Lexical Typology and Uralic Linguistics

The aim of the course is to introduce students to lexical typology which is a relatively new subfield of linguistic typology. This typological frame gave the students possibility to compare their (general) lexicological knowledge (usually based on English, German, Russian etc. and their mother tongue) with the data of the Finno-Ugric languages.

The first part of the course is intended to form the theoretical background. It includes an introduction to Lexical typology, and presents some selected methods of it. The second part completes the theory with some case studies. These case studies are the most investigated lexical fields from typological perspective. The lexical fields discussed during the course are (1) verbs of perception, (2) motion verbs, (3) numerals and numeral systems, (4) kinship terms and (5) colour terms. The e-learning materials contain the most important findings of the literature, structured exercises and tasks for further individual work. The students get information about data collection methods (e.g. questionnaires and sampling procedures), too. The students’ tasks are collecting and analyzing data of one chosen Uralic language.

An additional aim of the course is to discuss and explain some contradictions between the statements of linguistic typology and the data of the Finno-Ugric/Uralic languages.

Feedback for submitted exercises is provided on an individual base. Copyright-protected supplementary material can be accessed through the University of Vienna Moodle. For access send a mail to infuse@lmu.de