GAIL 2010-2014

These are the GAIL talks from 2010-2014:


February 17, 2010: Lev Michael (UC Berkeley)

Internal classificiation of the Kampan branch (Arawak)

A PDF of the abstract for this talk can be found here.


March 31, 2010: Delphine Red Shirt (University of Arizona)

Translating from blood memory

Currently a lecturer in the Special Languages Program at Stanford University, Ms. Red Shirt is also a Ph.D. candidate in American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona and a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. She will discuss the translation process using blood memory in the re-creation of text from Lakota to English: acceptability, adequacy, quality, and Lakota culture.


May 5, 2010: Rosemary Beam de Azcona (UC Berkeley)

Proto-Zapotec coronal obstruents and their implications for Southern Zapotec migration

Southern Zapotec is an internally diverse but historically under-documented subgroup of Zapotecan languages. In this talk it will be argued that this grouping is not a neat genetic grouping but rather should be thought of as an areal-genetic group. Some clues as to the history of Zapotec migration into what today is the Southern Zapotec region are found in archaeological (Brockington 1973, Winters 2009) and historical (Gutierrez 1609, Gerhard 1993, Oudijk & Dummond 2004) sources, but our understanding of this migration (or rather, these migrations) can be significantly enhanced by looking at shared linguistic features between the different varieties of Southern Zapotec. In particular, an investigation of the historical development of 10 coronal obstruents in 37 varieties of Southern Zapotec (Beam de Azcona forthcoming) reveal shared innovations that allow us to establish areal and genetic relationships which may be the result of shared migrations and periods of contact between Southern Zapotec languages, including some that are no longer in contact.


September 15, 2010: Dinner and Discussion


October 6, 2010: Keren Rice (University of Toronto)

The development of Proto-Athabaskan nasals in Fort Good Hope Dene (Slavey)

In the dialect of Dene (Slavey) spoken in Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories, Canada, Proto-Athabaskan nasals generally develop into oral stops in stem-initial position and the sonorant r in prefix-initial position. In this talk I focus on the development of prefix-initial nasals, examining why certain of them fail to undergo this shift. I speculate that while there was a general constraint introduced preventing syllable-initial nasals in most environments, factors of frequency and robustness of the nasal form blocked this constraint from applying in certain cases.


November 4, 2010: Clara Cohen (UC Berkeley)

Same-subject and different-subject subordinators in Imbabura Quichua: a non-hierarchical subjecthood diagnostic

A PDF of the abstract for this talk can be found here.


December 8, 2010: Martha Macri and Martha McGettigan (UC Davis)

A Discovery of Some Importance: New South Patwin Material

Platon Vallejo, son of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, was a fluent speaker of the Suysun language. J. Alden Mason interviewed Platon, recording about 100 items, but may not have been aware of his written records of the language. Martha McGettigan, great-granddaugher of Platon has in her possession copies of some of Platon's papers written in Suysun. Numbering on some of the pages suggests that the full collection, donated by the Vallejo family to a museum, includes extensive additional material. This presentation includes an outline of the immediate work to be done, an overview of the papers that Martha McGettigan has, an estimate of the total amount, samples of the Suysun data, and a selection of grammatical questions to be asked of the new materials.


January 26, 2011: Yoram Meroz

Words for 'Boat' in Southern California and the Origin of the Chumash Plank Canoe

The plank canoe of Southern California was a seaworthy boat, of a type unlike any other in the Americas. Its origin is still under debate. In particular, recent work by Jones and Klar (Jones and Klar 2005, Klar and Jones 2005) would link the California plank canoe with sewn plank boats of Polynesia. At the center of their proposal are some Chumash and Gabrielino terms for boats, which they interpret as borrowings from the language of early Polynesian visitors to North America.

In this presentation I will offer etymologies for these and some other terms for boats in languages of Southern California. This linguistic analysis involves no external loans, and fits with a scenario of local development of the plank boat as a successor to earlier dugout canoes. This analysis highlights some of the complex cultural interactions and population movements which occurred in Southern California over the past 4000 years.


