The Linguistic Colloquium takes place weekly on Wednesdays from 17:00 to 18:30 during the lecture period and is designed as an interactive platform for the exchange and promotion of synergies between established staff, doctoral students and master's students involved in linguistic research.
All linguists at the University of Graz and their junior colleagues are cordially invited to present their ongoing work for qualitative feedback from colleagues at the colloquium!
If you would like to be on the mailing list for the colloquium, please contact Ms. Urabl: birgit.urabl(at)uni-graz.at
Time and place
- Wednesday, 5 p.m. to 6.30 p.m., in seminar room 33.3.211, at the Institute of Linguistics, Merangasse 70.
- Participation is also possible via Zoom.
Winter semester 2024 - 2025
16.10.2024 Dr. Lee Pratchett (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel): What gender are they? Language contact and the evolution of Ju|'hoan gender system(s)
Juǀ'hoan is a Ju language of the Kx'a family spoken in Namibia and Botswana by communities of ethnic San, an exonym used to refer to the indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa. Similar to English, Juǀ'hoan has grammatical gender system in which classes of nouns are made known through the use of distinctive pronouns. As a largely non-standardized language and spoken in a myriad of different sociolinguistic contexts, the grammatical gender system is anything but stable. This variation offers a window into language acquisition and maintenance, and the development of new registers and varieties. Comparing data from different communities of practice, this talk elaborates on the ongoing diversification of the Juǀ'hoan gender system(s), detailing the specific linguistic ecosystems and language ideologies behind these developments.
23.10.2024 MA. MA. Zi Huang (Institute for Linguistics): Referentiality in D-nominalisations
There are two types of nominalisations: those formed by the nominalizer n and those formed by D. The latter type involves a fully verbal structure prior to being nominalized by D. As a result, the DP layer serves distinct functions in the two types. This talk focuses on a property closely tied to the DP layer: referentiality. Specifically, it asks: are D-nominalisations referential, and in what sense? I will demonstrate that the two verbal gerunds in English, POSS-ing (Justin's/his smashing his laptop) and ACC-ing (Justin/him smashing his laptop), despite their similarities in surface form, distribution and meaning, are differentiated by their referential properties. I will then compare how referentiality operates in POSS-ing with the same concept in the clausal domain. Finally, I will explore the semantic and pragmatic implications of referentiality and its formal representation.
30.10.2024 Univ.-Prof. Dr Gianina Iordăchioaia (Institute of Linguistics) and Dr Jeannique Darby (University College Volda, Norway): The structural complexity of zero vs. overt nominalisations: An experimental study
We experimentally evaluate three patterns of deverbal nominalisations derived by means of zero, -ing and Latinate suffixes (i.e. -(at)ion, -ment, and -ance) in terms of their ability to express causative and inchoative readings like their base verbs. Previous theoretical literature argues that causative readings require an overt nominalizing suffix, and thus zero nominalizations can only realize inchoative readings: see John's raising/*raiseof the glass vs. The elevator's rise to the top floor. This would suggest that zero nominalizations are structurally simpler than overt nominalizations. However, natural text corpora reveal plenty of zero nominalisations exhibiting causative readings: e.g. a continuous raise of salaries, the deliberate crash of a Germanwings passenger jet. We test these claims using native speaker questionnaires. We predict that zero nominalizations will be capable of receiving both causative and inchoative readings, and thus do not necessarily have simpler event structures than overt nominalizations.
06.11.2024 Mast. prof. jez. i knjiž Dr.phil. Stefan Milosavljević (Institute for Slavic Studies): The Multifunctionality of Cloning: Lexical → Functional → Situation Cloning!
The so-called lexical cloning (LC, Horn 2018), also widely known as contrastive focus reduplication (Ghomeshi et al. 2004) or identical constituents compounding (Hohenhaus 2004), is typically analysed as identifying the prototypical instance in the denotation or extension of a predicate (e.g., DOG-dog as a typical dog). However, LC also targets functional words, such as quantifiers, pronouns, modals, polarity items (the first two in a variety of languages, the latter two at least in Serbo-Croatian). It gives rise to different types of interpretations, such as domain widening, precisification, or contrasting referents. In this talk, I offer a unified approach to LC as a multifunctional pattern within the framework of situation semantics. I argue that LC focuses a situation pronoun as an argument of the given predicate: it indicates that the predicate is true of an entity (individual or eventuality) in a situation s, as well as in an alternative, broader situation s' that contains s, differing from it only minimally, with contextually tolerable or speaker-imposed exceptions.
