Koen Van Hooste, MA (Mr)
Room 46.21.04.08
Phone +49 211 81-14188
Fax +49 211 81-03170 (central fax, please include name of addressee)
Email vanhooste@phil.uni-duesseldorf.de
Subject
Linguistics
SToRE Membership
SToRE member since 21 Aug 2012
1. advisor: Prof. Dr. Robert van Valin
2. advisor: Prof. Dr. Leon Stassen
3. advisor: Dr. Thomas Gamerschlag
PhD Project
The Morphosyntax of Instrument Roles
There are many different ways of expressing a semantic instrument. In a language like German a Prepositional Phrase is used, as in for example: “Ich schreibe den Brief mit dem Stift.” A similar strategy exists in English and in French. It is also possible to employ a parphrasis with the verb “use”; “I use the pen to write a letter”. These are, however, all languages of (western) Indo-European descent. A Uralic language like Finnish uses a local case to mark a specific NP as the instrument. Consider: “Vasaralla hän koosti Ikea-kaapin”. The sentence reads (literally): “With a hammer, he/she built the Ikea cupboard.” Vasara “hammer” is suffixed by the adessive marker -lla/-llä. Other languages have a specialized case (the so-called instrumental) to mark an NP as instrument, such as Hungarian. There are many more strategies in the languages of the world to mark instruments. In many African languages (such as Yoruba), instruments are encoded using serial verb constructions In this PhD project, I will investigate the precise nature of the instrumental role (semantics) and then conduct a cross-linguistic, typological survey of the methods with which this role (morphosyntax) is instantiated.
Conference presentations
19-20 July 2012 – Typologica/Limes2 Düsseldorf: Conference Presentation: Direct Object Morphology and the Role of the Partitive in Finnish
5-6 April 2013- STaPs Heidelberg Workshop: Glossing in A Clear and Consistent Manner
1-3 August 2013 – RRG13 Freiburg/Breisgau: A Role and Reference Grammar Description of the Finnish Partitive Case
17-21 September 2013 – SLE 2013 Split, Kroatien: Poster Presentation: A Role and Reference Grammar Description of Object Marking in Finnish
13-17 November – STuTs Düsseldorf: Sprachtutorial Gotisch
Last updated
08.01.2014