InFUSE at the SLE summer school 2018

From 29 August – 1st September 2018, Tallinn University (Estonia) hosted the 51st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. The conference was preceded by an international summer school organised by the Graduate School of Linguistics, Philosophy and Semiotics (GSLPS) of the University of Tartu in cooperation with the Societas Linguistica Europaea, supported by the University of Tartu ASTRA Project PER ASPERA and by the Societas Linguistica Europaea.

The summer school had two focuses: typology and sociolinguistics. At the INFUSE meeting in Munich in October 2017 it was decided that the consortium will use the opportunity of having an activity of the biggest linguistic
event of Europe taking place at one of its partner universities by offering a workshop "Typology of Uralic  Languages". The teachers involved were Jeremy Bradley (University of Vienna), Gerson Klumpp
(University of Tartu), Johanna Laakso (University of Vienna), and Elena Skribnik (LMU Munich). It started with an overview lecture focusing on typological features present in these languages, followed by an in-depth discussion of morphosyntactic features relevant in information structuring (one of the current topics present also in the program of the SLE conference), and was rounded up by an overview on databases in which Uralic langages are represented.

Approximately one third of the summer school participants (10 out of 30) booked this course, and the goal to rise the interest in Finno-Ugric Studies was achieved because most of them had not studied Finno-Ugric languages before. Together with the other three components of the typology focus (“Language
complexity in a typological perspective” by Matti Miestamo, “Areality and micro-typology” by Henrik Liljegren, and “Semantics in contact” by Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm) Erasmus plus INFUSE could contribute to a visible high level academic event