Tuesday Seminar

The Linguistics Department Tuesday Seminar is held in St. John Hall 011 at University of Hawai‘i at Manoa from 12:00p.m. to 1:15 p.m. every Tuesday in the Fall and Spring semesters.  Any topic related to linguistics is welcome.  If you are interested in giving a talk or would like further information, please contact graduate assistant Wen-wei Han at wenwei at hawaii dot edu

Coordinator: Dr. William O'Grady


 Spring 2008 Tuesday Seminar Series:

Date

Presenter

Title & Abstract

2/5 Laura Staum-Casasanto

Stanford University

Linguistics Department

Using Social Information in Language Processing
 
          What kinds of information do listeners use when they understand language?  Comprehenders are deluged with many types of information beyond what is contained in the speech stream.  Psycholinguistic research shows that visual information, referential context, and affective information are all predictive of linguistic form and meaning, and that listeners use these sources of information during on-line language comprehension.  But what about social information? Language happens in a social context, and variationist research shows that social factors are predictive of speakers' behavior.  Do listeners keep track of this sociolinguistic information, and if so, do they make use of it during on-line comprehension?
          In this talk, I'll present a series of studies investigating whether listeners know the social meaning of a highly frequent socio-phonetic variable in English, t/d deletion, and whether they use this knowledge to understand speech.
2/12 Shigeo Tonoike

University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Aoyama Gakuin University

General Theory of Relativization

 
2/19 Robert Blust

University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Department of Linguistics

Complex Sound Changes
 
Discussions of sound change assume that a single phonological innovation cannot simultaneously affect two or more segments through phonetically unrelated processes.  Evidence is presented for three sound changes in individual Austronesian languages, and a fourth change that is recurrent over a number of languages, which appear to violate this expectation.  Although one of these changes may involve still poorly understood morphology, at least three others exhibit what appear to be concurrent multiple segment alterations (glide fortition and high vowel centralization in a number of the languages of Borneo, systematic vowel metathesis and centralization of non-high vowels in Hawu, schwa fronting and final stop devoicing in Pa' Dalih Kelabit).  It is suggested that such innovations be called 'complex sound changes'.  As with sound changes that involve simultaneous alteration of multiple feature values, complex sound changes cannot easily be reconciled with the view that all sound change is phonetically or phonologically motivated.
2/26 Nicholas Thieberger

University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Department of Linguistics

Language and Australian Native Title
 
Native Title is a form of radical land title found by the High Court of Australia to have existed at the time of the European invasion of Australia. In order to establish a successful claim on land that has not had any other kind of title, Native Title claimants have to establish that they have continuity with the occupants of the claimed area going back to the first settlement by non-Indigenous Australians. While a range of evidence is amassed in this process, I will discuss the use of linguistics in showing continuity with particular reference to two cases (Daniel v Western Australia and Bennell v Western Australia) in which I was employed by the claimants as a linguistic expert witness. Comparison of early texts in the language and more recent usage is one method used to show continuity, but there are issues of what constitutes 'same' and 'different' for the purposes of a legal argument. In one case we actually have hundreds of early sources, and dealing with this mass of information is a challenge for lexical comparisons.
3/4 Jeff Siegel

University of New England, Australia

Department of Linguistics

Retention of Pan-Pacific
Pidgin Features in Modern Contact Languages
 

          In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many grammatical features of Pacific Pidgin English, New South Wales Pidgin English, and Chinese Pidgin English were attested in Australia and across the Pacific (including Hawai‘i). These include a postverbal transitive marker im or em, extensive use of a resumptive pronoun he, and the existential/possessive verb got. In each of the expanded pidgins or creoles that emerged in various locations in Australia and the Pacific later in the 20th century, a different subset of these features was retained. For example, the transitive marker is found in all three varieties of Melanesian Pidgin (Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin, Vanuatu Bislama and Solomon Islands Pijin) and in Australian Kriol (spoken in the Northern Territory and Kimberley region of Western Australia), but not in Hawai‘i Creole. In contrast, resumptive he exists as a predicate marker or subject referencing pronoun in Tok Pisin, Bislama and Pijin, but is not a feature of Kriol or Hawai‘i Creole. On the other hand, got is used for both existential and possessive constructions in Hawai‘i Creole, and in Tok Pisin and Bislama, but only for possessive in Pijin and Kriol.
         
This talk examines these three Pan-Pacific grammatical features along with six others that were earlier attested in the Northern Territory, New Guinea, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and Hawai‘i. It argues that the presence or absence of a particular feature in the five expanded pidgin or creole varieties that developed in these locations can be accounted for by the presence or absence of “substrate reinforcement”. This occurs when a similar feature exists in the substrate languages that were significant when the contact variety’s pidgin predecessor was expanding. The most significant substrate languages were those of speakers who were bilingual in the pidgin and who expanded it to meet greater communicative needs, eventually shifting to it as their primary language.

