Talk by Ruby Sleeman (Institute of Mediterranean Studies) & Nicolas Lamoure (Goethe University)

by Melanie Hobich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Ruby Sleeman (Institute of Mediterranean Studies) & Nicolas Lamoure (Goethe University) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium. Date: Tuesday, May 28, 2024 Room: IG 2.201 Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Title: "F*cking with nouns, not f*cking with verbs" Abstract: This study expands on previous literature on borrowing curse words from English into other languages (ten Buuren et al. 2018, Vatvedt Fjeld et al. 2019, Zenner et al. 2017, a.o.) and focuses on the syntactic distribution of the borrowed adjective/adverb fucking in the goal languages Dutch and German. We created 2000 token random samples (Kilgariff et al. 2004, 2014) for both Dutch (using nlTenTen20) and German (using deTenTen20), which we handsorted and contrasted with a random sample of 2000 handsorted results for English (enTenTen21). Despite a handful of instances of verbal modification, the overwhelming amount of hits pertained to adjectival, adverbial and nominal modification. Why does the modifier fucking occur freely with nouns, adjectives, and verbs in English, but...
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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 Andreas Pankau (FU Berlin) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium

by Melanie Hobich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Andreas Pankau (Freie Universität Berlin) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium. Date: Tuesday, December 5, 2023 Room: IG 2.301 Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Title: "The syntactic representation of ADDRESSEE - evidence from wh-drop in Berlin German" Abstract: Many German dialects allow a curious type of wh-question, namely one where the wh-phrase is absent. The classical approach to such wh-questions can be found in Bayer (2010) and Pankau (2020). They both assume that a wh-phrase was present at some stage of derivation, but that it gets elided after having been moved to SpecCP. Hence the name for this type of wh-question, wh-drop. In this talk, I want to challenge this approach with novel data from Berlin German. Based on the syntactic properties of wh-drop, I first argue that neither a wh-phrase nor wh-movement are ever present in wh-drop. Instead, what moves is an empty operator and the movement it undergoes is most likely some form of scrambling....
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Talk by Agnes Jäger (Uni Jena) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium

by Melanie Hobich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Agnes Jäger (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) in the Historical Linguistics Colloquium. The talk will be in German. Date: Tuesday, November 28, 2023 Room: IG 2.301 Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Title: "Der Ursprung des werden+Infinitiv-Futurs im Deutschen - ein alternatives Szenario" Abstract: Neben dem futurischen Präsens hat das Deutsche im Verlauf seiner Sprachgeschichte periphrastische Futurformen mit Auxiliaren auf der Basis von Modalverben (v.a. sollen und wollen) und der Kopula werden entwickelt. Das letztere Muster verdrängte seit dem 16. Jahrhundert die modalverbbasierten Futurformen. Während diese Entwicklung empirisch gut beschrieben ist, gilt der Ursprung der werden+Infinitiv-Futurperiphrase nach wie vor als ungeklärt. Dies betrifft insbesondere die Frage, wie es überhaupt zur Verwendung des Infinitivs mit werden kam. Die bisherigen Erklärungsansätze (phonetische Reduktion des Partizip I, syntaktische Analogiebildung oder slavische Lehnsyntax) können die Entwicklung nicht befriedigend erklären. In diesem Vortrag wird ein alternatives Szenario des Ursprungs des werden+Infinitiv-Futurs vorgeschlagen, das auf Reanalyse beruht und die Entwicklung zentral in Beziehung zu bestimmten morpho-phonologischen...
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