patterns of person and number in transitive verbs in Gu-jingaliya (Maningrida, Northern Australia)
David Felipe Guerrero-Beltran (Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Université de Paris/CNRS & School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne) holder foredrag. Han skal snakke om grammatiske relasjoner i et australsk språk. Arrangementet er åpent for alle. Velkommen!
Time and place: Oct. 8, 2021 2:00 PM–3:00 PM, HW536
Gu-jingaliya (also referred to as Burarra/Gun-nartpa) is a non-Pama-Nyungan language from northern Australia that belongs to the Maningrida language family. This language has a highly agglutinative and synthetic morphology that is especially salient in person and number marking in verbs and nominals. Like in other agglutinative languages, Gu-jingaliya transitive verbs can agree with both subject and object depending on their referential features. However, Gu-jingaliya presents a system in which person and number prefixes can agree with different arguments, resulting in split agreement patterns. I will present an overview of the person-number system and the main characteristics of the agreement patterns of person and number in Gu-jingaliya transitive verbs.
2018
Looking into the future
The departmental seminar at ILN can offer another exciting invited speaker! This time, we host a talk by Ryan Bochnak out of the University of Konstanz. He is visiting us to talk about future temporal reference.
Time and place: June 1, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P. A. Munch's house, room 10
The nature of future temporal reference has long posed a challenge to linguistic theories of temporal interpretation. On the one hand, the future would seem to be the mirror image of the past on a linear timeline. On the other hand, the future is inherently non-factual, suggesting a modal analysis of the future which is non-symmetrical with the past and present. Cross-linguistic studies of temporal reference have furthermore uncovered much variation in the strategies used to express future interpretation, and this variation cross-cuts the tensed/tenseless language divide. This talk focuses on the availability of future interpretations without overt future morphology, for example sentences like The plane departs at 11am on Wednesday, where the present tense is used to talk about the future. Special attention will be given to aspects of cross-linguistic variation, using the extant cross-linguistic literature on temporal interpretation, with an eye towards how existing accounts could be leveraged to develop a cross-linguistically valid theory of future interpretation (and temporal interpretation more generally), as well as the challenges they face. I will suggest possible parameters of variation, and point to areas where more cross-linguistic research is needed to supplement the empirical picture.
Language change in multilingual settings: the case of Dutch urban vernaculars
Dr. Marieke Meelen from the University of Cambridge visits us to speak about language change in multilingual settings.
Time and place: May 25, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P. A. Munch's house, seminar room 10
In recent years, immigration to large cities in Europe has increased in both diversity and numbers. Second-generation immigrants generally speak both languages fluently, but in multicultural urban settings, these second generation immigrants and their non-immigrant peers have developed new urban varieties varieties ('multi-ethnolects' or ‘urban vernaculars’) based on the dominant language. The emergence of new speech styles in multilingual communities provides data that can be used to explore cognitive, language-internal mechanisms of change. In this talk, I will share new data from Dutch urban vernaculars, focusing on specific case studies in both the nominal and the clausal domain. I will compare these to known cases in related urban vernaculars and present a formal analysis based on the cross-linguistic results.
In the nominal domain I will zoom in on two changes that have been observed in varieties of Swedish, Norwegian and German as well: bare NPs exhibiting loss of prepositions and/or determiners and the grammaticalisation of the comparative/deictic markers ‘zo, zo’n’. In the clausal domain I will focus on the apparent loss of V2 word order, which has been observed in various other Germanic urban vernaculars, but until recently has not been considered a feature of Dutch urban vernaculars (see Meelen, Mourigh & Cheng forthcoming).
Figurative language acquisition
In this installment of the linguistic departmental seminar, the guest of honor is Ingrid L. Falkum. The topic of the talk is language acquisition in the area of semantics and pragmatics, and it is discussed by means of experimental method: Eye-tracking and picture selection.
Time and place: Mar. 2, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P. A. Munch’s house, seminar room 10
Dr. Ingrid Lossius Falkum is a researcher at IFIKK, UiO, and holds a PhD from University College London (UCL). Her main research interests lie at the pragmatics-semantics interface, especially lexical pragmatics.
It is widely agreed that a pragmatic ability, enabling the expression and recognition of communicative intents, is present early in development. For instance, children rely on their pragmatic abilities in word learning, which requires intention reading, knowledge of discourse status, inferences about speakers’ word choices, and some types of perspective taking.
