Sally Thomason published her paper, “How to establish substratum interference” in the new book, Issues in Tibeto-Burman Historical Linguistics, ed. by Yusuhiko Nagano and published by the National Museum of Ethnology, 2009.

Her paper “At a Loss for Words” has been reprinted in Natural History’s Annual Editions: Anthropology 10/11.

1.  Sally Thomason was interviewed by CNN on the reports of the “millionth word in English.

2. Sally gave one of the four plenary talks at ICML XII, the 12th International Conference on Minority Languages in Tartu, Estonia.

WHAT IS LOST WHEN A LANGUAGE IS STANDARDIZED?

Abstract:

Enlightened governments all over the world are granting language rights to minority groups, a tendency that is presumably welcomed by everyone attending this conference.  The specific rights vary from country to country, from making one or more minority languages official to establishing a right to native-language instruction in schools.  An issue that arises very frequently concerns standardization: which variety of a minority language should be selected or (if necessary) developed for official purposes, including use as a medium of instruction?  The advantages of selecting a single variety are obvious, especially the financial advantages.  The disadvantages are perhaps less obvious.  The focus of this presentation is on the disadvantages of standardization, in particular the concomitant loss of dialect diversity.  The most important disadvantages are arguably sociopolitical; but the scientific disadvantages, from a linguist’s viewpoint, are nontrivial.  Understanding of the processes and results of dialect divergence and convergence contributes signficantly to our knowledge of human language as a social and psychological phenomenon. Moreover, some nonstandard dialects have unusual, and unusually interesting, structural features that are not found in the associated standard dialect.  I will not argue that standardization should not occur, but rather that nonstandard dialects should be documented as fully as possible while documentation is still possible.  Examples will be drawn from several European languages and from a gravely endangered Native American language which is currently undergoing standardization.

3. Sally also gave  one of the keynote talks at ISB7, the 7th International Symposium on Bilingualism, in
Utrecht.

Children vs. Adults as Agents of Contact-induced Language Change

Abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between bilingualism and contact-induced language change, focusing on the question of which contributions might be expected from children and which from adults. The issue is reflected in debates among historical linguists as to whether internally-motivated language change is initiated by children during first-language acquisition or by adults — or by both. In language contact studies, it is possible to identify changes, usually temporary ones, that are initiated by children, and it is also possible to identify changes that are initiated by adults. The conclusion, therefore, is that both adults and children are responsible for contact-induced changes, although perhaps not for the same kinds of changes: shift-induced interference, which is due to imperfect learning of a target language by members of a speech community, is likely to be almost exclusively an adult phenomenon, or at least not primarily initiated by young children during first-language acquisition. I will not address in detail the question of the role of adults vs. the role of children in the initiation and spread of linguistic changes more generally, but some implications of the results from contact-induced change will be discussed in the concluding section.

Sally Thomason has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies for March, 2009.

Sally recently gave an invited lecture at the Workshop on Language Contact at FRAIS entitled, “Contact-induced language change sociolinguistics vs. historical linguistics?”

Abstract:

In studying language change, sociolinguists and historical linguists address the issues from very different perspectives.  Sociolinguists focus on ongoing change; historical linguists study past changes.  At least in part because of this difference in perspective, it sometimes seems as if the two groups of scholars are talking past each other rather than to each other.  In this paper I’ll argue that the respective sets of data should in fact permit compatible analyses, because any viable theory must surely encompass both synchronic variation and diachronic change.

Sally Thomason gave an invited talk, “How much can  we know  about ancient language contacts?” at the workshop on Interaction and Networking: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives, which was part of the project Early Networking in Northern
Fennoscandia held  in Oslø, Norway.
Abstract

For the vast majority of the world’s language families, there are no written records to help with the task of unraveling language history.  It is nevertheless possible, in favorable circumstances, to identify a history of language contact and to establish the existence and direction of contact-induced language changes.  This paper discusses methodological criteria for distinguishing favorable from unfavorable circumstances, using the Pacific Northwest Sprachbund of North America as an example.  The paper concludes with some observations about contributions that linguistic evidence can and can’t make — in conjunction with evidence from archaeology, cultural anthropology, and genetics — to efforts to understand human history.

Pires, Acrisio and Sarah G. Thomason. 2008. How Much Syntactic Reconstruction is Possible? In Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction, ed. G. Ferraresi and M. Goldbach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. p. 27-72.

Abstract:

This paper explores ways to synthesize methods from generative linguistics and historical linguistics to develop explanatory criteria that need to be satisfied by different attempts to carry out syntactic reconstruction.  It addresses various questions such as (i) the need to define exactly what it means to reconstruct a language; (ii) characterizing the formal entities that count as the basic elements in the analysis of the empirical evidence for syntactic reconstruction, and whether the units of analysis and the elements that need to be reconstructed are formal entities of the same kind; (iii) whether it is possible to establish general principles for reconstructing syntax; (iv) to which extent the methodology adopted for the reconstruction of other properties of a linguistic system can be applied successfully to the reconstruction of syntax; and (v) identifying methodological criteria to assess the success of a syntactic reconstruction, and devise empirical tests for the reconstruction model.

Sally Thomason published “Pidgins/creoles and historical linguistics” in John
Victor Singler & Silvia Kouwenberg, eds., The handbook of pidgins and creoles, 242-262.  Oxford: Blackwell. 2008.

Bill Baxter presented a keynote address at the 41st International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, 18-21 Sept, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The talk was titled  “”Old Chinese: the Baxter-Sagart Reconstruction, Version 0.98″

On April 4-6, the Department hosted the Twelfth Spring Workshop on Theory and Method in Linguistic Reconstruction, a long-running biennial series that began in 1986.  The talks were on Indo-European (Ben Fortson, Eric Hamp, Jay Jasanoff, Brian Joseph); Tibeto-Burman (Jim Matisoff, David Kamholz); Native American languages (Terry Kaufman, Ives Goddard, Bob Rankin); Australian languages (Claire Bowern); Caucasian languages (Alice Harris); Austronesian languages (Mark Hale); and general topics (Andrew Garrett, Lyle Campbell).  The best title (and certainly one of the best talks) was Bob Rankin’s: “The mystery of the Vice President’s Chair”.

From July 30-August 10, Bill Baxter co-ran an intensive workshop on Old Chinese reconstruction along with Professor CHEN Jian of Fudan University, Shanghai. The workshop was held at Leiden University, the Netherlands and was sponsored by the Research School for Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies (CNWS) and the Leiden University’s Faculty of Arts. The workshop focused especially on interpreting the
script of texts of the Warring States period (5th-3rd centuries BCE) recently excavated at
archeological sites in China.