FForum 2017-2018

These are the FForum talks from 2017-2018:

2017.08.29 Discussion of Summer Fieldwork

2017.09.05 Emily Remirez (UC Berkeley)

Using OpenSesame in elicitation contexts

This presentation is intended as a hands-on, workshop style exploration of the experimental tool OpenSesame and one example of how it was used in an elicitation context. OpenSesame is a user-friendly tool that uses familiar drag-and-drop interfaces to build Python-based experiments that linguists and consultants can interact with to gather linguistic data of many types. The goal of the talk is to inspire discussion about uses of this tool in elicitation or fieldwork settings and to equip those who’d like to use it with the resources to do so.  Slides from the talk, as well as additional tools and resources, can be found here.

2017.09.12 Robert Bringhurst

Literary Megafauna, Old-Time Linguistics, and the Dinosaur in the Room

For students of oral literature, the golden age of Americanist linguistics is 1890–1940: the half-century in which Boas, Bloomfield, Dorsey, Gatschet, Goddard, Hewitt, Uhlenbeck, and Boas’s many students and grand-students took thousands of pages of dictation in more than a hundred Native American languages. And to students of oral literature, languages, however fascinating in themselves, are more fascinating still when put to literary use. Arguably, then, the most important thing that North American linguists have done since is to analyze, edit, and study this vast literary corpus.

There are other opinions. To some linguists, literature is simply another field entirely, possibly as different from linguistics as astrology is from astronomy. And to some cultural theorists and identity politicians, “literature” is a phony colonial category, inapplicable and maybe downright threatening to Native American cultures.

My own view is that literature, like language, is a human universal, and that it is, like clean air and fresh water, a universal good. It can be poisoned and polluted, but a healthy cultural ecosystem will eventually restore it. (Healthy cultural ecosystems are admittedly now in very short supply.) Like Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock, I also think that the architecture of works of oral literature is linguistically just as interesting as the architecture of words, phrases, and sentences. In addition, it seems to me that literature, like language, is the magic food: a dish that even in tiny quantities nourishes all who partake yet is never consumed.

2017.09.19 Sawyer Scholarship Presentations (Meeting will be held from 4:00 to 5:00PM)

Presentations from two two undergraduate students who were awarded the Sawyer Scholarship.

The word order of classifiers, adjective phrases, possessive phrases, and demonstrative phrases in Vietnamese noun phrase.

Hoa Luong (UC Berkeley)

This project presents basic characteristics on nominal word order in Vietnamese and provides descriptive facts that in Vietnamese, classifiers serve as prenominal modifiers whereas adjective phrases, possessive phrases, and demonstrative serve as post-nominal modifiers. The project provides worksheets for practicing syntactic distribution of these elements in Vietnamese noun phrases.

Effect of Speaker on Nonword Repetition Task in Monolingual and Bilingual Children

Claudia Valdivia (UC Berkeley)

2017.09.20 GAIL Meeting (Meeting will be held at 6:00PM)

2017.09.26 Lev Michael and Christine Beier (UC Berkeley)

Developing an analysis of tone in Iquito

Iquito (iqu, also Ikíitu) is a highly endangered Zaparoan language of Peruvian Amazonia. In this talk we present an analysis of the Iquito mixed stress-tone system and also describe the winding research trajectory that led to this analysis. Our goal is to not only provide an analytical overview of this complex prosodic system, but also to sketch the empirical and analytical challenges we faced, and how we overcame them, with the hope that aspects of our experience will be useful to others facing similarly challenging prosodic systems.

Iquito exhibits both stress and tone, with the two systems interacting through a requirement that each phonological word in Iquito exhibit an H tone: if a word lacks a lexically-specified H tone, one is assigned to the syllable bearing primary stress. There is a major split in the prosodic system between verbs and all other word classes. Understanding the verbal tone system requires distinguishing prefixal, derivational stem, and inflectional domains, with each domain exhibit different restrictions on the position and co-occurrence of tones within them. In addition, tones in each domain affect tones in adjacent domains differently. Morphology further complicates the picture, as verbal morphemes exhibit a variety of metrical and tonal behaviors, including tonal assignment to adjacent morphemes, and the conditioning of vowel length in neighboring morphemes. In addition, tonal patterns associated with certain inflectional suffixes are affected by the presence of post-verbal arguments.

