Workshop on Information Structure in Endangered Languages
THIS EVENT IS ARCHIVED

Various speakers
Date: 8 May 2015Time: 9:00 AM
Finishes: 9 May 2015Time: 1:00 PM
Venue: Brunei Gallery Room: B102 (8 May) 4429 (9 May)
Type of Event: Conference
Registration for the workshop will open at 9:00 AM on 8 May 2015 outside room B102. The price of registration is £10 (£5 concessions). Lunch on 8 May and refreshments on both days are included in the price of registration.
The first Workshop on Information Structure in Endangered Languages will provide a venue for researchers working on the description and analysis of information structure in under-described and endangered languages to present their research and collaborate on the development of new methodologies for field-based research.
Plenary speaker
The plenary speaker for the workshop is: Dr Dejan Matic, MPI Psycholinguistics
Conference theme
Information structure (IS) is a level of sentence grammar at which the information contained in a sentence is 'packaged' to suit the needs of the discourse. Research on IS in endangered languages presents some unique challenges, as the necessary data (text collections, large-scale corpora of spoken language) typically do not exist, so researchers are compelled to develop and work with much smaller datasets than are available for large well-studied languages. Despite these limitations, research on these languages has led to significant theoretical and methodological advances in the field of IS.
Papers to be presented at the workshop address pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and prosodic aspects of the expression of IS in endangered languages from a variety of theoretical perspectives. They also include reference to new methodologies for field-based research. Please see the workshop schedule for details of the papers to be presented.
Schedule
8 May 2015, Room B102
Time | Event |
---|---|
09.00 | Registration |
09.30 | Welcome |
Session 1 - Chair: Eva Schultze-Berndt | |
09.45 | Comparative evidence in the analysis of additive focus marking Lutz Marten (SOAS, University of London) |
10.15 | How it all became so kòm-plicated: a comparison of the functional and structural profile of kòm in Juǀ’hoan and ǂKx’aoǁ’ae Lee J. Pratchett (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) |
10.45 | Multiple focus structures in two Siberian languages Dejan Matic (MPI Psycholinguistics) & Irina Nikolaeva (SOAS, University of London) |
11.15 | Refreshments |
11.45 | Plenary Talk - Chair: Irina Nikolaeva Discourse expectations and common ground Dejan Matic (MPI Psycholinguistics) |
12.45 | Lunch |
Session 2 Chair: Candide Simard | |
14.00 | Methods for investigating a conditional exponent of topicality in small corpora Oliver Bond (University of Surrey), Kristine A. Hildebrandt (SIUE) & Dubi Nanda Dhakal (Tribhuvan University) |
14.30 | The topic marking function of less grammaticalized definite determiners Doris Gerland (Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf) |
15.00 | A case of topical illusion Eva Schultze-Berndt (The University of Manchester) |
15.30 | Refreshments |
Session 3 Chair: Oliver Bond | |
16.00 | Typology of possessor prominence marking strategies Sandy Ritchie (SOAS, University of London) |
16.30 | Topics: what does prosody have to say? Candide Simard (SOAS, University of London) & Eva Schultze-Berndt (The University of Manchester) |
17.00 | Correlation between word order and intonation in three verb-initial Formosan languages Anastasia Karlsson (Lund University), Arthur Holmer (Lund University), Jan-Olof Svantesson (Lund University) & David House (KTH Stockholm) |
18.30 | Workshop dinner |
9 May 2015, Room 4429
Time | Event |
---|---|
Session 4 - Chair: Lutz Marten | |
09.30 | Information structure in Causcasian Urum: The effect of givenness on word order Stefanie Böhm (Bielefeld University) |
10.00 | Word order and information structure in Rangi Hannah Gibson (SOAS, University of London) & Oliver Stegen (SIL) |
10.30 | Information structure in Gela: with special attention to word order variation Claudia Wegener (Bielefeld University) & Candide Simard (SOAS, University of London) |
11.00 | Refreshments |
Session 5 - Chair: Hannah Gibson | |
11.30 | VO-OV alternations in North Sami Kristine Bentzen (University of Tromsø) |
12.00 | Round table discussion |
13.00 | Close |
Organiser and contact:
Sandy Ritchie, tr7@soas.ac.uk