The inaugural lecture by Gerson Klumpp, UT Professor of Finno-Ugric studies

The lecture is entiteled "On Ideophonic Predication".
Ideophonic (also onomatopoeic, descriptive, mimemic etc.) expressions are often perceived as less arbitrary representations of extralinguistic phenomena than other linguistic signs, in that they imitate directly or synaesthetically acoustic, visual, motoric, and other sen-sations. Ideophones are an interesting part of human language as they may be regarded as transformations of extralinguistic sounds into units of language. This transformation requires at least two processes. First, the adaptation of a "wild" sound string into a "tamed" one, fitting the articulation pecularities of a given language. And second, the integration of a sound string into speech, i.e. into the word stock and/or into the syntactic mechanisms of a language. The lecture gives a systematic account of grammatical strategies applied in ideophonic predication, based mainly on data from Komi, a European Uralic language.
Gerson Klumpp received his PhD at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 1999. He contributed to the study of Kamas, an extinct Samoyed language of Southern Siberia. In his dissertation on the verbal system of Kamas he focused on the grammaticalization of aspec-tual auxiliaries in a language contact scenario. The study was awarded a prize by the Societas Uralo-Altaica. His further research interests include the explanatory power of information structural categories in accounting for morphosyntactic problems like differential object-marking, especially for hitherto unpredicted object marking patterns in Uralic languages, as e.g. dialectal case-variation, or zero marking of referential objects. He devoted a larger study to the topic, which he is currently preparing for edition. G. Klumpp taught Uralic philology in Munich for many years, and served as replacement professor in Hamburg in 2008/2009. In autumn 2011 he joined Tartu university as a DORA professor of Finno-Ugric studies.