The Indo-European and Afroasiatic language families are both famous for containing many modern languages with long written records, as well as a number of extinct languages known only in inscriptions and manuscripts. However, their eastern neighbour, the Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) family, is not as well known for its old written traditions, despite the fact that numerous pre-colonial Trans-Himalayan-speaking societies penned literature on all sorts of topics. Moreover, this literature is useful not only for understanding the cultural milieu of its creators but also for synchronic and diachronic linguistic study, which informs us about the history of the third largest language family in number of speakers. This presentation will serve as a survey of the pre-1750 written languages in the Trans-Himalayan family and introduce listeners to their features, scripts, cultural context, and relevance for comparative historical linguistics. Specific attention will be given to those languages with written records that are not well known outside of Trans-Himalayan academia and what the older forms of those languages can tell us about their diachronic development.

In 1868, the first Finnish missionaries arrived in Namibia, the first cohort of graduates from the school that had recently been created by the Finnish Missionary Society. By 1870, they would go on to establish a mission in what used to be known as Ovamboland, which spans the northernmost parts of Namibia and extends to the south of Angola. Amongst them was Martti Rautanen, who would become the head of the mission in Ondonga, remaining in Namibia until his death in 1926. He would become known as the creator of the literary form of Ndonga.

Missionaries throughout history often worked closely with the local languages. They were viewed as useful tools in Christianisation efforts, and thus missionaries were some of the first ones to put them into writing, describe their grammar and lexicon, and work towards standardisation. The legacy of these efforts is ambiguous, as colonial politics and aims are inextricably tied to their contributions.

The Finnish missionaries were no exception. The most important of their work was the translation of the Bible into Ndonga, carried out mostly by Martti Rautanen, and later also into Kwanyama and Kwangali. Additionally, they wrote teaching materials, particularly in Ndonga, as well as dictionaries and grammars- some of which are still in use today. This thesis aims to assess the role of Finnish missionaries in Namibia and their involvement in colonial practices and language policies.

Life on the Tibetan Plateau is closely connected to the yak. As a cornerstone of pastoral  subsistence in Tibetan regions, yaks provide milk and dairy products for everyday food, serve as pack animals. Besides, they also supply fiber and hides, and their dung is used as fuel for cooking and heating (Rhode et al 2007). The importance is also reflected in the rich yak-related vocabulary of Tibetan languages, in which different terms are used according to age, sex (Tournadre & Suzuki 2021:737), and other socially salient distinctions. 

This paper examines yak naming terminology and connects lexical distinctions with pastoral management and broader cultural and religious values. Drawing on elicited data from Amdo Tibetan, with Lhasa Tibetan used as a comparative reference, the study investigates how different dimensions of yak classification are encoded linguistically. This paper addresses two questions. First, which semantic distinctions are encoded as lexicalized categories in Tibetan yak terminology, and which are expressed compositionally? Second, how do management-related terms (e.g. labor use, sale, slaughter) differ from age- and sex-based categories in how they are used in pastoral life? By answering these questions, this paper seeks to show that yak naming practices  encode not only biological properties, but also long-standing patterns of pastoral management, economic planning, and culturally embedded values.

This thesis investigates whether heritage speakers (HS) of Russian and people with aphasia (PWA) exhibit similar patterns in the production of tense-aspect (TA) morphology, despite their different backgrounds: HS develop their L1 under reduced input, while PWA experience language disruption due to brain injury. Through a systematic literature review of eight studies (four per group), the analysis focuses on the various T-A combinations in Russian. Both groups show preserved sensitivity to lexical aspect (telicity) but struggle with grammatical aspect, especially in non-prototypical forms. However, the underlying causes diverge: HS display grammar restructuring where grammatical aspect is lost and replaced by semantic or analytic strategies, while PWA experience processing breaks down under discourse-linking and cognitive load, as predicted by the Past Discourse Linking Hypothesis (PADILIH). The findings support non-deficit models in both fields, demonstrating that surface similarities reflect vulnerability at the syntax-discourse interface and not grammatical deficiency.

This presentation delves into the Goral ethnolect (West Slavic, Lechitic) and is based on my bachelor thesis about the dialect of the village Hrčava in Czech Silesia near the borders of Slovakia and Poland. Emphasis will be put on various different typological classifications from Slovak, Czech, and Polish academic circles, which consider the Goral ethnolect in Czech Silesia as simply Goral (Hannan 1996), Silesian (Zaręba 1988) or Eastern Lach (Kellner 1946) opening the question of how to define a Goral ethnolect - as a mere sub-dialect of Lesser Polish dialect or are there other criteria to consider?

