Workshop on the Afroasiatic t-morpheme
Short Title: WOA2

Date: 08-May-2024 - 09-May-2024
Location: University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Contact: Iris Kamil
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: https://sites.google.com/view/woa2-2024/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Typology
Language Family(ies): Afroasiatic

Meeting Description:

The second installment of the Workshop on Afroasiatic will focus on the middle t-morpheme and will be held on the 8-9 of May 2024 at the University of Edinburgh!

The Afroasiatic t-morpheme is a valency-alternating morpheme most commonly found to denote de-transitives, or more specifically: passives, middles, and anticausatives. While the morpheme is attested in all branches of Afroasiatic, its functional distributions vary across languages.

Synchronically, the morpheme's effect on argument structure has only been investigated for a few languages of Semitic and Berber, with investigations of its use in Egyptian, Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic remaining rare and descriptive at most. As a result, the diachrony of the morpheme is even more poorly understood.

In hopes of bettering our understanding of the morpheme in its Afroasiatic context, this workshop sets out to bring researchers of theoretical linguistic, Semitic linguistic, and philological specialisations together to

1. Gather and map the different patterns and issues associated with the form across Afroasiatic,
2. Initiate a methodological discussion on how to approach and solve these issues, and
3. Open up the discussion on the morpheme’s reconstruction to Proto-Afroasiatic.

For the full description and Call for Papers, please see WOA2's website.