At the same time, a large body of evidence suggests that until quite late in development, children have difficulties with certain pragmatic inferences that require them to go beyond the literal meaning of the linguistic form used to obtain the meaning intended by the speaker, as in implicature and uses of figurative language.
This makes pragmatic development seem like something of a puzzle: How can children be early experts at a pragmatically complex task such as word learning, but later have difficulty inferring what a speaker means in using a figurative expression? What is it about figurative uses that poses a challenge to children’s acquisition?
In this talk I present two recent experiments, conducted in collaboration with Franziska Köder, which investigate figurative language comprehension in children aged 3-8 years, focusing on metonymy and irony. Using a novel methodology which combines an online (eye-tracking) and an offline (picture selection) measure, we were able to shed light on some possible causes of children’s early difficulties with figurative language comprehension.
While the results of the metonymy comprehension task suggest that picture selection might underestimate children’s understanding compared to eye-tracking, the results of the irony comprehension task suggest that children might be sensitive to some cues to ironical intent while ignoring others. We discuss these results in the light of children’s developing pragmatic competence.
Language Planning and Policy in Ethiopia: Challenges and Prospects
Dr. Derib Ado will give a talk at our departmental seminar. He is an assistant professor at Addis Ababa University and works on a collaborative project with the University of Oslo (and MultiLing), Addis Ababa University, Hawassa University and NTNU. The talk is about the collaborative project and the linguistic situation in Ethiopia.
Time and place: Jan. 26, 2018 2:00 PM–4:15 PM, P. A. Munch's house, seminar room 10
Dr. Derib Ado is Assistant Professor at the University of Addis Ababa. His research interests include a diverse range of topics, namely speech production and perception, acoustics, phonology, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics and language technology.
The main aim of the project "Linguistic Capacity Building - Tools for the inclusive development of Ethiopia" is to increase the knowledge and capacity at Ethiopian universities to develop resources for disadvantaged spoken and signed languages, and with that provide the possibilities for children and adult speakers of these languages to use them in education and other democratic arenas that are important for the development of modern Ethiopia. By disadvantaged languages we mean those that are not fully researched, and that lack resources such as orthographies, descriptions of grammar, dictionaries and hence, teaching material.
Sign Language Phonology and Maxakalí home sign
Prof. Andrew Nevins from UCL is a linguist who has worked on a wide range of topics, but primarily focused on phonology and morphology. He is coming to UiO to give a talk on sign language phonology, more specifically related to his field work on the quite recently evolved home sign of the Maxakalí community in Brazil.
Time and place: Jan. 8, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P. A. Munch’s house, seminar room 10
In this presentation, we provide a phonological analysis of the distribution of handshapes on the dominant and non-dominant hand in the incipient village sign language found in the Maxakalí community in Brazil. Although this is a very young homesign with no external contact or influence, the analysis reveals that its most frequent handshapes reflect tendencies in choosing from a crosslinguistically unmarked set, and are particularly well-suited to quantitative analyses of handshape complexity found in models such as Ann (2006) and Brentari (2003), in addition to favouring a core set chosen from the most maximally dispersed handshapes.
2017
Metacognition and Inferential Accounts of Communication
Utterance interpretation is the theme of this installment of the departmental seminar, and the speaker is Nicholas Allott, from ILOS.
Time and place: 22. nov. 2017 14:15–16:00, Seminar room 15, P. A. Munchs hus
Nicholas Elwyn Allott is senior lecturer at ILOS, and an affiliate of CSMN.
Utterance interpretation is widely seen as an inferential process because the linguistic material uttered generally underdetermines utterance content.
In some respects the process resembles what has become known in psychology as ‘Type 2’ reasoning: the inferences are mostly warranted and apparently unencapsulated. But in normal, smooth communication, they are typically quick and seemingly effortless, and thus more akin to paradigm unconscious, ‘Type 1’ inferences. Any theory of utterance interpretation has to explain this apparent contradiction.
Minimalist metacognition
Part of the answer, I argue, is that a certain minimalist kind of metacognition (whereby a mental process is monitored and controlled by another, without the latter necessarily metarepresenting the former, cf. Proust 2013) is crucial to the inferential process of utterance interpretation. There are two prongs to the argument:
- The first is that the best inferential accounts of utterance interpretation (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 2012) require metacognitive feedback of this sort, even in normal smooth communication.
- The second prong of the argument is provided by some experimental results that show that feedback occurs in comprehension without hearers being aware of this. If the claim is right, then we learn something about the character of (some of) the mental processes involved in utterance interpretation.
