Welcome to the Roman Jakobson Linguistic Seminar
The aim of this invited lecture series is to provide a forum for both students and faculty members who are interested in linguistics broadly construed and in cutting edge research in all of its domains. We will meet every two weeks to listen to a lecture on recent research from both renowned international as well as Czech speakers. The meetings will be an opportunity to share new research and discuss it in an informal setting.
The Seminar is named in honour of Roman Jakobson, one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistics Circle and a professor at Masaryk University from 1933.
We will be meeting every other Thursday at 14:00.
Note that this semester, the Seminar is conducted together with the MUNI Lectures in Linguistics Series for most of the talks. We will inform you regarding the class room in advance of each talk.
Assessment
In order to pass the course, students must write a 1-page summary in English of one of the talks of their choosing. The text should be structured like a scientific abstract, for example for an international conference. The course is assessed on a pass/fail basis. We will provide more information on the assessment part in due course. See an excerpt from Macaulay's book Surviving Linguistics on how to write a good linguistics abstract:
The students are also expect to ask questions and engage in discussion. Each student should aim to ask at least two questions during the course of the Seminar.
Spatial cases and P-drop in Tsez The talk investigates spatial case marking in Tsez. Comrie and Polinsky (1998) argue for the decomposition of these forms into two core spatial morphemes (analogous to combinations such as from below in English), and optionally others, like the distal marker etc. The current talk points out that the bi-componential analysis leaves several puzzles unanswered. To resolve them, I argue that we need a tri-componential structure (roughly as in from in front (of)). Despite the need for the tri-componential structure, the marking of some cases is indeed bi-componential, i.e., some of the expected markers are missing. The talk suggests that this is because of portmanteau realisation: three units of meaning are present, but realised by only two markers. The specific conditions under which this happens are explored vis a vis the lexicalization theory used in Nanosyntax.