Student profiles
Siena Weingartz
Email: siena.weingartz@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
Website: https://thelinguistchick.wordpress.com
Thesis Title
Institution
Supervisors
Dr. Vera Hohaus
Prof. Andrew Koontz-Garboden
Research Summary
My research focuses on two areas of linguistics—language documentation and formal semantics. Within these areas, I look at the topics of gradability and modality in Ndebele (a Bantu language spoken in Zimbabwe) and Afrikaans (a Germanic language spoken in South Africa).
*Gradability*
Q: How do languages encode comparison constructions like ‘taller than’ or ‘shorter than’?
Languages vary as to how they encode comparison, both in terms of structure and also how the meaning of a comparative is composed. In Ndebele, for instance, a speaker might say something like ‘Siena is old, exceeding her sister’ to express that Siena is older than her sister.
*Modality*
Q: How do languages construct claims involving ‘must’ or ‘should’? (More specifically, this can be referred to as modal necessity.)
Modality is a widely-studied topic cross-linguistically: how do speakers express desires, rules, orders, wishes or goals? Interestingly, ‘must’ and ‘should’ do not translate with a one-to-one mapping across languages, and finding an analysis for these words or expressions in Afrikaans and Ndebele is certainly not trivial. In Afrikaans, for example, ‘moet’ is regularly translated as ‘must’, but actually patterns more like the English ‘should’ or ‘ought to’.
*Interaction of the above*
Ultimately, I’m curious about where these two topics interact: what if you should do something more than you should do something else? In this instance, the modal claim made by ‘should’ has been graded against another modal claim, effectively forming a comparison construction.
Lots to research and lots to discover!
Research Interests
Semantics,
linguistic typology,
cross-linguistic research/documentation,
Bantu languages.
Publications
Coming soon