In particular, the view that utterance interpretation is inferential is supported. A potential objection concerns levels of explanation (in David Marr’s sense): that some process is inferential seems to be a claim at Marr's computational level, while claims about the way that feedback works in utterance interpretation are at the algorithmic level. In reply, I try to illustrate the general point that facts about a process at the algorithmic level constrain facts about that process at the computational level and vice versa.
Expressions of modality: Insights from Javanese
In this installment of the departmental linguistics seminar, we can offer you some modality! Jozina Vander Klok, postdoc at ILN, will use data from Javanese to shed light on this phenomenon.
Time and place: 27. okt. 2017 14:15–16:00, P. A. Munchs hus, seminar room 15
Modality has been established as a semantic category which expresses two fundamental components: modal force (e.g. possibility or necessity) and modal flavour (e.g. epistemic, which expresses a conclusion is drawn from a particular body of knowledge; or deontic, which is based on a particular set of rules or regulations). In this talk, I discuss three aspects of modality where Javanese—an Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia—adds to the cross-linguistic picture of modal expressions. I draw primarily on data from original fieldwork in Paciran, East Java, Indonesia but also refer to data from other Javanese varieties.
First, different from languages like English in which modal expressions are referentially ambiguous for modal flavour (must can be used both in epistemic and deontic contexts) and different from languages like St’át’imcets in which modal expressions are referentially ambiguous for modal force, most modals in Javanese are lexically specific, expressing only one type of modal force and flavour. Second, the epistemic modal paleng in Paciran Javanese appears to allow for variable force, but I propose that the reasons are different from modals with variable force in Nez Perce (Deal 2011), Gitksan (Peterson 2010), or St’át’imcets (Rullmann et al. 2008). Third, in work in collaboration with Vera Hohaus, weak necessity modals (e.g. should, ought) in Javanese are transparently composed with the necessity modal plus a suffix –ne, which is not counterfactual morphology in contrast to the composition of weak necessity modals in many other languages (cf. von Fintel and Iatridou 2008).
"Sitte og arbeide": Is Scandinavian pseudocoordination with posture verbs a grammaticalized progressive construction?
Helge Lødrup, professor at ILN, will talk about Scandinavian pseudo-coordination.
Time and place: 29. sep. 2017 14:15–16:00, P. A. Munchs hus, seminar room 15
Scandinavian pseudocoordination with posture verbs (e.g. Han sitter og arbeider 'he sits and works') is traditionally considered a grammaticalized progressive construction. The posture verb is said to have a bleached meaning, and to have the status of an auxiliary or light verb.
This view has been criticized in later years (e.g. Tonne 2001, Lødrup 2014, Blensenius 2015). I will follow up this work, and argue that the pseudocoordinations in question are not progressive (or aspectual), they are not grammaticalized, and the posture verbs are lexical verbs with their regular meanings.
(Morpho)syntactic production in German, Italian and Greek aphasia: A test of three hypotheses
Lecture by Valantis Fyndanis, postdoctoral fellow at MultiLing.
Time and place: 19. may 2017 14:15–16:00, PAM 14
Agrammatic aphasia is primarily characterized by (morpho)syntactic impairment in production, which is often selective. For instance, in many studies tense was found impaired and subject-verb agreement relatively preserved. Several hypotheses have been put forward to account for the observed patterns of performance.
This study focuses on three of them: Distributed Morphology Hypothesis; Tense Underspecification Hypothesis; and Interpretable Features’ Impairment Hypothesis. These hypotheses make different predictions and are supposed to have cross-linguistic validity. According to the DMH categories involving inflectional alternations (e.g, tense, agreement) are comparably impaired in agrammatic aphasia. The TUH states that in the verb-related morphosyntactic domain only tense is impaired (“underspecified”) in agrammatic aphasia; subject-verb agreement and mood are well-preserved. The IFIH posits that categories involving integration processes (e.g., tense, mood, polarity) are more impaired than categories that do not involve integration processes (e.g., agreement).
The goal of this study is to test these hypotheses. To this end, German-, Italian-, and Greek-speaking individuals with agrammatic aphasia were administered three constrained tasks that tapped subject-verb agreement, tense/time reference, mood, and polarity.
Artificial Grammar Learning
Lecture by Julian Lysvik, PhD student at ILN.
Time and place: 5. may 2017 14:15–16:00, PAM 14
Laboratory and experimental methods in linguistics have become more and more common during the last few decades. In this seminar I will look at the experimental method known as Artificial Grammar Learning and discuss why this paradigm is interesting, which insights it has given, and how I use it in my own project.
