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.

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.

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.

Ian Catford, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Phonetics, and his daughter Lorna visited the department May 6. He visited his office, the Catford library and conference room, and the sound lab.

The Catford lectures, a series of lectures given on the occasion of Professor Catford’s retirement, are available for streaming viewing.

Wilfredo Valentin-Marquez has accepted a tenure-track job in the Department of Foreign Languages at Millersville University in Lancaster, PA.

Wilfredo completed his degree in 2007 in the joint Linguistics-Romance Languages program.

Congratulations, Wilfredo!!

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

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!!

Ezra Keshet will be our visiting Assistant Professor in 2008-09, holding the Language Learning visiting faculty position. Ezra will teach two of our semantics courses in 2008-09. 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!

The Linguistics Club is hosting a panel discussion with three
professional translators/interpreters from the University of Michigan
Health Services:
Fawzi El-Shafei (Arabic-English)
Maria Militzer (English-Spanish)
Linda Steinke (Arabic-English)

We will also hear from Helen Merenda, an undergraduate in the UROP
program, about her German-English translation project.

As always, cookies, brownies, and coffee will be forcefully offered.

Thursday, 17 April 2008
3:00pm - 4:30pm
Lorch Hall (room TBA)