Calendrier

• Maria Pupynina (Institute for Linguistic Studies, St. Petersburg)

dans le cadre DILIS

Vast cold lands Northeastern Siberia were historically inhabited by small-scale communities, tribes of nomads, fishers and hunters. This region used to be the gates for Americas’ settlement, and peoples and languages repeatedly replaced each other moving towards and backwards by Bering Strait/ land bridge and adjust seas. My area of interest are the contacts (i.a. cross-continent) of northeastern Siberian communities manifested in language features and language practices, the latter potentially explaining/supporting the former.

In this talk, I will concentrate on contact studies of two regions where I worked. One is the lowland of Kolyma river where five languages belonging to five different linguistic stocks are spoken: Tundra Yukaghir , Even, Chukchi, Yakut, and Russian. For the local communities having a command of five languages was the norm during the big part of 20th century. The second region is Chukchi Peninsula, a tiny easternmost end of Eurasia, where during the last century Chukchi, Chaplinski, Sirenik, Naukan, Inupiaq, English Hawaii pidgin, and Russian languages were spoken. Multilingualism here was a more distant and less widespread practice, which was continuously reducing during the 20th century.

ZOOM MEETING HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO TECHNICAL PROBLEMS

• Alexander Rice (University of Alberta)

dans le cadre DILIS

IMPORTANT: please note that this seminar will start at 3pm instead of 2pm

https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/98894395664?pwd=dkVkVDBiY0NCVVU4V3A0UlZWSGtFQT09

Abstract

This talk is based on a paper that will be presented at ALT14 in Austin. It describes the functions of the filler mashti as used in Northern Pastaza Kichwa [ISO 639-3: qvz], a variety of Amazonian Kichwa (Quechuan, Ecuador-Peru). Using a video corpus of naturalistic language and taking into account multimodal and prosodic signals; I show that mashti has multiple functions. It is used as a hesitation interjection, as a 'whatchamacallit' type placeholder for nominals, and as a resumptive pro-verb which anaphorically reiterates a previously uttered action or event. I propose that multiple functions of mashti are the result of semantic bleaching and a broadening of semantic scope and pragmatic repurposing.