Tuesday Seminar Series

January 10

No Tuesday Seminar

January 17

No Tuesday Seminar

January 24

No Tuesday Seminar

January 31

No Tuesday Seminar

February 7

No Tuesday Seminar

February 14

Jong-Bok Kim

Director, Institute for the Study of Language and Information, Kyung Hee University, Korea

Asymmetries in Korean Cleft Constructions and Interactions with the Information-Structure

  The Korean noun kes (‘thing, fact’) has a variety of uses. Among these, it can be involved in different types of constructions which appear to be counterparts of clefts and pseudoclefts in English. These cleft-like uses of kes involve the copula and further induce three main asymmetries: animacy, adjunct, and common-noun asymmetry. For example, in the pseudocleft construction, the XP headed by `kes’ (which is inter-substitutable with a common noun) can refer to either an inanimate or an animate entity as in (1). However, the phrase cannot refer to an animate entity in the inverted one as shown in the contrast (2):

(1) a.[John-i sa-n kes/chayk]-un i chayk-i-ta.

        John-NOM buy-MOD kes/book-TOP this book-COP-DECL

        `What/The book John bought is this book.’

     b. i chayk-un [John-i sa-n kes/chayk]-i-ta.

         this book-TOP John-NOM buy-MOD kes/book- COP-DECL

         `This book is what/the book John bought.’

In this talk, we argue that these three asymmetries are closely related to the types of copular constructions in Korean, predicational, equational, and specificational. In particular, we show that the cleft-like constructions inherit the information structure properties of copular clauses and further that the key aspects in the analysis are (i) whether the cleft-like clause that ‘kes’ heads is referential or not and (ii) where the partition in the copular clause between GIVEN and NEW information falls.

February 21

Thomas Dougherty

University of Hawai'i Department of Linguistics

Just what is the morphosyntactic alignment of Ainu?

Ainu is a language family formerly spoken in the north of Japan, in the south of Sakhalin Oblast in the Russian Federation, and in the Kuril Islands. The last remaining language in the family, Hokkaidō Ainu (usually just called "Ainu"), is spoken on the northernmost main island of Japan, Hokkaidō. Despite ethnographic and linguistic documentation starting in the mid 19th century CE, there have been no formal investigations into Ainu morphosyntactic alignment as far as I am aware. This presentation will explore the various phenomenon in Hokkaidō Ainu which could be used to determine its morphosyntactic alignment, including pronominal agreement markers on verbs, singular-plural agreement marking on verbs, etc.; as well as a brief areal overview of the morphosyntactic alignment of the other languages of Northeast Asia.

February 28

Fred Anderson    

Faculty of Letters, Kansai University, Japan  

Education in languages of lesser power:
East Asian and Pacific perspectives

Due to colonialism and territorial annexation, colonial and national languages have been imposed as vehicles of education throughout the Asia-Pacific region. In most cases, this has relegated minority and sometimes even majority indigenous languages to, at best, a minor role in formal modern education, and at worst active repression. Similarly, immigration in the region has led to situations where other languages—although they may be powerful national and even international languages in their places of origin—are ignored or marginalized in the educational systems of the countries to which they have been transplanted. In this presentation I will overview some case studies from a collection that Craig Volker and myself are compiling on education in indigenous and immigrant languages in the Asia-Pacific region (what we refer to collectively as “languages of lesser power”). Languages from Taiwan, Timor-Leste, and Papua New Guinea are likely to be discussed, as well as some general trends that come of these studies so far.

March 6

Robert Blust (UHM Linguistics) & Steve Trussel

The Austronesian Comparative Dictionary: A Work in Progress

March 13

Jonathan Cheng-Chuen Kuo [half-time]

University of Hawai'i Department of Linguistics

The origin of marked order in Truku Seediq clitic pronoun clusters

March 20

Hiroyuki Akama

Tokyo Institute of Technology

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a non-invasive technology for measuring the brain activity of a human subject who performs cognitive or sensor-motor tasks in response to visual or auditory stimuli. A scanner of fMRI (3.0-T Signa scanner of General Electric, Milwaukee, WI) has started to operate at Tokyo Tech, and It is particularly worth noting that the first fMRI experiments we are running here pertain to a research field of cognitive linguistics which incorporates mathematical and statistical modeling. Some of our colleague researchers are exploring the loci of the neural foundations of the embodiment theory (cf. Barsalou, 1999, 2003; Bergen, 2005) using the General Linear Model (GLM) which consists of finding clusters that exhibit significantly higher activity levels than the other brain regions (cf. Pulverm ü ller, 2001; Boulenger et al., 2009; Saygin et al., 2010; Willems et al., 2011). The others attempt to apply Machine Learning methods to classify the finer-grained activation patterns of voxels (3D pixel with volume in a neural image) which correspond to the meaning processing of words, semantic categories and sentences (cf. Haxby et al., 2001; Mitchell et al., 2004; Norman et al., 2008; Pereira et al., 2008, 2011; Mur et al., 2009). In this talk, I will provide you some research paradigms in fMRI, practical skills of operation, experiment design, data analysis, and, above all, possibilities for developing cooperative research in the near future with UHM Department of Linguistics.

