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Linguistics Seminar Series

Seminar Series: "Multiple Language, Cultural, and Ethnic Self-Identities of the German Lutheran Population in 'Russian Poland' in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries"

Most studies of language and confessional minorities focus on the self-identity, singular, of members of a minority community. Some minority populations, however, have two or more concurrent language, cultural, and ethnic self-identities (although usually only one confessional self-identity). This talk examines the self-perceptions of an understudied minority population, the Lutheran Russian Germans living in the western part of the Russian Empire known as Congress Poland or “Russian Poland” (now eastern Poland and southern Lithuania) during the 19th and early 20th centuries, before they were forcibly resettled by the Russian government into interior Russia during World War One.

The Russian Germans, also known as “German Russians,” were Russian citizens, the descendants of German artisans who had migrated to Russia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by invitation of Catherine the Great and Paul I. Those in Russian Poland lived mostly in integrated communities together with Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Belarusians, and Russians. Most were trilingual in Polish, Russian, and Low German, with some knowing Lithuanian as well. Based on documents in Lithuanian and Polish archives and a private collection in the U.S., the talk focuses on the Lutheran Russian German populations in the adjoining provinces of Suwałczyzna and Łomża (now Suvalkija in Lithuania and Mazowsze in Poland, respectively) and their adoption of Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian cultural features, as reflected in their naming and signature practices, language choices, cuisine, and self-identity as a group during a period when the concept of ethnicity had not yet been developed in Russia.

Date:
-
Location:
Niles Gallery (Fine Arts Library)
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Seminar Series: Undergraduate Research Presentation

[1] Samantha Dunn:

Impairments in Morphology Through the Lifespan.

An overview of how language, specifically morphology, develops and what it looks like when there is delay. Even when normal language development occurs, we are still at risk for language impairment due to brain damage. Often, a stroke can result in a language disorder known as aphasia. Aphasia results in a wide range of issues, but I will be focused on how morphology is affected following a brain injury that results in aphasia.



[2] Clare Harshey:

A Network Morphology Theory of Old Norse Nominal Inflection.

Network morphology is a framework which has proven useful and accurate for morphological analysis in a wide range of languages. Using computational notation, it models lexical information as a collection of interrelated nodes containing facts, drawing information from one another to generate the appropriate morphological forms. Using the KATR language to construct such a theory, Old Norse nouns can be modeled accurately and intuitively.

Date:
-
Location:
Niles Gallery
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Seminar Series: Absolutive Fabulous: Surprisingly Sensitive Sanskrit Suffixes

It seems perhaps unlikely that a language would maintain a single special alternative suffix, to be deployed just in case the word to be inflected has in its derivational history another particular kind of operation. Indeed such situations do arise, however, a notable case from Sanskrit being the gerund, also known as the indeclinable past participle, or the absolutive:



(1) General gerund formation:

√bhū- ‘be’: ger. bhūtvā ‘[after] having been’ or ‘[when X] had been’ (MacDonell [1927] 1986: 137)

√jñā- ‘know’: ger. jñātvā ‘[after] having known’ or ‘[when X] had known’

(Whitney [1885] 1945: 56)

√vac- ‘speak’: ger. uktvā ‘[after] having spoken’ or ‘[when X] had spoken’

(Gonda 1966: 78)

Specifically, the gerund form is created in the general case by suffixing -tvā to the so-called 'weak-grade' root. When the verb lexeme in question is the result of prefixing a(n etymological) preposition as a pre-verb (PV), by contrast, the formation of the gerund is systematically distinct, involving a potentially distinct stem and an unrelated -ya suffix instead:

(2) PV-prefixed gerund formation:

ger. nipatya ‘having fallen down’ (ni- ‘down, into’; compare √pat- ‘fall, fly’: ger. patitvā)

(Mayrhofer [1964] 1972: 103; Whitney [1885] 1945: 94)

ger. vimucya ‘having freed’ (vi- ‘apart’; compare √muc- ‘release’: ger. muktvā)

(Gonda 1966: 78; Whitney [1885] 1945: 122)

ger. pratyāgatya ‘having returned’ (prati- ‘reverse, back’; ā- ‘(un)to, at’; √gam- ‘go’: ger. gatvā) (Deshpande 2003: 122, 428; Whitney [1885] 1945: 34)

This choice among suffixes seems to depend on the presence or absence of a non-adjacent morphological boundary, and as such, the phenomenon's status between derivation and inflection, between regular and irregular, will inevitably force morphological theories into some potentially uncomfortable positions.

