*dhworom

Where? Online

When?Fridays, 12-1PM (biweekly)

What?*dhworom is a semi-monthly talk series, sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, showcasing diachronic work in linguistics, including genetic historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and work on language contact. In Fall 2020, *dhworom will primarily be an informal reading group on historical (morpho)syntax which will include informal conversations with scholars working on topics in historical (morpho)syntax. In particular, we will be focusing on the following topics this coming fall: (a) change in morphosyntactic alignment systems, (b) grammaticalization, and (c) contact-induced (morpho)syntactic change.

Who? *dhworom is organized by Edwin Ko. If you would like to join our mailing list, please send an email to eddersko@berkeley.edu. We welcome linguists and philologists from all departments and institutions.

Fall 2020: Historical (Morpho)syntax

2020.09.04 - Welcome back!

2020.09.18 - Alignment change

  • Garrett, A. (1990). The origin of NP split ergativity. Language, 261-296.

2020.10.02 - Alignment change

  • Hohepa, P. W. (1969). The accusative-to-ergative drift in Polynesian languages. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 78(3), 295-329.
  • Otsuka, Y. (2011). Neither accusative nor ergative: an alternative analysis of case in Eastern Polynesian. Topics in Oceanic morphosyntax, 289-318.

2020.10.16 - Grammaticalization

  • Joseph, B. D. (2000). Is there such a thing as “grammaticalization?”. Language Sciences, 23(2-3), 163-186.
    Brian Joseph will be joining us for a conversation about his paper!

2020.10.30 - Grammaticalization

  • Haspelmath, M. (1999). Why is grammaticalization irreversible?. Linguistics, 37(6), 1043-1068.

2020.11.13 - Grammaticalization

  • Kiparsky, P. (2012). Grammaticalization as optimization. In Jonas, D. John Whitman, J., & Garrett, A. (eds.), Grammatical change: Origins, nature, outcomes, 15-51.

2020.12.4 - Contact-induced morphosyntactic change

  • Dunn, M., Levinson, S., Lindström, E., Reesink, G., & Terrill, A. (2008). Structural Phylogeny in Historical Linguistics: Methodological Explorations Applied in Island Melanesia. Language, 84(4), 710-759.
  • Donohue, M., Musgrave, S., Whiting, B., & Wichmann, S. (2011). Typological feature analysis models linguistic geography. Language, 369-383.

2020.12.11 - Contact-induced morphosyntactic change

  • Mithun, M. (2008). The emergence of agentive systems. In Donohue, M. and Wichmann, S. (eds.), The Typology of Semantic Alignment Systems. Oxford University Press. 297-333.
    Marianne Mithun will be joining us for a conversation about her paper!

The reading lists for past topics and information about past talks can be on this page.