Linguist
There was a very enlightening small workshop on reciprocals in Utrecht just now. I was invited to talk about reciprocals in Daakaka, which was an interesting assignment since Daakaka does not have reciprocal pronouns or verbal reciprocal morphology. Speakers do not have to distinguish between reciprocal, reflexive and regular transitive structures. There are however things they can do to facilitate, or force, reciprocal interpretations. Look at my slides to find out more.
There was a wonderful small conference on Ideologies and Linguistic Ideas in beautiful Tbilisi last week, and I’m very happy I had the opportunity to team up with my colleague Marcin Kilarski to present some of our work on bias and ideologies in old and new debates on linguistic complexity. I also learned a lot about the role of ideologies in the history of linguistics, which is new and exciting territory to me. Download our slides here.
I heard many fantastic talks at this year’s ALT in Pavia and had some very inspiring conversations. The talk I gave was about realis and irrealis in Oceanic and beyond, and you can download the slides here.
Together with my two fantastic co-organizers Ana Krajinović and Jozina Vander Klok, I just hosted a workshop on tense, aspect and modality across languages at this year’s SLE in Leipzig. We had awesome presentations and inspiring discussions, learned a lot and had great fun.
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.
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.
Germany will participate in this year’s Olympiad of Linguistics in Yongin, Korea, and I am part of the small team of people who are organising the selection and training of the German team. We’ll have two rounds of online tests before inviting the finalists to our Berlin boot camp.
The Linguistic Evidence conference in Tübingen this year is long over and I’m sad I couldn’t be there, but our poster was well represented by my two co-authors, Manfred Krifka and Ana Krajinović. Click here to download the PDF.
My colleague Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and I, with generous support from Elke Teich, organised a workshop last week. We invited researchers from a variety of backgrounds, spanning language documentation, typology, language acquisition, computational linguistics and historical linguistics. We were very happy with the inspiring talks and vibrant discussions about challenges and solutions, which I am sure will continue beyond the small event we had.
2017 was a year full of talks, so don’t be surprised if you won’t see me on the circuit as much during 2018. The last talk of that year was at the MPI in Jena, where I talked about some of the things you’ll see if you compare languages based on corpus data that you’re likely to miss if you look at grammatical descriptions. I had some incredibly inspiring conversations and hope to visit more often (maybe even in 2018).