Sign languages have been shown to instantiate a range of variation in the syntactic encoding of content/wh-questions that is comparable to the one attested in spoken languages and includes wh-movement, wh-in situ, interrogative particles and multiple wh-questions (see Kelepir 2021 for a recent overview). Putting aside the issue of the directionality of wh-movement (Cecchetto et al. 2009), which is sign languages is predominantly rightward, I will review and further elaborate on the different syntactic strategies of question formation mentioned in Alba (2016). I will devote some attention to clefted questions, which have not received much attention in the literature on sign languages so far (with a few exceptions like Abner 2011 for ASL). Clefted interrogatives were first described for LSC in Quer & Zorzi (2023) based on a particular elicitation context (which-questions with two animate arguments of the same type), as exemplified in (1):
(1)
re re+squint fe
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANIMAL 3a-BITE-3b (3a-AUX-3b). IX3a (ANIMAL) WHICH(BB)
‘Which is the animal that is biting the other one?’

The manual markers of content interrogatives can be typically realized as simple or complex DPs across sign languages. In order to complete the picture, I will address the cases of the particular set of non-interrogative nouns that contribute specific constituent questions about time, age, etc. without any overt wh-sign beyond non-manual marking. In this connection, I will also address the question whether concealed questions (nominals with interrogative interpretation as arguments of question-taking predicates) are attested in LSC and how this evidence can shed light on the debate about their nature across language modalities (cf. for instance Frana 2021).

 

Speaker 
Professor Josep QUER (Pompeu Fabra University)
Josep Quer is ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of the Pompeu Fabra University since 2009, where he leads the Catalan Sign Language Lab (LSCLab). His research focuses on different aspects of the syntax and semantics of sign languages, as well as on Romance languages and Greek. Member of the research group ATLAS (Accessible Tools for Language Assessment in Schools) that started out at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Amsterdam) in 2021. He has led the projects SignGram Blueprint (COST) and SIGN-HUB (Horizon 2020) and has been co-editor of Sign Language & Linguistics (2007-2020). He is member of the Catalan Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Institut d’Estudis Catalans) in charge of the Catalan Sign Language projects. He was professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and ICREA Research Professor at the General Linguistics Department of the University of Barcelona.

Speaker 
Prof. Giovanna Colombetti
Visiting Professor, Department of Philosophy

Recent debates on the nature of the emotions include what has been called the “situated perspective”. Its proponents criticize the general tendency, in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, to consider emotions only as states, or processes, of a person’s brain or body (a position also known as “individualism”), with little consideration for the role of environment. As a remedy, scholars suggest to regard emotions as scaffolded by the environment, both synchronically and diachronically. In this talk, Prof. Colombetti will present this notion of “scaffolded emotions” in detail, explain why she thinks it is valuable, and suggest various ways in which it can be developed further.

Since 2015, the Book of the Dead in 3D Project produces 3D annotated models of ancient Egyptian decorated coffins and sarcophagi, conceived as media of funerary religion and magic. In this lecture it will be discussed how meaningful it is to study a religious text or image through digital annotations on a 3D model of ancient artefacts.

In the second part of this lecture, the application of VR technology to the study of ancient Egyptian coffins and funerary monuments will be discussed as well, through the presentation of the international collaborative project “Return to the Tomb: the re-contextualization of a 26th Dynasty Egyptian sarcophagus at the cemetery of Saqqara in Virtual Reality” (UC Berkely, UC Santa Cruz, Virginia Tech, University of Bonn)

Since 2015, The Book of the Dead in 3D Project produces 3D annotated models of ancient Egyptian coffins and sarcophagi, serving as mediums for funerary religion and magic. This lecture examines the significance of studying religious texts and images using digital annotations on 3D models of ancient artifacts. Additionally, the lecture delves into the application of virtual reality (VR) technology in studying Egyptian coffins and funerary monuments. The collaborative project “Return to the Tomb” by UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Virginia Tech, and the University of Bonn demonstrates the re-contextualization of a 26th Dynasty Egyptian sarcophagus in Saqqara Cemetery through VR.
 

Speaker 
Prof. Rita Lucarelli, Associate Professor of Egyptology, Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture, UC Berkeley
Rita Lucarelli is an Associate Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture, and the Class of 1939 Chair of Undergraduate Education. She is the Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and a Fellow of the Digital Humanities at UC Berkeley. She is presently working at a project aiming at realizing 3D models of ancient Egyptian coffins, the Book of the Dead in 3D. She is also completing a new monograph on demonology in ancient Egypt entitled Agents of punishment and protection: ancient Egyptian Demonology in the First Millenium BCE.