We describe the process by which our understanding and analysis of this system evolved, which in large part involved shedding assumptions based on early successes in the analysis of non-verbal tone, and increasingly embracing the complex role of morphology and syntax in the analysis of verbal tone.

2017.10.03 Andrew Garrett, Julia Nee, Zachary O'Hagan, and Ronald Sprouse (UC Berkeley)

Archiving your data in the California Language Archive

In this presentation, we will provide an overview of what the California Language Archive is, what types of materials it houses, and why you may want to deposit your materials in the CLA.  We will walk through several collections in order to foster a discussion of how collections can be organized, and of how those organizational styles can serve different audiences.  We will also demonstrate features of the pre-archive, where you can deposit materials before they are ready to be permanently accessioned.  We hope that this session will serve to spark ideas about how to organize a collection, as well as provide the skills necessary to begin the pre-archiving process.  Information about the Prearchive process can be found here.  The form that serves as a first step in beginning a Prearchive with the CLA can be found here.  

2017.10.10 Ryan Bennett (UCSC)

Expectation shapes speech perception in Kaqchikel Mayan: Psycholinguistics with ‘Small Data’

In this talk we explore the relationship between phonetics, phonology, and the lexicon in Kaqchikel, a Guatemalan Mayan language. The phonemic inventory of Kaqchikel includes a set of plain stops /p t k q/ as well as a set of 'glottalized' stops /ɓ t' k' ʛ̥ ʔ/. We investigated the perceptual similarity of these stops by means of an AX discrimination task conducted with Kaqchikel speakers in Guatemala. After connecting the patterns of perceptual confusion observed in this study to the synchronic phonology and diachronic development of Mayan languages, we consider whether perceptual similarity might be conditioned by two factors related to prior linguistic experience: (1) the acoustic similarity between phonemic categories, calculated from a one hour acoustic corpus of spontaneous spoken Kaqchikel; and (2) lexical statistics (phoneme frequency, functional load, etc.), calculated from a one million word written corpus. Our overall conclusions are (1) that experience-based lexical and acoustic factors do affect speech perception in Kaqchikel; (2) these factors most likely exert an influence through low-level perceptual tuning during perceptual learning; and (3) corpus methods can be robustly extended to psycholinguistic research on minority languages even when only limited and imperfect resources are available.

2017.10.17 Amalia Skilton (UC Berkeley)

Perceptual meanings in the demonstratives of Ticuna

In many languages, determiners, especially demonstratives, are said to encode whether the referent is visible (Anderson & Keenan 1985, Matthewson 1998).  Yet little is known about the semantics of visibility contrasts.  Drawing on fieldwork, I argue that the demonstratives of Ticuna (isolate; Brazil, Colombia, Peru) do systematically encode perceptual meanings, and that these meanings involve touch as well as vision.  The centrality of perception in Ticuna's demonstrative system challenges theories that treat demonstratives as simply indexing the location of an object in space.  Rather, demonstratives encode perceptual and attentional as well as spatial meanings (Hanks 2011; Peeters and Ozyurek 2016).

2017.10.24 Karee Garvin and Christine Beier (UC Berkeley)

A FForum discussion of ethics in fieldwork

During my fieldwork in Ghana this past summer, one of the things that I, Karee, was most struck by was the number of ethical questions I had to confront. These included questions about working in spaces heavily influenced by the SIL, about how my research goals fit with community-based research, and about what my responsibilities are to the community where I work, to the academic community, and to myself. These questions have sparked a number of interesting discussions with other members of our linguistics department, including Chris. 

Together, Chris and I have framed two highly impactful ethical questions that we would like to discuss with you at this Tuesday’s FForum meeting.

• The first question examines the difference between language ‘documentation’ and ‘description’ and the ethical spaces related to doing each type of work; and in particular, how different kinds of research goals are situated within the communities where we work and within the academic community.

• The second issue we would like to examine centers on working in communities where SIL International (a.k.a. the Summer Institute of Linguistics, self-described as “a faith-based nonprofit organization”) has worked or is working, and the ethical questions that result from these situations.

