2013. február 12. kedd 11.00 óra
Rácz Péter
Gyakoriság és szaliencia a szociolingvisztikában
The aim of this talk is to provide a working definition for the widely used concept of sociolinguistic salience. This definition relies on the connection between the salience of a sociolinguistic variable and the variable's frequency, namely, the transitional probabilities of the segmental realisations of the variable across idiolects or dialects. The talk surveys the notion of salience as used in linguistics, particularly in studies of linguistic variation, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. It then goes on to provide an operationalisation of the concept in sociolinguistics, along with a methodology to establish empirically testable boundaries for it. It is also shown how a frequency-based definition of sociolinguistic salience contributes a lot to rich-memory language modelling, which is exactly the type of framework assumed for most studies of frequency effects on language structure.
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2013. február 19. kedd 11.00 óra
Prof. Daniel McIntyre
(University of Huddersfield)
Read all about it! Reporting the news in Early Modern English
In this paper I report on a corpus-based project investigating the presentation of speech, writing and thought in Early Modern English prose fiction and news writing. The aim of the project is to determine how discourse presentation develops over time. To study this we have built and annotated a small corpus of Early Modern English using the model of speech, writing and thought presentation outlined in Semino and Short (2004). We are thus able to compare our findings against those of Semino and Short for Present Day English writing. In this talk I will discuss the construction of the corpus, tagging issues, and what the quantitative results suggest about news reporting techniques in the Early Modern period.
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2013. február 26. kedd 14.00 óra
Fiatal PhD-sok előadásai a Nyelvtudományi Intézetben
Kardos Éva
Telic marking in Hungarian
It is commonly assumed in the literature that the telicity of verbal predicates is the outcome of the cumulative effects of various components of the discourse (e.g. the verb heading the predicate, its arguments including scalar arguments (see Hay et al. 1999, Kennedy and McNally 2005, and Kennedy and Levin 2008), and contextual clues), which can all contribute some meaning component that is necessary to describe a situation that has an inherent endpoint. In this talk I show that when examined from a cross-linguistic perspective, the elements that one must consider in the calculation of telicity differ as far as their aspectual "weight" is concerned. Specifically, I present arguments for the idea that in Hungarian we can identify specific discourse components such as certain verbal particles and resultative XPs that are directly responsible for the telicity of a given predicate (hence the term 'telic marking') by virtue of placing a bound on the denoted event, something that is not observable in English, for instance. In the latter, I show that verbal particles and resultative XPs provide the scale of the predicate (and not the event) with a bound and thus they are unable to guarantee telicity by themselves.
In my analysis, which is based on Kardos (2012), I take a model-theoretic approach to the characterization of telicity in Hungarian. More specifically, I adopt Beavers’s (2012) figure-path relations model, which is an extension of Krifka’s (1998) theory of aspect. I first discuss this model, the main innovation of which lies in the fact that it assumes mutually-constraining ternary homomorphic relations between the part structure of two incremental theme arguments (i.e. the figure, which undergoes some kind of change, and the path traversed during the event) and the part structure of the event argument and that it provides a novel definition of telicity, which is less strict than the one proposed by Krifka (1998). After a brief description of the theoretical background, I use mainly degree achievements like fel-melegszik 'PRT-warm' and le-hűl 'PRT-cool' to illustrate event bounding as carried out by, for instance, verbal particles in Hungarian. I further assume that event-bounding constituents introduce event maximalization (cf. Filip and Rothstein 2006 and Filip 2008) into the predicate, thereby imposing specific constraints on the interpretive properties of the arguments that determine the aspectual make-up of the predicate. Since event maximalization has the crucial effect that the verbal predicate has quantized reference, it follows that the telic interpretation of such predicates arises due to a stronger notion (i.e. quantized reference) than the telic interpretation of the English counterparts of these predicates, where quantized reference is a sufficient but not necessary condition for telicity to arise.
References
Beavers, John. (2012). Lexical aspect and multiple incremental themes. In V. Demonte & L. McNally (Eds.), Telicity and change of state in natural language: implications for event structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Filip, Hana. (2008). Events and maximalization. In S. Rothstein (Ed.), Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect (pp. 217-256). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Filip, Hana and Susan Rothstein. (2006). Telicity as a semantic parameter. In J. Lavine, S. Franks, H. Filip, & M. Tasseva-Kurktchieva (Eds.), Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL) XIV (pp. 139-156). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Slavic Publications. 2
Hay, Jennifer, Christopher Kennedy, and Beth Levin. (1999). Scalar structure underlies telicity in degree achievements. In T. Matthews & D. Strolovich (Eds.), SALT IX (pp. 127-144). Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
Kardos, Éva. (2012). Toward a scalar semantic analysis of telicity in Hungarian. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Debrecen, Debrecen.
Kennedy, Christopher and Louise McNally. (2005). Scale structure, degree modification, and the semantics of gradable predicates. Language, 81, 345-381.
Kennedy, Christopher and Beth Levin. (2008). Measure of change: the adjectival core of degree achievements. In L. McNally & C. Kennedy (Eds.), Adjectives and adverbs: syntax, semantics and discourse (pp. 156-182). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Krifka, Manfred. (1998). The origins of telicity. In S. Rothstein (Ed.), Events and Grammar (pp. 197-235). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
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Az előadások helyszíne:
MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet
1068 Budapest, Benczúr u. 33.
földszinti előadóterem