MEAT in Cambridge

Katie was in Cambridge for a few sunny days, representing MEAT at CamCos 7. She presented joint work with Cora Pots (KU Leuven) on aspectual markers in Dutch and Afrikaans periphrastic progressive constructions. Their corpus data has shown that the more grammaticalised the marker is, the more likely it also encodes an evaluative component concerning the lexical verb’s eventuality. The particularly interesting aspectual markers are the motion verb ‘walk’ and core posture verbs ‘sit’/’stand’/’lie’. Although the conference is mainly a syntactic audience, they received a lot of interesting and positive feedback!

Catalan linguistics in Vienna

On May 4 and 5, 2018, took place at the Uni Wien the “Workshop on Catalan Syntax and its interfaces”, organized by Anna Kocher and Monja Burkard, from the Institut für Romanistik. They brought together the following invited speakers: Jorge Vega Vilanova (U. Hamburg), Gemma Rigau (CLT/UAB), Elisabeth Aßmann (U. Frankfurt), Xavier Villalba (CLT/UAB), Jonas Grünke (U. Mainz), Ingo Feldhausen (U. Frankfurt) and Elena.

The organizers excelled at creating a dynamic as well as relaxed atmosphere that gave rise to fruitful interactions. Topics included clitics, DOM, agreement, strong pronouns and the role of prosody in focus. Elena was very pleased to present her ongoing work on interrogative tags in Catalan in front of such a suitable audience. Interestingly, the North-Eastern Catalan speakers do not have oi? in their inventory of tags, so the distinction between oi? was inexistent in them. By contrast, speakers of the Barcelona dialect seemed to agree with the proposed contrast.