Please join us for a talk by visiting speaker Lev Michael of the University of California Berkeley. The talk will be Friday, April 14th at 3:30 PM in Rosenwald 011. Refreshments will be provided. Hope to see you there!
“Lexical homology in computational phylogenetics: A comparative Tupí-Guaraní”
Lev Michael
UC Berkeley
Please find below the preliminary spring schedule for the Language Variation and Change workshop. All talks will be held in Rosenwald 011, unless otherwise noted.
Friday, 4/14 at 3:30: Lev Michael (UC Berkeley), Lexical homology in computational phylogenetics: A comparative Tupí-Guaraní case study
Friday, 4/28 at 3:30: Cécile Vigouroux (Simon Frasier University)
Monday, 5/8 at 3:30: Friederike Luepke (SOAS)
Friday, 5/12 at 3:30: Hilary McMahan (UChicago)
Friday, 5/19, time TBD, in Harris 319: Grammar-Writing Workshop
Friday, 6/2 at 3:30: Cherry Meyer (UChicago)
LVC is very pleased to be hosting Brian Joseph of OSU this Friday, March 3rd. We hope you can join us for his talk at 3:30 PM in Rosenwald 301. As always, there will be a small reception following the talk.
“Social and Semantic Factors in the Diffusion of Morpho-Syntactic Change — Evidence from the Infinitive in Greek and the Balkans”
Brian Joseph
Ohio State University
A key feature differentiating latter Greek from Classical Greek is the demise of the verbal category and set of verbal forms known as the infinitive. Starting in Koine Greek of the Hellenistic period, we see a gradual erosion of the domain of the infinitive – both as to use and as to form – culminating in the modern form of the language with no infinitive at all. Rather, there is only finite subordination with verbal forms marked for person, number, and aspect, and in some instances tense. Moreover, this retreat of the infinitive and spread of finite subordination is found throughout all of the Balkan languages. I trace here the spread, i.e. the diffusion, of the loss of the infinitive within Greek, first examining the semantic factors that play a role in the progression of infinitive-loss and tying it to event structure. I then shift gears and look at a seemingly anomalous late retention of the infinitive in Jewish Greek of Constantinople, and tie that to the social circumstances of Jewish languages in general. In this way I provide some insight into both the semantic and the social side of the diffusion of a key morpho-syntactic change in Greek and other languages in the Balkans.
Please join us this Friday, February 24th at 1PM in Rosenwald 208 for a joint meeting of LVC and the Morphology & Syntax workshops. Our speaker will be Adam Singerman.
“Finite embedding and quotation in Tuparí”
Adam Roth Singerman
University of Chicago
There have been some changes to the LVC schedule for this quarter.
The schedule for the rest of the quarter has more or less been finalized. Hope to see you there!
Friday, January 27 at 3:30 PM in Rosenwald 301 — Robert Lewis (UChicago)
Late February (exact date TBD) — Emmanuel Ngue Um (University of Yaounde and CERDOTOLA)
Friday, March 3 at 3:30 PM in Rosenwald 301 — Brian Joseph (OSU)
Friday, March 10 at 3:30 PM in Rosenwald 301 — Adam Singerman (UChicago)
Welcome back to another exciting quarter of talks from the LVC workshop! We’re kicking things off with a talk from postdoc Lilia Rissman. So come join us in Rosenwald 301 this Friday, January 13th, at 3:30 PM. A light reception will follow the talk.
“Consistency and variability in the mapping from event concepts to event semantics”
Lilia Rissman
University of Chicago
Developing language requires constructing mappings between concepts and linguistic forms. This talk addresses the structure of this interface across languages: whether event concepts map to semantic structures in similar ways, and whether some concepts are more likely to be expressed in language than others. I focus in particular on verbal meaning, causation, instrumentality and voice, integrating evidence from English, Spanish, Mandarin, child homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language. Taken together, these studies point toward a conceptual/semantic interface in which conceptual knowledge drives cross-linguistic similarities, but some concepts are expressed more variably than others.
Please join LVC this Friday, December 2 at 3:30 PM in Rosenwald 301. It will be our last meeting of the quarter and our speaker is our own Jacob Phillips. Hope you can make it!
Please join the Language Variation and Change Workshop this Friday, November 11th at 3:30 PM in Cobb 116, for a talk from our invited speaker, Nicole Rosen. Details below.
“Nominal Contact in the Michif Language”
Nicole Rosen
University of Manitoba
Michif is an endangered Metis language with its roots in the Fur Trade in Canada, where it arose through the intermarriage of Cree and French people in Canada’s Red River Valley. It is considered a contact language, mixing Plains Cree and French. Michif has received considerable attention in the language contact literature due to its seemingly unusual syntactic and phonological patterns arising from the French-Plains Cree contact situation in which it was created. Bakker (1997) described the language as being formed through a process called language intertwining, resulting in a mixed language posited to have an NP/VP split, where French lexical items pattern like French and Cree lexical items pattern like Plains Cree. Since this time, the accepted view of the language is that the French-source DPs behave like French, while the Cree-source VPs behave like Plains Cree. In this talk I will argue against this received view, showing that this analysis of Michif holds only at a very superficial level. Once we examine the constituency of the DP and investigate the underlying structure in a more rigorous manner, the picture becomes quite different. Using evidence from gender, number and DP constituency, I show that the Michif DP in fact shows very little structural similarity to its parent French DP. As a result, with the one domain said to be French no longer looking French-like, we are left with a language which follows regular Algonquian-type syntax and semantics, with some particularities to allow for the introduction of French elements and some resulting Michif-specific innovations. Although it may be useful to historical linguists to describe its creation as V-N language mixing, I argue that this designation holds little insight into synchronic patterning of the Michif grammar, and that there is little motivation for this exoticization of the language, which patterns according to structures already available cross-linguistically.
LVC is cosponsoring a meeting of the Semiotics Workshop, on November 3 at 4:30 PM in Haskell 101, which will touch upon language contact in Mesoamerica.
with a brief addendum by Chris Bloechl