News

From 21st to 24th August 2019 Svetlana Berikashvili participated in the “SLE 2019”, 52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, held at the University of Leipzig, Germany. SLE meetings are held annually and their purpose is the advancement of the scientific study of language in all its aspects. The main advantage of this conference is that it brings together scholars from different theoretical frameworks and thus helps in understanding current tendencies/advances in the various subfields of linguistics. This year conference was attended by more than 450 participants from all over the world. All the information concerning the scientific programme of SLE 2019 can be found at http://sle2019.eu/programme 

Svetlana Berikashvili presented her talk “Contact-induced grammatical changes in Pontic Greek spoken in Georgia” in general session, in subfield of contact linguistics. Her contribution was dedicated to the study of contact-induced grammatical changes in the endangered variety of Pontic Greek (PNT) as spoken in Georgia. The structural changes in understudied variety involve different donor languages, namely Turkish (TUR), Russian (RUS) and Georgian (KAT). The talk was limited to the phenomena related to the developments affecting gender marking and differential subject marking which is more consistent in PNT spoken in Georgia in comparison with other Pontic varieties. The book of abstracts has been published on-line and is available from SLE 2019 official web-site: http://sle2019.eu/ 

The conference also included social events, excursions, book presentation, exhibitions of well-known publishers: Benjamins, Brill, Cambridge University Press, De Gruyter, Edinburgh University Press, Language Science Press and Oxford University Press.