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This project will critically engage with literature on globalization and hip-hop culture from a range of countries in order to take stock of the knowledge gained, and help steer future research to pertinent issues and insightful results. By seeking to identify common themes in the types of data used, methodologies adopted, and theoretical questions asked to date across studies, this project will lay the ground for a more active engagement with primary material in future, as well as identify new ways of engaging undergraduate students and the community at large in broader debates about language and society through the medium of hip-hop. |
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The purpose of this project is to contribute to our knowledge of how languages change when they come into contact with each other, taking a particular variety—Cypriot Greek—and a particular phenomenon from that variety—the loss of the genitive plural from the morphological paradigm of masculine adjectives and nouns—as a case study. Noted since the earliest descriptions of Cypriot Greek, this phenomenon has been attributed to transfer during translation from French originals. Old French preserved a nominative/oblique distinction but not an accusative/genitive one and it is precisely this dual case system that Cypriot is being claimed to be mapped on. We test this hypothesis based on three texts spanning the period of most intense contact between the two varieties (13th to 15th c. CE). |
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This study focuses on the current state of the absence in Cypriot Greek of a distinct genitive plural morpheme for masculine adjectives and nouns (–ων in other Greek varieties), and its replacement by the accusative plural (-ους). With the help of responses to a questionnaire investigating native speakers’ grammaticality judgements collected during fieldwork in Cyprus, the current distribution of this phenomenon across syntactic environments and different types of speakers is mapped. |
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We
focus on three closely
interrelated questions: What are the theoretical implications of
formalising
hypotheses regarding dimensions of pragmatic variation in Cypriot
Greek
(Terkourafi, 2002) within HPSG? Do the formalised accounts extend to
other
languages, specifically English and Japanese? What are the
methodological
requirements placed by these theoretical observations on methods of
data
collection and analysis, and how can data from different sources
(corpora, experimentation, intuition) be exploited to answer these
requirements? We
believe this three-pronged
approach that tackles
formalisation, cross-linguistic aspects and methodology in parallel can
lead to
a better understanding of how
contextual information can be integrated with formal syntactic and
semantic
analyses. |
| Project
description & conference papers (downloadable
.pdfs): What use is ‘what is said’? First Workshop on Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models, Université Libre de Bruxelles, June'06 Conventional speech act formulae: from corpus findings to formalization (with A.Copestake) Constraints in Discourse, NUI Maynooth, July'06 Conventional speech act formulae (with A.Copestake) International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Varna, July'06 |
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Quantitative analysis of spontaneous speech-act realisations in Cypriot Greek revealed an arbitrary preference for particular expressions to perform offers and requests over others with apparently almost identical compositional semantics, an effect heightened in certain contexts. We draw on the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar to propose that the preferred expressions are associated with two Feature Structures, one corresponding to the conventional formula, and another, the ordinary compositional structure. When the conventional formula is encountered, the background attribute of the context feature of the FS is probabilistically enriched with certain assumptions about extra-linguistic features. Computational implementation in the LKB system constitutes a first step toward modelling how socially-relevant information embedded in grammatical form may be extracted from it. |
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Short project description: |
| This
project probes
the role played by frequency of use in the emergence of linguistic
structures
by developing a series of hypotheses regarding the dialectical
relationship
between social organisation at the macro-level (including historical
and
demographic aspects) and individual commonsense action (including
cognitive and pragmatic aspects). Adopting a cross-disciplinary
perspective, that
combines
linguistics (construction grammar, grammaticalisation theory,
koineisation
theory), psychology (parallel processing of
multimodal information, emergence
and presentation of the self), and social theory (social network
theory, acts
of identity, habitus and linguistic
capital), I explore how pragmatic meaning is gradually freed from
(extra-linguistic and linguistic) context, becoming increasingly
conventionalised, and the role of culturally relative and
historically informed
notions of Self in this process. The test-bed for the proposed
hypotheses is
provided by Cypriot Greek, a geographically
delimited non-standard variety of
Greek, which represents a unique resource for teasing away social and
linguistic factors driving conventionalisation. A large corpus of
spontaneous
conversational data provides the primary material for synchronic
analysis,
while diachronic analysis relies on textual data going as far back as
the 12th
c. AD when the modern dialect originally emerged. |
State
Scholarships Foundation, Greece
Doctoral scholarship (October 1997 to March 2001)
Travel grants
Trinity Hall, Cambridge
Travel grant (BI-DIALOG, Bielefeld, June 2001)
Travel grant (6th IPrA Conference, Reims, July 1998)
Prizes & awards
State Scholarships Foundation, Greece
Award for academic excellence (September 1990)
Athens Music School,
Greece
First Prize at the
Panhellenic Piano Competition “Maria Kornilaki”
(March 1988)