Programme 2023/24
Since 2022/23, we changed the way DLLD works. We now invite one lecturer per semester to give three lectures (two online, one on campus) on different aspects of their work. The focus is on the journey they take to find what they’re searching.
Semester 1 2023/24: Joachim Kokkelmans (Bozen/Bolzano): Fonetisch-fonologische variatie: van geluidsopnames tot universele typologieën
In deze lezingenreeks wordt er ingegaan op vragen over de taalvariatie op het gebied van de fonetiek en de fonologie: hoe kan men variatie in de uitspraak van individuen meten, daarmee generalisaties formuleren over het fonetisch-fonologische systeem van een bepaalde taal en zo de variatie in de talen van de wereld verstaan en verklaren? Waar houdt mogelijke taalvariatie op, dwz. waar ligt de grens tussen taalsystemen die mogelijks zouden kunnen bestaan en onmogelijke taalsystemen? Er wordt aangetoond hoe men aan de hand van geluidsopnames een fonetisch onderzoek opbouwt, hoe taalkundige theorieën fonetisch detail en fonologische categorieën met elkaar verbinden en hoe ze de variatie op het vlak van de fonologie modelleren om te voorspellen welke talen al dan niet mogelijk zijn.
9 November 2023: Fonetisch onderzoek (online)
30 November 2023: Fonologische typologie (online)
14 December 2023: Variatie in de fonetiek en fonologie (toegepast) (on campus)
Semester 2 2023/2024: Metin Bağrıaçık (Boğaziçi): When two tongues meet: linguistic investigation of contact situations
29 Februari 2024: Contact with contact or an ode to Ammonians (online)
In this meeting, we set a framework for studying contact-induced phenomena. We treat the topic as a non-linear, dynamical system, and talk about the possible variables, linguistic- and extra-linguistic, which ultimately give the contact outcome the shape it has.
21 March 2024: Finding data that are and that aren’t (online)
Historical linguists know it very well that the study of linguistic change immediately faces the challenge of tackling with data that aren’t. Change due to contact is no exception. In this meeting, we will discuss how we could study contact in real time and how we could reconstruct a contact-history that has ultimately produced the specific outcome we observe.
25 April 2024: Making generalizations — big or small (on-site)
What will come out of a contact situation is, at face value, largely unpredictable; however, could we still not make any statements that would interest the larger linguistic audience? We will look at more case studies across the globe, compare and contrast them, and give the answer in the end.
Programme 2022/23
Semester 1: Marieke Meelen (Cambridge): How to do historical linguistics with scarce data
- 10 November 2022: On getting more out of historical data: transforming state-of-the-art NLP techniques to effective historical corpus-annotation tools
- 24 November 2022: On filling the gaps: fieldwork on endangered languages in Nepal
- 13 December 2022: On answering diachronic research questions: Case Studies in the history of Celtic and Tibetan
Semester 2: Oliver Niebuhr (SDU Sønderborg, Denmark): The charisma journey
- 1 March 2023: The charisma journey – Research overview and how it all came about
- 29 March 2023: How phonetics/speech sciences can be useful in life
- 26 April 2023: Show & tell
Programme 2021/22
30-09-2021 Emiliana Cruz (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Mexico City):
20-10-2021 Ashwini Deo (Ohio State University):
“The emergence of split-oblique case systems: a view from the Bhili dialect continuum (Indo-Aryan)”
22-11-2021 Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto):
“Mining for linguistic gold: The Ontario Dialects Project”
21-02-2022 Tamsin Blaxter (University of Cambridge):
09-05-2022 Diego Pescarini (CNRS):
‘Negation marking in central Romance: reviving some late 19th and early 20th century data’
Programme 2020/21
05-10-2020 Mathieu Avanzi (Paris VII):
19-10-2020 Artemis Alexiadou (HU Berlin):
“Linguistic changes in heritage grammars”
23-11-2020 George Walkden (U Konstanz):
“Can we predict future language changes?”
