Course Description
This course will examine the systematic ways in which semantic content changes, or is disposed to change, across time. The focus will be on those expressions that fall within the “functional lexicon”, rather than the “content lexicon”. One of the crucial properties of functional morphemes is that, in any given language, their inventory is limited, as opposed to the more open-ended lexicon of content items. Another important property of language-specific functional expressions is that they exhibit strong cross-linguistic similarities with respect to the set of meanings they express. The goal for this class will be to explore diachronic movement within a few semantically well-defined functional spaces, and demonstrate that there are generalizations to be made about the underpinnings and the dynamics of such movement. We will consider these generalizations in the context of the innovation of new functional meanings (recruitment), their entrenchment into the grammatical system (categoricalization), and their generalization over time.
Area Tags: Semantics, Pragmatics, Variation, Diachrony, Historical, Typology
(Session 2) Tuesday/Friday 10:30-11:50
Location: ILC S231
Instructor: Ashwini Deo
Ashwini Deo is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin. She received Masters degrees in Sanskrit Grammar and Linguistics from Pune, India in 1999, followed by a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2006. Her main research interest is in systematic semantic change phenomena — particularly in the ways in which functional morphemes like tense-aspect, negation, possession markers change over time. Within semantics-pragmatics she also works on synchronic phenomena in the domains of aspect, temporal reference, lexical semantics of verbs, and discourse particles. She has a long-standing interest in case and agreement patterns, particularly in split-ergative and split-oblique systems. Her empirical focus is on the Indo-Aryan languages, which are spoken in much of South Asia, and which provide us with a diachronic linguistic record of over 3000 years.