May 16, 2011: Gabriella Caballero (UC San Diego)

Documenting word prosody in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara)

Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) is a Uto-Aztecan language with culminative word prominence, realized as stress. Stress distribution is governed by lexical and morphological factors and falls within an initial three-syllable window. In addition to stress-accent, Choguita Rarámuri word prosody involves a tertiary tonal system (/H/, /L/, and /Ø/) which is dependent on stress. In this talk, I present acoustic correlates and distributional properties of tone and stress, and evidence that their interaction involves the following properties: i) only stressed syllables have contrastive tone (stressless syllables are toneless); and ii) removal of stress involves the neutralization of tonal contrasts. This talk addresses analytical and methodological implications of conducting this research within the context of a larger documentation project. Specifically, this research project seeks to eventually determine the degree to which age and gender differences of speakers might condition variation in production and perception of word prosody in this language.


April 27, 2011: Leanne Hinton (UC Berkeley)

Learning a Language Without a Classroom: The Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program for Endangered Languages

Inspired by California Natives who learned their languages as adults using "bootstrap methods", the Master-Apprentice language learning model for endangered languages was developed in 1992 by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, as an experiment in language learning for adults who have no other resources for learning to speak their heritage language.

Combining ideas from TPR, communication-based instruction, and linguistic elicitation methods, this program is for teams consisting minimally of a partnership between a speaker of the language and an adult learner (the apprentice), who ideally spend 10-20 hours per week together immersed in the language. The transmission process is usually guided by the learner, and is done primarily through activities. A weekend workshop teaches the teams the basics of the program, and follow-up gatherings and workshops review the principles and methods, give mentoring, and help renew the energy of the team process.

After almost 20 years, the model has spread to indigenous languages around the US and Canada, and to Europe and Australia. The manual for the program (Hinton 2001) has been translated into Brazilian Portuguese for distribution to indigenous communities, and efforts are being made to translate it into Spanish and Japanese. Variations on the model have developed to fit different kinds of situations. This paper will look at how the Master-Apprentice program is being implemented in various speech communities, and what the results have been.


September 27, 2011: Dinner and Discussion


October 25, 2011: Lev Michael (UC Berkeley)

Verbal Person Markers as Pronouns in Matsigenka (Arawak)

Verbal person markers have long presented a puzzle for linguists concerned with the morphosyntax of head-marking languages. These markers have been variously analyzed as 'incorporated pronouns' (Baker 1996, Jelinek 1984), agreement markers (Evans 1999, 2003), or hybrid elements that exhibit properties of both pronouns and agreement markers (Corbett 2006, Mithun 2003, van Gijn 2011).

In this talk I examine the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of verbal person markers in Matsigenka, a Peruvian Arawak language, and argue that a 'syntactic' analysis of these elements, in the spirit of Bresnan (2001), is most successful at characterizing their properties. This analysis has much in common with the emerging consensus that verbal person markers in head-marking languages are best treated as hybrid elements, but diverges from the position of, say, Mithun (2003), in that I argue that the 'pronominal' vs. 'agreement' properties of verbal person markers are partially dependent on the syntactic environments in which they appear. In particular, I argue that an analysis of alternations between a variety of construction types in Matsigenka (including basic active declarative, passive, habitual anti-passive, focus, and object marker elision constructions) suggests that the choice between these constructions is motivated by a desire to make verbal person markers as pronominal as possible. In certain morphosyntactic contexts, however, alternations between constructions are highly restricted, with the result that verbal person markers exhibit properties more characteristic of agreement markers.


November 29, 2011: Wallace Chafe (UC Santa Barbara)

Balancing Synchrony and Diachrony in a Polysynthetic Language

The Northern Iroquoian language Seneca is highly polysynthetic and highly fusional, two properties that challenge traditional methods of both description and pedagogy. Explaining the shape of Seneca words calls for the reconstruction of earlier stages of the language before numerous sound changes took place. I illustrate problems this situation creates for the construction of dictionaries, grammars, and texts, as well as for the design of teaching materials, and I suggest ways of dealing with them. I speculate on how fluent speakers of the language are able to do what they do, and I add a few remarks on what a language of this kind shows us more generally about language and the mind.


March 20, 2012: Hannah Haynie (UC Berkeley)

Sierra Miwok Dialect Geography

The Sierra Miwok languages spoken along the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada are traditionally treated as a subgroup of Eastern Miwok comprised of three primary languages/dialects. In this talk I describe a somewhat more complex Sierra Miwok dialect network that is evident in early twentieth century documentation. In examining these dialects I pay special attention to the role of inter-dialect contact in shaping the Sierra Miwok dialect continuum. I propose that both cultural factors and physical geography have influenced the development of the Sierra Miwok dialects, and briefly discuss the use of quantitative tools and geographic models in investigating the relationships between linguistic patterns and extra-linguistic factors.