Bearing in mind the crucial difference between national and ethnic labelling and typological classification of the language variety we will also briefly explore the notion of Gorals as “ethnic group” as opposed to “national minority”, and the notions why and how Gorals and their language variety assimilated.

Moreover, we will be talking about the language use in the village of Hrčava specifically, such as to what extent the village dialect can be considered as cohesive given that only 66 out of 249 inhabitants have their origins in the village with other inhabitants communicating in their own native dialect.

Etymograph is a linguistic database and an execution engine for phonological and morphological rules. In my talk, I will show how it works, and I will present how it was used for the modeling of sound changes between Proto-Germanic and Old English. The results of my work include identifying a sound change rule that wasn't explicitly described in previous literature.

The Letters as Loot corpus is a collection of commercial and private letters written in early modern Dutch, confiscated by the English navy in the 17th and 18th century and only recently digitalized. Whereas traditional linguistic research has often concentrated on the written language of elite male authors - this corpus also offers a glimpse into the language of normal people and allows for studying of language “from below”. 

In this presentation, I will talk about the use of the verbalizing suffix -eren as used in the Letters as Loot corpus, from the perspective of historical sociolinguistics with a focus on language use among Dutch non-elite writers.

Building on Rutten and Vosters (2023), who showed that -eren is the most frequent of 31 French loan suffixes in the corpus, this study for my BA thesis offers a more detailed research on this specific suffix. A quantitative analysis examines normalized frequencies across variables such as letter type, gender, and social class. This is complemented by a qualitative analysis of selected letters to explore the contexts in which the suffix occurs.

TBA

Iconicity, often understood as a form-to-meaning mapping in which a motivation for the form is observed, is found to be prevalent across communicative modalities (Dingemanse et al., 2020; Perniss & Vigliocco, 2014). The mimetic verb bubble with its reduplicated consonants resembles the sound of airflow through water, and similarly the sign for WIND in Dutch Sign Language (Nederlandse Gebarentaal, NGT) takes an open hand moving vigorously back-and-forth in imitation of air. 

Iconicity has been operationalized from three differing approaches in prior literature: as a categorical property with signs being either iconic or arbitrary, or as a scalar substance with signs ranging from being highly to not at all iconic, or as iconic signs having different strategies or motivations behind the form (Dingemanse et al., 2020). A general distinction is made between the action- and perception-based strategies. For action-based signs, the form directly represents how the hands manipulate/interact with the object: the NGT sign for SHOVEL mimics how the hands grip the handle. Whereas perception-based signs have more abstraction, and features of the referent are instead mapped onto the hands: the NGT sign for TREE has a 5-handshape representing the branches.

Prior learning studies suggest a mixed effect of iconicity in sign language learning in adult learners (Baus et al., 2013; Ortega & Morgan, 2015), as iconic signs can be rooted in sensori-motor experiences related to the referent and meaning becomes directly accessible. Thereby, the formal aspect of the sign is paid less attention to, and early learners produce iconic signs with lower phonological accuracy in comparison to arbitrary ones

This study will investigate further how iconicity, in its different flavors, plays a role in early lexical acquisition of NGT. Adult non-signers will learn a set of 60 learning items from the ongoing Signbeach project (Schiefner et al., submitted), which focuses on an online NGT learning environment for schoolchildren. Using a within-subjects design, learning items will be either low or high in iconicity, and highly iconic signs will be either action or perception-based in strategy. Participants will do a learning session, an immediate post-learning test and follow-up test three days later. The testing sessions will include lexical translations of each sign, and each production will be annotated for overall recall and phonological accuracy.

The learning rates for iconic and arbitrary signs are predicted to differ: action-based iconic signs are predicted to have greater recall in the follow-up test, but to be produced with lower phonological accuracy, than perception-based signs; and perception-based signs will have greater recall but less accurate articulation in comparison to arbitrary ones.

As is well known, poetic verse is made of language. However, the relationship between metrical structure and linguistic structure remains a challenging issue to define: how do these two levels interact? Are metrical forms derived from linguistic structure, or do they operate independently? 

In generative approaches to poetic meter, verse is typically analysed as the interaction between an abstract metrical pattern and the prosodic hierarchy of the text (Kiparsky, 1977). Much of the existing literature has focused on binary meters, such as the iambic pentameter or the Romance hendecasyllable, while ternary meters have received comparatively less attention. As Gasparov (1996) argues, ternary feet such as the anapest or the dactyl appear to play a marginal role in European versification. But is this really the case, or do ternary feet merely display a more complex structure, as suggested by recent theoretical work on ternary feet (Prince, 1989; Kager, 2012; Martínez-Paricio, 2013; Martínez-Paricio & Kager, 2015)? 

