|
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. |
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