Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique
Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités. Description du séminaire 
| Titre | Testing the Constant Rate Hypothesis – Changing possessive have in American English |
| Conférencier | Richard Zimmermann (Université de Genève) |
| Date | mardi 17 octobre 2017 |
| Heure | 12h15 |
| Salle | L208 (Bâtiment Candolle) |
| Description | The Constant Rate Hypothesis states that a linguistic variation should spread at the same rate of change across all contexts in which it is used. In this talk, I will test this prediction with a change affecting possessive have in American English between c. 1800-2000. Specifically, the realization of possessive have was lowered from I to V. One would thus expect negation (She hasn't a car > She doesn't have a car), inversion, VP-adjunct and VP-ellipsis structures to reflect this underlying change uniformly. A large body of material is collected to evaluate this expectation. In the process, I will discuss several issues that arise for the description of Modern English clause structure and mixed-effects modelling. |
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