The intention of the seminar is to introduce the ideas of AGL to researchers and other interested, and show how it can be applied to various areas such as syntax, morphology, typology and phonology, with an emphasis on phonology in my own research. Experiments that I introduce include topics on word-order typology, morphological categories, rounding harmony and phonological substance. I hope to show that this method is a valuable tool for linguistic researchers in diverse fields of research.
New access to an iconic dictionary: Ivar Aasen’s Norsk Ordbog (1873) in electronic format
Christian-Emil Ore and Oddrun Grønvik.
Time and place: 21. apr. 2017 14:15–16:00, PAM 14
The linguist and lexicographer Ivar Aasen published his Norsk Ordbok med Dansk Forklaring (Norwegian dictionary with Explanation in Danish) in 1873. This publishing event marks a watershed within linguistic research and language policy in Norway. The dictionary immediately became a) a reference point for the emerging scientific exploration of the Norwegian spoken language, b) a defining factor in establishing the Nynorsk written language, and in consequence c) a defining factor for the development of literacy and literature in Norway.
The 1873 dictionary is not easy to access for today’s user. Norsk Ordbog is a synthesis of speech materials collected through more than 30 years, and presents a proposed standard for written Norwegian with place – location - as the main source category. The entry format is well organized, but the dictionary is written as a running text, and contains information on a much larger number of base forms than those used as entry headings.
An electronic, searchable and linkable edition has therefore been both necessary and hoped for. The chief requirement to an electronic edition is of course that it must be easy to use, and support current and general research needs, while presenting the original text free from skewing.
In this seminar, two main approaches will be discussed to the task of providing an electronic edition of Norsk Ordbog:
Christian-Emil Ore will address considerations of principle activated in providing categorisation and searchability to older scientific text, organised on different premises from those of today. Interpretation dilemmas are unavoidable. How can such dilemmas most usefully be handled? And how does one select reliable main categories without imposing on Ivar Aasen points of view that he never held?
In addition to the entry headwords, many base forms which could have been entry headwords lie embedded in the dictionary text. How to pick out embedded base forms for expressions of speech variants? And what does the location information mean? Oddrun Grønvik will look at methods of identifying base forms and at the linking between word form and place expressed in Norsk Ordbog med Dansk Forklaring.
The logical semantic underpinnings of cross-linguistic variation in "figurative" uses of verbs
Alexandra Anna Spalek, postdoctoral fellow at ILOS.
Time and place: 31. march 2017 14:15–16:00, PAM 14
Formally-oriented linguists have paid comparatively little attention to ‘figurative’ uses of verbs (e.g. (1-b) or (1-c) in contrast to e.g. (1-a)) – also sometimes referred to as ‘non-literal’, ‘extended’ or – at least in the case of (1-b) – ‘metaphorical’ uses (see Giora (1997), Koper and Schulte im Walde (2016), Newman (2002), and Bowdle and Gentner (2005), respectively, for uses of these different terms).
a. [...] the knife cut through the meat.
b. His words cut with the sting of an obsidian sliver.
c. a bipartisan plan to cut the deficit
Our ongoing contrastive study of English and Spanish shows that while examples like (1-b) may fall under familiar theories of conceptual metaphor that are independent of grammar (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980), examples like (1-c) vary across languages in ways that reflect fundamental grammatical differences in lexical aspectual systems. We thus claim that examples like (1-c) constitute evidence that should not be ignored in debates about the analysis of verb meaning and the grammar/conceptual interface, such as that concerning manner/result complementarity (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1991).
This is a joint work with Louise McNally from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.
"Jævla rare ord": The syntax of Norwegian swear words
Lecture by Pål Kristian Eriksen, Ph.D. in linguistics.
Time and place: 17. march 2017 14:15–16:00, PAM 14
Among Norwegian swear words there are two deceptively similar words, "jævlig" and "jævla". Both appear to be adjectival derivations from the noun "jævel" (“devil”), and as they are sometimes interchangeable (like when being used adverbially, as in "jævlig kaldt" and "jævla kaldt", both meaning “fucking cold”), many Norwegians, and foreign students of Norwegian, might at first think of them as free variants of each other.
By closer scrutiny this turn out not the be the case, as there are syntactic, semantic and pragmatic differences in the use of these two words. In my talk I will highlight these differences, and I will argue that only "jævlig" is a true adjective, and that "jævla" may be analysed as a pragmatic particle, although with an adjective-like syntactic distribution. I will furthermore compare the syntactic and pragmatic peculiarities of "jævla" to similar words in English and Finnish.