Speaker
Prof. Mang Fan-lun Franz
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, CUHK
 

In this talk, I would like to give some serious attention to people under continuing political oppression, exploring the possibility that forgetfulness about injustices or atrocities is an epistemic vice. Some of the issues about moral integrity will also be discussed.

Online
No registration is required
Meeting ID: 970 4841 0270
Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/97048410270

Face-to-Face
Register by 16 Nov 2023
Link: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13677713

Eight guests were invited to join the awards ceremony, including Prof. Max Xiaobing TANG (Dean of the Faculty of Arts), Prof. Wing Hung KO (University Dean of Students) Mr. Leo Fai Hung MA (Head of New Asia College Library and United College Library), Dr. Frankie Kwan Kit WONG (Associate Dean (Student Affairs) of the Faculty of Social Science), Prof. Marques Shek Nam NG (Dean of Students of Chung Chi College), Prof. Kenneth Kam Siu CHEUNG (Dean of Students of New Asia College), Prof. Morris Siu Yung JONG (Dean of Students of Shaw College), and Prof. Vincent Chi Kwan CHEUNG (Dean of Students of CW Chu College).

Contestants are encouraged to depict the scenic beauty of the campus and share their personal experiences as the CUHKers. The winning entries cover a wide variety of themes including reflections on the loss of childhood memories brought about by the plastic bags in caa caan teng (local-style cafes), exploring the usefulness of “science’s uselessness”, depicting the connection and memories between family members and a wardrobe, and more. The essays have demonstrated exceptional skills in conveying emotions, vividly depicting landscapes, and offering insightful critiques, showcasing the literary talents of CUHK students.

Prof. TANG Sze Wing, Chair of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, noted in his speech that Literary CUHK has received enthusiastic support from students and alumni since 2015. As one of the activities under the project entitled “Learning Chinese Beyond the Classroom”, the aim of the competition is to encourage participants to understand the campus and the world through literature and promote writing. He also emphasized that the competition provides participants with a valuable opportunity to step out of the classroom, immersing themselves in  the ambiance of learning Chinese literature.

Additionally, ceremony in this year ceremony featured the “awardees’ recitation session” for the first time, where four students took the stage to recite selected portions of their entries, providing the audience with an alternative way to appreciate the excellence of their works beyond reading.

To motivate students’ interest in learning the Chinese language, the Department has edited and published teaching materials for students by combining the unique historical background and environmental features of CUHK. This includes a collection of selected literary works about CUHK, known as  CUHK, Landscape, and Humanities (中大．山水．人文). Literary CUHK is organized for all students and alumni every year since 2015 to arouse their interest in creative writing in Chinese and to enhance their observation and expressive skills through the writing competition. It is believed that the power of literature will pass through the ages and shine uniquely in the young generation.

More Information on Literary CUHK is available at the Learning Chinese Outside Classroom webpage at https://www.chltcac.cuhk.edu.hk/culitrecentnews.

In the 21st century, expectations of UN military peacekeepers have risen. They are supposed to do whatever it takes to protect civilians – including use force. However, the increase in writ has been accompanied by an increase in bureaucracy and risk aversion, putting the soldiers in a bind. My ethnographic research with Rwandan soldiers working as peacekeepers shows the everyday ways that UN peacekeeping has therefore become redundant in the complicated conflict management marketplaces of Central and West Africa today, and is being taken over by bilateral and sub-regional deployments that make no pretense of impartiality. This talk illustrates these points by looking at the problem of command (the philosophy of how to get soldiers to do things), arguing that rather than a command philosophy, the UN has a control philosophy. The result is an initiative-killing machine.
 

Speaker
Louisa Lombard (Department of Anthropology, Yale University)
Louisa Lombard is an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University and a member of the editorial collective of HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory. She is the author of State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic and Hunting Game: Raiding Politics in the Central African Republic. She is currently writing a book about how military peacekeepers confront ethical dilemmas in their work.

