GAIL 2008-2009

These are the GAIL talks from 2008-2009:


September 24, 2008: Dinner and Discussion


October 29, 2008: Justin Spence (UC Berkeley)

Some discourse effects on discontinuous nominals in Hupa

This paper investigates conditions on the distribution of discontinuous nominal expressions in Hupa, an Athabaskan language of northwest California.  Conathan (2004) shows that the relative order of noun phrases and verbs in Hupa is sensitive to discourse-informational considerations: brand-new or contrastive NPs tend to occur in preverbal position, whereas previously-mentioned, non-contrastive nominals tend to occur postverbally. The present study considers additional data bearing on this issue.  In particular, nominal material can be split between the two positions, as in (1), the last line of a story about a fishing trip:

(1)   nahx      w-e:-xa:n                  hayah-dang'    ɬo:q'
        two        PERF-1SG-handle   there-when     salmon
        I caught two salmon at that time! (NJ, Golla 1984:17)

Studies of similar phenomena in other languages (e.g., de Kuthy 2002, Fanselow and Féry 2006) have treated such discontinuous expressions as the result of distinct information structure values for sub-constituents of nominal phrases.  Drawing on these insights, I show that the postverbal element in Hupa discontinuous nominals is informationally peripheral and that the construction is comparable to right-dislocations in English. Implications of discontinuous nominals for the analysis of Hupa clause structure are also considered, especially insofar as they provide support for Rice and Saxon's (2005) theory of clause structure in Athabaskan languages.


December 3, 2008: Hannah Haynie (UC Berkeley)

A computational assessment of deep relationships among California languages

This paper applies modern statistical methods to the question of deep relationships between the languages of California and finds no evidence of links between the member families of the proposed Hokan and Penutian stocks.

Since the introduction of Hokan and Penutian groupings (Dixon and Kroeber 1913), quantitative data has been used to support the clustering of language families into these larger categories. From a statistical standpoint, however, it is unclear what conclusions can be drawn from the numerical data presented in support of Hokan and Penutian stocks (e.g. Dixon and Kroeber 1919). In spite of early quantitative data and evidence uncovered through the application of traditional comparative methods (Sapir 1917, Haas 1963, Hymes 1964, et al.), the Penutian grouping is not uniformly accepted and the Hokan stock is the subject of even greater skepticism.

In the intervening decades new statistical methods -- and the technology to execute them -- have been developed and adopted by linguists. One particularly promising method for investigating linguistic relationships at great time depths is Kessler's recurrence metric, which can be evaluated statistically through the use of a Monte Carlo simulation (Kessler 2001). A sample of 21 California languages, including 10 languages from the Hokan grouping, five languages from the Penutian grouping, and a control group of six languages known to belong to the Uto-Aztecan family, were compared and clustered using this methodology. The results of this procedure demonstrate that this method is capable of identifying widely-accepted family groupings, but cast doubt on the ostensible Hokan and Penutian stock-level relationships.


September 16, 2009: Dinner and Discussion


October 21, 2009: Laura Graham (University of Iowa)

Quoting Mario Juruna: Linguistic discrimination in Brazilian print media

In 1982, Mario Juruna, an extraordinary Xavante leader from Mato Grosso state, won the election for a seat in Brazil’s national Congress of Deputies and became the first indigenous Brazilian ever elected to national political office.  Juruna’s election was remarkable in a number of respects, among them that Juruna, a native speaker of a central Brazilian Ge language, had only elementary control over Portuguese, the language of national political discourse.  Using the tools of linguistic anthropology, focusing on language and its relationship to socio-political contexts, this analysis shows how leading venues in the Brazilian print press manipulated textual representations of Juruna’s quoted speech to advance a changing elite political agenda. I argue that editorial practice elevated Juruna to national prominence and show how influential print venues later transformed their textualizing strategies to undermine Juruna’s positive image.  Ungrammatical depictions of Juruna’s utterances helped to bring Juruna’s speech under the spotlight of public scrutiny where ideologies of discursive competence transferred to public understandings of his credibility and ultimately to his capacity to serve as a national leader.

Members of dominant groups have manipulated representations indigenous speech to advance non-indigenous agendas since Europeans set foot in the Americas. These representations, both positive (the highly eloquent speech of celebrated orators such as Chief Seattle, for instance) and negative (demeaning representations of Indian speech in Hollywood [Meek 2006] and other popular media, for example) have extended and perpetuated images of the Noble and ignoble Savage into the 21st century (see Sorber 1972).  Juruna’s case is particularly interesting -- and also disturbing – because it illuminates an astonishing transformation in media-created linguistic imagery within a relatively short period of time. Juruna’s is the only case I know in which the speech of a single individual is publicly represented in dramatically different ways over the trajectory of a public
career.

The analysis underscores the power of language and linguistic representation, in this case textual representation of speech, in public political arenas and has relevance beyond the Brazilian context. It highlights the importance of attention to language and speech – both oral and written -- as a means toward understanding the workings of power and authority in society and reveals ways that institutions work language inprocesses of social domination and to perpetuate social inequalities. Despite news reporting’s ‘neutral façade’, the analysis exposes ways that media can manipulate language and linguistic representation to influence readers’ interpretations and indicates that this can have significant political and social consequences.

Finally the study provides a compelling example of the almost impossible obstacles that indigenous activists face when they gain access to formal political power. Juruna’s case provides clear examples of ways that powerful institutions such as the print media manipulate language and representations of language – often in ways that are unnoticed -- to mute indigenous voices.  His case illustrates that linguistic representations impact how, indeed if, indigenous voices are heard in national and international arenas. The lessons extend beyond indigenous subjects and are relevant to representations of the speech of subaltern linguistic minorities generally.