When: Wednesday, June 5, 2024, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PMWhere: iQ East Court (Scape): 1.04 and online
A LingLunch talk by visiting PhD student Emmeline Wilson (Penn State). Click here to join via Zoom.
Talk abstract:
Emmeline is a second-year PhD student at Penn State University. In this talk, she will address the direction her research is taking by detailing in-progress and developing projects that consider the architecture of the lexicon, specifically in cases of bilingualism, with focus on the morphology-phonology interface, and situated within late-insertion, relational frameworks such as Distributed Morphology. One such in-progress work focuses on the structure of the bilingual lexicon by exploring the borrowing and integration of English verb stems into Pennsylvania Dutch (e.g., schiwwere/geschiwwert ‘shiver/shivered’). An architecture utilizing sublexicons (Gouskova et al, 2015) is posited to both explain the gradient integration found in borrowings and operationalize the process of analogy within a formal framework. A separate endeavor that also concerns itself with the operationalizing of a process, examines the difference in behavior of linking elements in two German dialects – Swiss German and standard German. There is reason to believe the linking elements in Swiss German have retained some historical semantic attribution while those in standard (non-Swiss) German have phonologized and now mainly optimize the prosodic word (Nübling & Szczepaniak, 2008). The project to be presented, currently in the design phase, constitutes an initial step in this endeavor by investigating the morphosemantic status of linking elements in Swiss German nominal compounds. Ultimately, results from this study will provide insight into how morphemes ‘phonologize’ and retain the allomorphic distribution attributed to earlier morphosemantic mappings. In addition, both projects address how bilinguals’ observation of and encounters with exponents lead to the association of elements with sublexicons.