Events

2012-2013 academic year diary

Friday, 19 April 2013
The Surrey Morphology Group will be holding a one-day workshop on agreement in Archi at the University of Surrey.
 

ROOM TBA

Friday, 3 May 2013

Surrey Linguistic Circle is delighted to present a talk by

Nicolas Evans, Australian National University
Title:           "Going for plural: the piecemeal emergence of a fourth number value in Nen"
Time:           11.30 - 12:30 
Room:          42 AC 05

 Abstract:

Nen is a language with complex grammatical number, both in nouns and verbs, but it is not straightforward to determine exactly how many number contrasts there are or how they should be characterised. Within nouns and pronouns the most basic pattern is a simple singular vs non-singular contrast, though this is only evident in non-absolutives, and some nouns make finer number distinctions with distinct dual forms of some cases.
Turning to verbs, we find a singular vs non-singular contrast in the (up to) two TAM+agreement positions crossed with a dual vs non-plural contrast in thematics and a few suppletive verb roots, occasionally reinforced by distinct dual forms of some of the TAM+agreement affixes. All verbs can, by these means,encode a three-way number contrast, though in most cases the dual value can only be encoded for one argument.
It is when we turn to the means of encoding a fourth number contrast that things get really complex, because of the large number of different strategies employed:
(a) within the coherent class of ‘posal verbs’, a contrast between a small plural and a large or exhaustive plural is encoded by combining singular agreement markers with dual thematics
(b) a small number of verbs have special forms (suppletive or infixed) for large plurals)
(c) middle verbs can encode large plurals by using the prefixal rather than the suffixal agreement site to agree with person and number values of the actor
(d) future imperatives, which are the only construction regularly encoding actor information on both prefix and suffix, obtain four number values by combining singular vs non-singular contrasts in the prefix with a different set of number assignments to the regular imperative suffixes: this works by recycling the singular suffixes to function as (small) plurals as well (disambiguated by the prefix) and pushing up the number value of the normal plural suffix to encode large plurals
(e) finally, large plurals of transitive objects can, for some verbs, be encoded by combining the singular object form, the imperfective aspect, and the ‘away’ directional prefix
After dissecting the workings of this system, I conclude by spelling out its implications for how grammars should deal with localised vs distributed and constructionalised methods of coding number, and examining the historical implications of how ‘number targets’ (e.g. having a four-valued number systems) are achieved in language contact situations.

Tuesday, 5 March 2013

Surrey Linguistic Circle is delighted to present a talk by
Tania Kuteva (jointly with Bernd Heine and Gunther Kaltenböck), Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf
Title:          Reconstructing elements of early human language.
Time:        1- 2 pm
Room:      42 AC 05

Friday, February 22, 2013

The Surrey Morphology Group will be holding a one-day workshop on computational approaches to morphological complexity, hosted by Paris-Sorbonne University.  

Tuesday, 19 February 2013

Surrey Linguistic Circle is delighted to present a talk by
Andrew Koontz-Garboden, University of Manchester
Title:          The lexical semantics of nouns and adjectives and variation in property concepts.
Time:         1.45- 2.45 pm
Room:        42 AC 05

Call for abstracts for South East Morphology Meeting on Morphophonology 2013
The Surrey Morphology Group invites members of the South East Linguistic Circle to submit a one-paragraph abstract for the next South East Morphology Meeting (SEMM), which will take place on 25 January 2013 at the University of Surrey. Abstracts should summarise the key points of the author’s presentation. Presentations are scheduled for the afternoon session and will last 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes questions.  For further questions on this meeting, please contact Serge Sagna, the new SEMM organiser.

Friday, 25 January 2013 

Southeast Morphology Meeting (SEMM) on Morphophonology, University of Surrey, Guildford. 

The format of the meeting will be as follows:
MORNING SESSION: Andrew Spencer and Erich Round (titles TBA)

AFTERNOON SESSION: this session will consist of a few shorter presentations. 

ROOM 30MS02
Time: 9 am to 5 pm 
For more details contact Serge Sagna 

3 to 6 January 2013

Endangered complexity: Oto-Manguean languages

The Surrey Morphology Group (University of Surrey) is organizing a SSILA session entitled “Inflectional classes in the languages of the Americas” for the 2013 Annual Meeting to be held during the LSA 2013 Annual Meeting in Boston, MA. 

Thursday, 1 - Friday, 2 November 2012 

Archi agreement workshop. University of Surrey. 

ROOM 03DK02

For more details contact Marina Chumakina (m.tchoumakina@surrey.ac.uk)

Wednesday, 24 October 2012 

SouthEast Morphology Meeting: 'Computational Approaches to Morphological Complexity' To be held at the University of Surrey. For more details contact Dunstan Brown.

Tuesday, 23 October 2012 

Surrey Linguistic Circle is delighted to present a talk by 

Prof. Mark Aronoff, Stony Brook University.  

Title: Defaults and Discreteness in Morphology 

Time:  1- 2 pm 

ROOM 42AC05

Friday, 14 September 2012

The Surrey Morphology Group is holding a dissemination workshop on the Alor-Pantar languages at the British Academy in London

Enquiries to: Marina Chumakina 

Tel: +44 (0)1483 682843

Surrey Morphology Group Homepage