«I will use things that I learned at TyLex in my research»

So Miyagawa, a research fellow at the University of Göttingen, recently attended TyLex — 2017, a summer school on typology and lexicon organized by the Higher School of Economics. In this interview he talks about what he liked about the school and what benefits it brought into his research. 

What was your most impressive experience here at TyLex?

It’s a very difficult question *laughs*. It’s very nice that the distance between the students and teachers is so close. So you can ask teachers very freely, and they are very kind, and they teach you very equally, and they gave us their experience, for example, about field trips, and their analysis, and also their experience on journals and so on.Did you have any personal revelations?Yeah, especially Martin Haspelmath’s talk. I think his view is very flexible, and it really makes my view on languages, you know, change into more flexible way. 

Was there anything in particular that changed your idea of language structure as a whole?

Yeah, for example Eitan Grossman’s talk about adposition borrowing and so on. Actually, I knew, that some languages have borrowed adpositions, but I didn’t know, for example, that they borrowed postpositions to prepositions and so on. This kind of starting point for research is very nice and I think I will use it in my research. For example, to focus on very few examples, but very important examples, like, opposite way of borrowing, preposition to postposition, postposition to preposition and so on.

Do you think any of the acquired knowledge will help you in your research?

Yeah, especially the last talk. Masha Koptjevskaya Tamm, Eitan Grossman and Vladimir Plungian, and also Misha (Daniel). They told us so many things about posting your papers to journals and it’s very nice, because I had some experience in journals, but not enough, like, three or four or five, around six I think *laughs*, but when I posted these papers to journals, I didn’t have so much experience, so I didn’t know, what I should’ve done. From the last talk I got some deeper image. And they got so much experience in many cases, they talked about many cases, and it was very informative. 

How did you like our cultural program, what did you like the most?

Yeah, Yiddish dance *laughs*. It was so exciting! And also choir.