From Marit Westergaard:

Our very own Natalia Mitrofanova has just been notified that she has been granted approx. 10 mill NOK from the Research Council of Norway for her project proposal MuMin – Multilingual Minds: grammar interaction in multilingual acquisition. The project fits perfectly with the AcqVA Aurora profile (especially Theme 2) and will add another post-doc as well as a researcher to the group. Here is a brief project description:

“The last decades have witnessed a remarkable increase in effort from several disciplines aimed to uncover the cognitive mechanisms of language acquisition and language processing, and to understand how language is organised in the mind. One important aspect of this enterprise is the study of whether and how multiple languages interact within multilingual minds. However, this question is difficult to address within current methodological approaches which compare the linguistic behaviour of bilingual children to that of their monolingual peers. In such setup it is impossible to establish whether differences between the groups are due to cross-linguistic influence (CLI) or to the reduced input that bilingual children receive in their two languages. In this project, we propose a new methodology which will enable us to disentangle CLI from the effects of reduced input. We will go beyond comparing bilingual children to monolinguals and make a comparison across multiple bilingual populations. In doing this, we will keep one language – the target – constant and vary the second language parametrically (based on the presence and absence of certain grammatical features). We will match the participants by their exposure to the target language, thus making sure that the only difference between the groups is their second language. This in turn means that if we find any differences in the way the bilingual groups comprehend or produce the target language, we will be able to confidently attribute these differences to the influence coming from their second languages. The findings of the project will have major implications for the theoretical models of languages in the mind, and for theoretical and practical aspects of language learning.”

Natalia will be collaborating with a number of scholars in this project – Masha Polinsky, Irina Sekerina, Olga Dragoy, Tanja Kupisch, Sharon Unsworth, Silvia Perpinan, Natalia Kartushina as well as Yulia Rodina and myself here at UiT.

We are looking forward to a new and interesting project and to further collaboration with Natalia and her team.

Congratulations, Natalia! Well done!

Best, Marit

Desalegn passed his defense with flying colors! Those of you who have not yet downloaded his thesis can do so at Munin. I warmly recommend it for anyone interested in the syntax of argument structure, the lexical semantics of verbs, the interplay between functional structure and roots or between lexical semantics and context, the splendours of Amharic verbal morphology, causatives, passives, middles, other Voices, or any of several related topics. At 380 pages it has something to offer everybody.

–Peter

We have a new doctoral defense coming up! Desalegn Workneh will defend his PhD dissertation on The Voice System of Amharic next week.

The event will start with a 45-minute trial lecture at 9AM on Thursday, September 3rd on “The interaction between viewpoint aspect and tense in Amharic morphosyntax”. All are invited to stream it live here. (The link has also been sent around by e-mail by Kari Guldahl.)

On Friday, September 4th, the defense proper will start again at 9AM. You may follow it here. (You will also find this link in that same e-mail.)

The defense opens with Desalegn summarising his thesis, followed by first opponent Dr. Mengistu Amberber who will be joining us from the University of New South Wales in Sydney (where it will already be 5PM, which is why we are starting earlier than usual) and then second opponent Prof. Michelle Sheehan, who will be joining us from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England (where it will still only be 8AM at the start of the defense).

Desalegn himself will be beaming in electronically from Addis Ababa University (where it will be 10AM at the start of each of the two events).

Don’t miss this exciting and historical event!

Director: Marit Westergaard

Principal investigators: Yulia Rodina & Fatih Bayram (Theme 1), Merete Anderssen & Natalia Mitrofanova (Theme 2), Øystein Vangsnes & Terje Lohndal (Theme 3), Jason Rothman & Evelina Leivada (Theme 4)

Summary

Humans are unique among animals in that we have language, a complex system enabling com­muni­cation about any topic, be it past, present or future. In fact, humans are not limited to one language, but can acquire several under the right conditions. Nevertheless, bi- and multilingualism (henceforth referred to as multilingualism, unless further specified) is not an either-or pheno­menon, as multi­lingual minds may (and typically do) undergo numerous changes across the lifespan, as a result of linguistic and non-linguistic factors. This means that multilingual minds comprise dyna­mic linguistic systems, as co-existing languages affect each other in a multi­tude of ways, both in the acquisition process and beyond.

