APLL in Leiden

My colleagues Ana Krajinović and Manfred Krifka are currently at APLL in Leiden to present our joint work on timitive structures in Oceanic, which have the shape it’s not good/it’s bad if . Timitive modality is a category often found in Oceanic, which typically occurs in warnings (Watch out, you might fall!) or negative purpose clauses (You should take an umbrella, lest you get wet!). Download the poster here.

Out now: Counterfactuality and Past

My article on counterfactuality and past is out now, and it’s free to access. In 2011, while I was working on the Daakaka grammar, I looked at the system of TAM markers and asked myself how hard it would be to figure out their meanings. Manfred Krifka suggested I start working with branching time to account for the realis/irrealis distinction, which I did. Except that the distinction we find in the Daakaka system isn’t binary, but tripartite.

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MelaTAMP at LTC 19 in Poznań

Our project was represented with two papers in this year’s Language and Technology Conference in Poznań. Ana Krajinović presented joined work with colleagues from Vanuatu and Melbourne on community-led language documentation. She won the award for the best student presentation.

Annika Tjuka, in a joined paper with Lena Weißmann and me, presented our tag set for the MelaTAMP corpora with a focus on tagging habitual aspect: the fact that habituality or genericity can be a property of stretches of discourse larger than a sentence makes clause-wise tagging complicated.

Habituality in four Oceanic languages

Our article (with Ana Krajinović, Anna Margetts, Nick Thieberger and Valérie Guérin) is out now and currently available for free here. In this article, we talk about habitual aspect in four Oceanic languages and demonstrate how it is (or isn’t) typically expressed. Reduplication and imperfective aspect play a particularly prominent role, sometimes in combination with each other.

How to revise your article after reviewing

Opening the mail…

Once you have submitted your article to a research journal, it can take a few weeks to a few months before you hear back. During that time, your editors are busy finding competent and willing reviewers, and hopefully, those reviewers are busy reading your work with discretion and charity and thinking about the best ways to help you improve your manuscript. If you do not hear back from the editors after 3 months, feel free to send them a friendly reminder that you are still waiting for reviews.

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Getting your manuscript ready for its first submission

You have interesting and original research to publish, but you have not done this before, how do you proceed? Here is how I do it.

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