Author: admin

For my second talk in Konstanz, I discussed my paper on Counterfactuality and Past in the What-if group. You can download the current manuscript version here: [download id=”362″]. My slides can be found here: [download id=”367″].

Last week, I had the privilege of giving two talks in Konstanz. In the colloquium of the linguistics department, I talked about our latest research on counterfactual futures in Oceanic and what they tell us about tense and mood in our subject languages. Download the slides here: [download id=”348″]. Read the paper here: [download id=”358″].

I went to Göttingen last week to talk about modality, which is turning into a pleasant tradition. In my talk, I outlined the typological debate on the irrealis distinction, introduced the tripartite branching-time model that I think will help us the relevant cross-linguistic variation, and discussed how the same approach also sheds new light on some long-standing questions about the nature of modality, counterfactuality and epistemic necessity. You can find the slides here.

There was an interesting small workshop in Torun in April on Measuring Linguistic Complexity. When the call came out, I had just finished a preliminary overview on the previous literature on the topic and was ready to get cracking, so I got together with Vera Demberg to test our hypothesis that focussing on POS tags rather than the token-level annotations would give us more reliable results on syntactic flexibility. Our results are in the proceedings.

My work in the Collaborative Research Unit on information density (ID) in Saarbrücken has made me think about the relation between grammaticalisation and ID. In an invited talk to Saarbrücken in April, I explored some of my ideas on this topic. You can find the slides here.