This paper addresses these questions through a case study of the Italian anapestic meter in “Lavorare stanca” (henceforth LS) by Cesare Pavese (1943). The meter of LS is commonly described as a regular anapestic meter with variable length, ranging from three to six anapests, whose relation to the prosodic hierarchy can be captured within Prosodic Phonology (Nespor & Vogel, 1986). Despite this apparent regularity, the meter displays systematic mismatches with the basic anapestic template. Two recurrent phenomena are particularly noteworthy: the presence of an extrametrical syllable between the second and the third foot, and stress assignment to the initial position of the anapestic foot, which is canonically unstressed. 

These patterns occur in a substantial portion of the corpus and have led previous scholarship to posit the existence of different metrical typologies within LS (Di Girolamo, 1976). To address these issues, the paper has two main aims. First, it uses these irregularities to explore the interaction between phonology and poetic meter, drawing on the concepts of the Internally Layered Foot (Martínez-Paricio & Kager, 2015; De Sisto, Martínez-Paricio & Topintzi, 2025) and extrametricality (Liberman & Prince, 1977; Hayes, 1982). Second, it proposes a unified account of the anapestic meter of LS within the framework of Bracketed Grid Theory (Fabb & Halle, 2008), showing how a single algorithm can generate the different surface structures observed in the corpus.

Compared to English tokenization tasks, tokenization of Chinesse sentences seems to be more difficult, as there is no spaces serving as indicators of word boundaries. This project investigates how traditional, neural, and large language models compare on Chinese word segmentation, using standard SIGHAN datasets and multiple evaluation metrics. We systematically evaluate Jieba, BERT-based tokenizers, and GPT-style LLMs on MSR and PKU corpora, focusing on accuracy, F1-score, consistency, and computational efficiency. Building on prior work in dictionary-based and n‑gram approaches, as well as modern segmentation tools, we benchmark a HMM‑based dictionary segmenter (Jieba), a supervised neural model (bert-base-chinese), and prompt-based GPT‑3.5/4 systems under a unified experimental setup.

Doxastic predicates are verbs that describe a person’s beliefs or mental state, such as “think” and “believe,” and some have been found to have a veracity entailment, suggesting that their complement is true (e.g. “Maya knows that the Earth is round” implies that the embedded clause is actually true). Within this group, there is a class of predicates called change-of-state or “come-to-know” verbs, which denote belief formation or the transition from not being aware of something to knowing about it (e.g. “discover”, “find out”). English research has covered several doxastic predicates, but the behavior of “come-to-know” verbs is still poorly understood.

If one were to consider a less-known language like Romanian, a Romance language spoken in Eastern Europe, they would find that, while attitude or factive verbs have been investigated somewhat in the past, we are lacking an overview of change-of-state verbs and their behavior. What are they, how does their entailment project, what complements do they accept and what aspectual class do they fall into? On that note, there does not seem to be much literature on diagnosing lexical aspect in this language, nothing comparable to Vendler’s classification, for instance. It is the goal of my BA thesis to gain a better understanding of “come-to-know” verbs and how they are used in Romanian and, in this presentation, I will discuss the preliminary findings of my research, including a list of change-of-state doxastic verbs and a method for determining aspectuality.

Our research aims to create a database of “find” verbs in several European languages namely Bulgarian, German, Italian, Norwegian and Danish. Past research has placed “find” under “think” verbs but we aim to challenge this notion. We examined various characteristics of “find” verbs through fieldwork involving judgement tasks with native speakers. These characteristics include transparency, experience and subjectivity as well as the contrasts between “find” and other attitude verbs such as “consider”, “know”, “think” and “believe”. This research is part of the NWO-funded project led by Natasha Korotkova based on her joint work with Pranav Anand regarding the nature of opinion verbs. 

The Ingrian language, a Finnic language spoken on the border of Russia and Estonia, shows an intricate morphophonological process of gemination, where the consonant between the first and second syllable may lengthen depending on the morphological form of the word. In the present talk, I propose a novel interpretation on the origin of this process, and relate it to other sound laws that have affected the Ingrian language before and since. Finally, I present how this analysis affects the phylogeny of Finnic languages.