We have created a folder on Google Drive with a number of readings that we’d like to share with you. The 3 readings to consider for Tuesday's discussion are the two statements from the LSA and the Dobrin et al. (2009) article. We think these readings will provide useful structure for the discussion and we ask you to read or skim them as suits your schedule. 

The folder also contains a number of other readings regarding ethics and fieldwork. We invite you to add any others readings you have found helpful in considering these types of questions. Our goal is that this shared folder will consolidate readings and resources on these topics that will be useful to our departmental community. Many helpful resources are also available through the LSA website, especially through the 'Issues in Linguistics' pages.

We encourage you to think about the dynamics in your communities and the specific goals of your own research activities that shape the unique ethical questions you face in the field; and we invite you to come ready to discuss your experiences and insights on these topics. We look forward to the discussion on Tuesday!

2017.10.31 Tessa Scott (UC Berkeley)

The first summer of field work:  a discussion

The first summer of fieldwork brought rewards and challenges for me. In this talk, I will introduce you all to my field site, the consultants I worked with, and the language I documented, Ndengeleko. Then I will highlight three struggles I faced during my trip: feeling overwhelmed, feeling lonely, and feeling like an outsider (and how this last one interacts with being a young woman in the field). These are issues that are a natural part of field work, but they can be huge obstacles. The more we, as fieldworkers, can talk about the difficulties and how to overcome them, the more we can enjoy all of the rewarding experiences of fieldwork. It is my hope that the second half of this talk is a discussion about these and other struggles and crucially, about ways to deal with and overcome them.

2017.11.07 Angel Sobotta (Lewis and Clark State College) and Milton Davis, Jr. (Colville Reservation)

Nez Perce language revitalization

2017.11.08 Phil Cash Cash (University of Arizona) Note: this is a GAIL meeting held at 6pm

The Sacred Earth

This talk opens with a traditional Ni·mí·pu· (Nez Perce) narrative that describes the origin of the name Hinmató·yalahtq’it belonging to the one known as Nez Perce “Young Chief Joseph” (1840-1904). The narrative as well as the name itself reinforces the link between sacred landscapes of the Pacific Northwest to the cultural identity of Young Chief Joseph in particular and to the Ni·mí·pu· (Nez Perce) peoples in general. It shows how these links are not just symbolic meanings of sacredness rather they embody organizing principles to enduring Indigenous human-environmental interactions. The talk ends with a translated political oratory attributed to Hinmató·yalahtq’it that was recorded to wax cylinder in 1907 (three years after his death in 1904). As an Indigenous oratory, it speaks of how notions of the sacred earth is embodied as a form of consciousness and as a powerful statement of Indigenous resistance. 

2017.11.14 Julia Nee (UC Berkeley) 

Path in South Bolivian Quechua

In this short talk, I present the motivations for my summer fieldwork on South Bolivian Quechua in Cochabamba, as well as the preliminary findings related to how path is syntactically and semantically expressed in the language.  

2017.11.21 Myriam Lapierre (UC Berkeley)

The emergence of quantity-insensitive iambic feet in Panará

This talk discusses the interaction of segmental and prosodic well-formedness in Panará. Specifically, I explore the possibility of accounting for the stress pattern of Panará without making reference to the notion of a foot. Findings show that, while it is indeed possible to account for the position of stress without reference to a foot, this prosodic category is necessary in accounting for the interaction between NC and geminate consonant faithfulness with prosodic well-formedness. Data from Panará suggests that words in the language ideally consist of a disyllabic foot with prominence on the right. In other words, words ideally consist of a quantity insensitive iambic foot, a foot type that has been argued against by a number of authors (Hayes 1995, van de Vijver 1995, van der Hulst 1996).