3/11 Peter Austin

Director of Endangered Languages

Academic Programme, SOAS

University of London

 

Linguistic Society of Hawai‘i

presents

Language Endangerment and

Conservation Symposium

Current Trends in Language Documentation
 

          In the last 10 years a new field of linguistics called ‘Documentary Linguistics’ has emerged. It is “concerned with the methods, tools, and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language or one of its varieties” (Gippert, Himmelmann and Mosel 2006:v). The activities carried out in this new field are called ‘Language Documentation’ and they strive “to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community” (Himmelmann 1998:166, see also Himmelmann 2006, Woodbury 2003).
          In this talk I review some of the basic characteristics of documentary linguistics and language documentation as they are developing now, and outline a number of challenging issues facing the field, including: (1) the definition of a comprehensive record of a language; (2) determining quality of the documentary record; (3) the boundaries between documentation and description; (4) interdisciplinarity and cross-discipline collaboration; (5) archivism and commodification; and (6) moral and ethical debates. My goal is not to resolve these issues but to clarify questions and to identify what is at stake for documentary linguistics and language documentation.

References
Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann and Ulrike Mosel (eds.) 2006. Essentials of language documentation (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs, 178). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998. Documentary and descriptive linguistics. Linguistics 36:161-95.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2006. Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for? In Jost Gippert, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann and Ulrike Mosel (eds.) 2006. Essentials of Language Documentation (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs, 178), 1-30. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Woodbury, Tony 2003. Defining documentary linguistics. In Peter Austin (ed.), Language Documentation and Description, Vol. 1, 35-51. London: School of Oriental and African Studies.

THURSDAY

3/13

Margaret Winters

Wayne State University

Cognition and Language Change
 
Location: Moore 575 (Linguistics Conference room)
Date/Time: Thursday, March 13, 12:00-1:15pm
 

Every theory of the nature of language, more or less, makes proposals about how that theory can be applied to language change, normally by looking at what might be entailed in changes in the nature of the entities which inform the theory.  Optimality theory, for example, proposes that change is captured in the reordering of constraints, while Cognitive Semantics calls upon modifications in the configuration of the radial set.  These proposals have all be successful in illuminating specific changes, but they do not necessarily get at the very nature of the relationship between language and cognition, that is, language and the language user.  I will discuss the way in which theoretical entities have been put to work diachronically and make a proposal for where one might look for “final causes”, the kinds of explanations which may indeed transcend specific theories.

3/18 Mark Campana

Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

The Pragmatics of Reduplication in Japanese
 
          In this talk I will describe how Japanese onomatopoeia and mimesis are used in everyday conversation.  As it turns out, this particular set of lexical items—beyond their obvious appeal to the senses—lies at the very heart of processing pragmatic information.  Specifically, I claim that these and other timing elements afford participants some extra time to manage the backlog, i.e. contemplate unfamiliar lexical items, evaluate the emotive states of others, navigate the floor--as well as plan for upcoming moves related to the same.
          Many key words in Japanese (typically quantifiers or intensifiers) contain double consonants whose pronunciation can be prolonged for affective purposes.  Onomatopoeic words also have distinctive phonological and morphological properties which the speaker uses to impart politeness features.  Examples of the former include IPPAI, CHOTTO, MINNA and YAPPARI.  Reduplication (full or partial) is the rule in the latter: GERAGERA ‘laugh uproariously’; KANKAN ‘furious’; YOROYORO ‘drunkenly’.  One must surely wonder why such affective words are constructed via the repetition of internal sounds.
          Instances of onomatopoeia were taken from natural conversation.  Some participants reacted as if hearing a lexical item with high semantic content (although with onomatopoeia the semantic load is relatively light).  The evidence therefore indicates that more information is being processed than would otherwise be expected.
3/25
~Spring Break~
4/1 Richard Dauenhauer

University of Alaska Southeast

Documenting Tlingit Oral Literature:
Text and Translation
 
One of the major tasks in descriptive linguistics is translation, particularly the translation of oral narratives from non-literate societies. A linguist's translation usually aims for a faithful approximation of structure in the source text, a practice which does not usually result in a natural, easily readable translation. However, for translations intended for a nonspecialist audience the problem of readability versus faithfulness is even more difficult, since the nonspecialist reader tends to think of the translated text as the original. A highly faithful translation then runs the risk of making the original narrator seem ignorant or incoherent, but a less faithful translation may obliterate features of the original text that are essential to the narrative. Prof. Dauenhauer will present some of the problems he has encountered in his career of translating Tlingit oral literature into English, as well as some of the issues in working with an endangered language and its speakers for over thirty-five years.
         
