Greek

Welcome Dunstan Brown

The morphological systems group is excited to be hosting Dunstan Brown, from University of York, for a two month visit to OSU. He is here to work with Andrea on a project modeling Greek nominal stress in DATR, and to talk all things defectiveness. (Check out his and Neil Bermel‘s “Feast and Famine” grant project on defectiveness and overbaundance!) And it is a great opportunity for our local community of morphologists to talk with Dunstan about his/their research: morphology and its interface to syntax, computational linguistics, Slavic languages, Network Morphology, Canonical Typology, inflectional complexity — so many points of shared interest!

Dunstan will be giving a colloquium talk in the department on October 29.

Welcome, Dunstan!

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.

Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore Conference

OSU-affiliated people at the 2018 Balkan & South Slavic ConferenceYellowstone National ParkThe Biennial Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore was, as always, a great time. It was full of Balkan food, dancing, nature and wildlife (courtesy of nearby Yellowstone National Park), and even some academic papers. (Andrea presented a talk, “Greek noun stress and the notion ‘head’ in morphology”. Linguistics grad student Rexhina Ndoci also gave a talk titled “Greetings and politeness in Albanian”.) And it was great to catch up with some OSU alums!

Thanks to Elena Petroska and Paul Foster for being great hosts at Montana State University, Billings.

International Quantitative Morphology Meeting

Jeff in Kalemegdan Park, Belgrade

Jeff in Kalemegdan Park, Belgrade

Jeff Parker and Andrea Sims just returned from Belgrade, Serbia, where they presented a paper at the First International Quantitative Morphology Meeting. The trip had a rough start, including a 26-hour travel delay that involved each being stranded in a different airport. Nonetheless, they made it to Belgrade in time to see some interesting talks, and got to show off some pretty cool graphs about the implicative structure of Russian and Greek nouns.

Slides from the talk: On the interaction of implicative structure and type frequency in inflectional systems (PDF)