Monday, February 25h @ 2:00 PM, Location TBA Verbal acts in the songs of the old Greek underworld In this talk I discuss the discourse patterns that emerge in the lyrics of Rebetiko, an urban folk music genre that flourished in the port of Athens in the early 20th century. In the 1920s, a ghetto […]
Continue reading →Monday, February 11th @ 12:30 PM, Social Sciences 302 The authentication of Sierra Leonean refugees Competing ideologies of the acoustic characteristics of voice During the Sierra Leone civil war, 1991–2002, many European countries granted asylum to Sierra Leonean refugees. Those without documentation were given an opportunity to participate in a language analysis interview. There are […]
Continue reading →Monday, February 4th @ 12:30 PM, Social Sciences 302 The Language is like a Map: Frames of Reference in MalakMalak This paper presents an analysis of spatial language, in particular, ‘Frames of Reference’ (FoR) utilizing elicitation, stimuli and natural discourse in fieldwork settings. The language in question is MalakMalak, a non-Pama-Nyungan Northern Daly language with […]
Continue reading →Monday, January 28th @ 12:30 PM, Social Sciences 302 Allocutive agreement and forms of address in Basque As in many other languages, Basque has a T-V distinction in the second person: ‘hi’ (and related pronominal and agreement forms) is used with close relatives and friends, while ‘zu’ (and related morphemes) is the neutral form. Although […]
Continue reading →Monday, December 3rd @ 3 PM, Harper 140 The role of multiple sources in the creation of novel formal categories in a new mixed language: Light Warlpiri as a case study Light Warlpiri is a newly emerged mixed language spoken in northern Australia, which combines elements of Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan) and varieties of English and Kriol […]
Continue reading →Tuesday, November 27th @3:30 PM, Harper 130 From “tall-issimo” to “game-issimo”: Subjectification and intensification in diachrony Abstract: Intensifiers are universally considered to be a productive field for investigating semantic change. However, diachronic work on such expressions mostly focuses on shifts from lexical words to functional ones (e.g., really/very) and treats intensification as a final stage […]
Continue reading →Monday, November 19th @ 3 PM, Harper 140 Wild Sounds in Wolof Abstract: In this paper we describe a group of sounds and articulations that stand outside of the basic phonemic and/or lexical inventory of Wolof (Niger-Congo) but are a core part of the language’s communicative system. We call these wild sounds and words following […]
Continue reading →Monday, October 15th @ 3 PM, Harper 140 Amawaka Speakers’ Creative Uses of Morphosyntactic Variation in Cultural Context Abstract: The 250 to 300 remaining speakers of Amawaka reside in the Western Amazonian lowlands along either side of the border that divides Peru and Brazil. Residents of most Amawaka villages serendipitously juxtapose (1) a reified system […]
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