language contact

Morphological Systems Group organizes AIMM5

 

Screenshot of AIMM5 GatherTown spaceScreenshot of AIMM5 poster session in GatherTown

We got to welcome more than 160 morphologists from around the world to OSU (virtually) for the 5th American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM5) last weekend. It was four busy but exciting days of stimulating talks and interesting discussion. (Check out this picture of one of the poster sessions that took place in Gather.Town!) We hope that everyone enjoyed the conference. We certainly did!

It was also an opportunity to show off some of the morphological research happening here at OSU. The program included five presentations from our group:

  • Martha Booker Johnson and Andrea D. Sims, “Using word vectors to investigate semantic transparency cross-linguistically”
  • Kyle Maycock and Andrea D. Sims, “Albanian second-position clitics as edge inflection: Evidence from cumulative exponence in the noun phrase”
  • Connor Rouillier, “The effect of event structure on subject-verb agreement in Najdi Arabic”
  • Noah Diewald, “Wao Terero lexical suffixes: Realization at the lexical semantic-discourse interface”
  • Micha Elsner and Andrea D. Sims, “Analogical modeling of morphology for L1 effects in language contact”

There were also presentations from OSU “friends of the morphology lab” Brian Joseph, Shuan Karim, and John Grinstead (with colleagues).

We look forward to AIMM6, to be held at the University of California, San Diego in 2023!

Paper on Balkan verbal complex published

Andrea Sims and Brian Joseph’s paper ‘Morphology versus syntax in the Balkan verbal complex‘ has just been published in the volume Balkan syntax and (universal) principles of grammar, edited by Iliana Krapova and Brian Joseph.

Paper Abstract: Various Balkan languages have a string of material called here the “verbal complex”, in which a verb occurs with various markers for tense, modality, negation, and argument structure. We examine here this verbal complex with regard to its status as a syntactic element or a morphological element. First, we carefully outline the theoretical basis for determining the status of a given entity and we then argue that the verbal complexes display different degrees of morphologization in the different languages. Albanian and Greek show the highest degree of morphologization of the verbal complex, with Macedonian close to them in this regard. Bulgarian shows a lesser degree of morphologization than Macedonian, making for an interesting split within East South Slavic, and Serbian shows an even lesser degree. We argue further that certain aspects of the verbal complex, especially in the languages with the greatest morphologization, represent contact-related convergence, and draw from this a general claim about the role of surface structure in language contact.

Katja Kibler presents at Midwest Slavic

Congratulations to M.A. student Katja Kibler on presenting her ongoing research at the 2017 Midwest Slavic Conference (April 7-9 at Ohio State). In her presentation, “Lexical Borrowings from Chinese into Russian among Russians Living in China”, Katja explored how the patterns of borrowing and non-borrowing can be explained using a community of practice analysis.

She continues to work on her data (with 100+ hours of audio still to go through) and is looking forward to completing her M.A. paper on this topic by the end of the year!

Grad student symposium

On February 18, 2017 the Slavic Linguistics Forum and the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures (DSEELC) held the first annual DSEELC Linguistics Symposium. The theme of this year’s symposium was “Language Away from the Homeland.”

With Prof. Renee Perelmutter (University of Kansas) giving the keynote speech on “Multiglossia and Globalization in the Online Discourse of Russian-speaking Israelis”, eight student presenters coming from all over the country, and participation from several departments at OSU, the event was a great success.

The event was organized by DSEELC graduate students Katja Kibler, Katya Rouzina and Hope Wilson. Congratulations on the successful conference!