Dr Luisa Marti, Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research grant for an experimental study of the semantic properties of Russian indefinites.
Many languages have indefinites (for example, in English, ‘some’, ‘nobody’, etc.) that are morphologically complex (English ‘no-body’ seems to be). Russian indefinites are particularly so, and are furthermore specialised for semantic functions that do not have dedicated indefinites in other languages. The overall research programme aims at finding out the connections between the often-complex form that indefinites take cross-linguistically and the meanings associated with those indefinites. The results of this research will offer insights into how the human language faculty works.
The project will be undertaken with Dr Tania Ionin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The funding is for two years, running until 2015.