At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Laurestine Bradford will be presenting Quantitative Analyses of Aspectual Phenomena.

When:
Wednesday, October 23, 12:00–13:00 (Montréal time, UTC-5)
Where:
MCQLL meetings this semester are in hybrid format. We will meet in-person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics Department, 1085 Dr-Penfield. If you’d like to attend virtually, the Zoom link is here.

All are welcome to attend.

  • Speaker:
    Laurestine Bradford
    Title:
    Quantitative Analyses of Aspectual Phenomena
    Abstract:

    The study of verbal aspect concerns the shapes of events in time (aspectual class) and the temporal perspective taken in particular descriptions (aspectual choice). To fully describe aspect in a language requires detailed semantic elicitation and theory. However, because aspect also has strong overt effects on verbs’ distribution and morphology, we might be able to get a leg up by analyzing textual data. In this talk, I will give an overview of several approaches researchers have taken to studying verbal aspect quantitatively. These include aspectual class induction from distributional data, crowdsourced judgments, or cross-linguistic projection, as well as aspectual choice prediction from contextual, lexical, and grammatical features. I will comment on the potential for applying similar methods in the context of a Tlingit corpus with rich aspectual morphology and discourse structure but with limited size and annotation.