When: Wednesday, May 15, 2024, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PMWhere: Zoom
Speaker: Dr Torsten Leuschner
We are delighted to be welcoming Dr Torsten Leuschner (Ghent University) as Visiting Reader in SLLF. Torsten will be giving his introductory lecture "'Comes love, nothing can be done': on (Not) Putting the Verb First in English and German"
Word order is one of the most salient characteristics of languages, including cognate ones like English and German which combine inherited patterns with the results of more recent, language-specific developments. This introductory lecture seeks to offer a fresh, application-oriented perspective on word order in English and German, focusing on verb-initial structures through the lens of Construction Grammar. We will consider verb-initial clause types in each language and the challenges they pose in translation (especially German-to-English), demonstrate the productivity of clause-initial verb placement in German through some colourful proverbs and slogans, and compare the latter with equivalent structures in English. Our observations will help us model the crosslinguistic similarities and divergences in a theoretically informed fashion, put into perspective the strange familiarity of the jazz standard cited in the title, and discover the benefits that a dual orientation towards application and theory brings to the enterprise of contrastive linguistics.