April 24, 2012: Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley)

On Word Class and Predication in Karuk

In this talk I examine non-verbal predication in Karuk, an indigenous language of northwest California. Karuk is thought to be part of the Hokan family, and shares the polysynthetic character of the neighboring northern Hokan languages. The example in (1) shows a typical Karuk sentence, in which the verb contains several derivational affixes, expressing event iteration (ip-), purpose (-ar), direction (-uk), and event plurality (-vu) and several inflectional affixes, expressing participant number and person (na-), aspect (durative -tih) and tense (future -heesh):

(1)    hâari          vúra                 xasík
        sometime  INTENSIVE      then.FUT

        na-pi-mus-ar-ûuk-vu-ti-heesh
        2SG:1SG-ITER-see-PURP-hither-PL.AC-DUR-FUT

        `You can come back to see me sometime.'
        Julia Starritt, "Coyote Marries His Own Daughter"

While verbal predication is the norm, Karuk also exhibits robust nonverbal predication, where a noun, adjective, adverb or quantifier functions as the predicate of the clause.  As shown in (2), non-verbal predication exhibits tense marking, but not agreement:

(2)   Náa vúra              yâamach-heech
       1SG  INTENSIVE   pretty-FUT
       `I'm going to be pretty'

       Imkyanváan, "Coyote Doctors a Girl"

The suffix -hi derives verbs from adjectives and nouns and the resulting forms do agree, as the minimal pair in (3) shows. (The sentences in (3) occur in close succession, describing the same eventuality, in Emily Donohue's telling of "The Pikiawish at Katamin".)

(3) a.  xás    tá-kóo         pa-'ir
         then   PERF-all       the-world.renewal.ceremony
         `Then the world renewal was over.'

    b.  yáas   u-kôo-hi-ti                pa-'ir
         then   3SG-all-VBLZ-DUR   the-world.renewal.ceremony
         `Then the world renewal ended.'

In (3a), the perfect marker tá attaches to the quantificational root koo `all'. There is no agreement on the resulting form. In (3b), the verbalizing suffix -hi attaches to the same root, koo, followed by the durative suffix -ti, and the resulting form bears 3SG subject agreement (u-).

Bright's (1957) interpretation of this pattern is that (2) and (3a) are instances of non-verbal predication. The tense and aspect markers that cooccur with non-verbal predicates are clitics, and hence not limited to verbal hosts, whereas the agreement markers are affixes that can only attach to verbs. Macaulay (1989) offers a reanalysis wherein tense and aspect marking of seemingly non-verbal predicates always involves verbalizing by -hi, though regular morphophonemic processes conspire to obscure the presence of this morpheme on the surface. Macaulay's analysis explains why all non-verbal predicates take h-initial allomorphs of the suffixal/enclitic tense and aspect markers, something that Bright must stipulate. To account for the lack of agreement on verbs derived in this manner, she appeals to semantics (p. 176-8), specifically that agreement is absent due to such clauses having an equative meaning.

In the talk, I explicate what Macaulay's claim amounts to in the terms of Stassen's typology of intransitive predication and evaluate it against a body of examples drawn from published texts and from original field work. I conclude that it is largely supported, though it leaves some data unexplained. In the final part of the talk I consider two ways of accomodating the recalcitrant data, while preserving the gains of Macaulay's analysis.

References:
     Bright, William (1957) The Karok Language. University of California publications in linguistics. Bind 13. CA: University of California Press.
     Macaulay, Monica (1989) A suffixal analysis of the Karok `endoclitic'. Lingua 78:159--180.
     Stassen, Leon (1997) Intransitive Predication. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


October 9, 2012: Jason Rissman (Google)

Meet the ELP

Join Jason Rissman from Google.org to see some new features of the Endangered Languages Project. Ask questions and suggest ideas for the project's future.


