Please join us for our last LEAP talk of the year, which is being organized jointly by LEAP and LVC. It will take place this Friday, 30 May at 11 am in Rosenwald 015 and on Zoom.
I (Parker Robbins, PhD Student, Linguistics, UChicago) will be presenting work from my second qualifying paper on Yiddish determiner use:
Is dos possessive? A study of variation in Yiddish possessive determiner use
In certain contexts, Yiddish permits the definite article ‘the’ to be used possessively, especially with body parts and kinship terms. Textbooks and grammars have claimed that using a possessive determiner (e.g. mayn ‘my’) is marked where possessive ‘the’ is possible. Examples from naturalistic speech, however, demonstrate that possessive determiners are regularly used outside of the contexts these sources would predict. To investigate the (non-)linguistic factors underlying the distribution of these determiners, I annotated 2,200 noun phrases from 30 speakers in the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe. This talk will highlight methodological challenges in analyzing Yiddish at scale, situate my findings in the typology of external possession, and discuss prospects for further
research in this area and for the development of computational tools for Yiddish corpus linguistics.