The paper will compare both areal and familial typologies with regards to Mpraa (Kayanic, Malayo-Polynesian). Primarily, the paper will discuss on the comparisons of voice marking within Kayanic-internal contexts and also an areal overview in (Central) Bornean languages. Lastly, special consideration for will be given with the notion of “Austronesian Voice” and its applicability in the typology of the Central Bornean languages.

My project is a pioneering study into the historical pragmatics of Middle Low German. I am investigating speech acts in three Middle Low German plays of the 15th century: Theophilus, the Redentiner Osterspiel, and the Bordesholmer Marienklager. I will be discussing my methods, the issue of Bad Data™, and my initial findings. 

This study analyzes the lexical selection strategies in the Let’s Learn Chinese (學華語向前走) series, specifically focusing on how vocabulary choices are tailored to the unique sociocultural backgrounds of overseas Chinese learners. A critical challenge in teaching Chinese as a second language how to bridge the gap between a learner’s domestic linguistic experience and formal classroom instruction. 

Accordingly, this study aims to find out how the lexical choices in the textbooks facilitate a transition from a passive heritage identity to an active, bilingual self-perception.

Imerkhevian Georgian is a lesser-studied dialect of Georgian spoken by Georgian-speaking communities in northeastern Turkey. While Georgian dialectology has primarily focused on varieties spoken within the borders of Georgia, dialects spoken in diaspora or cross-border contexts remain underrepresented, despite their relevance for questions of language contact and dialectal variation.

This study presents a qualitative, corpus-informed analysis of Imerkhevian Georgian based on digitized dialect texts drawn from the Georgian National Corpus. The paper examines selected lexical and morphosyntactic features attested in the corpus and discusses how these forms relate to Standard Georgian. Particular attention is paid to features that may reflect long-term contact with Turkish, but also  to forms that can be interpreted as remnants of earlier dialectal or historical structures.

Methodologically, the corpus serves as an empirical repository from which representative examples are selected for close linguistic analysis. The study adopts an exploratory approach that highlights the analytical potential of corpus data for the study of underdocumented Georgian dialects.

In many urban areas of Europe, which have witnessed an influx in migration from countries within Europe and beyond, new youth varieties have sprung up. They are heavily stigmatised, being frequently considered 'faulty' or 'deficient' versions of the standard language. In order to combat these - often xenophobically motivated - linguistic ideologies, scientific research on such varieties is important. For my resMA thesis, I documented the differences between a monoethnic and a multiethnic youth variety spoken by teenagers in Vienna. The project aims to find out how the two varieties differ on a phonetic, morphological, syntactic and lexical level. Additionally, similarities between the multiethnic youth variety of Vienna and those spoken in other German-speaking urban areas will be investigated to highlight supra-regional phenomena and trace a potential linguistic sub-culture.

Marshallese, a Micronesian language of the Marshall Islands, is famous for its vertical vowel system – its phonology is characterized by vowels which are phonemically distinct only in height, and which are realized as front, back, or rounded entirely according to the surrounding consonantal context. Its consonantal inventory makes up for the underspecification in its vowels by being relatively large and featuring secondary articulations, with phonemically palatalized, velarized, and labiovelarized consonants. These traits are typical of vertical vowel systems, which are otherwise uncommon yet found in a handful of unrelated languages all over the world.

In this talk I review and collate historical and comparative work on the Micronesian branch of Austronesian, with an eye to the specific developments that gave rise to the Marshallese system. Proto-Micronesian typically had words of a CVCV shape, with this typical word structure being severely modified in all extant languages except Kiribati. The breakdown of this word structure in favor of a monosyllabic CVC type in the other languages led to a redistribution of phonological information that was once contained in the final vowel to the rest of the word, expanding their segment inventories. Allophonic secondary articulations on consonants are also widespread in the family, but seems to only have phonemicized through vowel mergers in some languages. 

Micronesian thus offers a compelling case study in the evolution of vertical vowel systems, since its various subbranches display different combinations of the regular sound changes that conspired to create the Marshallese system, such that many of these processes must be reconstructed to some degree, at least sub-phonemically. Kosrean in particular has a vowel system that can be characterized as almost vertical, perhaps pointing to tighter-than-typically-assumed relations between Marshallese and Kosrean.

