Talk by Fenna Bergsma (Fryske Akademy) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium

by Melanie Hobich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Fenna Bergsma (Fryske Akademy) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium. Date: Tuesday, December 19, 2023 Room: IG 2.301 Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Title: "At least three infinitives in Frisian" Abstract: Frisian has two morphologically distinct infinitives: one ending in -e (pronounced as [ə]) and one ending in -en (pronounced as [n]). It has been argued (cf. Visser 1989, Hoekstra 1997, Bergstra 2020) that they follow the noun-verb distinction and that infinitives on -e are verbal infinitives and infinitives on -en are nominal infinitives. In some cases, the forms neatly fit their contexts: the verbal suffix -e appears in a verbal context and the nominal suffix -en appears in a nominal context. However, this is not always the case: there are infinitives on -en that appear in a verbal context and not in a nominal one (which has also been signaled by Hoekstra 1997). This means that a description with two infinitives does not fully capture the...
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Talk by Bernd Möbius (Saarland University, Saarbrücken) in the Phonology Colloqium

by Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Bernd Möbius in the Phonology Colloqium on Wednesday, 13.12.2023, 16-18 ct. in IG 4.301. Title: Information Density and Phonetic Variation. Abstract: In this talk I will take an information-theoretic perspective on speech production and perception. I will explore the relation between information density and phonetic encoding and decoding. Information density of a linguistic unit is defined in terms of surprisal (the unit's negative log probability in a given context). The main hypothesis underlying our experimental and modeling work is that speakers modulate details of the phonetic encoding in the service of maintaining a balance of the complementary relation between information density and phonetic encoding. To test this hypothesis we analyzed the effects of surprisal on phonetic encoding, in particular on dynamic vowel formant trajectories, stop consonant voicing, syllable duration, and vowel space size, while controlling for several basic factors related to the prosodic structure, viz. lexical stress and major prosodic boundaries, in the statistical...
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Talk by Elena Herburger (Georgetown University) in the Semantics Colloquium

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Elena Herburger (Georgetown University) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Title: Negative Concord and NPI licensing: their semantic and historical relation Date: December 7, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk I ask how Negative Concord comes into existence and how it changes over time. Focusing largely on Romance, I explore how treating Negative Concord as but a name for a lexical ambiguity between a negative reading and a corresponding existential(-like) reading with the distribution of an NPI (e.g. Herburger 2001) can help shed light on the fact that Negative Concord terms often originate from NPIs, and can gradually come to be ‘more negative’. This process is argued to be more advanced in French than in Spanish, a difference that I attribute to a difference in the realization of sentential negation (no vs. pas)....
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