Speaker:  Raphael Finkel

Authors: Raphael Finkel and Gregory Stump

Abstract: In natural-language pedagogy, principal parts are used as a concise way of summarizing a lexeme's full paradigm of inflected forms.  In the context of morphological typology, principal parts may be used as a means of gauging both the nature and the degree of the complexity exhibited by a language's inflectional paradigms.  We show that principal parts afford several different ways of measuring morphological complexity.  We define principal parts, propose desired characteristics (uniqueness, uniformity, optimality), then present seven derived measures of complexity.  We illustrate these measures by referring to Pāli, a middle Indic language.

A talk by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Professor of Media Studies, Ponoma College and Director of Scholarly Communication, Modern Language Association. What if the academic monograph is a dying form? If scholarly communication is to have a future, it's clear that it lies online, and yet the most significant obstacles to such a transformation are not technological, but instead social and institutional. How must the academy and the scholars that comprise it change their ways of thinking in order for digital scholarly publishing to become a viable alternative to the university press book? This talk will explore some of those changes and their implications for our lives as scholars and our work within universities.

Contact Andrew Hippisley andrew.hippisley@uky.edu for additional information.

Seminar: Linguistics Program Faculty Speaker Series

Angeli Ralli, University of Patras & Princeton

Morphology in Contact: Verbal loans in Asia Minor Greek

Abstract:

The purpose of this talk is to present how verbs of the agglutinative Turkish are accommodated in the fusional Aivaliot, a Greek-based Asia Minor dialect. With the help of the Aivaliot data, and in accordance with recent findings in relevant literature,it is argued that it is not particularly difficult for verbs to be borrowed, provided that certain structural / morphological conditions are met. More specifically, Turkish verbs are adapted to the Aivaliot morphology following specific constraints of Greek word formation, such as stem-based derivation and stem allomorphy. However, their integration in the recipient language is also conditioned by features innate to the donor. Crucially, the Aivaliot verbal loans present a major challenge to morphology, since they serve to show that morphological issues and approaches can be tested in contact situations, where languages of distinct morphological typologies may affect each other. Moreover, they also render Aivaliot a good candidate as a case study for language-contact considerations by proving that external factors, e.g. full bilingualism, are not the only (or main) reason for an extensive transfer of items and features.