Lutz Marten

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Lutz Marten is a German linguist and africanist. He is currently professor of general and African linguistics at SOAS University of London. [1] Since 2020, he is also the editor of the Transactions of the Philological Society. [2]

Contents

Academic career

After studying English language and literature, philosophy and African studies at the University of Hamburg, Marten joined SOAS for a Masters programme in linguistics in 1993, where, in 1995, he subsequently began his doctoral studies under the supervision of Ruth Kempson. In 1999, he completed his thesis entitled Syntactic and Semantic Underspecification in the Verb Phrase. [3]

Research

Between 2014 and 2018, Marten was the principal investigator of the research project Morphosyntactic variation in Bantu: Typology, contact and change, which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. [4] [5] He is also involved in the development of the Dynamic Syntax framework project, which is supported by grants from the ESRC, EPSRC, the Leverhulme Trust and AHRC. [6]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.

Linguistic typology is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages. Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain the universal tendencies.

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. See also the Outline of linguistics, the List of phonetics topics, the List of linguists, and the List of cognitive science topics. Articles related to linguistics include:

Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.

In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between arguments—specifically, between the two arguments of transitive verbs like the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of intransitive verbs like the cat ran away. English has a subject, which merges the more active argument of transitive verbs with the argument of intransitive verbs, leaving the object distinct; other languages may have different strategies, or, rarely, make no distinction at all. Distinctions may be made morphologically, syntactically, or both.

In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the single argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent of a transitive verb. Examples include Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, and certain Indo-European languages. It has controversially also been attributed to the Semitic modern Aramaic languages.

In generative grammar, a theta role or θ-role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure—the number and type of noun phrases—required syntactically by a particular verb. For example, the verb put requires three arguments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Herero language</span> Bantu language of Nambia and Botswana

Herero is a Bantu language spoken by the Herero and Mbanderu peoples in Namibia and Botswana, as well as by small communities of people in southwestern Angola. There were 250,000 speakers in these countries between 2015 and 2018.

A dummy pronoun is a deictic pronoun that fulfills a syntactical requirement without providing a contextually explicit meaning of its referent. As such, it is an example of exophora.

In linguistics, valency or valence is the number and type of arguments controlled by a predicate, content verbs being typical predicates. Valency is related, though not identical, to subcategorization and transitivity, which count only object arguments – valency counts all arguments, including the subject. The linguistic meaning of valency derives from the definition of valency in chemistry. The valency metaphor appeared first in linguistics in Charles Sanders Peirce's essay "The Logic of Relatives" in 1897, and it then surfaced in the works of a number of linguists decades later in the late 1940s and 1950s. Lucien Tesnière is credited most with having established the valency concept in linguistics. A major authority on the valency of the English verbs is Allerton (1982), who made the important distinction between semantic and syntactic valency.

The term predicate is used in one of two ways in linguistics and its subfields. The first defines a predicate as everything in a standard declarative sentence except the subject, and the other views it as just the main content verb or associated predicative expression of a clause. Thus, by the first definition the predicate of the sentence Frank likes cake is likes cake. By the second definition, the predicate of the same sentence is just the content verb likes, whereby Frank and cake are the arguments of this predicate. Differences between these two definitions can lead to confusion.

In linguistics, volition is a concept that distinguishes whether the subject, or agent of a particular sentence intended an action or not. Simply, it is the intentional or unintentional nature of an action. Volition concerns the idea of control and for the purposes outside of psychology and cognitive science, is considered the same as intention in linguistics. Volition can then be expressed in a given language using a variety of possible methods. These sentence forms usually indicate that a given action has been done intentionally, or willingly. There are various ways of marking volition cross-linguistically. When using verbs of volition in English, like "want" or "prefer", these verbs are not expressly marked. Other languages handle this with affixes, while others have complex structural consequences of volitional or non-volitional encoding.

In certain theories of linguistics, thematic relations, also known as semantic roles, are the various roles that a noun phrase may play with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb, commonly the sentence's main verb. For example, in the sentence "Susan ate an apple", Susan is the doer of the eating, so she is an agent; an apple is the item that is eaten, so it is a patient.

<i>Transactions of the Philological Society</i> Academic journal

Transactions of the Philological Society is a linguistics journal published three times a year by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Philological Society. It has appeared since 1854, making it the oldest scholarly linguistics journal. It is currently edited by Lutz Marten ; Frans Plank and Nigel Vincent act as consulting editors.

Ljubov Zinovjevna Sova is a Russian philologist notable for contributions in the field of linguistics and orientalistics. Her main fields of professional interest include linguistics, African philology, semiotics, typology, Slavic languages and journalism.

Dynamic Syntax (DS) is a grammar formalism and linguistic theory whose overall aim is to explain the real-time processes of language understanding and production, and describe linguistic structures as happening step-by-step over time. Under the DS approach, syntactic knowledge is understood as the ability to incrementally analyse the structure and content of spoken and written language in context and in real-time. While it posits representations similar to those used in Combinatory categorial grammars (CCG), it builds those representations left-to-right going word-by-word. Thus it differs from other syntactic models which generally abstract way from features of everyday conversation such as interruption, backtracking, and self-correction. Moreover, it differs from other approaches in that it does not postulate an independent level of syntactic structure over words.

Hilda Judith Koopman is a linguist who does research and fieldwork in the areas of syntax and morphology. She is a professor in the department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is the director of the SSWL database. The SSWL, which she together with Dennis Shasha inherited from Chris Collins at New York University NYU, is an open-ended database of syntactic, morphological, and semantic properties.

Ruth Margaret Kempson, FBA is a British linguist. She is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at King's College, London.

Universal Dependencies, frequently abbreviated as UD, is an international cooperative project to create treebanks of the world's languages. These treebanks are openly accessible and available. Core applications are automated text processing in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and research into natural language syntax and grammar, especially within linguistic typology. The project's primary aim is to achieve cross-linguistic consistency of annotation, while still permitting language-specific extensions when necessary. The annotation scheme has it roots in three related projects: Stanford Dependencies, Google universal part-of-speech tags, and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets. The UD annotation scheme uses a representation in the form of dependency trees as opposed to a phrase structure trees. At the present time, there are just over 200 treebanks of more than 100 languages available in the UD inventory.

In linguistics, the syntax–semantics interface is the interaction between syntax and semantics. Its study encompasses phenomena that pertain to both syntax and semantics, with the goal of explaining correlations between form and meaning. Specific topics include scope, binding, and lexical semantic properties such as verbal aspect and nominal individuation, semantic macroroles, and unaccusativity.

References

  1. "Professor Lutz Marten" . Retrieved 2021-02-23.
  2. "Transactions – The Philological Society" . Retrieved 2021-02-23.
  3. Marten, Lutz (1999). Syntactic and Semantic Underspecification in the Verb Phrase (Ph.D. thesis). University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies.
  4. "Research Project Grants 2014 – Leverhulme Trust" . Retrieved 2021-02-23.
  5. "Morphosyntactic variation in Bantu: Typology, contact and change – SOAS University of London" . Retrieved 2021-02-23.
  6. "Dynamic Syntax – Home" . Retrieved 2021-02-23.