Tuesday, 19 June 2012

time: 1.00 p.m. – 1.50 p.m.
place: Room 42AC05, Guildford Campus

Speaker: Petros Karatsareas, University of Cambridge 

Title:  'Neutering' nominal inflection in Asia Minor Greek

Thursday, 19 April  2012

time: 1.00 p.m. – 1.50 p.m.
place: Room 42AC05, Guildford Campus

Speaker: Claire Turner,  University of British Columbia 

Title: Modality in Northern Straits Salish

Thursday, 22 March 2012

time: 1.00 p.m. – 1.50 p.m.
place: Room 42AC05, Guildford Campus

Speaker: Marianne Mithun, University of California, Santa Barbara 

Title:  Recurring Pronominal Affinities: Higher-Level Semantic Generalizations or Beckoning Trails?

Tuesday, 20 March 2012

time: 1.00 p.m. – 1.50 p.m.
place: Room 42AC05, Guildford Campus

Speaker: Adina Dragomirescu, university of Bucharest

Title:  How does a non-finite verbal form emerge? The Romanian Supine.

Speaker: Alexandru Nicolae, university of Bucharest

Title:  Parameterizing definiteness: the relevance of the definiteness feature in the morphosyntax of the Romanian nominal phrase.

Tuesday, 17 January 2012

time: 1.00 p.m. – 1.50 p.m.
place: Room 42AC05, Guildford Campus

Speaker: Géraldine Walther, Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Université Paris Diderot & CNRS
Title:Assessing Description Compactedness: a Comparative Study of four Formalised Descriptions for French Verbal Inflection

Monday, 5 December 2011

time: 1.00 p.m. – 1.50 p.m.
place: Room 42AC05, Guildford Campus

Speaker: Antonio Fortin, SMG
Title:A unitary account of the semantics of Spanish diminutives

Tuesday, 22 November 2011
time: 1.00 p.m. – 1.50 p.m.
place: Room 42AC05, Guildford Campus

Speaker: Puis Ten Hacken, Swansea University
Title:Diminutives and plurals in Dutch

Tuesday, 8 November 2011
time: 3.00 p.m. – 3.50 p.m.
place: Room 55AC05, Guildford Campus

Speaker: Bert Remijsen, University of Edinburgh
Title: Shilluk morphology - a big system of inflection with a small segmental footprint

In Shilluk, a Nilo-Saharan language of South Sudan, a rich system of inflection is realised primarily through suprasegmental changes. That is, most inflections are reflected in the specification for vowel length, tone, and ATR within the monosyllabic stem. In contrast, affixal marking is limited.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of the exponents and of the processes they mark. I will focus on transitive verbs, a part of the grammar where the system of inflection is particularly rich, and that lends itself well to investigation because the inflections here are regular within classes (cf. Andersen 1993, 1992-1994 on closely-related Dinka). This work builds on the description of the morphosyntax of transitive verbs in Shilluk by Miller, Gilley & Remijsen (submitted) and on the analysis of the Shilluk sound system proposed in Remijsen, Ayoker & Mills (2011).

In comparison with languages where concatenative morphology is prevalent, inflections in Shilluk are realised within a limited segmental range. In my talk I will pay special attention to the implications of this limitation, as evidenced in combinations of inflections (e.g. spatial deixis plus agreement). In some such combinations, exponents of different inflections impose conflicting demands on the same suprasegmental feature (e.g. stem vowel length).  
In other combinations, there is ambiguity between a morphological exponent and the lexical specification of the verb root. Some such situations lead to syncretism, which may or may not be disambiguated by syntactic structure. In other cases, the particular combination of inflections is not grammatical.

References:
Andersen, T. (1992-1994) Morphological stratification in Dinka: on the alternations of voice quality, vowel length and tone in the morphology of transitive verbal roots in a monosyllabic language. Studies in African Linguistics 23, 1-63.
Andersen. T. (1993) Vowel quality alternation in Dinka verb inflection. Phonology 10, 1-42.
Miller, C.L., L.G. Gilley, & B. Remijsen (submitted). The morphosyntax of transitive verbs in Shilluk. Submitted to Journal of African Languages & Linguistics.
Remijsen, B., O. Gwado Ayoker, & Timothy Mills (2011). Shilluk.  
Journal of the International Phonetic Association 41, 131-145.

Tuesday, 1 November 2011
time: 12.30 p.m. – 13.30 p.m.
place: Room 42AC05, Guildford Campus

Speaker: Angeliki Efthymiou, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece
Title: Frequency and productivity of verb forming suffixes in Modern Greek: A corpus-based study

Tuesday, 4 October 2011
time: 1.00 p.m. – 1.50 p.m.
place: Room 55AC05, Guildford Campus

Speaker: Phaedra Royle and Alexandra Marquis, Université de Montréal
Title: Sensitivity to conjugation groups in French verb acquisition: Elicitation and spontaneous speech data

Abstract  

I present a series of studies on inflectional abilities in children learning the French language. These studies test whether the distinction between regular and irregular conjugation patterns impact on ability to master inflection in the perfect past (passé composé). French data are interesting as there are two regular groups (one sub-regular) as well as irregular verbs, all with different levels of type and token frequencies. The study of French verb acquisition can help us better understand the impact of different psycholinguistic factors on learning patterns. Elicitation experiments and corpora analyses for children aged between 2 and 7 years old are used to investigate this issue. The data suggest that French children are sensitive to the distinction between three morphological classes of different type frequencies (regular 1st or -er verbs; sub-regular 2nd or -ir verbs; and irregular) at early stages of acquisition, though they are also highly sensitive to item frequency. Recent elicitation data from older (5 to 7 year old) children show an additional sensitivity to a distinction between irregulars with no discernable suffix on the past participle (ex. mort ‘dead’) and those that have the vowel -u [y] (e.g. bu ‘drank’), a suffix that is no longer productive (no verbs are coined in this pattern). These data offer a rich picture of emerging and developing linguistic abilities in children. The interplay of sensitivity to morphological structure and potentiality, on the one hand, and recurring patterns in the corpus, on the other, highlight the multifaceted nature of the language acquisition device.

Enquiries to: Marina Chumakina 

Tel: +44 (0)1483 682843

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