Carmel O’Shannessy published the book chapter, “Language variation and change in a north Australian indigenous community.” In James N.. Stanford and Dennis R. Preston (eds) Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages, Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins pp419 – 439

Abstract:
A new mixed language, Light Warlpiri, has arisen in a remote community in northern Australia, systematically combining elments of Warlpiri (mostly nouns and nominal morphology) and Aboriginal English or Kriol (mostly verbs and verbal morphology). Grammatical relations are indicated in the two source languages by differing systems – Warlpiri uses case-marking in an ergative-absolutive system and AE/Kriol uses
SVO word order. Both systems operate in Light Warlpiri to some extent. Ergative marking is variably applied to A arguments and word order is mostly SVO, but also varies. Both adults and children use the ergative marker quantitatively differently in each language, and children are adult-like in how often they apply it in the two languages. But children mark postverbal agents ergatively more often than adults to. In doing so the children are regularizing a pattern found in adult speech.

Rene’ Kager, Joe Pater and Andries Coetzee guest edited a volume of “Phonology” (Volume 26(1), 2009). The theme for the volume is “Phonological Models and Experimental Data”.  I had two contributions in the volume: (i) The introduction with Pater and Kager. (ii) And a single-authored research paper with the title “Learning lexical indexation”.

Here is a link to the TOC of the volume:

Abstract of Andries’ paper: Learning lexical indexation.
Morphological concatenation often triggers phonological processes. For instance, addition of the plural suffix /-en/ to Dutch nouns causes
vowel lengthening in some nouns due to the stress-to-weight principle ([xat] vs. [xa:ten] ‘hole’). These kinds of processes often apply only
to a subset of words – not all Dutch nouns undergo this process ([kat] vs. [katen] ‘cat’). Nouns need to be lexically indexed as either undergoing this process or not. I investigate how phonological grammar and lexical indexation are learned when learners are confronted with data like these. Based on learnability considerations, I hypothesise that learners acquire a grammar with default non-alternation, so that novel items are treated as non-alternating. I report the results of artificial language learning experiments compatible with this hypothesis, and model these results in a version of the Biased Constraint Demotion algorithm (Prince & Tesar 2004).

From Erica:

I attended the first three week session of the LSA Institute in Berkeley California with the intention of taking a number of courses on language acquisition and psycholinguistics. (I had initially registered for Prosody and Language Comprehension, Auditory Word Recognition, Infant Language Acquisition and Cross Linguistic Language Acquisition.) However, there were so many other interesting topics and lecturers, that I found myself sitting in on a lot of other courses just for my own edification. This wide exposure to a lot of varied subject matter was very stimulating and inspiring.

Living in the dorms allowed me to meet quite a few other students of Linguistics from all over the world, and we had quite a bit of fun during off-hours hiking in the Berkeley Hills, and seeing the local sites.

I wouldn’t hesitate the recommend participation in future LSA Institutes to anyone who is interested!

From the series:  Linguists in the Woods

Carmel O’Shannessey’s paper (co-authored with Felicity Meakins) has appeared as an e-print in Lingua

Article title: Ordering arguments about: Word order and discourse motivations in the development and use of the ergative marker in two Australian mixed languages
Abstract:
Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol are mixed languages which are spoken in northern Australia. They systematically mix the lexicon and morpho-syntax of a traditional Australian language (Warlpiri and Gurindji) and an Australian contact variety (Kriol), bringing systems from the source languages into functional competition. With respect to argument disambiguation, both Warlpiri and Gurindji use a case marking system, whereas Kriol relies on word order. These two systems of argument marking came into contact and competition in the formation of the mixed languages. The result has been the emergence of word order as the dominant system of argument disambiguation in the mixed language, the optionality of the ergative marker, and a shift in the function of the ergative marker to accord discourse prominence to the agentivity of a nominal.

From Joseph:

“This summer at the Linguistics Summer Institute, I was able to take courses in Prosody, Pragmatics, Intonational Typology and more. Furthermore, I was able to work closely with scholars from around the world on my discourse prosody research project, bringing perspective and insight into my current work and ideas for valuable follow-up studies. Particularly valuable were conversations with Delphine Dahan from Penn and Carlos Gussenhoven from the Netherlands. After talking with each of them, I was just flush with excitement!

The institute was a ton of fun. The people were super friendly and linguistics permeated everything. Where else would the average person know about glottal stops and conversational implicatures?”

Andries Coetzee delivered the keynote address, entitled “An integrated grammatical/non-grammatical model of phonological variation,” in June at the “2009 Seoul International Conference in Linguistic Interfaces“.

Andries also gave an invited talk at the “2009 International Phonology and Phonetics Forum” in Kobe, Japan in August. The title of
his talk was “Gradient well-formedness in Harmonic Grammar: on the interaction of grammar and frequency.”

Pictured below: Andries, Mirjam Broersma, Maki Aoyagi, Shin-ichi Tanaka.

Diane Larsen-Freeman has been awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Innsbruck for the coming year.  She will be teaching courses in second language acquisition, multilingualism and English Grammar.

Congratulations, Diane.

The Department welcomes five new graduate students this year.

Tridha Chatterjee is interested in language contact in India

Yan Dong is interested in syllable structure and other aspects of phonological theory

Harim Kwon is interested in the phonetic-phonology interface

Candice Scott is interested in language contact, sociolinguistics and historical linguistics

Yiwen Zhou is interested in sociolinguistics and minority languages in China

The Department of Linguistics welcomes one new tenure-track faculty member and three new faculty members by courtesy.

Ezra Keshet joins the faculty in the area of semantics.  Professor Keshet completed his PhD in semantics at MIT and was the Language Learning Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department last year. Ezra’s work focuses on syntax, pragmatics and discours

Anne Curzan joins the faculty by courtesy in the area of English linguistics, History of English, language and gender and linguistic pedagogy.  Professor Curzan holds her primary appointment as Associate Professor and Thurnau Professor in the Department of English

Nick  Ellis joins the faculty by courtesy in the area of second language acquisition, language learning, construction grammar and cognitive linguistics.  Professor Ellis holds his primary appointment as Professor in the Department of Psychology and the English Language Institute

Barbara Meek joins the faculty by courtesy in the area of linguistic anthropology, child language socialization and acquisition, endangered and/or dormant language issues, linguistic theory and Athabaskan linguistics.  Professor Meek holds her primary appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology.