Events / ILST Seminar: Mini-Talks #2

ILST Seminar: Mini-Talks #2

December 6, 2024
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

111 Levin Building

1st-year graduate students in Linguistics will present mini-talks.

 

Speaker: Emily Pecsok
Title: Faultless Disagreement and Semantic Adaptation
Abstract: Disagreements are speech acts used by interlocutors to challenge previous assertions. When disagreements express subjective views, they can often be perceived as faultless. However, it is unclear whether accepting a disagreement as faultless causes comprehenders to update their own semantic representations of the predicate targeted by the disagreement. Using the vague quantifiers many and few as a case study, we find in two adaptation studies that participants shifted their meaning representations of the quantifiers after being exposed to disagreements that, on average, were more likely to be perceived as faultless. The adaptation strengthened the participants’ baseline preferences, suggesting that even when a disagreement is judged to be faultless, there exists a perceived asymmetry in the plausibility of the two viewpoints under discussion.

 

Speaker: Pristina Koon
Title: The morpheme -nya in Betawi
Abstract: Betawi is an endangered Malay/Indonesian-lexified creole spoken in the greater Jakarta area. While there is little existing literature on the morphology of the language, historical and modern sources show that it has maintained the morpheme -nya from Indonesian Malay/Indonesian. The use of -nya as an enclitic pronoun, though, was seemingly restricted during creole genesis. This talk revisits -nya in Jakarta’s contemporary contact situation and the resulting potential for ongoing expansion of this multifunctional morpheme’s range of functions.