Seminar Schedule

Speaker: Victor Bogren Svensson (SOL)

Title: Voice, Adverbial Verbs and Information Structure in Takituduh Bunun

Abstract:

This presentation reports preliminary findings on information structure in Takituduh Bunun (Austronesian: Taiwan), based on original fieldwork. It examines the functions and grammatical structure of topic and focus markers in the left periphery of the clause, the influence of information packaging on voice selection, and the impact the realization of quantifiers and focus particles as adverbial verbs has on their semantic interpretation. Preliminary findings indicate that topic and focus markers in Takituduh Bunun are used to encode a wide range of information structure functions, and that the choice of voice form is highly sensitive to information structure constraints, constituting another layer of complexity impacting voice selection, beyond grammatical and transitivity constraints. Finally, the realization of quantifiers and focus particles as adverbial verbs appears to render them highly sensitive to voice selection and head movement, offering new insights into the mechanisms underlying quantifier and focus licensing.

Speaker: Jonathan Puntervold (Gothenburg)

Title: In search of equivalence, in search of difference: Japanese linguistic historiography 1895-1945

Abstract:

When modern linguistics was established as a university discipline in late nineteenth-century Japan, it was initially based on European theory, specifically historical-comparative philology. Yet whilst this newly imported "science of language" held great promise, it also left the first generation of university-trained linguists with a thorny question of scholarly identity: How should they relate this new academic discipline to the work of Japan's native philological tradition, which dated back several centuries and had produced significant research results of its own?

In this presentation, I explore the origins of modern Japanese linguistic historiography by examining how successive generations of Japanese linguists attempted to make sense of their country's intellectual past against the backdrop of "scientific" Western linguistics. Comparing historiographical writings by scholars such as Ueda Mannen (1867-1937), Yamada Yoshio (1875-1958) and Tokieda Motoki (1900-1967), I demonstrate how the meaning of past scholarship was continually reinterpreted and renegotiated as different scholars sought to legitimise and reinforce their own visions for the modern discipline. In so doing, I show the history of language study in Japan as an ideologically loaded, contested space in which not only different understandings of language, but also different understandings of Japanese identity competed to define the meaning and direction of the modern discipline.