Of course, some frameworks are simply not up to the task, straining to minimize its theoretical significance, or playing fast and loose with fragmented stipulations that cover the facts, but miss the generalization(s). Rather than crowning one framework as uniquely suited to the descriptive task, however, the very process of rotating through the lenses of diverse morphological frameworks presents a clearer, and indeed more coherent picture of the Sanskrit gerund than any single approach can.

Date:
-
Location:
WTY Library 2-34A (Active Learning Classroom)
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Seminar Series: "Hittite 'Hyperbaton': the Syntax-Phonology Interface"

Although the functionally unmarked word order in Hittite is robustly SOV, many other word orders are well attested. In addition to some that are syntactically licensed and bear various discourse structure functions, there are also a number of quite puzzling configurations that involve discontinuous constituents and appear unmotivated in terms of discourse structure. Violations of well-known syntactic constraints suggest that these orders are phonologically motivated. Building on previous evidence that Hittite has “phrasal stress”, I will argue that many if not all such orders reflect: (1) that the primary accent in all Hittite phonological phrases (which mostly match syntactic phrases) falls on the leftmost constituent; (2) that some prosodically weak constituents (e.g., indefinite adjectives) require a phonological word as their immediate leftward host, while others (e.g., relative adjectives) require only a phonological phrase; (3) that the last two rules are violable, resulting in some “exceptions” to the dominant patterns. Further study is needed regarding what determines the “prosodically weak” status of some elements.

Date:
-
Location:
357 Old Student Center
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Seminar Series: "Ancient vestiges or recent innovations: evidence from click words with a shared occurrence in Khoesan and Bantu languages of southern Africa"

It is presently received wisdom that the click consonants in various Bantu languages of southern Africa reflect an uptake from a supposedly pre-existing substrate of Khoesan languages. The clicks in the latter very diverse languages are widely assumed to be of longstanding existence, and are postulated as original segments in current reconstructions for certain Khoesan families.

However: this paper reveals the presence throughout the Khoesan language families of click-initial words with a demonstrably Bantu-intrinsic identity. Successive sets are presented, and regularly repeated correlations are identified. Since many of these words have roots reconstructed for Proto-Bantu, it is possible to characterise the pathways by which various clicks have evidently emerged. These formulations even have a predictive power, in that they can in some cases also account for Khoesan words without click counterparts in a Bantu language.

The main discussion suggests various scenarios that might account for this previously unrecognised phenomenon, including the possibility that the various Khoesan language groups have perhaps descended from regional Bantu languages, and are therefore related not only to the latter but also to one another, even if perhaps as cousins rather than as sisters. (There is little evidence to support popular beliefs that the Khoesan languages are ‘ancient’, and that speakers of various early Bantu languages only entered the southern part of Africa in relatively recent times.) Although this paper is largely confined to demonstrating the abstract patterns that suggest these relationships, the evidence nevertheless points towards an actual mechanism likely to have been involved in the generation of clicks in both Bantu and Khoesan languages.

Wider implications of the findings are noted, not only for African linguistics but also for other disciplines such as archaeology and history. Future research directions are identified.

Date:
-
Location:
Niles Gallery
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Seminar Series: "Variation in young women's perceptions of dialect differences in the Arab World"

This study discusses perceptions of variation across dialects of Arabic in the Arab world as revealed through a perceptual dialectology map task. On a map of the Arab world, female undergraduate students at Qatar University provided information about boundaries where people speak differently and labels for those boundaries. A correlation analysis of the boundaries showed that participants viewed Arabic dialects as constituting five major dialect groups: the Maghreb, Egypt and Sudan, the Levant, the Gulf, and Somalia. A closer analysis of the content of the labels revealed variation in terms of principal (Goffman 1981) on whom they draw in their judgments, the latter being either individual, regional (intermediate) or wide-scope generic. This analysis not only identifies more granularity in the concept of principal, it also quantifies the different kinds of principal and identifies statistical relationships between them, the labels, and the boundaries.

