题目: The grammar of well-being: how to talk about health and illness in tropical societies

演讲者：Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald 教授（James Cook University, Australia）

时间：2021年3月31日（周三）14：00-15：30 （北京时间）

zoom会议号：943 3073 6185         密码：181768

摘要：Ways of talking about diseases, ailments, convalescence, and well-being vary from language to language. In some, an ailment 'hits' or 'gets' the person; in others, the sufferer 'catches' an ailment, comes to be a 'container' for it, or is presented as a 'fighter' or a 'battleground'. In languages with obligatory expression of information source, the onslaught of disease is treated as 'unseen', just like any kind of internal feeling or shamanic activity. Do the grammatical means of talking about diseases and ailments reflect traditional attitudes and thoughts about the origins of adverse conditions? How are diseases inflicted and spread? And what are the patterns involved in describing traditional healing practices and 'getting better'? Ways of speaking about disease, its nature, and treatments shift under the influence of mainstream cultures and national languages. For traditional speakers of a few languages, ‘malaria gets you’. For younger speakers, ‘you get malaria’. Ways of speaking change — but do the concepts?

Our special focus is on languages from hot-spots of linguisticdiversity and diseases of all sorts — especially Amazonia, with special attention to Tariana, an Arawak language spoken in the multilingual Vaupes River Basin area. We also address the ways in which the emergence of COVID-19 has affected this, and other languages.

演讲者介绍：Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Distinguished Professor, Australian Laureate Fellow, and Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. She is Honorary Life Member of the Linguistic Society of America, and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia (Brazil), and has written grammars ofBare (1995) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (CUP,2003). She is also an expert on the Ndu languages of the Sepik area in Papua New Guinea, having published The Manambu language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea (OUP, 2008) in addition to essays on various typological and areal topics, especially classifiers, evidentiality, imperatives, and serial verbs.