Challenges for inflectional description
Project Overview
Project
Challenges for inflectional description
Project members:
Prof Greville G. Corbett
Professor Gerald Gazdar, University of Sussex
Professor Dick Hayward, SOAS
Dr Andrew Spencer, University of Essex
Period of award
January 1997 - June 1999
Funder:
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
The series provided a forum for established scholars to report on current work, including interim results on four ESRC-funded projects which were running at Sussex, Essex and Surrey. It also gave a friendly but well-informed audience in which postgraduates gave their first presentations.
This seminar series involved the Universities of Brighton, Essex, Surrey and Sussex and the School of Oriental and African Studies, with additional participants from University of Cambridge, Cardiff Institute of HE, Imperial College, University of Kentuky and University College London.
Of the total of ten seminars, three were held at Essex, three at Surrey, two at Sussex and one each at Brighton and SOAS.
Different languages present different challenges for the description of an inflectional system. This ECSRC Seminar Series consisted of ten seminars in which invited speakers were given the opportunity to discuss particularly challenging data from the morphological systems on which they work.
Each guest led a fruitful extended discussion on a pre‑circulated paper. In each case the most challenging points of the inflectional system of the particular language were presented by the guest and then analyzed together as a group. The ninth seminar was given over to minority languages of Europe, with presentations on Catalan, Welsh, Icelandic, Basque, Bulgarian, Macedonian and various other Slavonic languages, all by regular members of the group.
| Speaker | Affiliation | Language discussed | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prof. Keren Rice | University of Toronto | Slave | Sussex |
| Prof. Daniel Everett | University of Pittsburg | Pirahã | Surrey |
| Prof. Jean-Yves Urien and & Prof. Gregory Stump | University of Rennes and University of Kentucky | Breton | Essex |
| Prof. Nicholas Evans | University of Melbourne | Mayali | SOAS |
| Prof. Marianne Mithun | University of California, Santa Barbara | Mohawk and Yup'ik | Essex |
| Prof. Alan Timberlake | University of California, Berkeley | Lithuanian | Surrey |
| Prof. Bernard Comrie | Max-Planck Institute, Leipzig | Tsez | Brighton |
| Prof. Martin Haspelmath | Max-Planck Institute, Leipzig | Lezgian | Essex |
| Various group members | Various affiliations | Lesser used languages of Europe | Sussex |
| Prof. Geert Booij | Free University of Amsterdam | Dutch | Surrey |
Table 1. Presentations given in the ESRC Seminar Series 'Challenges for inflectional description'
The series provided a forum for established scholars to report on current work, including interim results on four ESRC-funded projects which were running at Sussex, Essex and Surrey. It also gave a friendly but well-informed audience in which postgraduates gave their first presentations.