Linguist
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.
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.
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.
I haven’t been posting regularly about recent talks and publications, so here are a few more highlights from the second part of 2022:
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.
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 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!
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.
