LANGUAGE SEMINAR SERIES AT UCL SSEES

About the Seminar

The Language Seminar was established with the aim of providing a forum where teachers and scholars working with language and linguistics at UCL SSEES might share ideas with each other and with colleagues across and outside UCL SSEES. More specifically, during the first, introductory year the participants of the Seminar made it their priority to learn more about each others' work, whether that be focused on research or innovations in teaching methods, thus creating a common platform for all language-related activities at UCL SSEES.

Activities

Two different types of activities are organised under the aegis of the Language Seminar Series: regular seminar sessions and individually organised one-off events. During the first year the Seminar met three times per term. Besides these regular Seminar sessions, UCL SSEES Teaching Fellows and Lecturers organise individual events, which explore a particular language from a particular perspective or focus on methodological questions about teaching and translating a particular language. A Finnish-Hungarian International Studies Day took place in December 2009 and a Polish Poetry Translation Workshop in May 2010, both with invited guests. Detailed accounts of these events and programmes are in the 'Previous Events' section below.

Forthcoming Events

Aspect in Berber: Towards a Description of the Formal and Functional Properties of Grammatical Aspect in a Berber Dialect in South-East Morocco

This work assumes that the language-specific core meaning of categories of grammatical aspect ultimately accounts for their occurrence in both the clause and discourse, and aims to individuate the factors responsible for the selection of particular verb forms.

These considerations motivate the investigation of both the clause and discourse: the former is known to be aspectually sensitive to factors such as the structure of situations (eventuality types); on the other hand, the selectability of grammatical forms is constrained by discourse-related factors, such as foregrounding/backgrounding of events, sequencing of events, speed of utterance; moreover, pragmatic factors are also known to influence aspect selection at both levels.

Date and time: 3:15pm - 4:45pm, Thursday 02 June 2011
Venue: Room 503, SSEES UCL, 16 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BW

Speaker: Simone Mauri, PhD student at SOAS

Previous Events

When and Where?

Regular sessions take place once a month, on Wednesdays or Thursdays, between 3 and 5pm, and 4 and 6pm, respectively.

Most sessions take place at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (16 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BW); the room number is announced before each session.

Participation

The core participants and convenors of the Language Seminar are Teaching Fellows and Lecturers based at UCL SSEES but anyone (students and teachers alike) interested in, or working with, language(s) is welcome to attend the regular sessions and propose a topic for presentation. During the first year the regular sessions proved to be loci of thought-provoking, if at times provocative, and productive discussions, where linguists at SSEES shared and discussed ideas, doubts, and potential directions in their work in an encouraging, albeit critical, and relaxed atmosphere.

Contact Us

To register on the Language Seminar's mailing list or receive invitations to our regular sessions and events, please contact:

Eszter Tarsoly
Teaching Fellow in Hungarian
UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
16 Taviton Street
London WC1H 0BW

Tel: +44 (0)20 7679 8748
E-mail: e.tarsoly@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

This page last modified Friday 27 May 2011.