This article examines the phonological and pragmatic properties of canonical tag questions (CTQs) in Serbian and English. In English, the rising tone usually indicates that the CTQ is an information-soliciting question, while the falling tone implies its rhetorical function. In contrast, Serbian phonology assumes that Serbian CTQs are always interrogatives bearing a rising, H% contour. This article challenges this view by suggesting Serbian CTQs can also be used declaratively with a falling contour, as an expression of certainty conveyed by the anchor-clause proposition. Hence, the article first assesses the perception of the acceptability of a falling tone as applied to Serbian rhetorical CTQs in five contextualized recorded dialogues. The acceptability of each was estimated on the Likert scale by 30 first-year and 30 third-year Serbian native undergraduate English university students. While the results prove that the CTQs may, indeed, be realized rhetorically with a falling tone, the rising tone is still predominantly adjudged as most acceptable. Moreover, the research also seeks to ascertain whether there is an interphonological transfer due to a lack of pre-university English phonology instruction. This is accomplished through the respondents’ perception of English CTQ tones and their respective pragmatic functions within forty recorded sentences. The findings show that, while the third-year students, who had had previous phonological instruction, are better at telling the rises apart from the falls, there is no significant difference in the success between them and the first-year students, who had not been instructed, in discriminating between the two tones' respective pragmatic functions. Therefore, the fact that the participants recognize English rises and their functions better than the falls on the whole and that the rise seems to be the tone of choice in Serbian rhetorical CTQs clearly indicates that there is a significant interphonological transfer from the participants' Serbian/L1 onto their English/L2. A basis for further, interdisciplinary research, all these findings shed new light upon CTQs from several linguistic perspectives, underscoring the need for an earlier systematic introduction of students to L2 intonation.

This presentation examines the polysemy of the Estonian noun vili. Vili is mainly an agricultural produce term, which underlies a folk taxonomy that helps categorize fruit, vegetables, legumes and grain, while excluding all kinds of berries. Vili also participates in several expressions conceptualizing having a child and work. The aim of the study is to supplement the sense inventory of the EKI Combined Dictionary (EKI ühendsõnastik) by describing vili in a way that better reflects its organization in the mental reality of speakers while also giving contrasts to other edible plant terminology. The presentation argues that the current scientifically defined primary sense under- and overgeneralizes the use of vili at the same time and argues that a semantic network with a prototype ‘a plant product intentionally grown for food’ better represents the psychological reality.

The analysis is based on dictionary data, corpus material and the Estonian Association Dictionary (Eesti keele assotsiatsioonisõnastik). The presentation is conducted within the framework of cognitive linguistics and adopts conceptual metaphor theory to explain the expressions in which vili participates and semantic networks to propose an alternative to the current hierarchical sense model.

In the recent years there has been a growing interest in challenging the philosophical reception of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theory, which has been largely shaped by Jacques Derrida’s reading. Here, I will discuss the feasibility of applying the concept of trace to Saussure, given Derrida’s observation that this concept is already announced by the Swiss linguist. Signs are traces of traces inasmuch as they are positive entities based solely on the correlation of differences.

The question is whether this concept captures an aspect of reality that is missing from Saussure. Patrice Maniglier characterizes the object of Saussure’s theory in three ways: it is differential, dual, and doubly articulated. The concept of trace does well only in the first case—the differentiating and systemic character of a linguistic sign. In the second case, the distinction between the level of expression and the level of content is important. It allows the units of language to enter into a proportional relationship in which linguistic difference only becomes fully apparent. As for the third case, the secondary character of every sign system, which is a historical reconfiguration of another form of a system, is based on the distinction between difference and opposition. In language, representation is possible because oppositions between signs as dual entities represent observed qualitative differences within the levels of expression and content. Therefore, linguistic change occurs through the internal representation of language itself. 

Derrida’s project, based on combining iteration and the temporalization of the linguistic sign does not depart far from Saussure, since in both cases analysis does not arrive at an existing entity, but remains at the level of signs. However, Saussure’s scheme of systematic oppositions offers more nuanced explanations as the carrier of the process of semiosis than the concept of trace.

The ways in which languages describe the sensory world – the metaphors they employ and the meanings they structure – offer a window onto patterns of conceptual mapping that emerge from human interaction with the physical environment. Linguacultures vary considerably in how they verbally encode and mentally conceptualize the sensorium, and investigating this variation is crucial for understanding the interplay between language and culture.

In this talk, I present a case study on the language of sound in P’urhepecha (isolate, Mexico). Drawing on data collected during fieldwork, I examine the semantic resources and metaphorical mappings used to describe pitch and the metaphors employed to distinguish between high and low sounds. The findings challenge assumptions about the universality of Western conceptual schemata for pitch. On this basis, I advance a hypothesis concerning the cultural grounding of pitch metaphors in general, and of pitch metaphors in P’urhepecha in particular.