2017.11.28 Delfina de la Cruz and Ofelia de la Cruz Morales

KANA (Kaltlamachtiloyaj Tlen Nauatlachamanaltianij) and IDIEZ (Zacatecas Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology)

2017.12.05 Nicholas Rolle (UC Berkeley)

Grammatical tone in Gbarain Izon

This talk will discuss contrastive tone in the Gbarain dialect of Izon [ijc], an Ijoid language of Southern Nigeria. Data was collected in Port Harcourt, Nigeria in the summer of 2017 for 6 weeks. I show that both lexical and grammatical morphemes fall into three major tonal classes depending on their surface tones in isolation and the systematic effect they have on adjacent words in a phrase. Tonal patterns form large tonal paradigms, which were elicited primarily with one highly proficient and consistent speaker. I will summarize these patterns, and present the following theoretical hypothesis: the ability for grammatical tone to overwrite lexical and other grammatical tone depends on the scope of its Cophonology. This is largely dependent on morphosyntactic hierarchical relations, but is not isomorphic with them. I will illustrate this with evidence from objects in specifier position, pre-nominal modifiers, tense/aspect enclitics, and relative clauses.

2018.01.17 Karee Garvin and Christine Beier (UC Berkeley)

A FForum discussion on ethical issues in fieldwork

Building on our dynamic and fruitful discussion on ethical issues in fieldwork in October, we invite you to participate in another discussion this Wednesday, centered on the two themes given below.  As before, we two will offer some introductory orienting remarks to get the conversation started; we will moderate the discussion as necessary; and notes from the discussion will be made available subsequent to the event.  

Theme 1, first half of meeting:  Having privilege in an underprivileged community

Theme 2, second half of meeting:  Negotiating self-representation in fieldwork settings

2018.01.24 Edwin Ko and Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley)

2018.01.31 Juan Esteva Martínez (UC Berkeley)

2018.02.07 Denis Bertet (Université Lumière-Lyon 2, DDL research center, France)

How to make the most out of one morpheme: disentangling the inflectional morphology of Ticuna’s finite predicative head

In San Martín de Amacayacu Ticuna (SMAT; Colombian Amazon, isolate), object (OBJ) and subject (SBJ) indexes constitute two almost complete paradigms that regularly procliticize (among other proclitics) to finite predicative heads, with the former coming first and the latter second (e.g. ʨā=ʨíbɯ̀ (1SG.SBJ=eat), ‘I eat’; tá=ʨíbɯ̀ (3.C4.SBJ=eat), ‘he/she/it/they eat’; tɯ̄=ʨā=ʨíbɯ̀-ʔẽ́ʔẽ̄ (3.C4.OBJ=1SG.SBJ=eat-CAUS), ‘I feed him/her/it/them’ – tilde indicates nasality, accents transcribe tonemes, and “CX” stands for “nominal agreement class nºX”). However, each of these two paradigms displays some empty cells for certain persons or agreement classes. The language makes use of interesting morphological and tonological strategies to almost unambiguously compensate for these “lacks”. Analyzing these strategies will contribute to a synchronic and diachronic understanding of the intricate inflectional morphology and morphotonology of the finite predicative head in SMAT. Among other things, I will try to account for the observation that some morphemes can act both as OBJ or SBJ indexes depending on their morphosyntactic context. This talk will also “reveal” an intriguing case of nominal class agreement through tonal change. This work in progress will mostly be based on first-hand data collected in 2015-2017.

2018.02.14 No meeting

2018.02.21 Julia Nee (UC Berkeley)

A round robin presentation of didactic materials for endangered and less commonly taught languages and discussion of how we can share these resources

In this session of FForum, participants are invited (but not required!) to share materials that they have developed or used in teaching, revitalizing, or revalorizing endangered and less commonly taught languages.  We will also discuss the repositories for teaching materials that are available, as well as what we can do to archive and share our materials to allow other language teachers, activists, and learners to use our materials in their own ways.

2018.02.28 Sara Chase (UC Berkeley)

Coyote as teacher, theorist and language revitalist: Discussions on the xontehł-taw na:tinixwe mixine:whe immersion camp

Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe, or the language of the Hupa people in far Northern California, is currently endangered. With just a few first language speakers left, all over the age of 70, it is a critical time within the Hupa community to take action. The language did not become this way by chance, but was rather a result of settler colonial policies and ideologies that attempted to eliminate it through settler colonial schooling. Yet, through resistance and refusal, the Na:tinixwe have been able to hold on to their language, albeit in reduced numbers. This presentation will discuss a recent initiative within the community to strengthen revitalization efforts. The xontehł-taw language immersion camp, hosted in July of 2017, brought together elders, language teachers, parents, youth and 5-6 year olds to reclaim time and space for Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe. The curriculum was based off of a xontehł-taw (coyote) story told by one of the last fluent speakers of the language. Each day these 5-6 year olds would listen to this story told by this elder in Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe and learn more phrases each day. They would also learn the traditional lessons of their Na:tinixwe ancestors: don’t be greedy, don’t deceive to get your way. These lessons are not only to taught as simple lessons for children, but also speak to the broader teachings of Na:tinixwe ancestors, these teachings are in direct opposition to those of settler capitalism: accumulate money and property, take any measures necessary. This presentation will share the knowledge gained through teachings these stories, its theoretical and practical implications. Lastly, it will discuss how community led language initiatives and linguists can partner to create meaningful curriculum and programming.

2018.03.07 No meeting

2018.03.14 Konrad Rybka (UC Berkeley) Note: This is a GAIL meeting that will take place at 6pm.

Affordances as determinants of lexical outcomes of language contact: a study of fire fans in northeastern Amazonia

A fundamental question of contact linguistics is what factors determine the outcomes of language contact. Amazonian languages play a key role in this investigation because Amazonian peoples deprecate lexical borrowing as the linguistic counterpart of miscegenation. Yet, lexical borrowing sometimes occurs, raising the question what other factors moderate its rate and how its paucity is compensated by other processes, such as lexical innovation or semantic extension, when cultures come in contact. A particularly felicitous domain to investigate these questions is the vocabulary of man-made objects. A comparative study of the actual artifacts can determine in which cases they were borrowed, providing an independent benchmark against which the linguistic results and their determinants can be gauged. One hypothesis suggests that the names of artefacts are borrowed when a novel function for an object is introduced. Borrowing is also often linked to a need to designate new entities. By looking at lexical borrowing, lexical innovation and semantic extension against the borrowing of the objects, I explore how functions and needs regulate the lexical outcomes of language contact more broadly. The methodological contribution of this work is to couple continent-wide linguistic and continent-wide ethnographic comparison to uncover important large-scale cultural and linguistic processes and reveal smaller-scale processes of contact from which areal patterns arise. 

For this purpose, I analyzed South American fire fans, tools for fanning cooking fires, using museum objects and ethnographic sources (Fig 1). I first determined the distribution of different models and their dispersal to identify cases of material borrowing. I then analyzed the cases of material borrowing against the names of the fans. The results suggest that the linguistic outcomes of contact may be mediated by affordances: a relationship between functions and needs. I illustrate this on fans from northeastern Amazonia, designed specifically for the processing of bitter manioc, a key crop for many Amazonian societies. Borrowed by bitter manioc horticulturalists, for whom the fans afford optimizing its processing, their names are borrowed as well, often in complex Wanderwörter chains. The same fans borrowed by groups that rely on other crops, for whom they do not have new affordances (via-à -vis the group’s antecedent model), trigger semantic extension. The results speak to the importance of linking linguistic forms not only to their users but also to their referents when analyzing language contact patterns and highlight the impact that bitter manioc has had on the material culture and languages of indigenous people in South America. (A PDF version of this abstract can be found here.)

2018.03.21 Kayla Palakurthy (UC Santa Barbara)

Investigating Variation in Diné bizaad (Navajo)

This talk will discuss an ongoing project investigating synchronic variation in Diné bizaad (Navajo), a Southern Dene/Athabaskan language spoken in the American Southwest with data drawn from interviews conducted in 2016 and 2017 with 51 bilingual Diné bizaad/English participants. Though the Diné community has a rich shared linguistic and cultural tradition, variation among Diné speakers exists due to regional, generational, and sociocultural diversity. I will give an overview of recent analyses with a focus on variation in the usage of the Diné particle nít’ę́ę́’. I argue that there is evidence of earlier polygrammaticalization of this particle into a discourse sequencer, often indicating sudden or new events, and into a marker of habitual past time. Further, synchronic patterns point to ongoing changes in how the particle is used; younger speakers (<45 years old) show signs of phonological renewal, while increasing their frequency of nít’ę́ę́’ in the past time function. In addition to presenting results from the Diné language, I welcome broader discussion of methods for conducting variationist analyses in small indigenous communities and potential applications of this line of research to language maintenance efforts.