14-12-2020 Ailis Cournane (NYU):
“Modal verbs in language development and language change”
08-02-2021 Roberta D’Alessandro (U Utrecht):
“What microcontact tells us about language”
22-04-2021 Nino Grillo (York U):
“Local and Universal: On the interaction of universal parsing principles and grammatical variation.”
10-05-2021 Hae-Sung Jeon (U Central Lancashire):
‘Intonation: From Phonetics to Meaning’
Programme 2019/20
3 Oct 2019 Pritty Patel-Grosz (Oslo):
Explorations in the semantics of dance
7 Nov 2019 W. Tecumseh Fitch (Vienna):
The Evolution of the Neural Basis for Language: A Comparative Perspective
12 Dec 2019 Stefan Rabanus (Verona):
Possessive constructions in Cimbrian: contact-induced or autonomous morphosyntactic change?
2 Mar 2020 Ianthi M. Tsimpli (Cambridge):
Linguistic Complexity in Bilingual Children’s Grammars
30 Mar 2020 Chiara Gianollo (Bologna):
Simply not? How negation is strengthened in discourse, and which effects this may have over time
29 Apr 2020 Ingo Feldhausen (Frankfurt):
Programme 2018/19
3 Oct 2018 Tjerk Hagemeijer (Lisbon):
The formation of the Gulf of Guinea creoles: between languages, genes, and history
23 Oct 2018 Gerardo Mazzaferro (Turin):
3 Dec 2018 Beáta Megyesi (Uppsala):
Decoding secret writings from the past – CANCELLED
25 Feb 2019 Daniel Gutzmann (Cologne):
I lost my damn watch! The grammar of expressive adjectives.– CANCELLED
14 Mar 2019 Peter Alexander Kerkhof (Leiden):
2 Apr 2019 Lutz Marten (SOAS London):
15 May 2019 Marjo van Koppen (Utrecht):
Negation in the letters of P.C. Hooft: combining literary studies and linguistics
Programme 2017/18
26 Oct 2017 Roland Pfau (Amsterdam):
Sign Language Negation: From Gesture to Grammar
30 Nov 2017 Maria Garraffa (Heriot Watts, Edinburgh):
Mechanisms of language learning in children with developmental language disorder
4 Dec 2017 Beáta Megyesi (Uppsala):
Decoding secret writings from the past
19 Mar 2018 David Britain (Bern):
Discovering dialect with mobile phone apps
26 Apr 2018 Gea de Jong-Lendle (Marburg):
9 May 2018 Giuditta Caliendo (Lille):
Legitimacy and Identity in the Time of Crisis: a discursive perspective on European integration
Programme 2016/17
18-10-2016 Birgit A. Rasmussen (Copenhagen):
Tracing the Indo-Europeans – their language and culture
07-11-2016 Tamara Rathcke (Kent):
On the power of rhythm in language and music
14-12-2016 Francis Nolan (Cambridge):
Intonation analysis: the ‘British’ school and the emergence of a phonology of intonation
23-03-2017 Ielka van der Sluis (Groningen):
The use and effectiveness of multimodal instructions
27-04-2017 James Clackson (Cambridge):
Ancient Etruscan – deciphering an unknown language
08-05-2017 Rob Truswell (Edinburgh):
Bonobos, children, and fear of trees
Programme 2015/16
08-10-2015 Andrew Nevins (University College London):
Tooth and Throat Singing: Mondegreens and the Decoding of Sound Structure
26-10-2015 Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh):
Linguistic change in the North Atlantic: Investigating modern Faroese
07-12-2015 Marc van Oostendorp (Universiteit Leiden):
Frans klinkt als een machinegeweer, Nederlands als morsecode
09-03-2016 Klaus Abels (University College London):
What word order typology reveals about universal cognitive biases
25-04-2015 Ioanna Sitaridou (University of Cambridge):
Continuity, Contact and Change: The Greek varieties (Romeyka) in Turkey today
03-05-2016 Antonella Sorace (University of Edinburgh):
Bilingualism across the lifespan: language and general cognition