Carmel O’Shannessy gave a keynote address at the 16th annual Symposium about Language and Society - Austin, held at the University of Texas Austin,  April 11-13.

Abstract:

A new mixed language, Light Warlpiri, has emerged in a remote community in northern Australia. It is spoken by children and young adults in the multilingual community of Lajamanu and has developed within the last 30 years. Most verbs and the verbal morphology are from Aboriginal English or Kriol (AE/Kriol), while most nominal morphology is from Lajamanu Warlpiri (the variety of Warlpiri spoken in Lajamanu community). Nouns are drawn from both types of source language. An innovative auxiliary system has developed which draws on, but is not the same as, the systems in the source languages. But the system for indicating grammatical functions draws directly on the two typologically different source languages. Lajamanu Warlpiri uses case-marking in an ergative-absolutive system while AE/Kriol uses word order (SVO) in a nominative-accusative system. In Light Warlpiri these two systems meet.

The language ecology in the community is complex, and code-switching between languages is very common. Children growing up in the community learn the new language, Light Warlpiri, as their primary language, and also learn Lajamanu Warlpiri in their early years. Their learning situation raises the question of how they deal with very mixed input - to what extent do they show adult-like variation and patterning in the grammatical systems of each language? The study uses production and comprehension data to examine the children’s use of word order and ergative case-marking in each language.

Robin Queen participated in the Michigan Road Scholars Program.  The Michigan Road Scholars Tour for faculty at the University of Michigan is a five-day traveling seminar on the State of Michigan. This educational tour exposes participants to the state’s economy, government and politics, culture, educational systems, health and social issues, history, and geography.

Designed to increase mutual knowledge and understanding between the university and the people and communities of the state,the tour introduces participants to the places the majority of our students call home, encourages university service to the public, and suggests ways faculty can help address state issues through research, scholarship and creative activity. In addition the experience is expected to develop beneficial ties and promote interdisciplinary discussion among the touring faculty.

This year’s tour visited sites in Detroit, Flint, Lansing, Battle Creek, Grand Rapids, Traverse City, Leeland, Peshawbestown, Pellston, Sault St.  Marie and Kencheloe.

The Road Scholar participants with Lt. Governor, John Cherry

Lauren Friedman’s Honors Thesis received the Virginia Voss award from the Honors Program and the Matt Alexander Prize from the Linguistics Department due to its outstanding quality.

The thesis, entitled “The loss of Old English Null Expletive hit/it“, explores the loss of the null expletive it, or rather the changes that led to the requirement of an overt expletive hit/it in constructions which lack an overt thematic subject in Spec, IP of a clause. From the descriptions and analyses of OE considered in this study, along with an analysis of EPP (Extended Projection Principle) properties in OE (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998, Holmberg 2005, Jaeggli & Safir 1989), the thesis argues that OE is in stage 3: null true expletive it is possible across paradigms while null thematic and null quasi-arguments are restricted in use.  Additionally, I contend that despite the possibility for null subjects in OE, the EPP is checked is checked by Move XP (i.e. insertion of an overt category in the subject [Spec, IP] position).

Lauren has been an active member of the department and the undergraduate club over the last several years. She leaves the University of Michigan to attend graduate school in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Congratulations and good luck, Lauren!

Susannah Levi, who has been the Language Learning Assistant Professor in Phonetics this year, begins her new position as Assistant Professor of Phonetics in the Dept. of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology at New York University.

Congratulations Susie!!

Natalia Kondroshova and Christopher Becker each presented work at the 17th meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics held at Yale May 9-11.

Natalia presented work on Licensing Modality in Infinitival Structures.

Christopher presented work on Case and Agreement Feature Uniformity.

Ezra Keshet will be our visiting Assistant Professor in 2007-08, holding the Language Learning visiting faculty position. Ezra will teach two of our semantics courses in 2007-08. He is current completing his PhD in semantics at MIT, but his work also touches on syntax, pragmatics and discourse.

His dissertation argues that possible worlds and times must be explicitly represented in the syntax of natural language and explains several constraints such representations must obey. He has also done research on scalar implicature, showing that an analysis involving alternative semantics solves several puzzles relating to the topic; and telescoping, including arguments that syntactic rules sometimes bridge multiple sentences, given the proper discourse environment.

Other interests of Ezra’s include singing, cooking, and computational linguistics.

Welcome, Ezra!

Vera Irwin has been awarded a dissertation writing fellowship from the Sweetland Writing Center.

Congratulations, Vera!

Gerardo Fernandez-Salgueiro accepted an offer for a Tenure-Track job in Linguistics at National Taiwan Normal University.

He will start in the new position in Fall 2008.

Congratulations, Gerardo!

Eric Brown has been received a FLAS fellowship from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies to continue his work on Thai.

Congratuations, Eric!

Chris Odato and Debby Keller-Cohen presented their paper, “Revisiting off-target verbosity: Discourse context and speaker identity” at the Cognitive Aging conference held in Atlanta April 10-13.

Abstract

The claim that some older adults talk at length on irrelevant topics has spawned research on what has become known as “off-target verbosity” (OTV). In prior research, OTV has been attributed to speaker characteristics—inhibition (Arbuckle, Pushkar and colleagues) or communicative strategies (James et al., 1998). Out study examined the potential of discourse context and speaker identity to influence perceptions of these speech characteristics.

Forty older adults (age 70+) and forty college students participated in an experiment testing the effects of Participant Age (older/younger), Speaker Age (older/younger), Speaker Gender and Discourse Context (interview/conversation). Participants evaluated transcripts on five measures: focus, talkativeness, clarity, interest and the extent to which the speaker was off-target. The content of the speech represented in the transcripts was held constant while the context in which it was produced and the age and gender of the speaker to whom it was attributed varied between participants.

Age proved to be important in several ways. Overall, older participants were more generous in their evaluations. Also, speech was rated as more interesting when attributed to older speakers. In addition, there were significant interactions between research participant age and discourse context: younger, but not older participants found the speech represented in the transcripts more focused in the conversation context. Gender too was found to enter into evaluations: speech was seen as more focused and clearer when attributed to a female speaker.

This study points to the importance of identifying what analytic categories raters/listeners bring to the task of evaluating others’ speech.