[Jenling] Next Tue, 2.7., 14:15 Tense in West Polesian (Roncero)

[Ruprecht von Waldenfels]

Dear All,

please not the following guest seminar next Tuesday, July 2nd, 14:15, 
Carl-Zeiss-Str. 3 - SR 127.

Best wishes!
Ruprecht von Waldenfels

/*Kristian Roncero, MPI-SHH / FSU-Jena: */*Archaeology of the future.
Searching for the origins of the future tense constructions in West 
Polesian*

West Polesian is an Eastern Slavonic variety spoken in the marshes 
between Belarus, Ukraine and Poland. The speech community has been quite 
isolated for many centuries, given the frequent floods that let the 
villages inaccessible. On the one hand, this has contributed to a better 
preservation of earlier stages of the Eastern Slavonic culture and 
language. On the other hand, this isolation has also lead to innovations 
in the grammar. Since the draining of the marshes and the building of 
the first roads from the eighties on, the inhabitants are suddenly 
connected to the cities where other standardised varieties (particularly 
Russian) are being spoken. This is leading to changes in the grammar and 
lexicon and to even younger generations not using of West Polesian. 
Until recently there has been hardly any research on West Polesian, 
particularly on the areas of morphology and syntax.

In this talk I will be sharing about my recent PhD thesis on West 
Polesian morphosyntax, based on nine months of fieldwork in Belarus. 
First, I will introduce the study and some peculiarities about the area. 
I will also give more details about the sociolinguistic setting and some 
particularities of West Polesian grammar, which make it different from 
the rest of Eastern Slavonic varieties.

Second, I will narrow down the focus on the future tense constructions 
in West Polesian. In my PhD thesis I showed, that West Polesian has 
multiple future tense constructions or grams. In fact, some of these 
constructions adjust to at least six of the ‘future gram families’ 
proposed by Dahl (2000): the synthetic future tense (/ɾobɪtɪmu/); the 
de-obligative (/majusj////ɾobɪtɪ/); the de-volitive (/xotʃu////ɾobɪtɪ/); 
the de-venitive (/stanu////ɾobɪtɪ/); the copular future 
(/budu////ɾobɪtɪ/); and the Slavonic perfective present 
(/zɾoblju/) and all are highly grammaticalised (although in different 
degrees). On the one hand, this should not be surprising as, according 
to the cross-linguistic surveys in Bybee (1985) and Ultan (1978), future 
tense constructions are reformed frequently. On the other 
hand, no European language appears to have more than three constructions 
for the future tense in Dahl’s (2000) survey, and certainly not in the 
Slavonic family.

I will explain the origins and implications of such an unusually rich 
inventory of constructions. For this, I will show what the similarities 
and differences are between the West Polesian future tense constructions 
and the ones found in other European languages and whether there are any 
historical links. Moreover, I will present the unusual fate of the 
de-volitive (/xotʃu robɪtɪ/‘I will have to do’) and the de-obligative 
(/majusj robɪtɪ/‘I intend to do’), which have inverted their original 
roles overtime motivated by a large inventory of future tense constructions.

This talk is open to students with a background in Linguistics and/or 
Slavistics. After the talk there will be a time for questions and answers


*Recommended reading*: Sections 5 and 6 (pp. 317-326) from

Dahl, Ö. (2000). The grammar of future time reference in European 
languages. In Dahl, Ö. (ed.) (2000). /Tense and aspect in languages of 
Europe/. Berlin/NY: Mouton de Gruyter, pp.317-326.

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