Locative and existential predication in languages of the Ob-Yenisei area: Typology and information structure

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Beáta Wagner-Nagy, since 9/2024
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 490822200

The project applied for plans to examine the linguistic expression of locative and existential predications - like "the dog is in the tent" and "there is a dog in the tent" respectively - in 11 languages of the Ob-Yenisei area (language families: Uralic, Turkic, Tungusic, Yeniseian) in Central Siberia. Given the observation that the linguistic expression of locative and existential predications exhibits parallels or is even identical in many languages of the world, one question comes up immediately: Do locative and existential predications share a common underlying semantic-pragmatic structure or are there two divergent underlying structures? If the former applies, it has to be examined, how the desired reading can be disambiguated in a given context; if the latter applies, it has to be explored, how the divergent underlying structures are formally marked. The project at hand has two basic aims: First, the linguistic expression of locative and existential predications in the chosen languages will be examined and described from a formal perspective, following largely the typological approach. Second, the information structural configuration of locative and existential predications will be explored and the project aims at drawing conclusions for the theoretical questions mentioned above. Here, empirical methods of corpus linguistics shall be applied, since the examination of information structure always requires acknowledging the linguistic context of utterances. To sum up, the project aims at contributing to 1) the morphosyntactic description of the chosen languages, 2) typological approaches to locative and existential predication and most importantly 3) the theoretical understanding of the semantic-pragmatic structure of locative and existential predication.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Chris Lasse Däbritz, until 8/2024