| Kommentar |
The Q-Team ‘Tense-related phenomena in Melanesian languages’ is affiliated to the project ‘A corpus-based contrastive study of tense, aspect, modality and polarity (TAMP) in Austronesian languages of Melanesia (MelaTAMP)’.
The MelaTAMP project is led by Prof. Dr. Manfred Krifka and Dr. Kilu von Prince, funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and located at Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Philosophische Fakultät II.
The MelaTAMP project explores corpus data from seven Oceanic languages of Melanesia (Daakie, Daakaka, Dalkalaen, North Ambrym, Mavea, South Efate, Saliba/Logea) in a typological contrastive study of their TAMP systems. Unlike the well-studied tense-prominent languages, Melanesian languages encode mood and aspect as basic grammatical categories of their verbal systems. The main goal of the project is to enrich the field of typological research with new empirical data and to increase the visibility of mood-prominent languages (in the terminology of Bhat (1999)) in typological research. More details about the project can be found at http://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/273640553.
The Q-Team will address phenomena that can provide important additional insights to the main research questions of the MelaTAMP project. Working on some of the languages of the project, the students can study the following topics: temporal adverbs, frequency and aspectual adverbs, verb reduplication, and verb-like prepositions.
These phenomena will be comparatively easy to identify and analyze by students without a background in Oceanic linguistics. Classes are categorized as lectures given by the teacher, or workshops of an interactive nature, guided by the teacher. The lectures provide a theoretical background, while the workshops train the students how to approach a specific research question. By the end of the semester, the students will have acquired the necessary steps of a research process: posing a research question, using the methodology, and organizing the results. They will present their work in the form of an oral presentation at the end of the course. The students are required to understand written and spoken English.
References
Bhat, D.N.S.. 1999. The prominence of tense, aspect and mood. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
|