Cognitive Science of Bilingualism in its Social Context
Reader at the University of Edinburgh, Thomas Bak, will be giving an exciting lecture at ILN. In his talk, Bak will try to bridge the gap between Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics.
Time and place: 3. feb. 2017 14:15–16:00, PAM 14
From politics to cognitive science, few topics have generated recently as much controversy as bilingualism. Is it a blessing for people and their countries? Or does it confuse individuals and divide societies?
In my talk, I will present current research on cognitive effects of bilingualism, discuss why different studies might produce different results and reflect why Scientific findings can get politicised.
2016
Norwegian has not just imperatives, but also prescriptive infinitives
Janne Bondi Johannessen, professor ILN/MultiLing.
Time and place: 25. nov. 2016 14:15–16:00, PAM 15
My talk will be about a construction that is largely unknown in an otherwise well- studied language family, even though it must have been used since ancient times. While it is well known that North Germanic languages have imperatives, it is not known that they also have a second class of PRESCRIPTIVE INFINITIVES with their own grammatical and pragmatic constraints. The word ‘prescriptive’ indicates that the function of this infinitive is to state a command, instruction, order or request, i.e. a jussive function.
Imperatives in the North Germanic languages – Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish – typically have a form that is identical to the verb stem (though with additional person suffixes in the case of Icelandic and Faroese), i.e. they are identical to those one-syllable infinitives that have a word-final vowel as part of their stem, and are shorter than those infinitives that have a vowel suffix.
I will first the standard imperatives with the basic facts on the order of negation and the presence and position of subjects. And then present the child-directed prescriptive infinitives, and provide authentic examples from a number of sources, including child language corpora. The pragmatics of the construction will be discussed, and also the syntactic differences between prescriptive infinitives and imperatives, such as the position of negation and subject, and the type of subjects that are possible. I will argue that the prescriptive infinitives are an ancient phenomenon. If time permits I will also present some prescriptive infinitival constructions in the North Germanic and other Germanic languages, showing that these are not the same as the child-directed prescriptive infinitives. A discussion of theoretical points that can be drawn on the basis of the new empirical material constituted by the prescriptive infinitives will be provided, and an account incorporating syntax and context roles will be given.
Regularity versus productivity in word formation: a Construction Morphology perspective on the motivation of words.
Geert Booij, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Leiden.
Time and place: 11. nov. 2016 14:15–16:00, PAM 15
In this lecture, I will argue that morphology is primarily about the systematic relationships between the words of a language. These systematic relationships can be accounted for by a network of constructional schemas. These schemas provide various types of motivation for the properties of existing complex words of a language. I will first give some arguments for the Construction Morphology model of morphological knowledge. These insights will be applied to an analysis of large class Dutch of attenuative and frequentative verbs ending in –elen and –eren, verbs which regular systematic properties (compare Norwegian knitre ‘to rustle, creak’, jamre ‘to wail, moan’). Yet, these verb classes can not be expanded in a productive fashion, which shows that productivity and regularity cannot be equated. I will also argue that complex words of this type may be motivated in more than one way, and how Construction Morphology can do justice to this phenomenon.
Numeral classifiers in are stored in the brain according to modality of acquisition: evidence from three functional MRI experiments
Lecture by Marit Lobben, postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Psychology, UiO.
Time and place: 4. nov. 2016 14:15–16:00, PAM 15
How is meaning represented in the brain and how does it arise?
This talk presents evidence from three fMRI experiments on numeral classifiers to show that upon comprehension, abstract, grammatical categories are indeed simulated in the modal areas (visual, olfactory, emotional) that presumably were active when these concepts were acquired (i.e. the areas correspond to these concepts’ meaning). Moreover, no amodal hubs showed up, suggesting a fully distributed model where sensorimotor activations are directly connected. We look at two experiments from Japanese, one with classifiers for ‘pinch grip’ and ‘whole hand grasp’; and another contrasting the ‘animal’ and ‘food’ classifiers. An experiment on Vietnamese contrasts classifiers for ‘happy emotion’ and ‘human’.
Revisiting Pronominal Typology: On the Syntax and Semantics of Personal and Demonstrative Pronouns
Lecture by Patrick G. Grosz and Pritty Patel-Grosz, Associate Professors at ILN.
