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.
Category: Publications
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.
APLL in Paris
I have just returned from APLL 9 in Paris that came with lots of fascinating research and productive discussions. To check out my talk with Anna Margetts on multi-clausal expressions of possibility in Saliba-Logea and Daakaka, click on the thumbnail on the left.
Tagging tense and modality in Oceanic
I just came back from an inspiring and informative trip to Saarbrücken. I gave a talk in the FEAST series about tagging tense, aspect, modality and polarity in Oceanic languages. Here are my slides for the talk.
The future is what the universe wants
There was a remarkable small workshop on imperatives at ZAS last week that I was happy to be part of. It was a welcome opportunity to take up my work on potential mood directives in Daakaka and their relations to future assertions and embedded clauses. You can see my slides here.
Towards an ontology of modal flavours
I’m still feeling warm and fuzzy from the wonderful workshop we had last week at the DGfS conference about modal flavours. The idea for this workshop had formed last year during the SIAS summer institute on the investigation of linguistic meaning, together with Ryan Bochnak and Anne Mucha. We were very happy to win Aynat Rubinstein as our invited speaker and get some excellent submissions from various subfields of linguistics. We gave an overview of background motivations and common themes of the talks in our introduction.
Out now: Indefinites in Daakaka (Vanuatu)
There are two indefinite articles in the Oceanic language Daakaka, TUSWA and SWA. Like weak NPIs or unspecific indefinites in many other languages, TUSWA is excluded from positive assertions about the episodic past or present. In this paper, I try to locate them within the cross-linguistic space of indefinites and NPIs and sketch out an approach to account for their differences.
Read the full paper here.
Upcoming talk at Cologne
I’m excited to visit Cologne again, this time for a talk on an Oceanic perspective on tense and modality. If you’re in the area, you’ll find the details here.
Alienability as control — now out in print
I was fortunate to be invited as a contributor to a special edition of Lingua (in pre-Glossa times) on possession. My article on “Alienability as control” is now out in print at long last and, alas, behind a paywall. You can contact me to get the manuscript.
Poster for Sinn und Bedeutung 2016
I’m excited about the upcoming Sinn und Bedeutung conference in Edinburgh. The program looks very promising and I’ll have an opportunity to discuss some of my latest thoughts on the Daakaka distal and modal semantics more generally. If you can’t come but would like to see my poster, here it is.
It was created with XeLaTeX, graphics with Inkscape, maps with GMT.