I’m excited about the upcoming workshop on Multi-verb constructions at ZAS Berlin. I’m going to use the opportunity to present some of my latest thoughts on the topic and lobby for systematic typological comparison. See my slides here.
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The syntax-morphology trade-off
Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Language Science Colloquium at Universität des Saarlandes, about recent research on the syntax-morphology trade-off and further perspectives for text-based typology. Download the slides here.
Bibtex bibliographies selected by keywords, with customised keyword separators
This is a very specialised problem, but since I just found the solution, I wanted to briefly document this for myself. I usually use natbib, but for the preparation of reading lists, sorted by topic, I wanted to try biblatex. Creating a list of references selected by a keyword is not a problem at all.
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Starting in Saarbrücken: Information density, complexity and cross-linguistic variation
It’s October already and I have just received my appointment as a guest professor in the SFB (special research unit) on Information density in Saarbrücken. I will teach a class on “Cross-linguistic variation in structural complexity” and I’m excited to learn more about information density and possible applications of existing hypotheses and tools to typological comparison.
Upcoming workshop: Data management and corpus creation
I’m looking forward to this week’s CLARIN-D workshop on data management and corpus creation in Hamburg. As a member of F-AG 3, I’ll be attending with a short talk and am curious to learn more about current practices and experiences.
Now out: Dozing eyes and drunken faces
In many languages of the world, emotions and medical conditions are not attributed to an individual, but to a certain body part. For example, instead of saying “I am sad”, you may have to say something along the lines of “my heart is heavy” in many languages. In these cases, the meaning of “being sad” does not reside in a single word. “Heart” alone does not express sadness, and neither does “heavy”. Only the combination of the two can express this concept. The question is then how such languages form expressions that refer to an abstract emotion such as “sadness” . And the answer is that there are different strategies. One strategy is to say something like “the heaviness of the heart”. The Oceanic language Daakaka, however, uses a different strategy. Here, an emotion concept is expressed by a structure such as “the heavy heart”. This paper investigates these differences and their implications. Get it here or ask me for the preprint.
Prepare your LaTeX document for publication
When your manuscript has been accepted for publication, and you have adjusted the layout to the publisher’s requirements, these are the final steps before submission:
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Compiling a list of glosses from your glossed examples in a LaTeX document (under UNIX)
If you have many interlinearized examples in your LaTeX documents, you have probably wondered about the best way to handle them. Here are some ideas. There are two potential problems with the glosses: 1) different publishers may have different requirements for how to print them, so transferring glossed examples from one manuscript to another may be difficult. 2) You’ll want to have a list of all the glosses in your document, and it should be complete and consistent. To solve all that, the main strategy is to label all your glosses explicitly as such by using a new command we may call “Gloss”:
Three deaths and one marriage…
…made for a challenging field trip to Ambrym this year. Still, I was lucky enough to get enough speakers both of Daakaka and Dalkalaen to collect the data we need for MelaTAMP – thanks to the people of Emyotungan and Tio Bang in Port Vila. Now I’m excited to start with the analysis. Stay tuned.
MelaTAMP Workshop in Port Vila
We held a small workshop at the University of the South Pacific yesterday, on Emalus Campus in Port Vila, Vanuatu. The purpose was to introduce and discuss the storyboards we have developed as part of the MelaTAMP project.
We thank Robert Early and Meriani Situ for their organisation and local support, and we’re happy that our audience extended far beyond our few project members and collaborators.