LUCL Colloquium 30 September 2011

Information

On Friday 30 September Pieter Muysken (Centre for Language Studies - Radboud University Nijmegen) will give the first talk of this academic year. The title of his talk is "The ERC traces of contact project: a half way perspective".

Abstract

In January 2008 the five year ERC Traces of Contact project started in Nijmegen. It was the occasion for forming the Languages in Contact group, together with some other projects and with some other grant money. In this group we study language contact with different techniques, at four levels of geographical scale, and with different time depths:

(a) comparative structural studies on the languages of South America, and in particular those of the Amazonian fringe;

(b) elicited corpora of the languages of Suriname;

(c) elicited corpora of heritage languages in the Netherlands;

(d) experiments with multilingual Turkish- and Papiamentu-Dutch multilingual individuals.

Linguistically, our focus is primarily the TAME (tense, modality, aspect, evidentiality) system.

With our group we are now about half way through the project. The first sets of results are in, much fieldwork has been done already, some publications are out. However, now the hard questions are coming. Can we do everything we promised? Do our results come near answering our original research questions? I will begin sketching the project, then present some intermediate results, and finally turn to these hard questions, as a basis hopefully for discussion.

Date, time and venue

Contact

 The LUCL Colloquium organising committee consists of:

• Ronny Boogaart

• Marion Elenbaas

• Jessie Nixon

Please email the organisers if you are interested in giving a brief presentation of your ongoing research for future meetings.