Jeff Heath has published a grammar of Jamsay, a Dogon language spoken in Mali. Jeff is continuing work on the Dogon languages with support from the National Science Foundation and plans to produce grammars of all 20 Dogon languages.

Information
A Grammar of Jamsay
May 2008. 24 x 16 cm. XXII, 735 pages.
ISBN 978-3-11-020113-0
Series: Mouton Grammar Library [MGL] 45
MOUTON DE GRUYTER

From the publisher

Jamsay is the largest-population language among some twenty Dogon languages in Mali, West Africa. This is the first comprehensive grammar of any Dogon language, including a full tonology. The language is verb-final, with subject agreement on the verb and with no other case-marking. Its most striking feature is the morphosyntactically triggered use of stem-wide tone-contour overlays on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. All stems have a lexical tone contour such as H[igh], L[ow]-H, HL, or LHL with at least one H-tone. An exam of tone overlay is tone-dropping to stem-wide all-L. This is used for Perfective verbs (in the presence of a focalized constituent), and for a noun or adjective before an adjective. It is also used to mark the head NP in a relative clause (the head NP is not extracted, so this is the only direct indication of head NP status). The verb in a relative clause is morphologically a participle, agreeing with the head NP in humanness and number, rather than with the subject. “Intonation” is used grammatically. For example, NP conjunction ‘X and Y’ is expressed as X Y, without a conjunction, but with “dying-quail” intonation on both conjuncts.

Christopher Becker has filed his dissertation,  Clausal and Nominal Agreement in Russian: A Unified Approach, thereby completing all the requirements for his Ph.D. in Linguistics.

Congratulations, Christopher!

ABSTRACT

This dissertation unifies, in different respects, the formal and theoretical analysis of morphosyntactic agreement patterns, both those internal to the clause and internal to the noun phrase, focusing empirically on the syntax of Russian. Specifically, I develop a Minimalist analysis modifying the Agree and Probe-Goals approaches and show that many long-standing issues regarding agreement of formal features and Case can be accounted for without resort to certain stipulations and unclarities. In particular, I propose that clausal agreement reflects the features of the constituents of a subject DP (determiner phrase) and propose locality constraints on this agreement operation. Such a unified account of clausal and nominal feature agreement has been lacking in many proposals that consider the data in only one, or the other, domain.
Within the clausal domain, I examine copular structures in Russian, and propose modifications to the Probe-Goal hypothesis to account for the issues these structures present. Specifically, I demonstrate that DPs in copular structures can bear agreement features and Case independent of each other and I argue that the syntactic head that enters into agreement with the subject is unable to agree with the post-copular nominal. I account for Case variation of the post-copular nominal by positing two distinct Case-licensing heads, one that values nominative Case and one that values instrumental.
Within the nominal domain, I demonstrate that the uniformity of agreement features and Case on determiners, adjectives, and nouns in Russian can be accounted for if the inflectional head of the clause enters into simultaneous agreement relations with each head of the nominal domain – the multiple goal approach to agreement. This formulation of the Probe-Goal hypothesis allows for agreement between the inflectional head of the clause and the subject, and accounts for multiple and uniform occurrence of agreement features and Case within the subject. Regarding numeral phrases, I demonstrate the locality effects of the multiple goal approach to agreement, and account for disparate features and Case marking within these phrases.
This dissertation contributes to the theoretical understanding of agreement phenomena in morphologically rich agreement languages such as Russian and less inflected agreement languages such as English.

Gerardo Fernández-Salgueiro successfully defended his dissertation, entitled Aspects of the Syntax of (TP-) Coordination, Across-the Board Extraction, and Parasitic Gaps, on May 21, 2008.

Dr. Fernández-Salgueiro  has accepted a tenure-track position in Linguistics at National Taiwan Normal University.

Congratulations Gerardo

Seeing as many students and faculty are off creating department-related news rather than reporting on it, the department news will be fairly sporadic.

I imagine it’ll be updated once a month or so through September.