The history of the Byzantine empire provides rewarding opportunities for discovery. The late medieval small state of Trebizond is a hidden gem, only studied by a handful of modern scholars. Between its foundation in 1204 and conquest by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II in 1461, Trebizond made its fortunes as an Eastern Black Sea outlet for the silk roads through Tabriz to Central Asia. Its ruling family was closely related to the Byzantine imperial families in the middle and late medieval period. Its population was multiethnic, and multireligious. Studying Trebizond provides a novel and unique case study for late medieval history in Anatolia and the Caucasus, an Eastern centre of Byzantine culture.

This talk gives an overview of the fascinating historical landscape of Trebizond, from the perspective of global history. It is based on the speaker’s doctoral research, which examined the political relationship between Trebizond and Constantinople.

Speaker
Dr. Annika ASP
Independent Scholar

ZOOM Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183
Meeting link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183

Humans have cultivated chickpeas for about 10,000 years, making it one of the oldest and most important domesticated crops. This lecture will trace the history of chickpea domestication, its spread around the world, and the place of this versatile legume in South Asian cuisine. Exploring the history of the dish chana masala, a spicy chickpea curry originally from northern India, can illuminate important trade and cultural connections across Afro-Eurasia and the long lasting influence of the Moghul dynasty on taste. Long praised for its health benefits and medicinal uses, the small but mighty chickpea is not only be good for our bodies but may also be good for the earth itself. Indeed, it may hold the keys to both food security for millions and the fight against climate change.

Speaker
Prof. Cynthia ROSS
Department of History, Texas A&M University-Commerce

ZOOM Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183
Meeting link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183

Speaker 
Professor Jonathan Havenhill (The University of Hong Kong)
Dr. Jonathan Havenhill is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. His work involves the use of laboratory and experimental methods to examine the articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual patterns that underlie language variation and change. Using ultrasound tongue imaging, he has conducted a series of studies investigating interspeaker variability in the production of American English vowel contrasts, including fronted variants of the high back vowels /u, ʊ, o/ and the low back vowels /ɑ, ɔ/. His research interests extend to the role of visual perceptibility in misperception-based sound change and in the use of articulatory methods to account for typologically rare sounds, including occlusivized laterals in Hakka and doubly articulated fricatives in the Bantu languages Setswana and Sebirwa.

----------------------------------
In this talk, I present new articulatory and acoustic data that sheds light on the issues of language acquisition, contact, and change among Cantonese-English bilinguals in Hong Kong. The focus is on the production of the Cantonese sibilants /s, ts, tsʰ/ and the English sibilants /s, ʃ, tʃ, dʒ/. Descriptive work has long suggested that Cantonese /s, ts, tsʰ/ exhibit vowel-conditioned and/or interspeaker variability, although there remains no consensus on the precise quality of these variants. Earlier experimental work finds some evidence for speaker-specific and vowel-specific variation, but of a gradient rather than categorical nature. In contrast, several sociolinguistic studies propose that younger Cantonese speakers produce distinct alveolar [s, ts, tsʰ] vs. alveolo-palatal [ɕ, tɕ, tɕʰ] allophones, ostensibly as a result of contact with English. While the English and Cantonese sibilants exhibit partial phonetic and phonological overlap, the cross-linguistic mapping between the two has not been empirically established, a gap which this work aims to address.

Native Cantonese speakers with varying levels of English proficiency were recorded using high-speed ultrasound tongue imaging along with synchronized audio and lip video. Participants recited a Cantonese word list containing /s, ts, tsʰ/ and an English word list containing /s, ʃ, tʃ, dʒ/ in a range of vowel contexts. Dynamic acoustic and articulatory measurements were analyzed using generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs). Vowel height and rounding are both found to influence the place of articulation for L1 Cantonese /s, ts, tsʰ/. However, the degree of vocalic influence varies extensively on a speaker-specific and segment-specific (/s/ vs. /ts/ vs. /tsʰ/) basis, accounting for disparities between earlier descriptions. Further, discrete allophones for /ts, tsʰ/ are observed for some speakers, while contextual variation for /s/ is confirmed to be gradient. Speakers likewise exhibit a range of articulatory strategies in L2 English, particularly depending on whether their L1 variants are categorical or gradient. These findings are considered with respect to their implications for theories of bilingual phonological representation and of contact-induced change. Articulatory study of sociophonetic variables in multilingual communities is necessary not only to understand how speakers categorize the distinctive units of multiple languages, but also to understand how language contact motivates the introduction and spread of new linguistic variants.