General Linguistics Colloquium (SoSe 2026)

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The lecture introduces the current language situation and related debates in Greenland. Drawing on examples from arts and literature, such as the works of Julie Edel Hardenberg, Jessie Kleemann and Niviaq Korneliussen, we will explore the coexistence of multiple languages in Greenland, as well as associated questions of identity, decolonization and globalization. Who uses which language(s)? What effects of multilingualism can be observed in everyday life, politics, and art and culture? Finally, we will address the question of how the three language families represented in the Nordic region are approached in the field of Scandinavian/Northern European Studies.

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Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are elements or expressions that typically survive in negative or other specific environments, namely non-veridical contexts (cf. Giannakidou 1998, 1999; Zeijlstra 2022). Although NPIs are attested in all languages (Giannakidou 2011: 1661; Zeijlstra 2022: 17), Coptic (an Afro- Asiatic language) NPIs have largely “slipped through the cracks,” remaining under-researched even within descriptive Coptic grammars.

This talk aims to provide an overview of NPIs in Coptic and their diachronic development, based on a study of a diverse corpus of over 800,000 words, spanning various genres from the fourth to the tenth century CE. Coptic NPIs comprise various categories, including indefinite pronouns, modal verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, bare singular NPs, and minimizers. I examine how the indefinite pronoun laau ‘anyone, anything’ developed from a minimizer, hence rising from an NP to the functional head D (paralleling the development of the Middle Welsh dim ‘thing’ in Willis 2012), before evolving into a pronoun and, finally, an adverb.

Another distinct group of NPIs in Coptic consists of the modal verbs əš and əšcəmcom ‘can, be able to’. Uniquely, these modal verbs don’t license NPIs; rather they function as NPIs themselves. In veridical contexts, they have to be replaced by alternative constructions:

(1) nne-u-eš-toučo n-te-u-psuchê
NEG.OPT-3PL-can-save ACC-POSS:SG.F-3PL-soul
‘They cannot save their souls.’ (Isa 47:14)

(2) a. ouən-com mmo-f e-toučo
EXIST-power in-3SG.M to-save
‘He has the ability to save (literally: there is power in him to save).’ (Heb 7:25)

b. *f-eš-toučo
3SG.M-can-save

Furthermore, the conjunction oude –originally borrowed from the negative Ancient Greek conjunction oude ‘and not, not even’– appears to have lost its inherent negative force in Coptic. It occurs outside strictly negative contexts, suggesting a transition into a weak NPI.

References:

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1998. Polarity Sensitivity as (non)veridical Dependency. Linguistik Aktuell 23. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

________. 1999. “Affective Dependencies.” In Linguistics and Philosophy 22: 367–421.

Willis, David. 2012. “A Minimalist Approach to Jespersen’s Cycle in Welsh.” In Grammatical Change: Origins, Nature, Outcomes, edited by Dianne Jonas, John Whitman, and Andrew Garrett, 93–119. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582624.003.0005.

Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2022. Negation and Negative Dependencies. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198833239.001.0001.

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