News

Some updates from the Survey of California and other Indian Languages:

• Martha Schwarz archived 11 file bundles of sound recordings and field notes related to Kumal (Indo-Aryan; Nepal), from a week's fieldwork in July 2018. The recordings primarily consist of grammatical elicitation, with topics including verb paradigms, dative subjects and agreement, non-finite clauses, possession, deontic modality, negation, and more! You can listen to the Frog Story here.
• Kelsey Neely archived sound recordings of 50 traditional stories in Yaminawa (Panoan; Peru). This is the beginning of a large archival deposit that will include recordings, transcriptions, field notes, databases, photographs, and other materials associated with Kelsey's ongoing fieldwork in Sepahua from 2013 to the present. She writes descriptions of the plots of each story, which are rich in expressive content, linguistic form, and cultural and historical value. As Kelsey writes, the stories blend cosmology and moral teaching with humor -- many describe marriages between humans and ñũshĩwu (archetypal anthropomorphic animal spirits) that fail due to the inability of the animal spirits to adapt to life in human society. Trees and manufactured objects such as pots are also animated. Recurrent themes include the importance of cooperation, the danger of selfishness, the value of individual skill, and warnings, particularly to men, to be careful with what they say and how they treat women.
• Gabriela Caballero (PhD 2008) archived over 1,300 digital files in 76 file bundles related to Choguita Rarámuri (Uto-Aztecan; Mexico). The collection consists primarily of sound recordings from 2011 to the present, most with corresponding .eaf transcription files! The recordings in file bundles 2019-01.001 through 011, and 013 are elicitation; those in 2019-01.015 through 075 are personal, historical, and procedural narratives, conversations, interviews, prayers, and oratory. As an example, check out the myth of the cave, as told by Luz Elena León Ramírez, here.
• A preliminary (1980) dictionary of Barbareño Chumash (isolate; California), compiled by Kenneth Whistler is now available. One of Mary Haas's last students, Mr. Whistler received his PhD from this department in 1980, with a dissertation entitled Proto-Wintun Kin Classification: A Case Study of Reconstruction in a Complex Semantic System, available here.

The 2018-2019 colloquium series continues this coming Monday, February 25, with a talk by Jessica Coon (McGill). Same time as always, same place as always: 3:10-5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. The talk is entitled Mayan Agent Focus and the Ergative Extraction Constraint: Facts and Fictions Revisited, and the abstract is as follows:

Many languages of the Mayan family restrict the extraction of transitive (ergative) subjects for focus, wh-questions, and relativization (A’-extraction). We follow Aissen (2017) in labelling this restriction the ergative extraction constraint (EEC). In this talk, we offer a unified account of the EEC within Mayan languages, as well as an analysis of the special construction known as Agent Focus (AF) used to circumvent it. Specifically, we propose the generalization in (1).

(1) Mayan EEC generalization: 
When a pronounced copy of the object structurally intervenes between the subject and the A’-probe on C, the subject is restricted from undergoing A’-extraction.

Building on existing literature on syntactic ergativity, we argue that the restriction in (1) has a similar source across the subset of Mayan languages which exhibit it: locality. Evidence that locality is the source of the problem comes from a handful of exceptional contexts which permit transitive subjects to extract in languages which normally ban this extraction, and conversely, contexts which exceptionally ban ergative extraction in languages which otherwise allow it. 

We argue that the problem with A’-extracting the ergative subject across the intervening object connects to the requirements of the A’-probe on C: Mayan C is relativized to the feature [D]. This connects the Mayan patterns to recent proposals for extraction patterns in Austronesian languages (e.g. Aldridge, to appear) and elsewhere (van Urk 2015). Specifically, adapting the proposal of Coon and Keine (2018), we argue that in configurations in which a DP object intervenes between the probe on C and an A’-subject, conflicting requirements on movement lead to a derivational crash. While we propose that the EEC has a uniform source across the family, we argue that AF constructions vary Mayan-internally in how they circumvent the EEC, accounting for the variation in behavior of AF across the family. This paper both contributes to our understanding of parametric variation internal to the Mayan family, as well as to the discussion of variation in A’-extraction asymmetries and syntactic ergativity cross-linguistically.

(collaborative work with Nico Baier and Theodore Levin)