Written by CAT in News on Wed 27 February 2019. Tags: Meetings,
Join us this Wednesday, February 27th, at 6:30pm at the CAT lab (E004) for Constantina’s Fotiou (University of Cyprus) presentation on “An analysis of Cypriot Greek – English codeswitching practices” . If you want to attend remotely via the web conferencing link (here), please let me know by 4:30pm, February 27th. The abstract of Constantina’s talk can be found below.
Abstract
The aim of this talk is to examine Cypriot Greek – English codeswitching practices drawing from a dataset of naturally-occurring conversations among Greek Cypriots. As with all (linguistic) phenomena, codeswitching is better understood if studied from a variety of perspectives and at different levels of analysis. In this talk emphasis will be placed on the linguistic and discourse/conversational levels of analysis. It will be shown that in this context codeswitching mainly takes the form of English insertions in an otherwise Cypriot Greek grammatical structure. Nouns and noun phrases are the most frequently employed insertions followed by bilingual compound verbs (BCVs). The latter consist of a Cypriot Greek light verb bearing all grammatical inflections and, more often than not, an English non-finite verb (e.g., κάμνω analyse). BCVs offer a way to insert English verbs in a Cypriot Greek frame without morphological integration. Regarding the conversational/discourse level of analysis, it will be demonstrated that codeswitching is again of the insertional type in the sense that it does not challenge the predominance of Cypriot Greek in the course of an interaction. It can have a variety of discourse functions especially when it takes the form of constructed dialogue and reiteration. At the same time, it can take the form of participant-related codeswitching which can index specific attributes of the speaker. The talk will end with a short discussion on the broader role that English plays in Cyprus today and highlight the need for future studies examining the wider sociolinguistic functions of codeswitching in this community.
Upcoming CAT meetings- Spring Semester 2019
Mar 6- TBA
Mar 13- Svetlana Karpava, TBA
Mar 20- Elena Theodorou, TBA
Mar 27- TBA
Apr 3- Eleni Papadopoulou, TBA
Apr 10- Demetris Karayiannis, TBA
Apr 17- Kleanthes K. Grohmann, TBA
Written by CAT in News on Wed 20 February 2019. Tags: Meetings,
Dear CAT members and friends,
Join us this Wednesday, February 20th, at 6:30pm at the CAT lab (E004) for Evelina’s Leivada (University of Tromsø) presentation on “Linguistic primitives: Terminological fluidity and commensurability considerations” (Web conferencing link, join here). The abstract can be found below.
Abstract:
The aim of this talk is twofold. First, I will identify and analyze 10 cases of terminological fluidity, polysemy and/or misuse in linguistic research. Terms like ‘feature’, ‘linguistic genotype’, ‘parameter’, ‘language universal’, and ‘Universal Grammar’ are pervasive in linguistic research. Through discussing issues related to their (mis)use, I will show how the implicit or explicit assumptions behind their postulation carry important implications in relation to the (i) coherence of the field and (ii) position linguistics currently has within the broader scheme of things in cognitive science. Through (ii), I will connect the two aims of this talk and make the transition from linguistics-internal terminological issues to linguistics-external, interdisciplinary considerations that pertain to commensurability and granularity. More specifically, I will focus on the syntactic domain within a Minimalist framework and discuss whether the primitives on which its theories are built are primitives that are sui generis sustainable also from a biological point of view.
Best regards,
Natalia
Feb 27- Constantina Fotiou, TBA
Mar 6- TBA
Mar 13- Svetlana Karpava, TBA
Mar 20- Elena Theodorou, TBA
Mar 27- TBA
Apr 3- Eleni Papadopoulou, TBA
Apr 10- Demetris Karayiannis, TBA
Apr 17- Kleanthes K. Grohmann, TBA
Written by CAT in News on Wed 23 January 2019. Tags: Meetings,
Dear all,
We are having a meeting this Wednesday, January 23, 6:30-8pm at the CAT lab (E004) to talk about our research agenda for the semester. Maria, Vasiliki and I will be leading the discussion on some ideas.
