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ScanDiaSyn-bloggen i oktober 2008

Onsdag 29. oktober Several news items based on interviews during the NORMS fieldwork in the Faroe Islands have now just appeared. In the latest issue of the University of Tromsø magazine Labyrint there is one general article on the fieldwork as such as well as an interview with Kristine Bentzen on her investigations specifically. Moreover, in the fresh second issue of NordForsk Magasin, which focuses on research infrastructure, there is an interview with Janne B. Johannessen on the ScanDiaSyn database, and that interview was conducted during the Faroese fieldwork. – Øystein Tysdag 28. oktober Several researcher positions within NORMS have now just been advertised. The full announcement can be viewed here. The deadline is 1 December. – Øystein Fredag 17. oktober Workshop on auxiliaries, mood and modality Trondheim in September NORMS thematic group 8, on auxiliaries and modality, hosted a workshop on auxiliaries, mood and modality in Trondheim September 17-18. The workshop was organized by Guro Busterud and Kristin M. Eide, and the invited speakers were Anna Roussou, University of Patras, and Rolf Thieroff, University of Osnabrück. We also had participants from various other European countries, most of whom presented papers on the workshop, as well as local speakers. Participants at the NORMS Workshop on auxiliaries, mood and modality, September 2008. (Photo: Paula Prescod) There was a national nurse’s convention in Trondheim taking place during these days, which forced most of us to stay at Stav Gjestegård quite far from the city centre. This awkward place gave us a rich opportunity to talk to each other, since there was not much else to do in the evenings, and we started to get to know each other already on Tuesday evening, when most of us arrived. The topics were naturally mostly related to language, linguistics, and dialects… The first session on Wednesday started with some welcoming remarks by Kristin M. Eide, followed by the first talk given by Anna Roussou. She talked about mood, modality and control, especially in modern Greek, and focussing on the “mood” particle na. She addressed questions like the following: (i) Is na a mood element? (ii) How does it interact with the subject? (iii) How can na-clauses resemble both non-finite and finite (subjunctive) clauses? The next talk was given by Gillian Ramchand from Tromsø university and addressed the notion “possible world”, and more generally, the semantics of auxiliaries. This talk added a welcome semantic focus to our workshop. The third talk in this session was given by a member of the thematic group, Pål Kristian Eriksen, University of Helsinki. He talked about counterfactuals in Scandinavian languages, with the subtitle crossbreeds, mutants, and freaks. This talk gave a perspective from typology, providing yet another dimension to the workshop. Paula Prescod from Paris presented a paper on the auxiliary do and its functions and readings in Creole languages, in a talk with the title What does and doesn’t do for creoles: zeroing in on aspect and negation. This talk was followed by a talk by local speaker Christopher Wilder, where he talked about the imperative of silent GO (constructions of the type Off with its head!). After lunch invited speaker Rolf Thieroff gave us an overview over the various aspects of the subjunctive in European languages. Rolf is currently co-editing a two-volume work (with Björn Rothstein) on precisely this topic, with contributions on most major European languages. Kaori Takamine from University of Tromsø presented a carthographic approach to the typology of rare root modals in Japanese, before Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarsson, also from Tromsø, presented his paper liberalizing modals, on certain modals giving rise to hitherto unnoticed word order effects in embedded Scandinavian clauses. This was the last talk on Wednesday, and we took a bus down to the city centre to dine in the restaurant Grenaderen. This was a very nice restaurant, and the food was really delicious. So we recommend it! The first talk on Thursday morning was given by organizer Kristin M. Eide, presenting a paper called Disputing the modal-perfective ordering generalization, followed by invited speaker Rolf Thieroff, who talked about the German auxiliary sein ‘be’. The final talk was given by invited speaker Anna Roussou, called The morphosyntactic realization of (medio-)passive subjects. As the organizer, I would not hesitate to call this workshop a great success; firstly, because I got many comments from the visiting participants that the workshop had a very nice composition of perspectives and topics; secondly, because there was a very friendly atmosphere – which is often the case at such small and focussed workshops, but even more so at this one, partly because of our hotel in this awkward location; thirdly, because there was a very nice and often quite thought-provoking discussion after each and every talk. Finally, we had excellent weather, sunny and mild, which is certainly not necessarily so in Trondheim in September. I want to thank everyone who helped make this workshop such an interesting, positive, and inspiring experience for us all. – Kristin Fredag 3. oktober The NORMS Workshop on Subjects and Architecture of Grammar was arranged at NTNU in Trondheim on September 18 – 19, organized by Tor A. Åfarli & Mari Nygård. The workshop started after lunch the first day and ended at half past four the next day. It was preceded by the NORMS Workshop on Auxiliaries, Mood, and Modality, organized by Kristin Melum Eide & Guro Busterud. Invited speakers for the subjects & architecture workshop were Halldór Sigurdsson from Lund and Sabine Mohr from Stuttgart, who held two lectures each about expletives, null subjects, impersonal constructions etc. In addition to the two invited speakers, there were shorter presentations by Marit Westergaard (Tromsø), Werner Frey (Berlin), Pål K. Eriksen (Helsinki), and Mari Nygård (Trondheim), on topics ranging from subject positions and information structure to ellipsis and valuing of phi-features. All in all, a focused & interesting happening in an easygoing atmosphere! The workshop was eagerly commended by several participants. – Tor