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Public lectures

  • An evolutionary approach to the typology of functional expressions

    This talk explores a typological puzzle: some functional expressions - e.g., expressions of negation, demonstratives, pro-forms, quantificational and modal expressions - are near-universally present in the languages of the world, whereas others, including definite articles and the traditional inflectional categories of tense, gender, case, and so on – vary drastically in their presence, each type occurring very roughly in between one third and two thirds of human languages only.
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  • guest-lecture Svetlana Slijepcevic-Bjelivuk

    The lecture will present how basic emotions are conceptualised and expressed in Serbian and German phraseology, focusing on FEAR, ANGER, SADNESS and JOY. Since basic emotions are partly grounded in shared human physiology, the two languages often rely on strikingly similar phraseological images. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, contrastive phraseology and corpus data, the talk will give examples of different degrees of semantic and conceptual correspondence and will distinguish between phraseological units based on the same embodied experience and image, units sharing a broader conceptual model but differing in their linguistic imagery, and language-specific conventionalisations without a direct conceptual counterpart.
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