I was very happy to join a recent workshop on mistaken beliefs, organized by Simon Wimmer. I learned about intriguing new research by colleagues, and took the opportunity to present some ideas that relate contrafactivity to counterfactuality as expressed in natural languages. You can find my slides here.
Category: News
Counterfactuality and mood
In my new paper, I take stock of cross-linguistically common functions and expressions of counterfactuality.
It also includes a discussion about whether expressions such as should encode counterfactuality or some kind of “weak” necessity.
You can download it here, or contact me.
Open Text Collections
I’m excited to be a regional editor for Open Text Collections! We’re aiming to publish curated, thematically consistent sets of interlinear glossed texts from a wide range of languages, and I’m looking forward to new submissions.
Coming soon: Oceanic Word Units
My proposal for a project on Oceanic Word Units was recently approved by the German Research Society! We’ll start in 2024, but I’m already excited and looking forward to diving into vowel harmony, clitics, and the morphosyntax of subject markers. You can read the proposal here.
Wrapping up 2022: more talks and publications
I haven’t been posting regularly about recent talks and publications, so here are a few more highlights from the second part of 2022:
- Colleagues and I published a paper on training RRG parsers on low resource languages, including Daakaka data.
- I gave a talk at the awesome linguistics department in Cologne, with a few more thoughts about wordhood in Daakaka.
- I was also invited to the phenomenal UT Texas (which curiously expands to University of Texas at Austin) department of linguistics, which combines two of my favourite subjects, linguistic fieldwork and formal semantics. This gave me a chance to get back to some of my ideas about modal semantics.
How many books fit into a suitcase?
Turns out, not that many. I’m moving offices from HU to ZAS right now, and it will take a few more trips through Berlin Mitte before the handsome shelves of my new office are filled. I’ll post more about my new position and rewrite my landing page as soon as I’ve figured out who I am right now, so watch this space.
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.
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.
International Linguistics Olympiad
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.
Out now: Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21
The proceedings for Sinn und Bedeutung 21 is out now and available from here. Check out my article on how to derive the discontinuity implicature of past markers in Daakaka and elsewhere!