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Linguistics Professors present at International Conference on Historical Linguistics

Benjamin Slade and Aniko Csirmaz presented at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics in San Antonio, Texas on August 3rd, 2017. Below are the brief abstracts, video links, and the slides from two talks. Both of these talks come from the Workshop on Logical Vocabulary & Logical Change.

 Talk 1:

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Benjamin Slade & Aniko Csirmaz

 

Talk title: Adding meaning to Indo-Aryan & Hungarian aspectual adverbials then and again

 

Brief abstract: An examination of the internal structure of temporal/relationship adverbials and the interrelations between different adverbials in Nepali, Hindi, & Hungarian. Here we find connections between the word in Nepali and Hindi for "then" and the word for "again", and in Hungarian between "again" and "still", and all three languages exhibit a morphologically composite form for concessive "still" (as in "Bill's a jerk, but I still like him"), which involves an element meaning "then/again" and an additive particle ("also"/"even"). We offer a templatic analysis which captures the relations between these different adverbials.

 

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_pGHeh3wdE&feature=youtu.be&t=1m5s

 

Slides link: http://mitrovic.co/papers/slade-csirmaz-indo-aryan-hungarian-pieces.pdf

 

Talk 2:

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Benjamin Slade

 

Talk title: Why are there disjunctive particles in Sinhala & Dravidian

relative-correlatives?: existential particles in nonexistential environments

 

Brief abstract: Crosslinguistically many languages use morphemes from two series of particles — split roughly into additive/conjunctive/universal morphemes (Sinhala -t, Dravidian um, Japanese mo) and interrogative/disjunctive/existential morphemes (Sinhala da, Dravidian ō, Japanese ka) — in a wide range of “quantificational” contexts. Relative-correlative constructions  in Dravidian and literary/classical varieties of Sinhala  use a quantifier particle as a “closing particle” in the relative clause. Unexpectedly, the quantifier particle involved in these languages is part of the disjunctive/existential group, as opposed to the case in Nepali, where a member of the additive/universal group appears. I offer an analysis which treats existentially-associated particles as variables over choice-functions carrying an anti-singleton presupposition, accounting for both their use in the formation of epistemic indefinites, and in the formation of relative clauses.

 

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrHv7KETxvU&feature=youtu.be&t=4s

 

Slides link: http://mitrovic.co/papers/slade-sinhala-relative-correlatives-particles.pdf

 

Last Updated: 5/3/21