Rough cut viewing about a half hour in length of a UK-student-created documentary film, followed by a panel discussion. Viewing and discussion are open to the public, so bring a friend or two!
[1] Samantha Dunn:
Impairments in Morphology Through the Lifespan.
An overview of how language, specifically morphology, develops and what it looks like when there is delay. Even when normal language development occurs, we are still at risk for language impairment due to brain damage. Often, a stroke can result in a language disorder known as aphasia. Aphasia results in a wide range of issues, but I will be focused on how morphology is affected following a brain injury that results in aphasia.
[2] Clare Harshey:
A Network Morphology Theory of Old Norse Nominal Inflection.
Network morphology is a framework which has proven useful and accurate for morphological analysis in a wide range of languages. Using computational notation, it models lexical information as a collection of interrelated nodes containing facts, drawing information from one another to generate the appropriate morphological forms. Using the KATR language to construct such a theory, Old Norse nouns can be modeled accurately and intuitively.
It seems perhaps unlikely that a language would maintain a single special alternative suffix, to be deployed just in case the word to be inflected has in its derivational history another particular kind of operation. Indeed such situations do arise, however, a notable case from Sanskrit being the gerund, also known as the indeclinable past participle, or the absolutive:
(1) General gerund formation:
√bhū- ‘be’: ger. bhūtvā ‘[after] having been’ or ‘[when X] had been’ (MacDonell [1927] 1986: 137)
√jñā- ‘know’: ger. jñātvā ‘[after] having known’ or ‘[when X] had known’
(Whitney [1885] 1945: 56)
√vac- ‘speak’: ger. uktvā ‘[after] having spoken’ or ‘[when X] had spoken’
(Gonda 1966: 78)
Specifically, the gerund form is created in the general case by suffixing -tvā to the so-called 'weak-grade' root. When the verb lexeme in question is the result of prefixing a(n etymological) preposition as a pre-verb (PV), by contrast, the formation of the gerund is systematically distinct, involving a potentially distinct stem and an unrelated -ya suffix instead:
(2) PV-prefixed gerund formation:
ger. nipatya ‘having fallen down’ (ni- ‘down, into’; compare √pat- ‘fall, fly’: ger. patitvā)
(Mayrhofer [1964] 1972: 103; Whitney [1885] 1945: 94)
ger. vimucya ‘having freed’ (vi- ‘apart’; compare √muc- ‘release’: ger. muktvā)
(Gonda 1966: 78; Whitney [1885] 1945: 122)
ger. pratyāgatya ‘having returned’ (prati- ‘reverse, back’; ā- ‘(un)to, at’; √gam- ‘go’: ger. gatvā) (Deshpande 2003: 122, 428; Whitney [1885] 1945: 34)
This choice among suffixes seems to depend on the presence or absence of a non-adjacent morphological boundary, and as such, the phenomenon's status between derivation and inflection, between regular and irregular, will inevitably force morphological theories into some potentially uncomfortable positions.
Of course, some frameworks are simply not up to the task, straining to minimize its theoretical significance, or playing fast and loose with fragmented stipulations that cover the facts, but miss the generalization(s). Rather than crowning one framework as uniquely suited to the descriptive task, however, the very process of rotating through the lenses of diverse morphological frameworks presents a clearer, and indeed more coherent picture of the Sanskrit gerund than any single approach can.
One of a group of Indo-European speaking peoples intrusive to Anatolia, the Hittites rose from a modest city state to establish first a kingdom on the central plateau and then an empire that fought with the kings of Babylon and Assyria, the Hurrians, and the pharaohs of Egypt for control of SE Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, and contended with one or more Mycenaean Greek kings over western Asia Minor. One of their many vassal states was Wilusa, certainly to be identified with Troy. The multiethnic Hittite kingdom absorbed heavy cultural influence from many peoples and played a role in transmitting Ancient Near Eastern culture to the Greeks. A combination of factors, including the assaults of the “Sea Peoples”, brought an end to the Hittite Empire shortly after 1200 BCE, but some former subordinate states inherited their name and culture and maintained a degree of independence for several centuries until conquered by the Assyrians. It is these “Neo-Hittite” states that are represented in the “Hittites” of the Old Testament.