2018.03.28 No meeting (Enjoy spring break!)

2018.04.04 Maho Morimoto and Andrew Hedding (UC Santa Cruz)

Nido de Lenguas at UC Santa Cruz and Senderos

2018.04.11 Andrew Garrett and Erik Maier (UC Berkeley)

Karuk texts from 1901-1902: Language, philology, and narrative

In this presentation we describe an editorial project whose goal is to present Karuk-language versions of the four Karuk texts transcribed by A. L. Kroeber in 1901-2 work with Mrs. Bennett, Johnny Gorham, Martha Horn, and Little Ike. These constitute the earliest known documentation of Karuk above the sentence level. Because Kroeber did not know and had not worked much with Karuk, and unlike his fellow Boas student Edward Sapir wasn't a transcribing superstar, there are obvious challenges of interpretation. All four texts are narratives with echoes and iterations in later Karuk sources, facilitating the linguistic interpretation and affording some insights into narrative variation.

2018.04.18 Daniel Hieber (UC Santa Barbara)

Lessons from an isolate: Chitimacha diachrony in area perspective

Within historical linguistics, language isolates are often viewed as a problem. Their isolate status makes it difficult to peer into their history, and internal reconstruction is generally thought to be of limited utility. Campbell (2013:170–172) briefly discusses how historical linguists might productively gain insights into the diachrony of language isolates, but notes the “frequent sentiment that it is not to be tolerated that there should be languages with no relatives” (p. 170).

Chitimacha (ISO 639-3: ctm) is one such isolate from Louisiana. It was documented extensively by Albert S. Gatschet, John R. Swanton, and Morris Swadesh from 1881–1934 (Gatschet 1881a; Gatschet 1881b; Gatschet 1883; Swanton 1908; Swanton 1920; Swadesh 1939), and its last native speaker passed away in 1939. Very little has been published on the language, and the majority of what has been published reflects the sentiment mentioned by Campbell – attempts to resolve Chitimacha’s isolate status by incorporating it into this or the other language family (Swanton 1919; Swadesh 1946; Swadesh 1947; Haas 1951; Haas 1952; Gursky 1969; Brown, Wichmann & Beck 2014). None of these proposals has been widely accepted (Campbell & Kaufman 1983; Kimball 1992; Kimball 1994; Campbell 1997).

This talk attempts to view Chitimacha’s status not as a problem to be solved, but as a potential treasure trove of insights into the social and linguistic history of both the Chitimacha language and the Southeast U.S. more generally. Because of the limited accessibility of the Chitimacha corpus until recently, and the prevailing interest in language classification, the precise nature of Chitimacha’s participation in the Southeast linguistic area has until now remained largely uncertain. This talk uses language-internal evidence to shed some initial light onto that history and the relationship between Chitimacha and the other languages of the Southeast.

In this talk I examine the language-internal evidence for the diachrony of three major grammatical features of Chitimacha: positional auxiliary verbs, switch-reference, and agent-patient alignment. Using archival data from Morris Swadesh (1939), I show that each of these features has a clear, language-internal diachronic pathway, wherein existing lexical and grammatical material were recruited for these new functions. However, each of these features is shared by other unrelated languages of the Southeast U.S., suggesting that their development in Chitimacha was in fact motivated by contact. How then did Chitimacha borrow these structural features without borrowing any lexical or grammatical material?
Following Mithun (2012), I propose that multilingual speakers in the Southeast carried over discourse-level patterns of managing information flow into Chitimacha, and that as these discourse patterns became more frequent and routinized, they grammaticalized into major features of Chitimacha grammar. It is not grammatical structures themselves that are borrowed, but rather a preference for packaging information in discourse in ways that parallel grammatical structures in the original language.

The existence of these shared structural patterns between Chitimacha and other languages shows that Chitimacha is indeed situated firmly within the Southeast linguistic area. Chitimacha’s isolate status, rather than forming a barrier to our understanding of Southeastern history, in fact provides a unique window into the history of the Southeast, as well as mechanisms of contact-induced grammatical change.

