These are the GAIL talks from 2015-2017:
March 18, 2015: Clare Sandy and Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley)
Punctuation is prosody: Making historic transcriptions of Karuk accessible for revitalization and research
Past researchers used punctuation differently to represent various prosody and utterance boundaries in Karuk. We utilize archival recordings and transcriptions to create a key that allows us to translate the historic transcription systems. A better understanding of prosody will aid language revitalization and research on Karuk word order.
April 22, 2015: Vince Medina
Community revitalization of the Chochenyo language
Vince Medina will speak about his work in reawakening the Chochenyo language, the indigenous language of present-day Berkeley, and his work to make the language accessible to family members through social media and language classes.
September 16, 2015: Dinner and Discussion
November 4, 2015: Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)
Nez Perce texts from the missionary period
Both Catholic and Protestant missionaries were active among the Nez Perce in the 19th century, and the missionaries left behind a rich selection of written materials: grammars, dictionaries, and literacy primers, in addition to religious texts. To the extent that these materials portray the language accurately, they offer an invaluable picture of the state of the language shortly after contact. I will discuss some of the ways I have used these materials in my work on contemporary Nez Perce, focusing on modals and agreement.
February 17, 2016: Christine Beier (UC Berkeley and Cabeceras Aid Project)
Ikíitu language revitalization and (re)valorization: from 2001 to 2016, and beyond
This talk explores the complex, winding, and fascinating trajectory of revitalization and (re)valorization of the Ikíitu language (a.k.a. Iquito; Zaparoan; ~15 elderly speakers) within the Ikíitu heritage community, as seen from my perspective as a participant in the ongoing Iquito Language Documentation Project (ILDP). Initiated in 2001, and designed with a core revitalization component, the ILDP provides a useful temporal frame within which to examine key changes and developments in the community-internal status of the Ikíitu language, anchored to a broader context of historical, social, economic, and political facts and factors. In this talk, I will discuss how various attitudes toward the language, both positive and negative, have been expressed in the Ikíitu community of San Antonio de Pintuyacu, Loreto, Peru, over the years, not only through overt discourse — ranging from informal conversation to reported speech to political rhetoric — but also more subtly through community members’ and leaders’ actions and inactions; and I will describe how these attitudes are fundamentally implicated in shaping the future of the language.
April 27, 2016: Katie Sardinha (UC Berkeley)
Expressive Clitics in Kwak'wala
Within words, expressive clitics in Kwak'wala follow a common cross-linguistic pattern of appearing on the border between derivational and inflectional material. Within sentences, their distribution shows a certain kind of 'exhuberance' that expressive elements are sometimes noted for: namely, expressive clitics can appear on the predicate, on arguments, on modifiers, and on auxiliaries, and may re-occur in several different places within the same sentence (though apparently not within the same prosodic word). While this distributional exhuberance could suggest that expressive clitics are an anomalous class within the grammar, I'll question to what extent this is actually the case given comparable distributional properties of inflectional material in the language more generally, especially the future tense clitic (=tlh).
Next, I'll show that expressive clitics behave semantically like expressives on the theory of Potts (2007). Yet while expressives on Potts' theory convey only speaker-oriented meaning, I'll discuss some preliminary data suggesting that a subclass of expressive clitics, the diminutives and the augmentative, convey information about size, potentially making them descripive-expressive hybrids and furthering an existence claim for such elements made by Fortin (2011) with respect to Spanish 'connotative' suffixes. Finally, I'll consider whether the distribution of expressives constrains or biases their interpretation, specifically with respect to who or what the expressive is 'about', or targeted towards.
Along the way we'll look at methods designed to elicit expressive clitics in a fieldwork context, recognizing that there are unique challenges involved in the elicitation of the expressive dimension. I will also highlight what I've learned about why studying expressive language is important to speakers and communities, and will talk about what led me to work on this topic in the first place.
Fortin, Antonio. 2011. The Morphology and Semantics of Expressive Affixes. PhD. Thesis, University of Oxford.
Potts, Christopher. 2007. The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33(2):165-197.
September 7, 2016: Dinner and Discussion
November 16, 2016: Julia Nee (UC Berkeley)
Zapotec language documentation and revitalization in Teotitlán del Valle
The purpose of this talk is to overview a number of language documentation and revitalization activities that have taken place in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico over the past year. I will discuss the process through which the community’s language committee developed a new orthography for the language, as well as made steps towards the creation of street signs in Zapotec, two activities that have had great practical and symbolic consequences on how speakers view their language. I will consider barriers to progress in the creation of new revitalization materials, as well as a number of ways that these barriers can and have been avoided. I will address ways that I have integrated revitalization work into my overall language documentation project, as well as propose steps for the future.
February 22, 2017: Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley)
Caquinte Information Structure
A PDF of the abstract for this talk can be found here.
April 12, 2017: Brook Lillehaugen (Haverford College)
Archives, morphological analysis, and XML encoding: interdisciplinary methods in the creation of an online corpus of endangered language texts
Zapotec (Otomanguean), an indigenous language family of Oaxaca, Mexico, has a long record of alphabetic texts, the earliest dating to 1565 (Oudijk 2008). Interpreting these colonial documents can be difficult because of the challenges of early orthography, grammar, and printing conventions. In this talk I describe how linguistic knowledge and interdisciplinary methods can be brought to bear on this corpus of texts in order to facilitate the use of the historical material by non-specialists. I describe the project Ticha: a digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec (Lillehaugen et al. 2015), which allows users to explore multiple layers of these texts, including images of the original documents, transcriptions, translations into English and modern Spanish, linguistic analysis, and commentary.
Access to these texts has consequences outside of the field of linguistics, including history, in which indigenous Zapotec writings have been largely ignored, apart from the work of a small handful of ethnohistorians. Moreover, this historical corpus of texts exists alongside modern Zapotec speaking communities, many of whom do not know that these texts exist. There is great value in having a demonstrable written history, especially to speakers of a language that is marginalized. For speakers of Zapotec who are resisting language loss and discrimination, the fact that there are historical written texts can serve as a point of valorization, and the texts themselves can be important instruments for language revitalization.
September 20, 2017: Dinner and discussion
November 8, 2017: Phil Cash Cash (The University of Arizona)
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.