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At the end of this course you are able to read, evaluate and comment upon scientific articles within the domain of linguistic universals and diversity in internal state language. You can understand linguistic analyses within this domain, compare them and apply them to new data. You can formulate a research question on a relevant phenomenon in one or more languages, and design and conduct a small-scale study to answer that research question. You can report on the results of your research project in academic writing.
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Language gives us a special window on human diversity and universality. Systematic comparison of structural and semantic properties of different languages has various aims:
- discovering the extent and the limits of linguistic diversity;
- discovering the underlying principles by which variation among languages is constrained;
- discovering the origins of diversity;
- discovering the distribution of the linguistic patterns in time and space.
Each year this course focuses on a specific topic, within which linguistic universals and diversity are examined. The topic for 2020-2021 is differential argument marking. It is a very wide-spread phenomenon across languages of the world, which has attracted the attention of numerous researchers. We examine the following questions:
- What kind of semantic, pragmatic, lexical and morphosyntactic features are responsible for differential marking?
- Are there universal effects associated with diverse referential scales, such as animacy hierarchy?
- How can we explain these patterns from a cognitive and communicative perspective?
- What are the geographic and genealogical biases in the spread of differential marking?
- How does differential object marking emerge and develop in time?
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