There has been a Chinese population in Cambodia for more than 500 years and contact with Cambodia was first mentioned by the eminent China emissary Zhou Daguan as early as 1296 during his travels there. Despite a relatively high degree of integration into to the majority Cambodia culture, ethnic Chinese have maintained their own social organizations, news media, and schools.  The Cambodian Chinese population is organized around five Huiguan (会馆) ‘congregations’  corresponding to the southern-origin Chinese groups that comprise it: Chaozhou 潮州会馆,  Cantonese 广肇会馆，Hakka 客属会馆, Fujian 福建会馆, and Hainan 海南会馆.  Until the Khmer Rouge forced closure of Chinese schools in the mid seventies, the language of Chinese education followed the dialects of each association.  However, in recent times Mandarin has become the lingua franca of the Sino-Cambodia community, though among ethnic Chinese there are few if any native speakers of Mandarin.

Through examination of survey data and recorded interviews, this presentation sketches a picture of the contemporary Chinese community in Cambodian and outlines some of the language change occurring by contact with the majority Khmer langauge. The paper gives special attention to examples from the local Cantonese.

EVENT SCHEDULE

12:00-12:25:  Gihyun Gal   (faculty mentor: Greg Stump).

12:25- 12:50:  Aaron Mueller   (faculty mentor: Mark Lauersdorf).

1:00-1:50: Corey Meeks   (faculty mentor: Jennifer Cramer).

ABSTRACTS

Gihyun Gal

Comblending in Korean neologisms with borrowing English words

This research focuses on an interesting type of word formation process in Korean that involves the combination of different morphological processes, namely compounding, blending, abbreviation and acronym. As previously shown, both of these processes are both very productive in Korean (Jung 1992, Seo 2013, Lee 2014). 'Comblending', a term I coined to describe this new process, draws from the above-mentioned processes and seem to be on the rise on the World Wide Web and on social media like Instagram. However, although they might be argued to arise from those sources, these new forms get integrated in current speech rather than just being used on the previously mentioned platforms. More importantly, in many of those neologisms also involve borrowings from English and include an agent-like word 족[dʒok], which means 'person or group of people'.

(1) Grup dʒok 'elders who keep on living like students' > grown-ups + dʒok

(2) BMW dʒok 'Office workers using public transport' > Bus Metro Walking + dʒok

(3) Naports dʒok 'People who enjoys sports after work' > 'night' [naɪt] + sports + dʒok

(4) Eomma cri 'interrupted PC user, usually by his/her mother' > Eomma ‘mother’+crisis

(5) Chilaryman 'person who still live with his parents' > child + salaryman

Such data raise questions relating to (1) the internal structure of these new complex words (2) the order of which the different processes come into play (3) the type of analysis that would appropriately describe this peculiar process and (4) whether we have instances of phonological overlapping or not. I will here examine these newly coined words from an argue that given the derived meanings, a purely morphological approach seem favorable. When the Korean neologisms are formed by either compound process or blend process, some sub-processes would be happened such as acronym or abbreviation before the neologisms are coined completely through compound or blend processes by Korean speakers on the World Wide Web or on social media. Because those two processes would be a sort of important process in order to form of the Korean neologisms productively. Through the neologisms, it is possibly to glance some tendencies of current Korean social situations. Because most of Korean neologisms mirror of thoughts of Korean aspect such as lifestyle, a desire of education, social economy situation and characters of people.

Aaron Mueller

Lexical and Semantic Shift in the Linguistic Construction of Social Gender: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Written U.S. English

This study aims to track shifts in linguistic constructions of gender in written U.S. discourse using the Corpus of Historical American English (1810-2009). Lexical values were examined by dividing selected gender words by gender and by word type (e.g. male pronouns, female titles); per-million occurrences were observed by decade and word-type category. Semantic values were compared by decade through calculating mutual information and t-scores for select collocations. Preliminary results indicate that male words appear more frequently than female words for almost every word-type category; non-binary gender words appeared too infrequently for analysis. Semantically, men are associated with appearance, wealth, and power, and intellectual pursuits; women, mainly with appearance. Appearance was the main semantic association for all genders, though women exhibited this to a greater extent than men. Mutual information and t-scores varied less than was expected; this could suggest that linguistic constructs of these genders have changed little despite perceived sociocultural progress.

Corey Meeks

Creative production and pedagogy: Teaching and learning through documentary creation

As students and teachers transition into the modern classroom, we must understand how to teach and learn in new ways. Educators may teach the way they are taught, yet there are many reasons that suggest we cannot continue to teach as we have for the past several hundred years. Dr. Cramer experimented with the idea of teaching through creating in a class on American English (LIN/ENG 310), and she facilitated the creation of a documentary that would showcase our knowledge about dialectal variation in the United States. Ultimately, the class produced a roughly 20-minute film on the dialects of Kentucky, a topic selected and cultivated by the students themselves. Several teams did everything from scripting to video production and editing with minimal control from the instructor. By playing their roles, they were given a better reason to understand and internalize the material covered in the course compared to hearing it in a lecture or reading it from a book. We hope teachers will continue to experiment with the idea of teaching through creating, as the Italian enlightenment thinker Vico Giambattista said, "To know is to put together the elements of things."

When more than one person talks simultaneously, overlaps happen. Overlapping talk is a ubiquitous phenomenon found in any speech exchange systems (cf., Schegloff, 2000). However, when it comes to the second language acquisition (SLA) research, overlapping talk has seldom been taken up as an object of investigation.

