General Linguistics Colloquium (SoSe 2026)

This talk...

This talk...

The lecture introduces the current language situation and related debates in Greenland. Drawing on examples from arts and literature, such as the works of Julie Edel Hardenberg, Jessie Kleemann and Niviaq Korneliussen, we will explore the coexistence of multiple languages in Greenland, as well as associated questions of identity, decolonization and globalization. Who uses which language(s)? What effects of multilingualism can be observed in everyday life, politics, and art and culture? Finally, we will address the question of how the three language families represented in the Nordic region are approached in the field of Scandinavian/Northern European Studies.

In this talk I will first present the diachrony of the Attic-Ionic /äː/ → /æː/ → /εː/ shift and the related processes, from the earliest, Proto-Hellenic stage to the final merger of /æː/ with /εː/ in the Classical times. Next, I will discuss the distribution of these vowels in the four Attic-Ionic dialects, and finally we will turn our attention to certain nominal forms and endings and what evidence can be deduced from them.

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are elements or expressions that typically survive in negative or other specific environments, namely non-veridical contexts (cf. Giannakidou 1998, 1999; Zeijlstra 2022). Although NPIs are attested in all languages (Giannakidou 2011: 1661; Zeijlstra 2022: 17), Coptic (an Afro- Asiatic language) NPIs have largely “slipped through the cracks,” remaining under-researched even within descriptive Coptic grammars.

This talk aims to provide an overview of NPIs in Coptic and their diachronic development, based on a study of a diverse corpus of over 800,000 words, spanning various genres from the fourth to the tenth century CE. Coptic NPIs comprise various categories, including indefinite pronouns, modal verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, bare singular NPs, and minimizers. I examine how the indefinite pronoun laau ‘anyone, anything’ developed from a minimizer, hence rising from an NP to the functional head D (paralleling the development of the Middle Welsh dim ‘thing’ in Willis 2012), before evolving into a pronoun and, finally, an adverb.

Another distinct group of NPIs in Coptic consists of the modal verbs əš and əšcəmcom ‘can, be able to’. Uniquely, these modal verbs don’t license NPIs; rather they function as NPIs themselves. In veridical contexts, they have to be replaced by alternative constructions:

(1) nne-u-eš-toučo n-te-u-psuchê
NEG.OPT-3PL-can-save ACC-POSS:SG.F-3PL-soul
‘They cannot save their souls.’ (Isa 47:14)

(2) a. ouən-com mmo-f e-toučo
EXIST-power in-3SG.M to-save
‘He has the ability to save (literally: there is power in him to save).’ (Heb 7:25)

b. *f-eš-toučo
3SG.M-can-save

Furthermore, the conjunction oude –originally borrowed from the negative Ancient Greek conjunction oude ‘and not, not even’– appears to have lost its inherent negative force in Coptic. It occurs outside strictly negative contexts, suggesting a transition into a weak NPI.

References:

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1998. Polarity Sensitivity as (non)veridical Dependency. Linguistik Aktuell 23. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

________. 1999. “Affective Dependencies.” In Linguistics and Philosophy 22: 367–421.

Willis, David. 2012. “A Minimalist Approach to Jespersen’s Cycle in Welsh.” In Grammatical Change: Origins, Nature, Outcomes, edited by Dianne Jonas, John Whitman, and Andrew Garrett, 93–119. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582624.003.0005.

Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2022. Negation and Negative Dependencies. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198833239.001.0001.

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The term framing effect refers to the empirically well-established phenomenon that choices and judgments are systematically affected by which part of a two-sided state of affairs is described. For example, when the outcome of a plan to tackle the economic crisis of a company is described in terms of number of jobs to be saved it will be endorsed more often than when it is framed in terms of number of jobs to be lost (e.g., The plan will result in [the saving of 2,000 out of 6,000 jobs] / [the loss of 4,000 out of 6,000 jobs]). Framing effects have been extensively investigated in psychological research on judgement and decision making. However, the source of framing effects is not yet settled. In my talk, I will address framing effects from linguistic perspectives. Firstly, I will discuss different semantic-pragmatic accounts of framing effects. Secondly, I will present novel findings indicating that framing effects can be modulated by context and numeral modification.

The finite predicate complex of Oceanic languages canonically consists minimally of 1) a subject marker, 2) a TAM marker and 3) a verb root. Depending on the language, these elements form a single word unit or are distributed over several morphophonological words. In two Oceanic languages of Ambrym, however, TAM markers can form word units with the preceding subject marker, the following verb root, or stand alone. In this talk, I will present data from two empirical studies to investigate the distribution of functional elements over word units in both languages. The first study is based on spontaneous orthographies that were elicited for the previously mostly unwritten, unstandardised languages. The second study looks at phonetic realizations, in particular of vowel-harmonic vs vowel-disharmonic versions of TAM markers. Both studies largely converge on the analysis that wordhood in the predicate complex of both languages is probabilistic and performance-driven.

This talk...

This talk...

This study investigates cross-linguistic variation in the grammatical integration of ideophones. I propose an ideophonic parametric hierarchy and test it through a function-based comparison of German corpus data and Changana fieldwork data. The results show stronger grammatical integration in Changana than in German, broadly supporting the hierarchy while highlighting the role of category shifting and language-specific affordances.