Congratulations to Jordan Chark who defended her dissertation entitled ‘Understanding meaning-driven variation along the grammaticalisation trajectory: the case of Icelandic búinn' at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, last week.
She investigated the emergence of a novel perfect marker (the búinn-construction) in early modern Icelandic. Modern Icelandic thus has two expressions that fall into the category of 'perfect'. The theoretical motivation behind this was to gain a better understanding of how speakers choose between functionally overlapping expressions.
Drawing from historical corpus data and novel experimental data her dissertation maps out the emergence and propagation of the búinn-perfect. She argues that understanding how speakers choose between competing expressions necessarily involves models of linguistic production and comprehension that incorporate 'internal' factors (pertaining to the language system) and 'external' factors (pertaining to the social facts of the interlocutors and situation of utterance) in tandem.
The dissertation was part of the project ‘Modeling meaning-driven register variation’ (CRC 1412-Register A05).