***
About the speaker:
Richard Dauenhauer is the President's Professor of Native Languages and Culture at the University of Alaska Southeast. He received his PhD in comparative literature in 1975 from the University of Wisconsin Madison with a dissertation titled "Text and context of Tlingit oral tradition". Richard is an adopted member of the Tlingit Chookaneidí clan and bears the name Xwaayeenákh. He is a former poet laureate of Alaska, and is married to the Tlingit native speaker and scholar Nora Marks Dauenhauer (Keixwnéi, Lukaax.ádi clan), with whom he has collaborated extensively. Together with Nora he has published three volumes of facing-page translations of Tlingit oral literature in the highly regarded "Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature" series, as well as a variety of Tlingit language teaching materials. His ongoing collaborations with Nora include a collection of Tlingit narratives of the battles with Russians at Sitka, a collection of myths from the Tlingit Raven Cycle, and an intermediate level textbook for Tlingit language teaching. He has also published on language revitalization and language teaching from his experiences in working to revitalize the Tlingit language. In addition to his interests in the Tlingit language, he has published a number of translations of poetry from German, Russian, Finnish, Classical Greek, and other well-known languages, as well as works on the history of the Russian colonial period in Alaska.
4/8 Emily Bartelson

University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Department of Linguistics

But I'm not a botanist!
Dealing with plants in linguistic description
 
Plants play a central role in almost every human society.  In traditional cultures this importance is even more apparent.  As linguists document and describe languages spoken in traditional cultures, they encounter a wide variety of plant terminology and knowledge, and deal with it in various ways.  The purpose of my project has been to examine the treatment of traditional knowledge about plants, especially plant terminology, in recent descriptive linguistic work.  In this presentation I will summarize my results and offer a set of suggestions to linguists, as well as some comments on why I believe this issue is important to linguists, botanists, and above all to the language communities themselves.
4/15 James Crippen

University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Department of Linguistics

Tlingit Orthography: LSA preparatory presentation
 
(Note: This 20 minute talk is in preparation for the 2008 LSA Summer Meeting. Suggestions are welcome.)

A long history of attempts at writing the Tlingit language have left as many as 23 different systems for either native speaker literacy or scientific transcription. Historically, eight different orthographies have been proposed for native speaker use, and five Latin-based systems remain in publication today. This "embarrassment of riches" causes rifts among speakers and impedes literacy development by making texts in one orthography inaccessible for users of another orthography. Indeed, despite the many writing systems and the relatively numerous published texts for such a small speaker population, the literacy rate among native speakers remains surprisingly low, although nearly all speakers are literate in English.

In this presentation I will review the major Tlingit writing systems in use today, and will then review them based on proposed characteristics of completeness (phonological, morphological), effectiveness (ease of learning, ease of use), consistency (regularity of representation), popularity (who uses what), and technological facility (computer representation). Especially with regard to the latter, I will discuss some possible means for encoding the various orthographies in Unicode, and present a few solutions to compensate for defects in the most popular orthographies.
4/22 Shigeo Tonoike

University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Aoyama Gakuin University

A Minimalist Theory of Binding

 

In this talk, I propose a minimalist theory of binding, basically following Hornstein’s (2001) movement approach but departing from it in some important respects. The major points of the proposal include:

1)      The Binding Principles DO NOT exist as such. They are epiphenomena of the way anaphors, pronominals and referential expressions are generated.

2)      The referential function of a DP resides in the (possibly covert) definite determiner contained in it.

3)      Coreference between two DPs is captured by the identity of the definite determiners (NO indices).

4)      Identical definite determiners arise only as a result of movement that leaves a copy of the determiner of the moved element (Partial Copy Theory of Movement)

5)      Movement can be local as in reflexivity, reciprocity, and control, or long distance as in pronominals.

6)      Local movement takes the form of probe-goal agreement and movement of Chomsky (2005), mediated by the verbal phase head v*. Therefore, it is confined strictly within v*P. This accounts for the locality and c-command restriction of anaphora.

7)      The probe-goal based agreement/movement operation involved in reflexivity, reciprocity and control is driven by what I call voice feature, whose value can be Reflexive or Reciprocal (as well as Transitive, Intransitive, Passive, etc.).

8)      Pronominals arise as a result of non-local movement, an extended version of Nune’s (2004) sideward movement and is driven by the need to provide an argument to bear a theta-role either at some higher position or in a separate phrase structure.

4/29

Nabila Louriz

Hassan II University-Casablanca

Visiting scholar at

MIT Linguistics and Philosophy

How are “alien” Vowels Adapted in Loanwords?

