The third presentation in the 2014-2015 Central Eurasian Colloquium will be held on Monday, March 23rd.

Anne Tamm
Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins University
Associate Professor, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary
Researcher, Central European University

Monday, March 23rd
4:15pm
Ballantine Hall 140

“Negation in Uralic Languages”

The grammaticalized expression of negation is a linguistic universal. This talk presents negation in the Uralic language family. A comprehensive typological questionnaire provides the basis for this talk, viewing negation in 17 Uralic languages, most of which are endangered. As in Turkic languages and unlike the languages in Europe, there is an extensive system of morphological negation in Uralic languages. Various special features will be discussed: negative auxiliary verbs–the special Uralic feature–and their ways of combining with the rich inventory of other negators in different types of clauses, as well as negative replies, negative indefinites, abessives/caritives/privatives, scope, polarity and emphatic negation.

Anne Tamm is currently a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the Theoretical Linguistics Program, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, in 2005. She has published on categories, mainly case, aspect, modality, evidentiality, negation, and verb classes. She is a co-editor for the forthcoming volume from John Benjamins: “Negation in Uralic Languages” (Edited by Matti Miestamo, Anne Tamm, and Beáta Wagner-Nagy, University of Stockholm/Johns Hopkins University/University of Hamburg).