Ana Krajinovic

Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf | HHU · Department of Linguistics and Information Science

Watch the talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSiBctxCnTM&t=9s The study of the evolution and emergence of grammar and structure in language has greatly benefited from grammaticalization theory, which studies the development from lexical to grammatical forms and from grammatical to even more grammatical forms in the languages of the w...

We focus on a collaboration between community members and visiting linguists in Erakor, Vanuatu, aiming to build the capacity of community-based researchers to undertake and sustain documentation of Nafsan, the local indigenous language. We focus on the technical and procedural skills required to collect, manage, and work with audio and video data,...

Watch the talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kicJqn0_cQ

Watch the talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFg3YZXF0Pg The morphosyntactic richness and multifunctionality of the lexicon of psych expressions has often been observed in Oceanic languages. In this paper we focus on the morphosyntactic patterns of psychological expressions in Nafsan, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu. We show that Nafs...

Watch the talk on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjemXUEXtNQ&t=1s The description of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM) categories is often considered to be one of the more difficult tasks in language description, due to the proliferation of TAM categories in the literature and complex relationships between different language-internal proces...

Watch the talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTTUC2JFYsE&t=1s

In this thesis I study the meaning of tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) expressions in Nafsan (South Efate), an Oceanic language of Vanuatu, from a typological perspective. I focus on the meanings of the perfect aspect and realis/irrealis mood in Nafsan and other Oceanic languages, as case studies for investigating the cross-linguistic features of thes...

In this thesis I study the meaning of tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) expressions in Nafsan (South Efate), an Oceanic language of Vanuatu, from a typological perspective. I focus on the meanings of the perfect aspect and realis/irrealis mood in Nafsan and other Oceanic languages, as case studies for investigating the cross-linguistic features of thes...

This paper offers a diachronic and a contact-based analysis of existential, locative, possessive, and copulative constructions in Malabar Indo-Portuguese creole (MIP). The existential, locative, and possessive predicates are all expressed with the copulative verb tæ , and nominal and property-denoting predicates can either have the copula tæ or zer...

Published in Zygmunt Vetulani and Patrick Paroubek (eds.) Human language technologies as a challenge for computer science and linguistics — 2019, Poznan: Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje. 185-189. New expanded version of this paper from 2022 can be found on https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05328-3_8. Abstract: Close collaboration between community...

Freely available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/stuf-2019-0002 Abstract: Our knowledge about tense, aspect and modality (TMA) in the Oceanic languages of Melanesia has so far been severely limited by the lack of available data. Habituality in particular, as one of the less described TMA categories, has not yet been widely discussed for this group of...

This paper reports on the properties of negation in Nafsan (South Efate), a Southern Oceanic language of Vanuatu, with special focus on asymmetries regarding TMA meanings and negative verbs.

This paper offers an analysis of the semantics of the perfect in Nafsan (South Efate) and argues for several implications for the typology of the perfect aspect. I show that all the functions of the perfect in Nafsan can be derived from placing the Topic Time in the posttime of the event in question, equal to Klein (1994) analysis of the English pe...

In this paper I offer an analysis of conditional clauses in Nafsan (South Efate) in a comparative Oceanic perspective. By using the data from the corpus of Nafsan (Thieberger 1995-2018), and more recent fieldwork data (Krajinović 2017), I reanalyze and complete certain aspects of the description of conditional clauses in Nafsan by Thieberger (2006)...

Malabar Indo-Portuguese is a creole language formed in a situation of language contact between the Portuguese colonizers and the native Malayalam-speaking community of the Malabar Coast in the 16th century; nowadays, it is spoken by a few last speakers in Cannanore. This book contributes to its linguistic description, which has so far benefited fro...

This paper offers an analysis of the semantics of the perfect in Nafsan (South Efate) and argues for several implications for the typology of the perfect aspect. I show that all the functions of the perfect in Nafsan can be derived from placing the Topic Time in the posttime of the event in question, equal to Klein’s (1994) analysis of the English...

'Making laplap' storyboard for eliciting perfect aspect and counterfactual conditional clauses, available on https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1421185. 'Haircuts' storyboard for eliciting perfect aspect and duality (negation), available on https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1421227. 'Garden' storyboard for eliciting present counterfactual conditional cl...

Semantics of perfect in 5 Oceanic languages

Issues about the classification of realis and irrealis in Oceanic languages

Temporal clauses with the subordinators kandə (< Portuguese quando) and k(w)a in Malabar Indo-Portuguese creole (MIP) are used to express any kind of temporal relation between two clauses, typically sequence or simultaneity. These temporal clauses are ubiquitous in contexts in which Portuguese, the lexifier of MIP, could not employ temporal quando...

In languages with mood prominence (Bhat, 1999), realis and irrealis are usually assumed to be the basic mood categories. Realis typically refers to past or present realised events, while irrealis can refer to a range of modal values, including future, possibilities, imperatives, and counterfactuals. Nevertheless, the realis and irrealis categories...

The Indo-Portuguese creoles of the Malabar were formed in a situation of language contact between the Portuguese colonisers and the native community of the Malabar Coast in the 16th century; nowadays, they are limited to a few last speakers in Cannanore. This dissertation aims to contribute to their linguistic description, which until now has benef...