Next session of the Linguistic Theories and Data seminar

Date: Friday, February 10, 2023 - 2:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Inalco, Pôle des Langues et des Civilisations, 65 rue des Grands Moulins, room 3.15

Modern Armenian as a diasystem

Samuel Chakmakjian, INALCO - ERTIM & SeDyL, CNRS

Armenian is an Indo-European language with two standard variants. Despite its two very different phoneme inventories and years of relative isolation from each other, scientific research often points to a (synchronic) phoneme-to-phoneme correspondence between the two variants. Moreover, today speakers of both variants are increasingly found in shared social spaces (Karapetian, 2014; Chahinian & Bakalian, 2016) communicating with considerable ease. To explain these phenomena, this presentation will examine the possible application of the 'diasystem', first proposed by Uriel Weinreich (1954), and developed by other linguists (Cochrane, 1959; Moulton, 1960; Pulgram, 1964). This analysis will be explored taking into account the conventions of current research in Armenian linguistics, the contemporary sociolinguistic landscape and practical applications for the linguist, as well as for the speakers themselves.

References

Chahinian, T. and A. Bakalian (2016). Language in Armenian American communities: Western Armenian and efforts for preservation. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2016(237), 37-57.
Cochrane, G. R. (1959). The Australian English vowels as a diasystem. Word 15(1), 69-88.
Karapetian, S. (2014). "How Do I Teach My Kids My Broken Armenian?": A Study of Eastern Armenian Heritage Language Speakers in Los Angeles. Ph. D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.
Moulton, W. G. (1960). The short vowel systems of northern Switzerland: A study in structural dialectology. Word 16(2), 155-182.
Pulgram, E. (1964). Structural comparison, diasystems, and dialectology. Linguistics 2(4), 66-82.
Weinreich, U. (1954). Is a structural dialectology possible? Word 10(2-3), 388-400.

Averbal sentences in Russian and English:
Perspectives of a method integrating contrastive, enunciative and corpus linguistics

Antonina Bondarenko, SeDyL, CNRS

At the heart of all linguistic theory lies the question of what constitutes a sentence. The object of the present study is the controversial phenomenon of the averbal sentence, i.e. a structure in which the typical syntactic marker of phrasal status - the verbal predicate - is absent. Convinced that linguistic constraints hidden in a monolingual perspective can emerge in a cross-linguistic comparison, we examine the phenomenon in Russian and English, two languages with particularly different typological properties as regards the verb. We integrate contrastive, corpus and enunciative methods, with the aim of (a) describing the semantic-pragmatic features of verb absence specific to each language, and (b) exploring the implications for existing theories. Thanks to a new parallel-and-comparable corpus of 1.4 million words and a novel method of automatic absence retrieval (elusive open grammatical structures), we are able to overcome the data limitations imposed on previous research and revise existing accounts. The results also give us new empirical bases for defending the phrasal status of these structures, and lead us to propose a model of the sentence that strives to be capable of accounting for the averbal phenomenon. In our contribution to the seminar, in addition to providing an overview of the background controversy and presenting our multidisciplinary methodological framework, we summarize the descriptive results and their theoretical implications, including for the analysis of informational structure and syntactic ellipsis, and reflect on theoretical and descriptive perspectives in the topic of averbal sentences.

References

Elugardo, Reinaldo, & Stainton, Robert J (Eds.). (2005). Ellipsis and Non-Sentential Speech. Springer.
Guillemin-Flescher, Jacqueline (2003). Theorizing translation. Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée, 8(2), 7- 18. https://doi.org/10.3917/rfla.082.07
Lambrecht, Knud. (1994). Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus and the Mental Representation of Discourse Referents. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511620607
Merle, Jean-Marie (Ed.). (2009). Faits de Langues: La Prédication (Vols. 31-32). Ophrys.
Zanettin, Federico.(2014). Corpora in translation. In Juliane House (Ed.), Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach (pp. 178-199). Palgrave Macmillan.