The Linguistics and Greek Verb Conference finished 9:30PM last night, with my wife giving the last paper on the semantics of θη middles in Koine Greek and their motivation from other clause types.

The entire two days were extremely satisfying. I have a nice collection of notes to write up for the four sessions that I was requested to blog about. Thank you, everyone, who helped Rachel and I get to Cambridge. We had an incredibly productive time–Rachel connected with Rutger Allan and they had a really positive conversation about voice that’s going to continue via e-mail.

For my part, meeting Robert Crellin and have some conversation about the perfect. His dissertation and my thesis come from very different places in terms of descriptive terminology and theoretical background, but it was immensely satisfying to find that we have effectively arrived at the same conclusions (worded slightly differently). That is to say, given his work with Klein 1994 (link), I would have come to the very same conclusions about the event structure of perfect semantics. Now, whether the same could be said about my own efforts in the other direction, I don’t know, but I do look forward to enjoying fruitful dialogue in the future.

Now, however, we have to pack to begin our journey home. We have a day for wandering around Cambridge and then a flight back to Chicago tomorrow.

More to come…