November 14, 2012: Jane Hill (University of Arizona)

The Shoshonean Wedge: Language Dynamics and the Uto-Aztecan Presence in Southern California

Apparent long-term archaeological and human-genetic continuity in areas of Southern California occupied historically by Takic-speaking peoples have led many archaeologists to continue to advocate a great antiquity for this presence (estimates vary between 5000 and 3500 years of time depth) that is inconsistent with the linguistic data. Bright and Bright (1969) long ago suggested the presence of a substantial substratum vocabulary in Gabrielino/Tongva and the Cupan languages.  A new look at the languages based on three samples of vocabulary (basic vocabulary, flora-fauna vocabulary, and cultural vocabulary) collected for the project 'Dynamics of Hunter-Gatherer Languages' (NSF BCS 0902114) suggests that Bright and Bright were correct in identifying an unusually large number of words which lack Uto-Aztecan etymologies in these languages.  The paper compares the California languages with the Uto-Aztecan languages of the Great Basin and shows that the California languages exhibit substantially higher percentages of untraceable lexical items in the sample than do the Numic languages.


September 11, 2013: Dinner and Discussion


October 22, 2013: Stephanie Farmer (UC Berkeley)

Interactions of Nominal and Verbal Number in Máíhɨ̱̀kì

Máíhɨ̱̀kì, a Western Tukanoan language spoken in the Amazon basin of Northern Peru, has a subset of verb roots that indicate event plurality. These are the suppletive counterparts to single-event verb roots. In this talk, I will outline the Máíhɨ̱̀kì system of encoding verbal plurality, paying particular attention to the complex ways in which it interacts with nominal plurals. I will argue that two types of nominal plural in Máíhɨ̱̀kì - an 'optional' suffix that encodes specificity and an obligatory suffix that may be used generically - are the nominal analogues to event-external and event-internal verbal plurality, respectively.


November 12, 2013: Gabriela Caballero (UC San Diego)

Loanword prosodic adaptation patterns in two Mixtecan Languages

A growing body of work on loanword phonology asks: what are possible cross-linguistic patterns of adaptation between languages with different word prosodic systems (stress, tone, “pitch accent”)? (Kubozono 2006, Kang 2010, Davis et al. 2012). In this talk, we provide the first analysis of prosodic loanword adaptation in two Mexican languages with complex word prosody: Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) (CR; Uto-Aztecan) and Ixpantepec Nieves Tu’un Savi (Mixtec) (INTS; Oto-Manguean). Both CR and INTS have stress and tone with similar acoustic encoding, but different interaction (stress is dependent on tone in CR, while stress and tone are independent in INTS). CR and INTS retain the original prominence (stress-accent) from Spanish, but different repair strategies in each language give rise to different surface loanword prosodic patterns. We show that in both languages these different repairs not only result from strong prosodic restrictions in the native phonologies, but also from the predominance of different word/morpheme canonical forms and differences in decoding the acoustic properties of Spanish prominence. (This work is collaboration with Lucien Carroll (UCSD))


March 12, 2014: Richard Rhodes (UC Berkeley)

Towards a Semantic Dictionary of Algonquian

Most work on comparative Algonquian focuses on formal similarities between languages. But we know enough about Proto-Algonquian to know that formal differences can mask underlying categorial similarities (cf. Buck 1949). For example, most Algonquian languages have a clear six-way distinction in stages of life, most sex differentiated: ‘baby’, ‘child’, ‘boy-girl’, ‘young man-young woman’, ‘man-woman’, ‘old man-old woman’. However, the forms expressing these distinctions are not all cognate.

Shawnee

Fox

Ojibwe

Menominee

Plains Cree

Cheyenne

‘baby’

hapelohza

apenôhêha

abinoojiins

pepeehsæh

oskawâsis

mé’ėševȯtse

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘child’

hapelohza

apenôha

abinoojiinh

oskææcian

awâsis

ka'ėškóne

‘boy’

skilawehziiza

kwîyesêha

gwiiwizens

apææhniihsæh

nâpêsis

hetaneka’ėškóne

‘girl’

skwehzeeza

ishkwêsêha

ikwezens

kiiqseehsæh

iskwêsis

he’éka’ėškóne

‘young man’

mayaanileni

oshkinawêha

oshkinawe

oskiineniw

oskinîkiw

kȧsovááhe

‘young woman’

mayaaniyhkwe

ihkwêhêha

oshkiniigikwe

keekaah

oskinîkiskwêw

kȧse'ééhe

man

hileni

(i)neniwa

inini

enææniw

nâpêw

hetane

woman

yhkweewa

ihkwêwa

ikwe

metææmoh

iskwêw

hë’e

old man

pasitooza

pashitôha

akiwenziinh

kæqc-enææniw

kisêyiniw

ma'háéso

old woman

nekipwehza

metemôha

mindimooyenh

weeyawekæh

nôtikwêw

mȧhtamȧhááhe

Table I

Any reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian needs to recognize that this system is old, even if the forms do not unambiguously reconstruct for all categories. Similarly, the basic verbs for eating are suppletive, or semi-suppletive in all languages, but not all forms are cognate, and in some cases obviously cognate forms nonetheless present reconstruction problems.