13.11.2024 MA. PhD Svitlana Antonyuk (Institute of Slavic Studies) (based on joint work with James Lavine): On Causers and Event Initiators: the representation of external causation in Ukrainian syntax
An important question in the argument structure and event structure research concerns the role that notions such as causer or event initiator play in the syntax, as well as the exact nature of their syntactic representation and licensing. One prominent line of research argues in favour of the Undifferentiated Initiator view, according to which Agents, non-volitional Causers and Natural Force arguments are all merged in Spec,VoiceP position (Ramchand 2008; Bruening 2013; Legate 2014; Wood 2017 i.a.; Cf. Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer 2006; 2015; Schäfer 2012). We present novel evidence in favour of the differential encoding of causation as separate from the external argument (EA)-introducing VoiceP layer, thus arguing against the Undifferentiated Initiator (UI) view. We examine a wide range of constructions in Ukrainian that bear on the matter, relying, i.a., on the Scope Freezing Diagnostic (SFD, per Antonyuk 2015; 2020; forthcoming i.a.), and drawing on relevant crosslinguistic evidence from Polish, Icelandic, Lithuanian, German, and English.
We show that all (Inanimate) causer arguments in Ukrainian are necessarily encoded as NPINSTR, and provide evidence to suggest that apart from the differential encoding of EAs and non-volitional Causers, no further differentiation is observed, i.e., all Causers are merged in the Specifier of the same projection, as the sole argument of vCauseP. While this is in line with the three-layered verbal VoiceP--vP--√ architecture (Harley 2013; Pylkkänen 2002; 2008), a single Merge position for the more transparently causative Non-volitional Causers and Natural Force arguments as well as the far less obvious manner-of-action and Instrument arguments suggests the differentiation in thematic roles is viewed by syntax as less important compared to the shared causative component (Cf. Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou and Schäfer 2006; 2015; Schäfer 2012).
The account derives a range of Transitive Impersonal constructions in Ukrainian, whereby the internal argument is probed Accusative in the absence of an active Voice layer (see also Antonyuk forthcoming; Cf. esp. Legate 2014) and has a range of theoretical implications, including for the analysis of the Causative Alternation, to be discussed in this talk.
20.11.2024 Univ.-Prof. Mag. dr.phil. MA Gunther Kaltenböck (Department of English Studies): Corpus linguistics network: CorpusLab Discussion and first draft of the new CorpusLab Website
27.11.2024 Assoc. Prof. Dr. Seong-Lin Ding (University of Malaya): Heritage language vitality and marginalization in Malaysia
This study examines how languages are practiced and managed among various Chinese families in multilingual Malaysia. The study was conducted through ethnographic observation and interview in selected Chinese communities in the states of Perlis, Penang, Malacca, Sabah, and Sarawak. Two research questions are as follows: (1) how language practices, ideologies and management strategies operate within the Chinese families; and (2) how and why the heritage languages (HLs) are maintained or shifted. The predominant view underlying family practices seems to be the common belief about the adverse effects of HL acquisition on the development of the majority languages (i.e., English, Malay, and Mandarin). However, given the complicated minority-majority language reality in Malaysia, it is unclear whether the family has a real choice in determining which language(s) it wishes to transmit and preserve. The findings reveal that language choices are constantly interacting with and shaped by non-linguistic influences, for instance, the national language policy, socioeconomic opportunities, educational concerns, and the possible impact of geopolitics and geo-economics. By examining family language practices and ideologies, this paper argues that these notions can be used as a means to understand/reflect language vitality and, more importantly, the potential marginalization of the HL(s) in the society. The study indicates how language shift is taking place inter-generationally and the need to redress major efforts in cherishing and maintaining HLs in the Chinese Malaysian communities.
04.12.2024 MA Aleksandra Milosavljević (Institute for Slavic Studies): How many 'selves' are there in the adnominal domain? The case of BCMS
In the adnominal domain, the self-intensifier sam 'self' in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (BCMS) performs at least two functions. It can act as a modifier that, descriptively speaking, reduces imprecision or vagueness, closely matching English true/real or very (e.g., sam vrh 'the very top,' or postao je sam đavo 'he became a real devil / the devil himself'). It can also function as an intensifier, presumably marking that the referent of the nominal is the member of the subset of discourse-topical referents with the highest degree of aboutness, as viewed by the interlocutors (e.g., sreli smo kraljicu samu 'we met the queen herself') (Arsenijević 2024). In existing literature, these two functions are often treated as distinct phenomena (e.g., for Russian, Goncharov 2015). In this talk, I argue for a unified semantic account of these two seemingly disparate functions of sam, proposing that, both as a modifier and a self-intensifier, it functions as a maximizer targeting the endpoint (i.e., the maximal value) on an available scale.