Lisa Del Torto successfully defended her dissertation, “Ci Arrangiamo: the Realities of Shift-Maintenance Negotiation in an Italian-Canadian Community,” on August 25th, 2008.

Abstract:

This dissertation investigates the complexities of processes of language shift and maintenance among four generations of Italian Canadians by examining what participants say about language and what they do with language in family interactions. The analysis of multigenerational family conversations, informal interviews, and ethnographic observation focuses on the sociolinguistic means through which participants create and negotiate simultaneous pressures to shift to English monolingualism and to maintain the Italian language and notions of Italianness. Italianness is an important aspect-of-self for the participants, and they (re)create it through linguistic means that do not fall under traditional notions of linguistic maintenance.

An examination of what people say about language has shown that participants feel that younger generations are losing the Italian language. Third-generation participants claim that they have full receptive knowledge of Italian and more productive knowledge than they often use, but that social norms for the use of Italian and English in family conversations dictate that they use only English, with the exception of an occasional Italian emblematic expression. At the same time that participants feel a push to use only English, they want to maintain Italianness and the Italian language. The examination of what participants do with language focuses on three linguistic phenomena recurrent in family interactional data: family interpreting, Stylized Italian English, and emblematic insertion of Italian lexical items into otherwise English utterances. I explore these phenomena as (socio)linguistic practices and resources that respond to and (re)create simultaneous pressures for language shift and maintenance. These resources also reinforce notions of Italianness for individuals and families.

Little work has been done in sociolinguistics and language contact studies to explore the ways in which shift and maintenance are parts of the same dynamic sociolinguistic process. Sociolinguistics has largely ignored the ways in which participants create and negotiate simultaneous pressures for shift to monolingualism in the majority language and maintenance of the heritage language. This dissertation addresses shift and maintenance as simultaneous and intertwined processes, and troubles definitions of linguistic maintenance by examining some of the realities that multiple generations of an immigrant community are experiencing from an on-the-ground ethnographic perspective. Studying these participants at this point in time provides a real-time model of language shift and maintenance and the practical realities of a North American language contact situation.

The dissertation was chaired by Robin Queen

Miki Obata’s Qualifying Research Paper, “Improper Movemen, Intervention and the (Possible) Elimination of A/A’-Position Types,” has been approved by her readers, and she has now advanced to doctoral candidacy.

Congratulations, Miki!

Jeff Heath spent Jan-Aug 2008 in Dogon country, Mali. He was joined by three other project colleagues: Russian M.A. Kirill Prokhorov (Jan 08-Jan 09), Scripps College graduate and UCLA grad-student-to-be Laura McPherson (Jun 08-May 09), and U Indiana grad student Abbie Hantgan (Jun-Aug 08). Jeff worked on Najamba-Bondu, Tabi-Sarinyere, Beni, and Nanga. Laura is working on Tommo-So and will be supported by a Fulbright grant from September on. Kirill is halfway through a field project on Mombo (aka Kolu); he has primary financial support from MPI-EVA (Leipzig). Abbie is working on Bangeri Me, an apparent language isolate (culturally Dogon, but no linguistic connection to Dogon or anything else). We will be greatly expanding our Dogon website with the new data (including many videos and images) in the next two months or so after our website guy (U Washington compling grad student Steve Moran) gets back from a holiday. Jeff’s Grammar of Jamsay (Dogon language) finally appeared earlier this year (Mouton Grammar Library). The four fieldworkers presented at the CALL meeting in Leiden in late August. Jeff, Kirill, and Abbie plans to be back in the field summer 09 and beyond.

Excerpted from the National Science Foundation

The sixth International Linguistics Olympiad ended today in Slanchev Bryag, Bulgaria, and U.S. high school students captured 11 out of 33 awards, including gold medals in individual and team events. This was only the second time the U.S. has ever competed in the event. Their achievement brings a new focus on computational linguistics.

This year’s Olympiad featured 16 teams from around the world, including Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Sweden, South Korea and Slovenia. Each problem presented clues about the sounds, words or grammar of a language the students had never studied, such as Micmac, a Native American language spoken in Canada, the New Caledonia languages of Drehu and Cemuhi, as well as several historical Chinese dialects. They were then judged by how accurately and quickly they could untangle the clues to figure out the rules and structures of the languages to solve the problem.

Team 1 was composed of Guy Tabachnick of New York City, Jeffrey Lim of Arlington, Mass., Josh Falk of Pittsburgh, Pa, and Anand Natarajan of San Jose, Calif.

Jae-Kyu Lee of Andover, Mass., Rebecca Jacobs of Encino, Calif., Morris Alper of Palo Alto, Calif., and Hanzhi Zhu of Shrewsbury, Mass. participated as Team 2.

Team 1 claimed a silver medal in the team competition and Team 2 captured a gold. Team 2 also won a trophy for the highest combined score on the individual competition. In the individual competition, Jacobs, Lim and Tabachnick were awarded bronze medals, Alper and Natarajan won silver, and Zhu captured a gold.

The U.S. teams were led by head coach Dragomir Radev, associate professor of computer science, information, and linguistics at the University of Michigan, and associate coach Lori Levin, co-chair of NACLO and associate research professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Adam Hesterberg, who achieved the highest individual score in last year’s Olympiad and is currently attending Princeton University, was present this year as an assistant coach. The team was also accompanied by National Board Certified Teacher Amy Troyan, who also serves as gifted program coordinator at Taylor Allderdice High School.

Marlyse Baptista was invited to organize and teach a workshop at the Caribbean Language and Linguistics Institute in July. The Institute was held at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica in conjunction with the Society for Caribbean Linguistics. The title of the workshop I convened and participated to is: Portuguese-lexified Creole Languages: Exploring the Papiamentu-Cape Verde Connections.

Carmel O’Shannessy returned from a productive field trip to Lajamanu Community, Northern Territory, Australia. There, she recorded and transcribed traditional Warlpiri songs, as part of a project jointly funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Documentation Project, and Janganpa Association, a Warlpiri association. In addition, she collected data on Light Warlpiri, a new mixed language spoken in the community; on code-switching practices which led to the new mixed language and on noun phrases in Kriol, an English-lexified creole spoken in northern Australia.

Sam Epstein, Hisa Kitahara and Daniel Seely continue their collaborative biolinguistic research regarding the formal and predictive properties of contemporary Minimalist phrasal derivations and the important role of Third factor (i.e. not uniquely linguistic) mechanisms in providing deeper explanations of aspects of
human syntactic knowledge.

San Duanmu taught a phonology course at Peking University (PKU). The course was the equivalent of a first-year graduate phonology course at UM, but it was taught in 4 weeks during June-July. The course was hosted by the UM-PKU Joint Institute. There were over 50 students, mostly MA and PhD students in Linguistics. All were from Chinese universities, except two from UM. Other than the course, San also visited other schools and met with some linguists there.

Deborah Keller-Cohen and Chris Odato presented the paper, “Talk too Much?:  Age and Speech Situation in Evaluating Others’ Seech:  Off-target Verbosity Revisited,” at the International Congress on Language and Social Psycoology on July 18, 2008