Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

Vorträge im Rahmen des Kolloquiums Slawistische Linguistik

Im Wintersemester 2023/24 findet das Kolloquium mittwochs 12:30-14:00 Uhr über Zoom oder hybrid statt (Präsenz: Dorotheenstr. 65, Raum 5.61). Wenn Sie an den Vorträgen teilnehmen wollen oder selber vortragen wollen, wenden Sie sich bitte an Berit Gehrke.

 

25.10. Vesela Simeonova (Graz): Modals for the present and for the past in Bulgarian [online]

The interactions of tense and epistemic modals have been subject to a great deal of interest since Condoravdi's (2002) seminal work. Condoravdi argues that past tense can project either higher or lower than the modal, giving rise to epistemic and counterfactual (CF) readings, respectively (and not in both positions). This is illustrated in (1).

(1) Mary might have won the race.
a. epistemic reading: modal > past
b. CF reading: past > modal
c. impossible: past > modal > past

Condoravdi explores this topic predominantly with English data and, as shown in (1), the proposed solution is syntactically covert. Bulgarian is an ideally suited language to test this theory empirically and determine the position at which tense is interpreted relative to the modal, because: (i) it has overtly tensed modals; (ii) it has no infinitives. 
In this talk, I show that some of Condoravdi's predictions are borne out for Bulgarian, while others lead to an additional layer of complexity, and explore the empirical and theoretical consequences of these findings in relation to more recent cross-linguistic developments on epistemic modality.

Condoravdi, Cleo (2002). Temporal interpretation of modals: modals for the present and for the past. In: Beaver, Martinez, Clark, Kaufmann (Eds.), The Construction of Meaning, pp 59-88. CSLI Publications.

 

1.11. Olga Borik (UNED, Madrid): Commitment datives (joint work with Ismael Iván Teomiro García) [hybrid]

In this talk, we focus on a specific use of the dative case – commitment dative – and put forward the hypothesis that these datives can be used to overtly express commitment of the speaker or the hearer. We argue that this type of datives cannot be easily explained by applicative-based analyses (see Cuervo 2020 for an overview) without radically changing the semantics of the applicative because they are restricted to particular types of speech acts, namely, commissives and directives. Instead, we rely on the proposal of Geurts (2019), who offers a commitment-based analysis for basic speech acts, including commissives and directives. Drawing on empirical data from Russian and Spanish, we argue that the main contribution of commitment datives is to overtly mark the commitment of the speaker to the goal of making the proposition expressed by the sentence true (Geurts 2019).

 

15.11. Jan Chromý (Prag): What do we recall immediately after reading a sentence? [hybrid]

Der Vortrag basiert auf dem folgenden Artikel:

Chromý, J. & Vojvodić, S. (2023). When and where did it happen? Systematic differences in recall of core and optional sentence information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, DOI: 10.1177/1747021823115919 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17470218231159190)

 

22.11. Metodi Efremov (Nova Gorica/Leipzig): The Semantics of the Macedonian Definite Articles [hybrid]

Macedonian seems to have three definite articles (Tomic, 2012; Minova-Gjurkova, 1994; Koneski, 2004).
 
1. Kucheto    si             igra.

Dog+the   refl.CL    playing
‘The only dog in the current situation is playing.’

  1. Kucheno             si            igra.
    Dog+the.distal   refl.CL   playing
    ‘The dog distant from us in the current situation is playing.’

  2. Kuchevo                   si            igra.
    Dog+the.proximal   refl.CL   playing
    ‘The dog close to me in the current situation is playing.'

While this paradigm has been documented in the literature, the full extent of how similar and how different the three definite articles are semantically has not been accomplished. In this talk, we attempt to fill this gap. In doing so, we follow Schwarz's (2009, 2013) general theoretical proposal that uniqueness and familiarity are necessary to explain the semantic behavior of definite articles. On the basis of various data that we will present, we argue that the t-root article in Macedonian lexicalizes iota and satisfies strong and weak familiarity, while the v and n-root articles satisfy weak familiarity. We will additionally present data that illustrates that the three articles are not equivalent to their corresponding demonstratives, from which they historically evolved, as the latter have different presuppositions for their use to be felicitous (Minova-Gjurkova, 1994; Karapejovski, 2017, 2020).

 

13.12. Mojmír Dočekal, Michaela Hulmanová & Aviv Schoenfeld (Brno & Tel Aviv): Slavic sorting and genericity: Experimental evidence from Slovak [zoom]

 

20.12. Karolina Zuchewicz (Leipzig): TBD [hybrid]

 

10.1. Mariia Razguliaeva, Maria Onoeva, Radek Šimík & Roland Meyer (HU Berlin & Prague): TBD [hybrid]

 

24.1. Sławomir Zdziebko (Lublin): There is no escape from abstract representations. Containment, faithfulness and Polish palatalizations [zoom]

 

14.2. Roland Meyer (HU): Cross-Slavic differences in aspect use in the light of parallel corpora [hybrid]

 

21.2. Uliana Yazhinova (HU Berlin): Sprachliche Zweifelsfälle [hybrid]

 

 

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