Date:
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Location:
Lexmark Room, Main Building
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Linguistics Seminar: "Embodiment and Competition: Two Factors in the Organization of Languages"

For decades, many linguists have framed the study of language in terms of a language faculty, a specialized cognitive ‘organ’ unique to humans.  In the last decade, even the most stalwart proponents of this view have come to acknowledge the existence of other factors in the organization of human languages. In this talk, I will concentrate on two of these factors, embodiment and competition, drawing examples from the morphology of spoken and signed languages. Neither is unique to language, nor especially human or cognitive in nature.  Their role in the structuring of languages points to a new research paradigm in the study of language, in which no single factor is privileged and the importance of any one of them is gauged only by the insights it provided, not by its uniqueness to language.

Date:
-
Location:
Niles Gallery
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Linguistics Seminar: "On the architecture of the left periphery in early Celtic and related matters"

While in verb-initial Old Irish, topicalization was achieved via left dislocation and focalization was achieved through clefting, the older Continental Celtic languages achieved such pragmatic information structuring through movement into the left periphery of the clause (though the right edge of the clause could also be a target for such purpose).  This paper commences with an inspection of relative clause syntax in Continental Celtic while outlining what we can tell about other movement mechanisms in the clause and then goes on to explore the architecture of the left periphery in these languages.  This exploration provides some insight into the prehistoric development of verb-initial clausal configuration in Insular Celtic.  Some comparative attention is also paid to the architecture of the left periphery in other Indo-European languages and it is found that the Continental Celtic languages have a role to play in determining the degree of articulation to be reconstructed for the left periphery of proto-Indo-European itself.

Date:
-
Location:
Lexmark Room
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2nd Annual Graduate Conference in Linguistics

 
09:00-09:10 - Welcome



09:10-09:40 - Ben Jones
Performing Down East:  Dialect, Impression, and Temp Tales
"Temp Tales," a series of animated YouTube shorts by O'Chang Comics, presents the experiences of a temp worker recently relocated to Maine.  As part of the performance, imitations are made of the dialectal features of rural and coastal regions.  This talk examines the phonetic features that are used  by the main performer, a native of Maine, in presenting this dialect.  Comparisons are made between the performer's non-dialectal and dialectal speech to determine what features of the dialect are considered important in rendering the dialect.
 
09:40-10:10 - Michelle Compton
I Ain’t Gonna Give Up My Language: How to Perform Research Investigating the Use of Contrastive Analysis as a Method to Assist the Transition from Appalachian English to Standard American English
This presentation will explore and critique the methods for investigating contrastive analysis as a tool for instructing Appalachian students. This use of contrastive analysis is meant to ease students' transition from Appalachian English to Standard American English in a way that prevents harmful and negative ideologies about their vernacular dialect. My presentation will examine and compare  the methods required for a study of this sort on two age groups: college students and high school students. I will also postulate on the benefits and significance of the study as a whole, as well as those for each individual age group.
    
10:10-10:30 - Morning Break



10:30-11:00 - Razia Husain
Linguistic Tools for the University of Kentucky Writing Center: A Proposal
This presentation will propose a collaboration between the UK Writing Center, Linguistics program, and department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies in order to get more linguistics-based tools into the Writing Center so as to facilitate teaching and learning the composing process.
 

11:00-11:30 - Nathan Hardymon

English Becomes More Analytic?: A Proposal
This presentation will give a proposal for research that looks at English as becoming more of an analytic language with special attention paid to the auxiliary verbs "do" and "did" and the periphrastic superlatives and comparatives. Through corpus investigation, I hope to find some evidence of these verbs gaining some traction with uses like modals and of the superlatives and comparatives gaining more traction in the periphrastic forms diachronically.


11:30-12:30 - Lunch Break



12:30-13:00 - Sophie Moradi
How to Do Things with Verbs

Forthcoming

 

13:00-13:30 - Amber Thompson

Luvale Causative Morphology
Luvale is a Bantu language spoken by more than 600,000 people in Zambia and Angola. However, it has been widely understudied and almost no current literature is available on the language. In order to lessen this information gap, this presentation will focus on the description of one feature of Luvale Verbal Morphology--the causative derivations--which seems to be undergoing a change in usage since the time of the last complete grammar in 1949. This presentation represents the current stage of Amber's ongoing research for her M.A. thesis.
 

13:30-14:00 - Parker Brody

Morphological Agreement in Basque
Summary
 

14:00-14:20 - Afternoon Break

 

14:20-15:20 - Plenary Speaker - Mark Lauersdorf
Who used what language with whom and when? -- data-driven pattern identification, social network analysis, and other historical sociolinguistic 'hocus pocus'
Summary


15:20-16:00 - Closing

 

Date:
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Location:
Bingham Davis House
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