March 27

Spring Recess - No Tuesday Seminar

    April 3

Toshiaki Furukawa

Graduate School of Language and Culture, Osaka University, Japan

Taking a discursive approach to language documentation: The case of Hawaiian

Linguists have produced Hawaiian reference grammars, dictionaries, and other cultural texts.  However, the pragmatics of--and the face-to-face interaction in--this Polynesian language remains under researched. A preliminary analysis of Hawaiian media talk was presented at a Tuesday Seminar in 2010. I continue this line of research with an investigation into the pragmatics of Hawaiian by examining an audio recording of an interview with Hawaiian speaking elders or kupuna that include the prominent practitioner/researcher, Mary Kawena Puku'i. The goal of the presentation is to show a way of conducting sociolinguistic research through re-visiting interviews that were recorded in the 1960s, primarily, for the purpose of documenting and conserving Native Hawaiian language and culture.

April 10

Kamil Ud Deen

University of Hawai'i Department of Linguistics

Hello Old Friend: The Return of Universal Grammar

April 17

Akeamakamae Kiyuna  

University of Hawai'i Department of Linguistics

Kāhulu Pepeke: A look at Relativization in Hawaiian

Peter C. Lincoln  

University of Hawai'i Department of Linguistics

Nuts to Years

April 24

Emerson Odango  

University of Hawai'i Department of Linguistics

A Progress Report on the Development of Language Vitality Surveys for Minority
Language Communities

In this presentation, I discuss my ongoing efforts in the development of a language survey which seeks to assess language vitality of endangered/minority language communities, with particular focus on intergenerational transfer of language in the crucial domain of the home.  This issue is not always examined closely in language surveys, even in those that have explicit questions about "language vitality". In Spring 2010 for Dr. Katie Drager's Methods of Language Conservation seminar, Apay Tang and I worked together to develop a pilot survey that focuses on intergenerational transfer in the home domain for minority languages. In the Summer of 2011, I administered this draft survey to a few community members of Pakin Atoll, a diasporic community of speakers of Mortlockese living in Pohnpei State in the Federated States of Micronesia, as a means of testing the practicality using such an assessment tool. After some revisions based on comments made by those participants in Pakin, this semester I am in the process of administering a revised survey to other native speakers of Mortlockese who attend the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. Despite the relative small sample size of these initial tests, I assert that direct feedback from survey participants is an important factor in the initial design and subsequent revisions of surveys which assess language vitality in the home domain. In this presentation, I will share some of the comments made by the participants, raise questions about the scope and design of language vitality surveys, and emphasize the importance of ongoing collaboration at various levels in the creation of language vitality surveys.

May 1

University of Hawai'i Department of Linguistics

While there has been some limited work on the sound system of Pidgin, the variety of English spoken in Hawai‘i has received less attention. To address this gap, we have embarked on a large-scale description of variation in Hawai‘i English. Of the 99 interviews conducted thus far, this presentation will focus on variation in the vowel realizations of 16 speakers. The speakers, who are all from either Kalihi or Kane‘ohe, vary in age, gender, and ethnicity. For these speakers, acoustic phonetic analysis was conducted on vowels from spontaneous speech produced during sociolinguistic interviews. The analysis provides evidence of several sound changes in progress, and it reveals that phonetic realizations of Hawai‘i English vowels differ in a number of ways from those found in varieties of English spoken elsewhere. Taken together, the results provide a first step toward a socially-informed acoustic phonetic description of Hawai‘i English

May 9 (Wed)

John Kupchik  

Kyoto University - JSPS

A study of synchronic vowel elision in hiatus contexts in Eastern Old Japanese poetry

This talk will take place in Moore 575 at 3:00pm, not in St John 011 at 12:00pm. Take note!

This study presents an analysis of all attested examples of synchronic 
vowel elision in hiatus contexts in the Eastern Old Japanese (EOJ) poetry 
of the 8th century CE. Synchronic elisions occur optionally at the 
boundary between two separate word forms and are not lexicalized. These 
are distinct from diachronic elisions, which are found in compounds, 
verbal morphophonology, and lexicalized collocations. It will be shown 
that the rules and explanations given in previous studies on Old 
Japanese elision (none of which focused specifically on EOJ or 
synchronic elisions) are inadequate to explain the EOJ data as they all 
have numerous exceptions that cannot be easily explained. This study 
provides a new explanation that has no exceptions. Unlike the previous 
studies, I step away from looking at morpheme type and syllable count 
and explain the situation purely in terms of phonology interacting with 
a default type. The implications for typology and phonological theory 
will also be discussed due to the fact that EOJ shows extensive 
synchronic V_2 elision, which is rare among the world’s languages.
 

UH Manoa

   Department of Linguistics

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