The AcqVA Aurora Center will conduct ecolo­gi­cally valid research, re­flect­ing today’s globa­lized world, where learning mul­tiple lan­guages at various points in the lifetime has become increasingly common. Our research will focus on a range of multi­lingual speaker groups and thus feed into current chal­lenges related to migration, education, and health, addressing important and yet unanswered questions for science and society. AcqVA Aurora will combine solid empi­ri­cal work with advanced theoretical (and statistical) model­ing in three domains: A) Acquisition: how multilingual minds develop in children and adults, B) Variation: how and why languages may differ considerably across indivi­duals and groups in space and time, and C) Attrition: how and why language erosion may occur over the course of the lifespan. The three domains will be studied within four cross-cutting themes, focusing on inter­related issues of multi­lingualism: 1) how linguistic and non-linguistic experiential factors shape linguistic and cognitive outcomes, 2) how multiple languages in the same mind influence each other, 3) how clo­sely related varieties co-existing in the same mind are processed, and 4) how representing and juggling multiple languages manifest and result in adaptations at the neurological and domain-general cognitive levels.

Both senior and junior scholars will be repre­sented among the PIs, which will ensure future recruitment and fulfil the intention of the Aurora call, preparing team members for further grant proposals, e.g. a Center of Excellence (CoE) from the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and European Research Council grants (ERCs). AcqVA Aurora will hire four postdoctoral fellows and four inter­national Adjunct Professors (20%), one for each theme, plus a lab manager. Further­more, we will fill a gap in our current theoretical and methodological focus by hiring one full pro­fessor with a strong track record in neuro­cognition of multi­lingualism and qualifications in neuroimaging metho­dologies (e.g. MRI), com­plementing the beha­vioral and psycho­linguistic methods already in use in our labs. This means that AcqVA Aurora will add ten outstanding scholars to the current team, making UiT a world-leading center for research on the linguistic and cognitive sciences of multi­lingualism.

A special Christmas message from Marit:

More terrific news today! This is (almost) incredible – but it just became official:

Our proposal to become an Aurora Center has been granted!!!

This is a 4-year / 30 million NOK grant from UiT that will enable us to hire many new people and do many cool things (see below for a summary of the center proposal).

I am really happy and excited about this. This will be a true game-changer for our research.

Thanks to everyone in LAVA/AcqVA who has worked so hard for many years to build up this amazing group. And thanks to everyone who contributed in important ways to this application.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF US!

Many happy greetings,

Marit

As we’re still digesting two in-depth presentations by Omer Preminger against abstract Agree as a way to analyze anaphora and other predicate-argument relations, the discussion from the Thirty Million Theories of Features workshop continues unabated in various venues — Gillian has a new blog entry entitled Define semantics, and I have one on the question of whether plural properly contains singular. And now Thomas Graf has posted a lengthy response to my blog post on his own blog, Outdex, entitled Omnivorous number and Kiowa inverse marking: Monotonicity trumps features?

The implicit complaint in McCawley’s book title, Thirty Million Theories of Grammar, was that having many theories of something is a less satisfactory state of affairs than having few (viable) theories of it — to paraphrase Thomas Graf’s characterization of that position, if you have more than one viable description of something, you don’t fully understand it. At the Thirty Million Theories of Features workshop, I was indeed hoping we would be left with fewer than we started from. I’m not sure we are (see Gillian’s blog posts for some summaries). But Thomas Graf articulated the opposite perspective, that it can be better to have more theories of a complex object of study — in his words, if you only have one viable description, you don’t fully understand the object you’re describing.

Now we segue into Omer Preminger week, with two additional talks and discussion with Omer Preminger (Wednesday and Friday).

The Thirty Million Theories of Features workshop is upon us! The hope is that by the end of the workshop, there will be fewer theories of features than we started with — as Gillian put it in her blog post, there will be blood on the floor.

Today we start off with Thomas Graf, who will ask (and perhaps answer) the question of whether features are more trouble than they’re worth!

The program for GLOW 42 (Oslo, May 7-11) is out, and CASTL is well represented!

On the main program, there’s a talk by Michal Starke together with CASTL alumnus Pavel Caha along with Karen de Clercq and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd, entitled ‘How to be positive’.

In addition, there are posters by Martin Krämer together with Chris Golston (‘Diphthongs as microfeet: Deriving a typological asymmetry’) and Serge Minor and Natalia Mitrofanova (‘A competition-based account of locative modification in Russian’). Maybe we’ll be hearing practice runs for those here soon?

Furthermore, CASTL alumna Sandhya Sundaresan and former CASTL colleague Thomas McFadden have a poster together with Hedde Zeijlstra (‘Deriving selective opacity in adjuncts’). Our colleague from long ago, Anders Holmberg, has a poster with Murdhy Alshamari (‘Topic particles, agreement and movement in an Arabic dialect’).

Congratulations to all of the above on having their abstracts accepted. Have a look at the full program to see many additional exciting talks and posters.