September 5, 2019
Here are some late-breaking additions to our file of linguists' summer updates:
- With the funding provided by the Sawyer Fellowship, undergraduate students Teela Huff and Nicholas Carrick under the guidance of graduate student Myriam Lapierre went to Mato Grosso, Brazil and conducted linguistic fieldwork with the Xavante community of Etenhiritipa. The Xavante language, or A’uwẽas it is called by native speakers, is a Central Jêlanguage spoken in west-central Brazil. During their time in the community, they elicited approximately 12 hours of Swaedish list data and gathered a sizeable amount of vocabulary from participant observation with the community. In the upcoming semester, the goal of this project is to input all of this fieldwork data into a FLEx database that then can be archived in the California Language Archive as well as be utilized to create a dictionary for the Xavante community. Alongside the dictionary, pedagogical materials that the community desires will be created. The project will then focus on the creation of a preliminary phonological analysis as well as incorporating Xavante lexical items into a pre-existing database to perform historical reconstruction of Macro-Je.
- Miriam R L Petruck participated in The First Designing Meaning Representations Workshop held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Florence, Italy, presenting her work on Meaning Representation of Null-Instantiated Semantic Roles in FrameNet, and a Special Theme Session at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference on Cross-theoretical Perspectives on Frame-based Lexical and Constructional Analyses: Bridging Qualitative and Quantitative Studies, presenting work with Lori Levin entitled Frame Semantic Parsing Needs Constructions.
- Jesse Zymet presented work with Margit Bowler on so-called majority rules vowel harmony in Warlpiri at the Manchester Phonology Meeting, in Manchester, UK. He also participated in UCLA's Doctoral Hooding Ceremony (almost a year after filing the dissertation!), and had a paper with Jeff Adler (co-first author) accepted with minor revisions to Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. The paper is entitled "Irreducible parallelism in phonology: evidence for lookahead from Mohawk, Maragoli, Sino-Japanese, and Lithuanian"; here's a link to the most recent version. Finally, this summer Jesse has been working with Peter Jurgec (University of Toronto) to put together an experiment that assesses speaker knowledge of patterns of morphophonological variation in Slovene. Jurgec is currently conducting this experiment in Slovenia.