 
This talk is an attempt to investigate the adaptation patterns employed to accommodate French vowels in loanwords in Moroccan Arabic (MA, hereafter). The focus is on nasal vowels. Previous research maintains that –in languages that lack phonemic nasal vowels- they are repaired as a sequence of oral vowel + nasal consonant (VN, henceforth). That is the nasal vowel of the donor language undergoes the process of “unpacking” and is adapted as VN in the host language; deletion of the nasal element is due to only to phonological changes (Paradis & Lacharite 1996, Paradis and Prunet 2000). This follows from languages’ tendency to preserve borrowed phonological information. However, data from MA show that the nasal vowel is repaired in three ways: (i) VN (ii) V, or (iii) deleted altogether. I shall demonstrate that phonological explanation per se is insufficient. Then I shall discuss how both phonology and phonetics interface to repair loanwords with nasal vowels. I shall conclude by presenting an analysis that can account for the different strategies (i-iii), namely, one that incorporates both phonology and phonetics.
5/6 Mie Hiramoto

University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Department of Linguistics

Slaves speak pseudo-Toohoku-ben:
Constructing linguistic marginality
in Japanese Translation of Gone with the Wind
 
          In a study of Japanese women's language (JWL), Inoue investigates the use of JWL in two translated novels and concludes that translations represent "an intertexual relationship that 'involves two equivalent messages in two different codes.'" (Inoue 2003: 318).  Her study clearly demonstrates that JWL is reproduced in translation through the use of language ideology and also that this reproduction is accomplished by erasure of certain attributes that are presumed to exist in the characters' original states, a process known as "transduction."  The main focus of this study is the investigation of minority characters' (namely, enslaved men and women and poor Whites) intertexuality and the transduction of their speech attributes in the
Japanese translation of Gone with the Wind (GWTW). The findings show that none of the slave women use JWL and neither they nor the slave men, nor the poor Whites use Standard Japanese (SJ) in the translation.  Further, I propose that their speech is modeled after a stigmatized Japanese dialect, namely Toohoku dialect, or Toohoku-ben (TB).  In the data, linguistic features used by minority characters that resemble TB include: the sentence final particles da and bee; a vowel coalescence (ai ~ ee) as seen in, for example, the polite verb ending form gozeemasu ; prenasalizations like kendo ~ kedo 'but'; and a merger of high front vowels (sungari ~ shingari 'last').
          The original English GWTW text employs eye-dialect orthography to signify minority characters' speech, thus the use of non-SJ in the translation may be understood as intertexual-interdiscursivity. However, assigning speech styles to characters based on a specific regional dialect, namely TB, requires a different explanation. Following Och's (1990) model of indexicality, I suggest that use of pseudo-TB serves to directly index the characters' non-standardness, and therefore to indirectly index stigmatization associated with TB. Furthermore, non-normativity reproduced through intertexual stigmatization via use of pseudo-TB conclusively serves to stereotype 'the enslaved men and women as well as poor Whites' as deviated minorities.  That is, pseudo-TB erases certain attributes (e.g., gender, place of origin, ethnicity) of the characters and just highlights their second-class natures.  This imaginary variety, unrealistic to the point of not even qualifying as an actual dialect, derogate the minority characters, portraying them as a group of people who lack the ability to speak (1) a complete dialect, or even (2) correctly speak a stigmatized dialect.
          This study provides linguistic evidence that the use of SJ in translation is based on socioeconomic distribution rather than actual linguistic distribution.  Attention to the linguistic representation of marginal characters in GWTW likewise underscores the salient marginality of the TB in Japanese language ideology.  While it is certain that the minority characters' use of non-SJ (which strongly resembles TB) is a translation of the original non-standard English, the assignment of the pseudo-TB reinforces linguistic inferiorization against the slaves and poor Whites, as well as TB speakers.

 


Previous seminars:

Semester

coordinator

organizer

Fall 2007 Dr. William O'Grady Wen-wei Han
Spring 2007 Dr. William O'Grady Diana Stojanovic

Fall 2006

Dr. William O'Grady

Jawee Perla

Spring 2006

Dr. William O'Grady

Fabiana Piccolo

Fall 2005

Dr. William O'Grady

Laura Robinson

Spring 2005

Dr. William O'Grady

Tsai-hsiu Liu

Fall 2004

Dr. Kamil Ud Deen

Tsai-hsiu Liu

Spring 2004

Dr. Kamil Ud Deen

Valerie Guerin

Fall 2003

Dr. Kamil Ud Deen

Valerie Guerin

Spring 2003

Dr. Kamil Ud Deen

Fabiana Piccolo

Dr. Kamil Ud Deen suggested creating this website, and Jun Nomura designed and implemented the site in Spring 2003.

UH Manoa

  Department of Linguistics

Tuesday Seminar Home

Last updated 04/24/2008