In this presentation, I will present my preliminary investigation of overlapping talk observed during pair work activities in elementary Japanese language classrooms at a U.S. university. The data come from a corpus of 67 video-recorded pair work cases. A conversation-analytic (CA) framework is used to closely examine the occurrences of overlapping talk on a turn-by-turn basis.

By drawing on the ‘unusual’ characteristics of overlapping talk found in the database, I will discuss whether or not these pair work activities afford opportunities for SLA.

Through this presentation, I would also like to discuss how CA, established by sociologists, such as Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, can be applied to the analysis of L2 interaction data in order to advance our understanding of the SLA process.

This presentation details a case study of two competing participles of the Spanish verb matar ‘to kill’ (matado/muerto ‘killed/dead’). I provide quantitative data from corpora of modern Spanish that show that muerto ‘dead’ is the preferred form for matar in passive periphrastics. The use of the participle muerto (from the infinitive morir ‘to die’) in the paradigm of matar has long been considered a textbook example of verbal suppletion in Romance; however, I offer an alternate explanation. The objective of this analysis is to demonstrate that these two participles are best considered to be allomorphs of the same archimorpheme /to die/. The general premise of my claim is that agentivity determines the distribution of forms: an agentive reading triggers the participle matado, while a non-agentive reading triggers muerto. The nature of this particular instance of verbal allomorphy provides insight into the origins and maintenance of irregular verbal forms in language.

The Chatino people from Oaxaca, Mexico, believe that the departed begin a new life that is parallel to the world of the living, known in the Chatino language as Jlya^G.  In order to reach Jlya^G, the recently departed must traverse on a treacherous path that goes through mountains, rivers, and towns. Jlya^G  is a metaphysical place that corresponds to an actual location in our plane of existence found towards the northern part of the Chatino region in the municipality of Zenzontepec (coordinates 16° 32′ 0″ N, 97° 30′ 0″ W). 

Prayers, stories, myths, place, and performance are crucial elements in the practice and belief of the Chatino concept of the dead. In the Chatino town of San Marcos Zacatepec, when an adult dies, family members call an expert to perform a speech called Ti^A Su^A Kna^A or ‘prayer to the dead.’ The Ti^A Su^A Kna^A is recited at the dead person’s wake. The goal of the speech is to guide the dead through the trail of the dead and to encourage them not to come back and taunt their family members, friends, and community members either by showing up in individual’s dreams or appearing as a ghost qu^B tiq^E.

The departed also need to demonstrate endurance, agility, and artistic skills. For example, when they reach a place called Sa^A tqen^A, located in the town of Cieneguilla, San Juan Quiahije (coordinates 16.3000° N, 97.3167° W), the dead have to dance. The dead men, in addition to dancing, must whistle or sing. Women only have to dance. Hence, Chatinos believe that artistic abilities such as dancing, whistling, and singing must be learned and practiced during the course of a person’s lifetime. This presentation will discuss these aspects of Chatino conceptions of the dead and describe the verbal art of the rituals involved as the recently dead move on to Jlya^G.

Recent work on agreement has uncovered evidence that morphological properties of sentences (such as syncretism) interact in non-trivial ways with agreement relations. In this talk, I provide an analysis of this type of interaction between morphology and agreement in terms of a two-step theory of agreement. Adopting the terminology in Arregi and Nevins 2012, we can refer to these as Agree-Link, or the syntactic establishment of an Agree relation between Probe (agreement target) and one or more Goals (agreement controller(s)), and Agree-Copy, or the postsyntactic copying from Agree-Linked Goal(s) onto the Probe. Evidence for this split of Agree into two separate steps comes from the fact that they can be derivationally intercalated by postsyntactic operations such as Linearization in Hindi and Slovenian (Bhatt and Walkow 2013, and Marusic, Nevins and Badecker 2015) postsyntactic morpheme displacement (cliticization) in Bulgarian (Arregi and Nevins 2013), and Vocabulary Insertion (exponence) in West Germanic (van Koppen 2005).



I offer evidence for this two-step analysis of agreement from a different empirical domain, namely, the interaction of agreement with case syncretisms due to postsyntacic impoverishment (in the sense of Distributed Morphology) in Indo-Aryan and Basque. In both cases, variation in the possibility of agreement with oblique case-marked arguments (ergative in Indo-Aryan, dative in Basque) is due to a uniform establishment of syntactic Agree-Link relations, coupled with dialect- or language-particular differences in the application of Agree-Copy and its derivational interaction with postsyntactic impoverishment rules.



The interaction of agreement and case syncretism in these languages converges with other phenomena in arguing for a strongly derivational theory of Agree in which the latter is established in two steps, the second of which is postsyntactic and can interact in different derivationally defined ways with other postsyntactic operations. The variation found is thus largely reduced to familiar feeding and counterfeeding interactions among operations in a derivational theory.

This lecture will introduce the basic structures that define Romani as a unified language, as well as its basic dialectal divisions. Special attention will be paid to Balkan Romani and to Romani as a Balkan language.

The two closely related Celtic languages Breton and Welsh represent an interesting comparative laboratory for exploring language contact phenomena, since much of the period of their divergence from a common ancestor has been accompanied by intense language contact: Breton with French, and Welsh with English. A number of the ways that the modern forms of the two Celtic languages differ from each other, including reflexive and reciprocal constructions and the encoding of motion events, can be seen as cases in which the two languages have, over time, moved in the direction of aligning their patterns with those of French and English respectively, in a process of convergent evolution which is distinct from, though related to, grammatical borrowing. In neither modern language do the patterns match those of the contact language perfectly, but the isomorphy with French and English is nonetheless striking, especially when seen against the background of other effects of intense contact in these languages.