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 just published my intro to morphology (Einführung in die Morphologie, in German). It starts out from the idea of the morphological cycle, which suggests that languages move through stages of isolating, agglutinating and fusional morphology, and uses this idea to introduce basic concepts of morphology, including inflection, derivation, paradigms, and different types and degrees of synthesis.
I haven’t been posting regularly about recent talks and publications, so here are a few more highlights from the second part of 2022:
My grammar of Daakaka, which was first published in print in 2015, is now available online from De Gruyter’s website. Please check if you can access it via your institution, or get in touch with me for a digital copy.
The semester ended for me with a highly enjoyable visit at Uta Reinöhl’s lab in sunny Freiburg. I took the opportunity to talk about a puzzle concerning the role and emergence of word units in Oceanic. I’m currently writing a research proposal in the context of a Collaborative Research Centre we’re cooking up at HHU, where I hope to shed more light on this fascinating conundrum.
My paper with Ana Krajinović and Manfred Krifka on the role of irrealis in TAM systems is now online and free of charge. We use the tripartite model of branching time I developed in this other paper to account for the meanings of realis and irrealis markers in a variety of languages and delineate their role in human language, with a focus on Oceanic.
I’m very excited about this year’s AFLA 2020. The organizers are doing a fantastic job at hosting it online. You can see the program and download all the slides here. There is also a youtube channel where all the talks have been posted. I haven’t been able to see all talks live so far, due to different time zones, but I have been very impressed with the quality of those talks that I have seen. It’s definitely worth taking a look. I used my slot to work on my greater narrative about how Oceanic languages can change our understanding about the relation between tense and modality, and between time and reality.
The last talk of 2019 was an invited talk in Düsseldorf, where I presented some of my recent work on adverbial serial verb constructions in Daakaka and beyond. You can download my slides here.
We can often choose between more basic, highly grammaticalized, ways to express a given meaning, and more verbose ways of doing so. Thus, in English, we may say “Brenda can catch the train” or “it is possible that Brenda will catch the train”, with quite similar interpretations. In my article with Anna Margetts, we argue that expressions of possibility in Daakaka and Saliba-Logea correspond to it is possible that in terms of their syntactic complexity, but to can in terms of their paradigmatic properties, frequencies and meaning. Look at the publication here or download the preprint.
