Hittite belongs to the extinct Anatolian sub-branch of Indo-European. Written in cuneiform script, this language is attested on ca. 30,000 (fragments of) clay tablets found mainly in the royal archives of the capital Hattusa (modern Boghazkale, Turkey). Covering the centuries of the second half of the second millennium BCE, it is the oldest Indo-European language that is available to us through contemporaneous documents.

Based on my newly published textbook (Swahili Grammar and Workbook, Routledge, 2014), this course will focus of some features and patterns that are typically found in African languages but are relatively rare among other languages of the world.

The goal of this seminar is to explore in some detail current theoretical frameworks for the investigation of the origins and development of various outcomes of language contact. The seminar presupposes a basic linguistic background and (preferably) previous experience in language contact and/or historical linguistics. The course will explore contact phenomena at various levels of linguistic structure, including phonetics/phonology, morpho-syntax and syntax, as well as the frameworks that have been developed to analyze them.

In this course, various topics of Chinese syntax will be discussed, including the structure of clefts, relative clauses, noun phrases, and comparatives. We will draw data from Mandarin and Cantonese and occasionally some other dialects.

Many languages classify direct objects in two classes along some semantic parameter by assigning them a mark. This property is referred to as Differential Object Marking (DOM). A non-exhaustive list of semantic parameters that have been described in the literature is the following: animacy, specificity, definiteness, topicality and telicity. The actual marking can adopt several external forms: case or adposition on the object, agreement morpheme on the verb, clitic doubling, even plain scrambling can be taken to be a form of DOM.

This course will examine several approaches to the syntax of verb-initial (V1) languages with a special emphasis on Mayan and Austronesian languages. Some V1 languages are strictly VSO, others are VOS, and a significant number combine both orders. We will explore the factors that underlie these alternations. A number of V1 languages can be more adequately characterized as predicate-initial, with V1 being just a subset of clause-initial predicates. We will also discuss and analyze structural properties that are or may be associated with V1.

In this course we will examine the prosodic phonology of words from a theoretical and typological perspective. Our initial concerns will be to determine the ways in which the word domain can receive phonological marking and to understand how these phonological markings should be interpreted. While we will cover clear cases of stress, tone, duration, and harmony, much of our focus will be on interpreting ambiguous cases of prosodic phenomena which may or may not be best analyzed in terms of “accent” (which we will attempt to define).