I can do science me!

[merijn]

Though I am unemployed at the moment, I have been busy the last couple of months writing an article with my MA thesis supervisor about post-predicate subjects in non-verbal predication in Zulu. Tomorrow we will give a talk about it at a conference in the beautiful city of Leiden. Since my co-author was in Togo for two months until this week, I will do the talking. It is the first time that I give a talk to linguists other than BA and MA students, so I am very nervous. (It doesn't help that I have to wake up tomorrow at 6.50 which is more than 4 hours earlier than when I usually wake up. I know, my biorhythm is fucked up). This is also the first time I feel like a proper professional linguist (even though it is not my profession at the moment).
Anyway, if anyone is interested in the hand-out, send me a pm, and I will try to send you the hand-out some time next week.

[Mr. Z]

Though I am unemployed at the moment, I have been busy the last couple of months writing an article with my MA thesis supervisor about post-predicate subjects in non-verbal predication in Zulu. Tomorrow we will give a talk about it at a conference in the beautiful city of Leiden. Since my co-author was in Togo for two months until this week, I will do the talking. It is the first time that I give a talk to linguists other than BA and MA students, so I am very nervous. (It doesn't help that I have to wake up tomorrow at 6.50 which is more than 4 hours earlier than when I usually wake up. I know, my biorhythm is fucked up). This is also the first time I feel like a proper professional linguist (even though it is not my profession at the moment).
Anyway, if anyone is interested in the hand-out, send me a pm, and I will try to send you the hand-out some time next week.

Well, I hope it goes out for the best. The subject sounds interesting, and I guess since this is a forum full of linguistics students and people interested in the subject, most here would agree. Good luck!

[roninbodhisattva]

Good luck indeed! I've been in the first presentation jitters phase and I can sympathize! While this is probably not totally true about all subfields, and of course not about all people, unless you're completely challenging somebody's life work in front of other people, I've found linguistics to generally be a pretty congenial bunch.

Hope it goes well! Also the paper does sound interesting. Could you give us an abstract?

[merijn]

I did the talk this morning. Most people said my presentation was good, but quite a few people said that it went over their heads (our research is quite technical generative syntax, and I can understand that people who are working on the classification of Dogon languages are not familiar with phrases such as "head movement constraint" and "SpecPredP")
As I said, if you want the hand-out, tell me in a pm or in this thread and I will send it to you (can you send an attachment with a pm? if not I will have to find another way to send a pdf).
But our research in 4 sentences: In Zulu there are two kinds of post-verbal subjects in verbal predication: dislocated subjects that trigger full noun class agreement on the verb and vP internal subjects that don't trigger noun class agreement (instead the verb shows default noun class 17 agreement). There are some more semantic differences as well, for instance a dislocated subject cannot be focused but an internal subject can. We claim that there are no internal subjects with non-verbal predication with the exception of predication with khona "there". We also give a syntactic analysis of these facts.
That should give you an idea what it is about. Maybe I will give you some example-sentences later, but right now I am too lazy to type them

[merijn]

We sent the article to a journal last week. If people are still interested, I can send them the article.

[Drydic]

I'd be interested in reading it. Understanding it, that's another story, but I'd like to try

[merijn]

I'd be interested in reading it. Understanding it, that's another story, but I'd like to try

OK, send me a pm with your e-mail. (alternatively, if you don't want me to know your e-mail address I could use yousendit, but sending an e-mail is much easier)

[Rodlox]

Though I am unemployed at the moment, I have been busy the last couple of months writing an article with my MA thesis supervisor about post-predicate subjects in non-verbal predication in Zulu. Tomorrow we will give a talk about it at a conference in the beautiful city of Leiden. Since my co-author was in Togo for two months until this week, I will do the talking. It is the first time that I give a talk to linguists other than BA and MA students, so I am very nervous. (It doesn't help that I have to wake up tomorrow at 6.50 which is more than 4 hours earlier than when I usually wake up. I know, my biorhythm is fucked up). This is also the first time I feel like a proper professional linguist (even though it is not my profession at the moment).
Anyway, if anyone is interested in the hand-out, send me a pm, and I will try to send you the hand-out some time next week.

sounds like fun. I hope you and your co-authors do well in that and in future endevours.

The paper sounds a little too technical for where I am now; but thank you for offering.