2018.04.25 No meeting

2018.05.02 Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley)

A Phonological Sketch of Atorai (Arawak, Guyana) Based on Unique Recordings

In 1965, G. Kingsley Noble, Jr. (1923-1994), then a professor at San Jose State University, carried out several weeks of linguistic fieldwork in the Rupununi river basin of Guyana, principally among speakers of Wapishana, an Arawak language. With the help of a Wapishana-speaking translator, Noble additionally recorded two speakers of Atorai (ISO 639-3:aox; aka Ataroi, Atorada, etc.), a related language now with only rumored native speakers (Meira, p.c.) -- they were elders Christine George and Felix Xavier. These reel-to-reel audio tapes were recently digitized by the Berkeley Language Center for the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, making them widely accessible for the first time. The result is 2.5 hours of lexical elicitation -- resulting in well over 600 unique lexical items -- and a single 2-minute monologue. These  are the only known audio recordings of the language. And they significantly expand upon early word lists, which are otherwise the only source of documentation of this language: 18 items collected between 1817 and 1820 by Carl von Martius (1794-1868), published in 1867; 34 items collected between 1819 and 1820 by Jacob A. van Heuvel (c1787-1874), published in 1844; 192 items collected in 1832 by Johann Natterer (1787-1843), unpublished; 18 items collected between 1840 and 1844 by Robert Schomburgk (1804-1865), published in 1848; and 122 items collected between 1913 and 1916 by William Farabee (1865-1925), published in 1918.

As early as 1848, as part of a British government-sponsored expedition, Schomburgk warned of the small number of speakers of Atorai, writing that: "They belong to the Wapisiana-Parauana family, however they are now nearly extinct. I found in 1843 only seven adults of the pure Atorais [...]. Including those arising from an intermarriage between an Atorai female and a Wapisiana, and their sister-tribe the Taurais or Dauris, there might be about 100 individuals, comprising adults and children." By 1918, following on a University of Pennsylvania-sponsored expedition between 1913 and 1916, William Farabee wrote that: "At present they do not exist as a separate tribe and no longer speak their own language. They have been absorbed by the Wapisianas, whose language is in common use. Very few can speak Ataroi [sic] and the language will disappear with this generation. Only three individuals of pure blood -- one man, a woman relative, and her daughter -- and not more than a hundred half-bloods remain."

In this presentation, I offer a sketch of the segmental phonology of Atorai and situate it in the northern Arawak context, in which the language is shown to be significantly divergent from its nearest relative Wapishana. This is consonant with Schomburgk's characterization: "There is a greater difference than a mere dialectic variation between the Atorai and Wapisiana language; and in some words of similar signification there is neither a relation in the sounds nor in the syllables which express it." I compare the representation of Atorai forms across the 5 different sources; and I discuss the history of the Atorai people from an areal perspective, the ways in which Atorai has featured in classifications of Arawak, and the provenance and trajectories of the known documentation of the language.

2018.05.09 Flavia de Castro Alves (Universidade de Brasilia and University of Oregon)

Dative Subject in Canela

A set of predicates (nominal and verbal) can occur in constructions that express mental or physical states in Canela. In these constructions, with one or two arguments, the experiencer is overtly marked by the dative postposition.

In this talk, I will present the different predicates that can occur in Cxn (i) and Cxn (ii): nouns and monovalent, bivalent and trivalent verbs. In addition, I will identify the pattern found in these constructions and evaluate the grammatical condition of the dative phrase. The syntactic tests applied to the constructions include reflexivization, imperative, negation, occurrence of the co-referential topic pronoun, control and deletion in coordinate and subordinate clauses, and switch-reference.

The properties of behavior and control displayed by the dative postpositional phrase show that the constructions (i) and (ii) share many of the syntactic characteristics of verbal sentences. Considering that the properties of behavior and control are the requirements for the category of subject, one can say that the dative postpositional phrase in constructions (i) and (ii) is the subject, not an oblique.

Such evidences are enough to argue in favor of the grammatical category of subject as a morphologically heterogeneous category in Canela, but at the same time is unified by its syntactic behaviors. (A longer version of this abstract can be found here.)