Andries Coetzee has published a new paper in Language, the Journal of the Linguistic Society of America.

Coetzee, Andries W.  2008.  Grammaticality and ungrammaticality in
phonology.  Language, 84(2):218-257.

Abstract

In this paper, I make two theoretical claims: (i) For some form to be
grammatical in language L, it is not necessary that the form satisfy
all constraints that are active in L – i.e. even grammatical forms can
violate constraints. (ii) There are degrees of ungrammaticality – i.e.
not all ungrammatical forms are equally ungrammatical. I first show
that these claims follow straightforwardly from the basic architecture
of an Optimality Theoretic grammar. I then show that the surface sound
patterns used most widely in formal phonology cannot be used to test
the truth of these two claims, but argue that results from speech
processing experiments can. Finally, I discuss three experiments on
the processing of non-words of the form [stVt], [skVk] and [spVp] in
English that were designed to test these claims, and show that both
claims are confirmed by the results of the experiments.

Jon Yip and Eric Brown are attending the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute for 8 weeks this summer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

SEASSI is supported by a consortium of over a dozen universities, including the University of Michigan.  The program offers language and cultural classes to undergraduate and graduate students, professionals and heritage speakers in almost every national language of Southeast Asia, as well as some minority languages.  SEASSI provides one of the only opportunities in the United States to take certain Southeast Asian languages for credit.  This summer, Jon is taking Khmer language classes and acquainting himself with implosive stops and central vowel diphthongs.  Eric is taking Lao language classes and collecting information on the heritage language programs offered by SEASSI.  Those traveling to Madison the first week of August should come and watch them both play Javanese gamelan!”

Robin Queen, along with Andrei Markovits, gave an invited lecture on their work concerning the involvement of women in canine rescue organizations.  The lecture was presented to the Fellows of the Human-Animal Interaction Symposium.

Marlyse Baptista, along with Viviane Deprez, gave an invited lecture at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique lab  on “Structures Formelles du Language”, Groupe de Recherche sur les Grammaires Creoles. June 16, 2008. Paris, France.

View the abstract.

Marlyse Baptista, along with Lisa Green and Tom Klinger, presented a keynote address at the Symposium on Louisiana Dialects and Cultures at Louisiana State University.

View the full program

Robin Queen gave a keynote address at the Indiana University Sociolinguistics Fest Workshop, entitled Language variation and social essentialism.  She explored the place of social and cognitive essentialism for understanding and explaining language variation, using data from a variety of sources, including the television sitcom, Ellen, and weblogs maintained in the voice of a family dog.

Carmel O’Shannessy is in Lajamanu working on a grant from the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Program (hosted at SOAS) and Janganpa Association, a Warlpiri association. She’s documenting traditional Warlpiri songs. The songs form narratives, in which ancestral beings travel across the country. The songs use some words that are used in spoken Warlpiri and many that are not, and the grammar is completely different from spoken Warlpiri. The phonology appears to be the same.

In addition she’s collecting data on Light Warlpiri and code-switching by Warlpiri speakers who don’t speak Light Warlpiri.

Susannah Levi presented a poster at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Paris.

The poster, co-authored with Stephen Winters and David Pisoni, was entitled, “A cross-language familiar talker advantage. The abstract is available as a downloadable .pdf file.

Susi now takes up her new position as Assistant Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology at New York University.