Time and place: 14. okt. 2016 14:15–16:00, PAM 15
The goal of this talk is to shed new light on the debate of whether pronouns (she / he / it) generally have the syntax and semantics of definite descriptions (the woman / the man / the thing) or that of individual variables. As a case study, we investigate the differences between personal and demonstrative pronouns in German. We argue that the two types of pronouns have the same core make-up (both contain a null NP and a definite determiner), but demonstrative pronouns have additional functional structure that personal pronouns lack. This analysis is shown to derive both their commonalities and their differences, and it derives the distribution of demonstrative vs. personal pronouns by means of structural economy constraints.
When “noun” meets “noun”: Binominal word-formation in the world's languages
Lecture by Stephen Pepper, Doctoral Research Fellow at ILN.
Tid og sted: 30. sep. 2016 14:15–16:00, PAM 15
What happens when noun meets noun to form a new word?
Or, more generally, what are the ways in which the languages of the world allow speakers to combine two “nominal” concepts in order to name a new (complex) concept?
In Germanic languages the preferred strategy is compounding, as in Norw. jern.bane [iron.way] ‘railway’, and this is also the case in Chinese, Japanese and Korean: 铁路 tie.lu, 鉄道 tetsu.do, 철도 cheol.do, all [iron.road] ‘railway’. But such strategies vary greatly from one language to another. Thus, Romance languages mostly employ a “phrasal compound” involving a preposition (e.g. Fr. chemin de fer [road of iron] ‘railway’), while Slavs tend to use an adjectivized modifier to qualify the head noun (e.g. Russ. железная дорога želez.naja doroga [iron.adjz road] ‘railway’; although Slovak uses a nominalizer here: želez.n.ica [iron.adjz.nmlz]).
In Turkish we find the izafet construction (demir.yol.u [iron.road.iz]), while Malagasy has a possessive suffix that qualifies the head noun (lala.m.by [road.per.iron]). In all of these examples (and many more that could be given), the two concepts ‘iron’ and ‘road’ combine to form the new meaning ‘railway’, and in each case, the construction is different. Further afield we find yet other constructions, such as the use of double-marking in Siberia and noun classifiers in the languages of South America.
This talk presents my doctoral project, in which I investigate the various strategies of “binominal word-formation” in the languages of the world. I will discuss the background for the study, how I arrived at my “comparative concept”, the onomasiological approach in which I start out from 201 different concepts (including ‘railway’), and some of the many interesting preliminary results that have so far emerged from my initial sample of 41 languages.
Does Äiwoo have grammatical relations?
Lecture by Åshild Næss, Associate Professor at ILN.
Time and place: 20. may 2016 14:15–16:00, PAM 2
The Oceanic language Äiwoo (Solomon Islands) shows a pattern of clausal organisation which has key properties in common with the symmetrical voice systems found in many Western Austronesian languages, but differs from these in that it lacks a syntactic pivot. In this talk, I will examine the formal properties of argument encoding in Äiwoo, and argue that it does not make reference to a level of grammatical relations. There is no formal property which systematically correlates with the status of 'voice-selected argument', i.e. the argument picked out as prominent by the verbal voice system. As noted above, the language lacks a syntactic pivot; although bound pronouns on the verb mark A arguments differently depending on whether or not they are the voice-selected argument, they do not align voice-selected Os with voice-selected As; and word order depends not only on which is the voice-selected argument, but also on the status of an argument as nominal or pronominal. Instead, I will argue that the Äiwoo system of clausal organisation directly encodes a notion of discourse prominence, in the sense of which aspect of the event the speaker wishes to draw to the hearer's attention.
Næss argues that the unusual aspects of clausal organisation in Äiwoo stems from its historical origins in a symmetrical voice system where the syntactic pivot was lost as a result of the development of obligatory argument marking on verbs, as head-marking languages are often pivotless. Interestingly, the marking of arguments directly on verbs is also a typical property of two other types of languages often taken to lack a level of grammatical relations, namely semantic alignment ('active-stative') languages, which align S with A or O depending on semantic properties of the verb and/or event; and hierarchical alignment ('inverse') languages, in which argument encoding depends on the relative position of A and O on some version of the Nominal Hierarchy. This suggests that head-marking is a property which facilitates clausal organisation without grammatical relations, and thus may be viewed as supporting the Role and Reference Grammar view of grammatical relations as being essentially a reference-tracking device. The analysis further highlights the typological variation found within the Austronesian languages of the Melanesian region, and the importance of mapping the ways in which individual language systems deviate from 'canonical' patterns of grammatical organisation for our understanding of linguistic structures and their functions across languages.
