Sorry, I neglected to add the time of the talk to this announcement.<br><br>The next talk in the Cognitive Development Center seminar series will be given by:<br><br>Anne Tamm, CEU<br>Date: Wednesday, February 2, 2011, 5 PM<br>
Location: CEU Cognitive Develoment Center, Hattyú u. 14, 3rd floor<br><b><br>
Cross-Categorial Case: Telicity and Evidentiality</b><br><br>Cross-categorial
 case (a.k.a. ‘case on verbs’, ‘verbal case’, ‘versatile case’, 
henceforth: CCC) is a cover term for various case phenomena in atypical 
syntactic environments (e.g., on verbs), and expressing atypical 
semantics (e.g., tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, negation). 
Previous scholarship has discovered ‘verbal case’ in several languages 
across the world. For instance, Blake (2001) describes case in the 
verbal tense and aspect system of Kalaw Lagaw Ya. Aikhenvald (2008) 
discusses the ‘versatile cases’ of Ket and Manambu, which express aspect
 and modality or temporal, causal and other relationships between 
clauses. Analyses of more accessible languages with rich CCC systems 
were missing until the rich pool of data of the Uralic languages was 
discovered. <br>
The Uralic languages provide excellent linguistic and extra-linguistic 
conditions for exploring the complexity of interdependent factors: rich 
nominal and cross-categorial case paradigms, a wide scale of forms 
between verbs and nominals, well-documented diachronic and synchronic 
variation (especially in Finnic or Permic), existing descriptions of 
spatial and non-spatial semantics of the cases. <br>
Integrating the new research agenda with the new data and with previous 
scholarship has resulted in the insight that CCCs are rarely markers of 
prototypical predicate categories but have retained much of their core 
semantics. In addition to their idiosyncratic morphosyntactic 
constraints, CCCs impose semantic and pragmatic constraints on their 
environment: the nature of the evidence, evaluation of knowledge, and 
expectations about the goals of activities. Tendencies in the 
grammaticalization of predicate functional categories have become 
clearer: e.g., spatial cases tend to give rise to tense-aspect marking, 
comitatives to Aktionsart (intensification, habituality), and abessives 
to negation. <br>
The partitive case provides the example of cross-categorial case, which 
in present-day Estonian exemplifies the diachronic evolution path from a
 spatial case to an aspectual case and further, to a marker of epistemic
 modality and evidentiality. The categories of aspect and evidentiality 
preserve the basic semantics of the spatial partitive; the example 
provides an illustration of the shared structure of these categories.