News

The 2018-2019 colloquium series continues this coming Monday, April 8, with a talk by Elizabeth Closs Traugott (Stanford). Same time as always, same place as always: 3:10-5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. The talk is entitled On the Rise of the Dative and Benefactive Alternations in English: The Intertwining of Differentiation with Attraction, and the abstract is as follows:

The rise of the ‘dative’ alternation (e.g. She gave her neighbor birthday presents ~ She gave birthday presents to her neighbor) has been shown to develop in later Middle English, around 1400 (Zehentner 2018). Building on Zehentner and Traugott (Forthcoming), I outline the rise of the benefactive alternation (e.g. build her a house ~ build a house for her) after 1600 from a historical constructionalist perspective and compare it with the rise of the dative alternation. My focus is on what evidence these developments provide for De Smet et al.’s (2018) discussion of attraction and differentiation. De Smet et al. propose that when functionally similar constructions come to overlap analogical attraction may occur. So may differentiation, but this process involves attraction to other subnetworks and is both “accidental” and “exceptional”. I show that in the histories of the dative and benefactive alternations functionally similar constructions come to overlap, and differentiation from each other plays as large a role as attraction to each other. Both attraction and differentiation occur at different levels: the verb and its distribution, the alternation subtype, and the larger system. Differentiation plays a considerably more significant role than De Smet et al. propose.

Terry Regier visited Sweden and Germany March 2-13 for a series of talks: An invited keynote at the kickoff event for the Chalmers AI Research Center in Gothenburg, followed by talks at the University of Gothenburg, Uppsala University, and Leipzig University.

Congrats to alumna Elise Stickles (PhD '16), who has just accepted a tenure-track position in the English department at the University of British Columbia! 

The Program Committee of the LSA is accepting proposals for Organized Sessions to be held at theLSA's 2020 Annual Meeting, which will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana from January 2-5.  An Organized Session is an excellent opportunity to present a group of similarly-focused presentations on a diverse array of topics and in a wide variety of formats. In addition to individual LSA members, Committees and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are encouraged to submit proposals on topics falling under their purview, and proposals are particularly welcome from women and underrepresented ethnic minorities, and on linguistic topics relating to the Southeastern United States in general and New Orleans in particular. In addition, proposals related to theUnited Nations International Year of Indigenous Languagesare also particularly encouraged.

The submission deadline for "regular" organized session proposals is May 15, 2018.  The deadline for proposals that build upon themes emerging from the Davis LSA Institute is July 17.  For more information about submitting an organized session, clickhere.

The 2018-2019 colloquium series continues this coming Monday, March 18, with a talk by Matthew Dryer (Buffalo). Same time as always, same place as always: 3:10-5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. The talk is entitled Evidence for the Suffixing Preference, and the abstract is as follows:

It might be thought that there already exists overwhelming evidence for a preference for suffixes over prefixes. However, strictly speaking, most of the available evidence is evidence for an orthographic suffixing preference, i.e. a preference for suffixes over prefixes in the orthographic representations of words in grammatical descriptions. Haspelmath (2011), however, questions how reliable such orthographic representation are and therefore questions whether there is good evidence for a suffixing preference. In this paper, I provide evidence for a suffixing preference by examining the phonological properties of two types of affixes, tense-aspect affixes on verbs and pronominal possessive affixes on nouns, examining the former in 827 languages and the latter in 553 languages. It has been suggested that pronominal possessive affixes do not exhibit a suffixing preference. However, I provide evidence that under one interpretation of the suffixing preference, pronominal possessive affixes do indeed exhibit a suffixing preference.