Single Review on past events

For a non-linguist it isn´t that easy to explain the grammatical difference between a sentence like “I saw a woman”, “I saw the woman” and “They need an assistant who knows English”. In his presentation on “Diachronic Typology of Differential Argument Marking” Ilja Serzants made his audience understand the difference.
First of all he had to explain several linguistic terms, starting with the meaning of Differential Argument Marking (DAM): “Certain nouns (more precisely, NP types) sometimes tend to be marked differently than other nouns, e.g., along the animacy hierarchy.” Animacy is one of the parameters that have been observed to constrain DAM systems in various languages. Animacy in Linguistics is a parameter that may values representing various degrees. Humans, for instance, occupy the highest slot in the animacy hierarchy. Inanimate objects such as stones or grass are ranked very low, and animals usually occupy a space in between; languages may also distinguish between humans and animals which – although both being logically animates – may nevertheless being treated differently, e.g., a language may distinguish only between animate humans versus animals and inanimate. There would be thus no difference for these languages between inanimates and animate animals, both being opposed to humans.

Then the linguist presented examples for animacy- and (in)definiteness-driven DAM: The object of the sentence “I saw the woman” is definite and animate; “I saw a woman” is indefinite but specific and animate, whereas “They need an assistant who knows English” is indefinite, nonspecific and animate.
He furthermore pointed out that there are DAMs that apply on the whole sentence and can alter the aspectual value or the modal value of the verb, or they are triggered by negation of the verb or they are concomitant to the change of tense.

But what is Typology? Typology can be defined as “study of patterns that occur systematically across languages: typological generalization. The patterns found in typological generalization are language universals”.
The main goal of Linguistic Typology is thus to establish generalizations that are valid across languages (no matter which type). Ilja Serzants in particular analyzes and compares Finnic, Baltic and East Slavic languages, e.g. Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Finnish.
But why do we need generalizations? – Beside a number of obvious practical reasons generalizations create a meta-level that allows for coherent theoretical assumptions and models which would have cross-linguistic validity. Further they open up the way for assumptions about how languages are organized.
Diachronic Typology additionally involves a chronological dimension. The aim here is to establish generalizations across developmental paths of a particular grammatical category: where it comes from, how it expands (becomes productive) and how it disappears.
“The aim of my particular study is to find out how and why DAM systems arise? What are their transitional changes and demise? Are various DAM systems somehow interrelated diachronically?”, Ilja Serzants explained. His working hypothesis he would describe – in a simplified version – like this: “DAM may be regarded in several cases as a transitional stage in a major process whereby a specific new marking extends the old one. Given that this is a major restructuring of the alignment patterns, it is expected that we will observe gradience: certain contexts are affected earlier than others.”