
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.
Linguist

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.
Our paper on how to map the modal-temporal semantics of TAM markers in Oceanic languages empirically is now out in the proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 20.
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.
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.
Continue reading “Out now: Counterfactuality and Past”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.
I’m currently in Cologne at the small Vielfaltslinguistik Conference (Diversity linguistics). It’s great to see so much new and interesting work on lesser described languages. My own talk, on joined work with Manfred Krifka and Ana Krajinović, focuses on empirical methods in our MelaTAMP project. Our slides can be downloaded here: [download id=”473″].
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.

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.
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.
Continue reading “How to revise your article after reviewing”