Projekt

Events with three participants have long been recognised for their central role in the evolution of human society and technology. 3PEs include any scenario involving three participants, e.g. events encoded by transactional verbs like 'give' and 'show', placement verbs like 'put', and benefactive constructions like 'do something for someone', among others. There is considerable variation both cross-linguistically and within individual languages in how the three participants are expressed across different event types, and 3PEs present interesting problems for linguistic typology and theory. The 1st phase investigated a broad set of concepts expressing different semantic types of 3PEs. The investigation started with an etic grid of concepts including GIVE, BRING, PASS, PUT, SHOW, ASK, TEACH, FEED, etc. The 2nd phase of the project continues to investigate the cross-linguistic encoding of three-participant events. It broadens the data foundation by including further strategic languages but narrows the original focus to two core concepts which stand out in some of the preliminary findings of the 1st phase: 'bring' and 'take'. The project will cover 15 languages and have three areal foci: Austronesian, Papuan and South American languages, continuing and extending the project's analysis of languages of the Pacific Rim. The project's crosslinguistic investigation will be integrated with three areas of research: Talmy's typology of lexicalisation patterns of motion events, Bohnemeyer's types of event segmentation, and Narasimhan's investigations. The linguists Nicholas Thieberger, Harriet Sheppard, Nikolaus Himmelmann, Antoinette Schapper, Stefan Schnell, John Hajek, Nikolaus Himmelmann, Christian Döhler, Claudia Wegener, Frank Seifart, Katharina Haude, Sonja Gipper and Katja Hannß are members of the project team as well.

• Dr. Anna Margetts

  Monash University
  School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
  Linguistics Program
  Building 11 (Menzies), 5th floor W503B
  Clayton, Victoria 3800
  Australien
  

• Prof. Dr. Birgit Hellwig

  Universität Köln
  Philosophische Fakultät
  Institut für Linguistik
  Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
  Köln
  

• Dr. Sonja Riesberg, M.A.

  Universität Köln
  Institut für Linguistik,
  Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
  Köln