If anyone wants to sign up for a presentation, the available dates can be found below.
All are welcome!
Best,
Natalia
Jan 30- Maria Tenizi, TBA
Feb 6- TBA
Feb 13- TBA
Feb 20- TBA
Feb 27- Constantina Fotiou, TBA
Mar 6- TBA
Mar 13- Svetlana Karpava, TBA
Mar 20- Elena Theodorou, TBA
Mar 27- TBA
Apr 3- Eleni Papadopoulou, TBA
Apr 10- Demetris Karayiannis, TBA
Apr 17- Kleanthes K. Grohmann, TBA
Written by CAT in News on Wed 16 January 2019. Tags: Meetings,
Dear CAT members and friends,
The Cyprus Acquisition Team wishes you a happy and productive new year! With the beginning of the Spring Semester, we will also have our first weekly meeting on Wednesday, January 16, 6:30-8pm at the CAT lab (E004) at the University of Cyprus old campus. Georgios Georgiou (RUDN University) will give a talk on “Developing experimental designs to uncover non-native speech perception and production patterns”. The abstract can be found below. Information on upcoming meetings can also be found further below.
See you there!
Best,
Natalia
The lecture aims to present the work of Dr Georgios P. Georgiou, Post-Doctoral researcher at RUDN University, Moscow with respect to experimental studies on the perception and production of non-native sounds by foreign/second language listeners (Georgiou, 2018a, 2018b, 2019; Georgiou & Themistocleous, 2019). These studies focused on healthy individuals aiming to reveal the way that a non- native language is filtered through the listeners’ first language and the cognitive mechanisms that enable the representation of non-native phonological categories in the listeners’ phonological space. Also, through the aforementioned studies it is determined how speech categorization and speech signals encode linguistic, sociolinguistic, psychological, biological and other information. Dr Georgios P. Georgiou is currently the head of RUDN University phonetic lab and works as a principal investigator on the project “Perception of non-native segments by Russian monolingual speakers”. Ongoing studies of this project examine the perceptual realization of Greek consonants by Russian monolingual speakers (Georgiou, 2018c) and the effect of vocabulary size on the assimilation of English vowels to the native phonological categories of Russian speakers. Future research will focus on the speech and language of individuals with cognitive impairment, using perception and production tasks. The goal is to shed light on the effects of this condition on speech acquisition that will enable a better understanding and a possible early diagnosis of the decease.
Georgiou, G. P. (2019). Bit and beat are heard as the same: Mapping the vowel perceptual patterns of Greek-English bilingual children. Language Sciences, 72, 1-12.
Georgiou, G. P., & Themistocleous, C. (2019). Vowel Learning in Diglossic Settings: Evidence from Arabic-Greek Learners. International Journal of Bilingualism (revised).
Georgiou, G. P. (2018a). Perception and Production of Greek Vowels by Egyptian Arabic Learners of Greek as a Second Language (doctoral dissertation). University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus.
Georgiou, G. P. (2018b). Discrimination of L2 Greek vowel contrasts: Evidence from learners with Arabic L1 background. Speech Communication, 102, 68-77.
Georgiou, G. P. (2018c). Perceptual Realization of Greek consonants by Russian monolingual speakers. Lecture at the Symposium on the perception of non-native sounds by Russian speakers, December 10, 2018. Moscow: RUDN University.
Jan 16- Georgios Georgiou, Developing experimental designs to uncover non-native speech perception and production patterns
Jan 23- Maria Tenizi, Vasiliki Erotokritou, Natalia Pavlou- Semester Planning
Jan 30- Maria Tenizi, TBA
Feb 6- TBA
Feb 13- Evelina Leivada, TBA
Feb 20- TBA
Feb 27- Constantina Fotiou, TBA
Mar 6- TBA
Mar 13- Svetlana Karpava, TBA
Mar 20- Elena Theodorou, TBA
Mar 27- TBA
Apr 3- Eleni Papadopoulou, TBA
Apr 10- Demetris Karayiannis, TBA
Apr 17- TBA