Historical Linguistics

Sigríður Sæunn publishes a paper in Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði [Icelandic language and general linguistics]

Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir published a paper entitled, “’Haf góðan dag’ Um uppkomu nýrrar kveðju út frá hugmyndum um talgjörðir” [‘Have a nice day’ The emergence of a new leave-taking term in Icelandic in the light of Speech Act Theory] in Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði 41.-42The paper is on the leave-taking term Hafðu góðan dag (‘Have a nice day (ACC)’), which has become prominent in Modern Icelandic but has been prescriptively deemed “improper Icelandic” due to its being influenced by English Have

Claire Bowern publishes in Diachronica

Claire Bowern is an author, headed by Jayden Macklin-Cordes and Erich Round (Ling PhD 2009) of a new study on phylogenetic signal in phonotactics. The paper uses data from Pama-Nyungan (Australian) languages to track the extent to which phoneme inventory characteristics (phoneme presence/absence, unigram and bigram frequency) show phylogenetic signal. This is relevant for claims that Australian languages do not show sound change. The paper is open access and supplementary materials are available.

Claire Bowern and former students publish paper on Pama-Nyungan kinship

Former Pama-Nyungan lab member Catherine Sheard (lead author), department PhD alum Rikker Dockum, Claire Bowern, and Bristol Anthropology Professor Fiona Jordan, recently published a paper in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences using phylogenetic methods to study the ways that different kinship systems change across the Pama-Nyungan family.

Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir presents a talk at DGFS

Sirrý Sigurðardóttir gave a talk at a workshop during the DGfS (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft) last week. Sirrý’s talk, entitled “The Anti-Occam’s Razor: The distinction between pronouns and expletives in Icelandic” (link to abstract), was presented at the workshop “Theoretical approaches to grammatical (non-)identity in synchrony and diachrony.”
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