News

On June 5, 2019 Svetlana Berikashvili, participant of the Carl Friedrich Lehman-Haupt International Doctoral Program, presented her research project “Differential Subject Marking in Georgian”. Svetlana briefly outlined her research topic and introduced her main research questions. In order to give the audience the full picture, Svetlana explained basic assumptions of the theoretical framework of her research i.e. Minimalist Program (MP) as presented in Noam Chomsky’s proposal and gave the architecture of language. Svetlana talked about differential approaches of analysing DSMs, namely Functional, Optimality-based, Morphological and Syntactic approaches and provided examples from different languages. The methodology and excepted outcomes were outlined during the presentation.

The audience followed the presentation with great interest and came up with many questions afterwards, including general, clarifying and more specific questions. The questions led to a very vivid discussion. As the audience was diverse, i.e. researchers from different disciplines attended the Doctoral Forum, the main interest lay in the potential practical outcome of Svetlana’s research, as well as more specific questions like those of marking NPs in different languages and study of the phenomenon from the diachronic point of view. Svetlana’s talk and subsequent discussion gave everyone insights on the subject marking in Georgian from the perspective of generative grammar.