Half-time seminar: Alice Bondarenko, PhD student at the Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University

Abstract

My PhD project is about markers meaning ‘together’, what I call sociative markers. The format of the thesis is a monograph, divided into three studies investigating sociative markers from different perspectives. In this talk, I present two of these studies.

• The first study is typological and investigates coexpression patterns (the mapping of several meanings to a single form across different contexts) of sociative, reciprocal and reflexive markers in 91 languages spoken in Africa. The data comes from grammatical descriptions. The results show that reciprocal markers tend to align either with reflexive markers or with sociative markers, but not both, suggesting two distinct types.

• The second study is a corpus study of three Swedish sociative markers (ihop, samman and tillsammans), focusing on the distinction between the meanings of joint action and of centripetal motion (motion from several directions into a single point). I argue that the degree of boundedness to the predicate is directly correlated to the semantics of the markers.

On Alice Bondarenko