Invitation - USYD Department of Linguistics Research Seminar

[Sebastian Fedden]

Dear colleagues,

 

The first USYD Department of Linguistics Research Seminar this semester is co-organized with the Department of Italian Studies and the European Studies Program. Please note that time and venue are different from the usual.

 

Dr Kristine Horner

Reader in Luxembourg Studies & Multilingualism

Director of the Centre for Luxembourg Studies at the University of Sheffield

 

Constructing the Ideal Citizen-Speaker as Monolingual? Language as Site of Struggle in Multilingual Luxembourg

 

Thu, 11 August 2016, 16.15-17.45

SLC Common Room, Room 536, 5th level, Brennan MacCallum Building A18, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006

 

You will find a short CV of our speaker below.

 

Best,

Sebastian

 

 

CV

Kristine Horner is Reader in Luxembourg Studies and Multilingualism at the University of Sheffield, where she is also Director of the Centre for Luxembourg Studies. She has published widely in the areas of language politics, language ideologies and multilingualism, including special issues of Language Problems and Language Planning (John Benjamins, 2009) and the Journal of Germanic Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Her most recent major publications are the books Introducing Multilingualism: A Social Approach (co-authored with J-J. Weber; Routledge, 2012) and Multilingualism and Mobility in Europe: Policies and Practices (co-edited with I. de Saint-Georges and J-J. Weber; Peter Lang, 2014). Currently, she is writing a monograph on language politics and the discourses of endangerment, integration and citizenship in Luxembourg and leading the Worldwide Universities Network on Multilingualism and Mobility in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

Dr Sebastian Fedden | Lecturer in Linguistics

School of Letters, Art and Media | Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

N367, John Woolley Bld A20 | The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006

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[Sebastian Fedden]

Dear colleagues,

 

Our USYD Department of Linguistics Research Seminar continues with a talks by:

 

Dr Rebecca Defina

The University of Melbourne

 

Events in language and thought: The case of serial verb constructions in Avatime

 

Thu, 19 August 2016, 12.00-13.30

Rogers Room, John Woolley Bldg A20, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006

 

You’re welcome to bring your lunch to the talk. After the talk we’ll have our Linguistics Afternoon Tea.

 

You will find the abstract below.

 

Best,

Sebastian

 

 

Abstract

Events occur all around us in continuous streams of activity, yet we think and talk about them in terms of discrete units. These conceptual and linguistic event units are often assumed to align. For instance, serial verb constructions (SVCs) are often said to refer to single conceptual event units (e.g. Aikhenvald 2006; Bisang 2009; Comrie 1995). In this talk, I will present results from my investigations of SVCs and conceptual event units in Avatime, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana.

 

Conceptual event segmentation was investigated across three different kinds of thinking: thinking-for-speaking, memory, and perception. Co-speech gesture analyses suggested a strong alignment between SVCs and single event units during thinking-for-speaking in Avatime. Also during perception, priming with SVCs was found to lead people to segment events in a more unified manner. In contrast, no clear signs of alignment were found between SVCs and event units in memory. Together these results support the idea whereby rich and varied event concepts are constrained or aligned with linguistic structures when speaking or signing and this process of alignment may have knock on influences on how further events are processed or conceptualized.

[Sebastian Fedden]

Dear colleagues,

 

Our USYD Department of Linguistics Research Seminar continues with a talk by:

 

Professor James Martin

The University of Sydney

 

Relaxing stranglehold of predication: Tagalog MOOD

 

Fri, 26 August 2016, 12.00-13.30

Rogers Room, John Woolley Bldg A20, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006

 

You’re welcome to bring your lunch to the talk. After the talk we’ll have our Linguistics Afternoon Tea.

 

You will find the abstract below.

 

Best,

Sebastian

 

 

Abstract

Schegloff (1996) suggests that linguists need to relax what he refers to as the 'stranglehold of predication' in our characterisations of language, and focus on the parameters of action. In this talk I'll draw on SFL to demonstrate one of the ways in which structural-functional theories can respond to a challenge of this kind, focusing on the interpersonal grammar of Tagalog (the systems of mood, polarity, modality, tagging, vocation, comment and engagement in particular). The analysis suggests that additional tiers of grammatical structure are required to describe the grammar of talk-in-interaction, and that the complementarity of system and structure at clause rank in SFL grammars facilitates an integrated perspective on the grammaticalisation of interpersonal meaning – a perspective critical to the development of functional language typology.

 

Butler, C. S. and M. Taverniers (2008b) Layering in structural-functional grammars. Linguistics 46, 4: 689-756.

 

Schegloff, E. A. (1996) Turn organisation: one intersection of grammar and interaction. In E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff and S. A. Thompson (eds.) Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 13). 52-133.

 

 

CV

J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.  His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focusing on English and Tagálog - with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics, forensic linguistics and social semiotics.  Recent publications include an introduction to the genre-based literacy pedagogy of the ‘Sydney School’ (Learning to Write, Reading to Learn, Equinox 2012); with Clare Painter and Len Unsworth, a book on children’s picture books (Reading Visual Narratives, Equinox 2013); and a book on system network writing (Systemic Functional Grammar: a next step into the theory -- axial relations, Higher Education Press, Beijing 2013). Eight volumes of his collected papers (edited by Wang Zhenhua, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press) have recently been published in China (2010, 2012). Professor Martin was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998, and was Head of its Linguistics Section from 2010-2012; he was awarded a Centenary Medal for his services to Linguistics and Philology in 2003. In April 2014 Shanghai Jiao Tong University opened its Martin Centre for Appliable Linguistics.