Master of Arts in Comparative Syntax and Semantics, Charlotte Sant
Master Charlotte Sant disputerer for ph.d.-graden i humaniora og samfunnsvitenskap og vil offentlig forsvare avhandlingen: «Nominal coercion at the syntax-semantics interface: an investigation of countability, events and gender»
Avhandlingen er tilgjengelig her!
Prøveforelesning over oppgitt emne holdes kl. 10:15, samme sted:
“Nonlocal readings of adjectives: A focused survey”
Prøveforelesningen vil også bli strømmet/the trail lecture will also be streamed.
Disputasen starter kl. 11:15, og vil bli strømmet her. The defense will be streamed here.
Opptak av disputasen vil være tilgjengelig i en måned.
A recording of the disputation will be available for one month.
Populærvitenskapelig sammendrag av avhandlingen:
I look into how grammar and meaning work together, with a special focus on creative changes in meaning, i.e. coercion. For example, we usually think of a pumpkin as a countable thing. If you drop one and it explodes, you may still say “There is pumpkin everywhere!”. You are then treating it like a pumpkin mass rather than a countable unit, using grammar to help you express this change in meaning. I investigate the extent to which meaning is encoded in the grammar of nouns, looking at English and the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Specifically, I look at 1) these changes in countability, like we saw for “pumpkin”, in Norwegian; 2) certain adjectives in English that express the frequency of events, like “occasional”; 3) unexpected cases of adjective agreement in Norwegian. I argue that coercion, as a changer of meaning without any direct signaling, is not uniform: grammar sometimes adapts to a desired change in meaning, but in other cases, context does the job without the grammar.
Hovedveileder
Professor Gillian Ramchand, UiT Norges arktiske universitet
Biveileder
Professor Kristine Berntzen, UiT Norges arktiske universitet (2023-2024)
Professor Antonio Fábregas, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet (2020-2023)
Bedømmelseskomité
Professor emeritus dr.philos. Kjell Johan Sæbø. Universitetet i Oslo, 1.opponent.
Professor PhD Jenny Doetjes. Leiden University, Nederland, 2.opponent.
Professor PhD Peter Arne Svenonius. UiT Norges arktiske universitet, leder av komitéen.
Disputasleder
Førsteamanuensis Ingeborg Høvik, Institutt for språk og kultur UiT Norges arktiske universitet i Tromsø.
De som ønsker å opponere ex auditorio kan sende e-post til leder av disputas ingeborg.hovik@uit.no innen kl. 13.00 disputasdagen.