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School of Languages, Linguistics and Film

Guest Speaker Seminar Series: Dr Nicholas Rolle (ZAS Berlin)

When: Wednesday, December 13, 2023, 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Where: ArtsOne 1.28 and on Zoom (link below), Mile End Campus

We are delighted to be welcoming Dr Nicholas Rolle (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) to the department who will deliver a seminar entitled "Bipartite morphemes, grammatical tone, and restrictions on exponent shape". The session will be followed by a drinks reception.

Abstract

This talk focuses on exponence, defined as the mapping of syntactic structure to phonological structure by way of stored X↔Y pairings. I focus on a restriction on exponence which often is tacitly assumed but not formally developed: all phonological content of a single exponent must be strictly local in its initial state. This restriction entails that all ‘bipartite morphemes’ (e.g. circumfixes of the German ge-...-t type) involve multiple X↔Y pairings, which makes several predictions to be discussed. Ultimately, this research stems from my work on grammatical tone, in which a linguistic category can be expressed by potentially non-local segmental and tonal exponents. I close the talk by showing how grammatical tone informs us about this topic.

Zoom link: https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/87422978734

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