Vorträge am 30.01.2023

Im Rahmen der Veranstaltung „Forschungsschwerpunkte der Finnougristik“ des Instituts für Finnougristik / Uralistik der LMU laden wir herzlich zu zwei Vorträgen am Montag, 30.01.2023 um 14 c.t. ein:

Sergey Say (University of Potsdam)

Predictability of bivalent argument encoding patterns

Verb’s argument encoding patterns are commnonly believed to be largely conditioned by the verb’s meaning, especially in the case of transitive verbs, see (Fillmore 1968, Hopper, Thompson 1980, Tsunoda 1985, Dowty 1991, Lehmann 1991, Lazard 1994, Malchukov 2005) inter alia. In the case of non-transitve bivalent verbs, the mappings between verbs’ meanings and argument encoding are less transparent, but language-specific studies often assume that there are regular corespondences between semantic and syntactic properties of arguments in these verbs, too. Intuitively, however, language-specific verbs can differ in the degree to which their encoding pattern is predictable from their meaning. In my talk, I put forward a technique for operationalising this intuition in a quantitative-typological setting. In a nutshell, this technique is based on the premise that the encoding pattern P associated with the verb V in language L is predictable to the extent that V’s neighbouring verbs in L also display P. By V’s neighbouring verbs I understand verbs whose translational equivalents cluster together with the translational equivalents of V in terms of their argument realization in other languages. In my talk, I am going to present some results of applying this technique to the data from BivalTyp, a typological database of bivalent verbs and their encoding frames (Say 2020). In particular, I will claim that the in the predictability hierarchy is populated by verbs with high transitivity prominence, which corresponds to some previous assumptions, but I will also discuss important differences between verbs that low transitivity prominence paying special attention to psychological verbs (‘be surprised’, ‘fall in love’, ‘be glad’) whose argument encoding behaviour is prone to language-specific idiosyncrasies.

Maria Ovsjannikova (University of Potsdam)

Possessive constructions in Forest Enets: syntax and discourse

In my talk, I will discuss the strategies of possessor encoding in Forest Enets (Northern Samoyedic, Uralic). After a brief overview of the Enets core case system, I will focus on the two types of possessor encoding, the nominative and the oblique. The oblique possessor is traditionally described as the major possessor encoding strategy in Enets, whereas the nominative possessor encoding has not been discussed in the existing grammatical descriptions. Based on elicited data, I will show that the oblique possessor is a part of the noun phrase headed by the possessee, whereas the nominative possessor shows the properties both of a detached topicalized constituent and of an external possessor. Then I will proceed to the comparison of the use of these two strategies in the corpus of oral texts. I examine their distribution in terms of the syntactic function and semantic class of the possessee and the predicate type. I will present evidence to the effect that the nominative possessor encoding is strongly associated with constructions that describe 1) various types of possessive relations (predicating possession, stating the possessor’s age and name) and 2) the state of the possessor’s body part. Meanwhile, oblique possessors typically serve as referential anchors and are less determined by constructional semantics, in particular they are more common when the possessee is agentive and animate.

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Die Veranstaltung findet sowohl in Präsenz im Hauptgebäude Raum M114 statt sowie hybrid unter dem folgenden Zoom-Link: https://lmu-munich.zoom.us/j/93938720682?pwd=ZnRCV1JnL2w4SVdvMHlCTEtWL2NjZz09

Meeting ID: 939 3872 0682
Passcode: 284661

Herzlich Willkommen!

Das Team des Instituts für Finnougristik / Uralistik