Lectures by Dr. Zrinka Kolaković
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29 – 30 April 2025
2:00 PM – 5:40 PM - D31
We warmly invite all those interested to two lectures by Dr. Zrinka Kolaković, which will take place on April 29 at 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. in room D31.
Dr. Zrinka Kolaković graduated from the University of Zagreb and holds a bi-national PhD from the University of Regensburg and the University of Zagreb. She is a functional linguist with interests in language variation and change. Dr. Kolaković has conducted both qualitative and quantitative empirical studies on semantic, morphological, and syntactic topics, focusing primarily on aspect and clitics. Her postdoctoral experience includes positions at the University of Klagenfurt and the University of Hamburg.
You can find the abstracts for both lectures below.
Lecture at 2:00 p.m.
Clitic placement variation in the left periphery: Navigating methodological challenges
In Croatian, clause-initial constituents composed of two individually stressed words are associated with variation in clitic (CL) placement. In sentences containing such constituents, CLs can be positioned after the first multi-word constituent, after the first stressed word of the multi-word constituent, or follow the second constituent. This talk addresses the methodological intricacies that researchers encounter when studying the three competing CL placement options in the left periphery of declarative sentences. The methodological challenges range from the selection of data sources and the limited size of available data to the non-trivial questions of data annotation and the choice of statistical tools that can effectively test and disprove existing hypotheses and theoretical models.
Lecture at 4:00 p.m.
How information packaging influences clitic placement in Croatian
In this workshop session, we will explore the interplay between information structure (IS) and clitic (CL) placement in Croatian. Attendees will engage in discussions about how to differentiate between various but highly intertwined IS properties and how these can be reliably annotated in ecologically valid corpus linguistic data. Drawing on preliminary findings from a corpus linguistic study, we will present empirical evidence demonstrating how IS concepts such as givenness and contrast influence CL placement options in declarative sentences in Croatian, based on approximately 400 annotated sentences.
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