Please join us in Rosenwald 301 on Friday, April 19 at 3:30 PM for the next LVC meeting of the Spring Quarter! Our very own Gabriel Gilbert will be presenting on the results of a corpus study on the distribution of a class of morphemes in Hawaiian known as directionals and its implications for L2 acquisition.

The Hawaiian Directional System: Corpus Analysis and Implications for L2 Acquisition and Revitalization Pedagogy

This study represents the first quantitative study of the Hawaiian (Austronesian, Oceanic, Polynesian) directional system, presenting a corpus analysis of the directionals based on a collection of oral interviews of Hawaiian L1s conducted during the 1970s. A complex part of Hawaiian grammar, these directionals represent a hallmark of L1 speech and an index of “authenticity” among the Hawaiian community (Hawkins 1982; Wong 1999; NeSmith 2002). The results of this study demonstrate clear distributions and corresponding meanings between the directionals and their related predicates, with semantic extensions and nuances illuminated by both diachronic and comparative analyses. Finally, this study addresses how the insights of this work can empower L2 acquisition of more complex paradigms and aspects of L1 grammar, exploring how further linguistic analysis can enrich pedagogy and address community concerns on L2 variety divergence from L1 speech.