Shawnee

Fox

Ojibwe

Menominee

Plains Cree

Cheyenne

‘eat’ AI

wihzeniwa

wi·seniwa

wiisini

meecehsow

mîcisow

-mésehe

‘eat’ TI

homiici

mi·čiwa

omiijin

miicwah

mîciw

-mése

‘eat’ TA

nitamwa

amwe·wa

odamwaan

miiw

mowêw

-mév-

Table II

I will argue that there is significant value in reconstructing the category systems of the Algonquian family independent of formal considerations. I will limit myself to three areas: stages of life, food, and the head. Each of these areas highlights different problems in reconstruction and sheds some light on current concerns about the derivation of complex stems.


April 2, 2014: Terrence Kaufman (University of Pittsburgh)

Two Large-scale Documentation Projects of Meso-American Languages

I will outline what I consider to be two highly effective ways of of documenting endangered languages on a large scale.  These ways differ mainly in whether the research operation functions during academic vacation months or is a full-time operation.

My account is based on experience in this area since 1970, during 28 years of directing such projects.

Between 1970 and 1979 I was research director of the Proyecto Lingüístico "Francisco Marroquín" (PLFM) in Guatemala, whose research and administrative program I devised in collaboration with Bob Gersony, Jo Froman, Dave Drake, and Tony Jackson.  This was a full-time operation that generated its own funding through a language school.  Lexical databases were created for 21 dialects of 12 languages.  For most of these languages descriptive grammars were written as PhD theses by linguists in charge of teams of native speakers who compiled the majority of the lexical data.

Between 1993 and 2010 I was codirector of the Proyecto para la Documentación de la Lenguas de Meso-América (PDLMA) in Mexico, whose research and administrative structure I devised in collaboration with John Justeson, and since 1999 with Roberto Zavala Maldonado as well.  This project operated during academic year vacation months and was funded by outside agencies.  The PDLMA worked on 31 languages, and completed 23 lexical databases.  So far only dictionaries have been produced as part of the research program of the project, but several descriptive grammars have been written by linguists who compiled data for dictionaries.  The work of the PDLMA has continued since 2010, inasmuch as 10 of the 23 lexical databases were edited as dictionaries between 2012 and the present time, and the directors and the relevant linguists have devoted a goodly amount of their time in preparing these dictionaries.  The dictionaries range in size between 6000 and 17000 entries.

These projects have been in Meso-America, but the work done could be done anywhere there are roads, buildings for rent, doctors, markets, electric power, and no armed conflict in the neighborhood.  The projects I have organized have relied on local availability of some supplies and equipment, but all of this material could be imported at need.

The work of a documentation project is enhanced and made more effective and efficient by having several linguists working on parallel research, that is, each doing the same work on several different languages.  More work gets done, overall expenses are lower because certain expenditures will cover several linguists for the same cost as for one linguist, and especially because linguists working in the same place on the same problems can exchange knowledge and advice.


September 17, 2014: Dinner and Discussion


November 19, 2014: Maziar Toosarvandani (UC Santa Cruz)

Uncovering verb meaning in Northern Paiute

Building on earlier work, Vendler (1967) identifies four aktionsart classes for predicates in English: states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements. These classes reflect the shared behavior of the language's predicates in grammatical constructions sensitive to various components of their meaning. I will explore a class of verbs in Northern Paiute that at first glance appear to be achievements. In certain aspectual environments, however, including the progressive aspect and so-called 'durative gemination', they do not all behave in the same way. Investigating the semantics of these verbs in a language like Northern Paiute is challenging because there are few fluent speakers and all of them are elderly. I will discuss the methods I have been using in the field to uncover the meanings of achievement and other verbs.