Please join us for this quarter’s first meeting of the Language Variation & Change Workshop, this Friday, January 18 at 3:30pm, in Rosenwald 301. A light reception will follow.

On object shift, ergativity, and microvariation in Inuit
Michelle Yuan, UChicago

This talk investigates variation in the ergative system of the Inuit dialect continuum, for which the ergative pattern has been observed to be weaker in certain dialects than in others. I argue that the status of ergativity is systematically connected to another, seemingly independent point of variation: variation in object shift, i.e. whether the object raising to a structurally high position is a full DP or a pronoun (cf. Woolford 2017).

Evidence for this approach comes from novel fieldwork on the Eastern Canadian dialect group of Inuktitut—which, as I show, displays a number of previously unnoticed properties that make this correlation especially clear. From this, I present a novel analysis of ergativity across Inuit that reduces this correlation to variation in case competition for dependent ERG case assignment (Marantz 1991, Baker 2015). This captures the generalization that ergativity is intrinsically tied to the properties of the object, but more strikingly posits that ergativity need not directly reference any structural properties of the ERG case-bearing subject. More broadly, this talk offers a case study on how microvariation may be used as a lens into syntactic theory, and vice versa, by treating the Inuit languages as minimally-differing points along an otherwise gradient system.

Please also feel free to join us for any of our other talks this quarter.

Week 3 (1/25): Cherry Meyer (UChicago)
Week 4 (2/1): Betsy Pillion (UChicago)
Week 5 (2/8): Laura Horton (UChicago) + fieldworkers’ social at the Pub
Week 6 (2/15): Ella Karev (UChicago)
Week 8 (3/1): Sharese King (UChicago)
Week 9 (3/8): Maria Polinsky (Maryland)

Please join us for this quarter’s final meeting of the Language Variation & Change Workshop, this Friday, December 7 at 3:30pm, in Rosenwald 301. A light reception will follow.

In search for Greek-Egyptian lexicon: methodologies of analysis
Sofia Torallas-Tovar, UChicago

The sources we have for the Egyptian variant of post-classical Greek spoken and written in Egypt are fragmentary and problematic. This variant was spoken and written from the Hellenistic period down to the eighth century CE, in contact with the Egyptian language among others. Recent studies have tackled different linguistic aspects. I will present in this paper the methodologies to deal with the complexities and interpretation of these sources, followed by some lexicographical case studies.

Please join us for a meeting of the Language Variation & Change Workshop, this Friday, November 16 at 3:30pm, in Rosenwald 301. A light reception will follow.

Ideophones…beyond expressiveness
Natalia Bermúdez, UChicago

In this talk, I look at the humorous use of ideophones in Naso (Chibchan, Panama) through a social lens, and show what it bears on theory of ideophony in relation to evidentiality (Dingemanse 2012, Michael 2008), intimacy/alignment (Nuckolls 2010, Webster 2015), and expressiveness.

Recent typological literature on ideophones takes an a priori approach to measuring expressiveness in terms of how closely an ideophone deviates from grammatical context (Dingemanse & Akita 2017). However, this approach cannot account for speakers’ naturally occurring humorous expressive productions and interpretations. I show how a social approach, where expressiveness is empirically qualified in terms of speaker intuitions, reactions, and choices, teaches us that speaker competence of expressivity is more complex than physical correlates; ideophones function in ways beyond a scale (“less expressive” to “more expressive”) of expressiveness. In particular, Naso data shows that ideophones are productively and commonly used humorously, and that they index social identifications.

Why are ideophones so effective at deriving humor? I argue that ideophone humor is an effect of first-person perspective alignment with another entity, which creates experiential intimacy and induces humor through contrast with another competing identification (e.g. Naso [vs. Latino]; woman [vs. man]; and proper woman [vs. improper woman]), based on contextual use of the following ideophone data produced by two Naso women in conversation:

[kʰjuk kʰjuk] ‘the controlled sound of a fish biting at a line’
[ʃwap] ‘the sound of pulling a fish out of the water to land’
[pak] ‘the sound of a man kissing his wife, to her misfortune’; ‘the sound of a cow defecating’
[tʃas tʃas] ‘washing clothes in a controlled manner’
[pʰaw pʰaw] ‘washing clothes in a loud, obscene manner’

I analyze that the experiential value that ideophones encode derives from their depiction of sensory information. This perspective, when coupled with the sound symbolic connotations of ideophones, as well as their saliency as a unique lexical resource, creates a strong candidate for social indexicality. Speakers exploit and use ideophones to portray their own social identifications. This analysis predicts it is cross-linguistically common for speakers to use ideophones in socially indexical and humorous ways.

Please join us for a meeting of the Language Variation & Change Workshop, this Friday, November 16 at 3:30pm, in Rosenwald 301. A light reception will follow.

Masculinity and coarticulation influence sibilant categorization in nonce words
Jacob Phillips, UChicago

Previous research has found that listeners shift category boundaries in response to both coarticulatory context and speakers’ social attributes. The present study integrates these questions, exploring sibilant categorization in a nonce word lexical decision task. The target words contained a potentially ambiguous sibilant onset in /sCr/ clusters, for example ‘sprimble’ or ‘shprimble’. The stimuli were paired with faces determined to be more or less masculine than average. The results of this study suggest a high degree of individual variability, both with respect to compensation for coarticulation in these clusters and in sensitivity to social attributes, with responses mediated by listeners relative endorsements of traditional masculine stereotypes.