Submitted by tomash on 15 December, 2010 - 08:48.
1. Ronald Kim
Title: Typology, grammaticalization, and the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European case system
Recent publications have challenged many of the long-held assumptions about the reconstruction and prehistory of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) case system. In this lecture, I summarize these findings and evaluate their importance for Indo-European (IE) and general historical linguistics. Not only is the number of cases to be reconstructed for PIE called into question, but the agglutinative or “secondary” cases of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages, long regarded as typologically odd, are shown to be well motivated developments with numerous parallels within IE and elsewhere. The semantic reinterpretation of adverbial markers as case markers, and the grammaticalization of postpositional phrases as univerbated case forms, must have been taking place already in the late stages of the protolanguage. These results allow us to view the notoriously complex PIE case system, with its elaborate system of portmanteau endings marking case, number, and inflectional class, in wider typological perspective, and to better understand its historical evolution in the various IE languages.
2. Cormac Anderson
Title: How English is Irish? On the typology of initial consonant clusters
Description: Recent cross-linguistic studies into the typology of initial consonant clusters (eg Scheer 2007) have argued that in spite of a surface gradient continuum there is a binary division between TR-only languages, where only initial obstruent + sonant clusters are allowed, and anything-goes languages, where all logically feasible initial consonant clusters are grammatically permitted.
This paper examines the place of Irish within this classification, as it is clearly a liminal case in terms of the binary typology. Although Irish permits only TR-clusters in root words, non-TR clusters do occur under the morphosyntactically induced phonological processes of consonant mutation
active in the language.
This paper uses data primarily from the Old Irish but also deals with Modern Irish as well as making reference to a number of other languages. Contrastative reference is made to both English and Polish and the presentation will act as a good crash course in Irish phonology for anyone interested in the topic.
Time and place: 13:30 in 601A