The texture of the lexicon
Jenny Audring at the University of Leiden presents her work in collaboration with Ray Jackendoff.
Time and place: 13. may 2016 14:15–16:00, PAM 2
A traditional cornerstone of linguistics is von Humboldt’s “infinite
use of finite means” — the creative potential of linguistic rules. In
morphology, however, rules have always been an uncomfortable notion.
The grammar of words is rampant with ‘craziness’: nonproductivity and
idiosyncrasy. In this talk I argue for an approach to morphology which
addresses the quirky as well as the regular, the idiosyncratic as well
as the transparent, the marginal as well as the productive.
Instructional Practices and Teacher Development: A Usage-Based Perspective
Hana Gustafsson, postdoc MultiLing.
Time and place: 19. feb. 2016 14:15–16:00, PAM 2
Instructional Practices and Teacher Development in English-Medium Instruction Higher Education: A Usage-based Perspective
This lecture addresses the challenge of designing a language development program for teachers in international English-Medium Instruction (EMI) Higher Education (HE) contexts.
2015
Evaluative morphology: A bit of Geforsche or Forscherei (‘idle research’)
Guest lecture by Antje Dammel, University of Freiburg, about evaluative morphology. Open for all.
Time and place: 20. nov. 2015 14:15, PAM, seminar room 2
This talk is about the notion of evaluative morphology (EM). I ask how EM can be defined, delineated, and in which ways the interaction of affix, base, context, and pragmatic inference has been and could be modelled.
I show that diachrony can shed light on these questions. In a case study based on corpus data from historical German, I investigate the rise of pejorative functions, focussing on the two derivation patterns Ge-e and -(er)ei. Both patterns derive action nouns, adding the feature 'frequentative' and implying a dismissive/ironic attitude towards the action referred to.
The findings suggest that the relative strength of the factors involved in constituting pejorative meaning may shift diachronically, describable in terms of pragmatic strengthening and conventionalisation. However, implicature tests reveal what seems typical for evaluative derivational functions in general, i.e. that they hardly ever develop into full-fledged semantic features of the respective affix, completely independent from context and pragmatics. I will discuss how this can be accounted for.
Research on the run: Methodological challenges when recording and observing in construction sites
Kamilla Kraft, PhD Candidate at Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan (MultiLing), about methodological challenges when recording and observing in construction sites. Open for all.
Time and place: 13. nov. 2015 14:15, PAM, seminar room 2
How to do fieldwork and collect data is perhaps one of the most central and recurring issues of academic life. Contact has to be made, access negotiated, and the right tools need to be used for generating the kind of data one is interested in. While this process seems pretty straightforward, the negotiation of these three steps co-determines a considerable part of methodological design and consequently limits and enables different types of analyses. The point of my presentation will be to highlight some of the challenges and possibilities in this regard by focusing on what I have done in my own PhD research.
The aim of my research is to explore how multilingualism and communication structure work and workers, e.g. through everyday interactions and work activities. For this I needed to obtain video and audio recordings of work (whether it be of the actual construction of the building or planning how to build) from the sites. Since Norwegian legal requirements for gaining access to construction sites are quite strict, I relied on self-recordings made with an action-camera mounted to the hard hat of a worker. While this has had the obvious benefit of granting me access to the site by proxy, there have also been various challenges; the battery of the camera, the quality of the recordings, what is recorded, who is recorded, and what it all can be used for in terms of analysis. When doing ‘research on the run’, ethical, technical and academic challenges are bountiful – but it is also doable, rewarding, and fun.
The head in nominal compounds: A new discovery from Africa
This presentation by Steve Pepper describes the discovery in the Cameroonian language Nizaa of a new and hitherto undocumented phenomenon. Open for all.
Time and place: 5. juni 2015 14:15, Henrik Wergelands hus, room 536
A much-debated issue in the search for morphological universals has been the position of the head in compound words.
Williams’ (1981) ‘Right-hand Head Rule’ states that “the head of a morphologically complex word [is] the righthand member of that word.” While this rule generally works for compounds in English, Norwegian and other Germanic languages, it is invalidated by Hebrew, Maori and Welsh, all of which have left-headed compounds.
A second, “principles and parameters” inspired hypothesis – that languages select for either right‑headed or left-headed compounds – is falsified by two kinds of evidence:
- Javanese and Vietnamese, both of which exhibit left-headed native compounds and right-headed borrowings (from Sanskrit and Chinese, respectively; Bauer 2009); and
- Mandarin, which has right-headed nominal compounds and left-headed verbal compounds (Ceccagno & Scalise 2006).
