NAIL Activities for 2007-2008
Spring 2008
Marine Vuillermet, UCSB Visiting Scholar
Topic: Ese Ejja, a Tacanan language of South America
Date: Tuesday, May 6 2008
Time: 7:30 PM
Location: Chafe/Mithun residence
Ese Ejja is a Tacanan language spoken both in Peru and in Bolivia by around 1000 speakers. I started my fieldwork with speakers in Bolivia in 2005, for my Master's thesis. I wrote about the sociolinguistic profile and the phonetics and phonology of the language. I spent 7 months in Bolivia (SOAS-HRELP Field Trip Grant) in my first year of PhD work. For the NAIL meeting, I would like to present the argument coding in this ergative Amazonian language; I hope for helpful comments on an interesting double-absolutive constuction I will emphasize during the presentation.
Megan Lukaniec, UCSB Visiting Scholar
Topic: Project Yawenda, a revitalization project for the Huron-Wendat language (Iroquoian) in Quebec
Date: Tuesday, April 22 2008
Time: 7:30 PM
Location: Chafe/Mithun residence
Huron-Wendat is an Iroquoian language that was spoken in southern Ontario and Québec until the late 19th century. In 2007, the Huron-Wendat Nation, in collaboration with Université Laval, was granted funding for a language revitalization project spanning over five years. At the end of these five years, Project Yawenda plans to teach the Wendat language to children in the tribal elementary school. As we are nearing the end of the first year of the project, I would like to discuss with the group some of the project's goals and recent progress. As one of the project researchers, I would also like to present some of the inevitable challenges facing our community due to resource constraints as well as internal social and political dynamics.
Fall 2007
"Welcome Back" meeting
Date: Thursday, October 11, 2007
Time: 7:30 PM
Location: Chafe/Mithun residence
At this meeting we will welcome our new members to NAIL, and catch up with old friends after a productive summer. Graduate students Joye Kiester and Andrea Berez will give short presentations about their summer fieldwork in Mexico and Alaska.
Martha Macri, Professor, University of California Davis
Department of Native American Studies
Rumsey Endowed Chair of California Indian Studies
Director, Native American Language Center
Topic:
Nahuatl in Ancient Mesoamerica:
When Did It Begin? How Do We Know? Why Does It Matter?
Date: Friday, November 9, 2007
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: GSA Lounge, above Multicultural Center
Evidence for the presence of a Uto-Aztecan language closely related to Nahuatl in ancient Mesoamerica continues to build. An examination of Nahua words represented in Maya hieroglyphic texts is followed by consideration of the implications of such a presence, and the reasons given for continued objections against it. The consequences of an early Nahua presence calls into question conclusions about the prehistory of Mesoamerican languages that are based on the intuition of linguists, and, however much this may be denied, on glottochronology.
Join us after Professor Macri's talk for dinner at Ming Dynasty. Please RSVP to Bets at .
Jean Mulder, Professor, Melbourne University
Topic: Clitics in Sm'algyax: Approaching theory from the field
Date: Monday, November 26, 2007
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: McCune Conference Room, HHSB 6th floor
Sm'algyax (British Columbia and Alaska) is a highly ergative VSO language with an uncommonly wide range of clitics. This talk has the twofold function of demonstrating how Anderson's (2005) constraint- based analysis of clitics gives insight into the complex behaviour of Sm'algyax clitics, and how the Sm'algyax clitics themselves afford empirical means of testing such a theory.
Building on Stebbin's (2003) definitions of intermediate word classes in Sm'algyax, this talk utilizes, and extends somewhat, Anderson's Optimality Theoretical approach. Drawing on Sm'algyax texts from field research and published sources, it is demonstrated that in terms of their varying phonological dependence, Sm'algyax clitics include internal clitics, phonological word clitics, and affixal clitics. The existence of affixal clitics in Sm'algyax calls into question the viability of the Strict Layer Hypothesis (Selkirk 1984) and adds empirical support to Anderson's arguments for describing such clitics via ranked constraints rather than inviolable rules.
Conversely, Sm'algyax clitics contradict Anderson's analysis of the direction of clitic attachment as being language specific and instead support Klavans' (1985) view that it is clitic specific. With the exception of one clitic set, which has variable attachment specific to clitics within the set, the direction of attachment in Sm'algyax is specific to sets of clitics; internal clitics all attach to the left as enclitics, whilst affixal and phonological word clitics all attach to the right as proclitics. Further, unlike Anderson's findings for Kwakwala, Sm'algyax allows topicalisation of NPs containing clitics with leftward Stray Adjunction, thereby challenging Anderson's postulate that this phenomenon precludes topicalisation.
Coming up later this year...
Wally Chafe and Bets Shipley will co-present 'Mary Haas and the golden age of linguistics at UC Berkeley.' Video and discussion. Sometime during Fall 2007.
Our own Tim Henry and and Bets Shipley will discuss demonstratives in Ventureño Chumash and Shasta, respectively, during Winter 2008.
Paul Kroskrity, Professor at UCLA, will be joining us in Spring 2008. Stay tuned for more information!