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Regular version of the site
ФКН
Book
The many facets of agreement

Caha P., Kasenov D., Starke M. et al.

Muenchen: Lincom Europa, 2023.

Article
Two challenges for existentialist approaches to strict negative concord

Rudnev P.

TABU: Bulletin voor Taalwetenschap. 2024. P. 312-328.

Book chapter
Languages examined or referred to in the present book

Creissels D., Zúñiga F., Moroz G.

In bk.: Applicative Constructions in the World's Languages. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2024. P. 61-73.

Working paper
Grammar in Language Models: BERT Study

Chistyakova K., Kazakova Tatiana.

Linguistics. WP BRP. НИУ ВШЭ, 2023. No. 115.

Lecture 'Possession in North Saami: Rich Morphology in Competition with an Analytic Construction' by Laura Janda

Lecture 'Possession in North Saami: Rich Morphology in Competition with an Analytic Construction' by Laura Janda

On May 13 a lecture 'Possession in North Saami: Rich Morphology in Competition with an Analytic Construction' by Laura Janda (the University of Tromsø, Norway) took place at HSE. The event was organized by the School of Linguistics.

Abstract

North Saami (a Finno-Ugric language spoken by about 20,000 people in Northern Scandinavia) is replacing the use of possessive suffixes on nouns with an analytic construction. Our data (>30K examples culled from >10M words) track this change through time and parameters of syntax, semantics, frequency, genre, and geography. Since this change follows an S-curve, the most important factor should be differential weighting of the two linguistic variants. Although language change is unquestionably different from biological evolution, we challenge the assertion that it must be driven by social values alone. We find evidence of both inherent and socially conditioned fitness values. The innovative variant may be inherently more fit because it has a wider syntactic and semantic range and is indispensable, whereas its competitor can always be replaced. Furthermore, intense pressure on this minority language conditions a fitness advantage for the innovative construction, which is morphologically simpler. There is evidence that the possessive suffix is being reinterpreted as a vocative derivational morpheme. 
Video of the lecture (Youtube)