Scalise and Fábregas (2010) therefore conclude that the position of the head inside a compound can be considered neither a universal principle nor a parameter. Instead they hypothesize that for each compound type in any given language there is a canonical head position, which might be infringed by loanwords.
However, human languages never cease to surprise and it turns out that the situation is yet more complex. This presentation describes the discovery in the Cameroonian language Nizaa of a new and hitherto undocumented phenomenon. Uniquely in the published literature, it seems, Nizaa exhibits both left-headed and right-headed native [N+N] nominal compounds in approximately equal measure. This state of affairs is not attributable to language contact, but rather to a striking sub-regularity involving semantic relations.
The analysis based on Cognitive Grammar forms part of Steve Pepper’s on-going PhD project on the cross-linguistic nature of nominal compounds.
Semi-insubordination in Dutch and Norwegian
Guest researcher at ILN, Karin Beijering, will present her postdoctoral thesis.
Time and place: 29. may 2015 14:15–15:30, Henrik Wergelands hus, room 536
This project is concerned with a remarkable construction, known as semi-insubordination. An example from Dutch is 'Misschien dat hij ook komt' (literally ‘Maybe that he is coming too’).
Subordinate clause
For the average speaker of Dutch there is nothing odd about this utterance, but it has a number of puzzling properties. The sentence part following ‘misschien’ (‘maybe’) is formally a subordinate clause (cf. the subordinator ‘dat’ (‘that’) and the finite verb ‘komt’ (‘comes’) in final position). The subordinate clause is not headed by a main clause, but by an adverb only (other possible heads include adjectives and nouns).
Subordinator is optional in Norwegian
In Norwegian, the subordinator is only optional (e.g., ‘kanskje (at) han er syk’ [literally ‘maybe (that) he is ill’]), and far more often omitted than present in semi-insubordinate constructions. Another striking characteristic is that the construction is often headed by forms expressing modal or modality-related meanings.
Aim of project
The aim of the present project is to analyze the grammatical and functional properties of semi-insubordinate constructions. The project will be concerned with questions like:
- Which elements can head this construction type, and why?
- Why do speakers sometimes prefer it over a simple main clause such as ‘Misschien komt hij ook’ (‘maybe he is coming too’)?
- Does this kind of construction convey the same meaning as a simple main clause alternative?
The project involves a synchronic comparative corpus study of the grammatical and especially the semantic and functional properties of semi-insubordination in Dutch and Norwegian.
Traces of history
Lecture by Christine Meklenborg Salvesen (ILOS) on verb second word orders in Germanic and Romance, and the use of resumptive elements in V2 languages. Open for all.
Time and place: 6. mars 2015 14:15, Henrik Wergelands hus, Room 536
The presentation is divided into two distinct parts:
- The first part is a presentation of the Traces of History project, which is funded by Norwegian Research Council. The project is a diachronic take on verb second (V2) word orders in Germanic and Romance.
- The second part of the talk is a presentation of a research idea linked to the project, namely the use of resumptive elements in V2 languages.
Christine Meklenborg Salvesen is a researcher at Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS).
Language standardization in a historical and business perspective
Guest lecture Andrew Linn aims to establish a context for understanding language standardization. Open for all.
Time and place: 30. jan. 2015 14:15–16:00, Room 536, Henrik Werglands hus
Professor Linn will begin by discussing standards and standardization processes as “omnipresent conduits of a modernizing and globalizing world”before exploring some historical cases.
He will then report on an ongoing project to compare language standardization at the level of the nation state with the experience of international business.
In conclusion he will explore to what extent standards in general and standardized languages in particular have continued relevance in a debate where not only standard languages but distinct languages and stable language communities of any sort have been deconstructed on a wave of Superdiversity.
Language standardization
Developing a standard form for a minority language is one of the projects of the University of Oslo’s Multiling center, and the most influential model of language standardization was developed half a century ago by Einar Haugen to describe the development of the modern standard varieties of Norwegian.
For these reasons and others, awareness of the theory and practice of language standardization looms large in the mind of Norwegian linguists.
Language standardization in practice is however not simply a product of modernity, of a socio-political drive for structure, system and hierarchies, but rather goes back at least to the Middle Ages.
Furthermore, language standardization is not just an issue for language policy makers and planners working at the level of society (nationally or locally). It is, for example, a key issue for international business, where standardization refers to the establishment of language practices at global level in contrast to language practices which are “nationally responsive”.