[PLing] Jezik & Linguistics Colloquia series: Daria Seres (April 9 @ 1pm)

[Jezik&Linguistics Colloquia]

Dear all,

The Center for Cognitive Modelling of Language and the Center for
Experimental, Formal and Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Nova
Gorica would like to invite you to our next Jezik & Linguistics Colloquium,
to be held on *Thursday, April 9,* at *13:00 CET*, streaming on Zoom
<https://ungsi.zoom.us/j/64832734061?pwd=nTBb6p6d5IIpXaBhISZEcZJ06Xlxh0.1> (
https://ungsi.zoom.us/j/69690277509?pwd=aH3h4rk4Ll8bQpCEaDbrld6yi48YsS.1).

*Daria Seres* (University of Graz) will be presenting a talk titled
*"**(In)definiteness
in languages with(out) articles"*.


*Abstract:*

(In)definiteness as a semantic category is typically investigated on the
basis of languages with articles, yet roughly half of the world’s languages
lack articles altogether, as documented in WALS (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013).
In this talk, I will restrict my attention to referential (as opposed to
quantificational) nominal arguments (as opposed to predicates) and consider
typologically diverse languages in order to assess how they encode nominal
reference.

The talk will focus on the expression of definite and indefinite reference
cross-linguistically, with particular attention to bare nominal arguments
and their contribution to theories of nominal reference. I will first
discuss the semantics of bare NPs in Russian, arguing that their default
interpretation is indefinite (following Heim 2011, contra Dayal 2004), and
that alternative readings arise only through pragmatic strengthening and/or
contextual support (Seres & Borik 2021).

I will also report the results of three empirical studies that investigate
how definite and indefinite domains are encoded across contexts and
languages. Using a Translation Mining methodology that compares the
distributions and interactions of multiple grammatical markers in parallel
texts (Liu et al. 2023, a.o.), Studies 1 and 3 examine the behavior of
nominal expressions in languages with and without articles from different
families, including Russian, Mandarin, Hindi, Hebrew and others. Study 2
focuses on three Slavic languages, Russian and Polish (both lacking
articles) and Macedonian (with a definite article only), and investigates
how their nominal systems structure definiteness and indefiniteness,
thereby testing the predictions of formal semantic theories of nominal
reference.

Dayal, Veneeta. 2004. Number marking and indefiniteness in kind terms.
Linguistics and Philosophy 27: 393-450.

Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). 2013. The World Atlas of
Language Structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology. Available at *https://wals.info/ <https://wals.info/>*

Heim, Irene. 2011. Definiteness and Indefiniteness. In C. Maienborn, K. von
Heusinger & P. Portner (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of
Natural Language Meaning, pp. 1025-1058. De Gruyter Mouton.

Liu, Jianan, Shravani Patil, Daria Seres, Olga Borik & Bert Le Bruyn
(2023). ‘Articleless’ languages are not created equal. *Proceedings of Sinn
und Bedeutung 27*, 381-398.

Seres, Daria & Borik, Olga. 2021. Definiteness in the absence of
uniqueness: the case of Russian. In A. Blümel, J. Gajić, L. Geist, U.
Junghanns & H. Pitsch (eds.), Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2018
(Open Slavic Linguistics), pp. 339–363. Berlin: Language Science Press.

We hope to see you there!



Best,

Arne Goelz, on behalf of the Center for Cognitive Modelling of Language and
the Center for Experimental, Formal and Theoretical Linguistics -
University of Nova Gorica
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.univie.ac.at/pipermail/pling/attachments/20260320/9b249427/attachment.html>