Eric Brown has just received a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation

From the program website:

“The Graduate Research Fellowship provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based master’s or doctoral degrees and is intended for students who are in the early stages of their graduate study. The Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) invests in graduate education for a cadre of diverse individuals who demonstrate their potential to successfully complete graduate degree programs in disciplines relevant to the mission of the National Science Foundation.”

Congratulations, Eric!

Eric Brown has received a grant from the International Institute to go to Cape Verde this summer to begin a project looking at Cape Verdean Creole phonology, variation and orthographic reform.

Congratulations, Eric!

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.

Two Linguistics faculty will be teaching courses at the 2009 LSA Summer Institute.

Carmel O’Shannessey will be teaching  LSA 216:  Linguistic effects of language attrition and shift

The course will explore changes that take place within languages and speech communities when the dynamics of language use changes, so that languages spoken less often come to be spoken more often, and others come to be spoken less often. We will examine the linguistic processes occurring in use of the languages from which speakers are shifting and those to which they are shifting, including creation of new mixed languages or varieties. We will examine the interplay of language learning and attrition through individuals’ dynamic use of first and second languages in these complex situations.

Sally Thomason will be teaching LSA 212:  Language contact and language change

Because language contact is a fact of life for most of the world’s people, it is hardly surprising that it often plays a major role in language change. This course will begin with a brief survey of historical, social, and political settings of language contact, to provide background for the main focus of the course: contact-induced language change. Among the topics that will be covered are social and linguistic predictors for the effects of language contact (together with a discussion of why they can never be expected to yield deterministic predictions); the effects of contact-induced language change on the structure of the receiving language; criteria for establishing contact as a cause of language change; mechanisms of contact-induced change; linguistic areas as a special problem for the study of contact and change; mixed languages (pidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed languages); and contact-induced changes in some (not all) dying languages.

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.

Carmel O’Shannessey presented a colloquium talk entitled “Can child-directed speech lead to a new language?” at the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at Syracuse University on Dec. 5.
Abstract
Code-switching practices between Warlpiri and English have led to a new mixed code, Light Warlpiri, in a remote community in northern Australia. Elements from two typologically dissimilar languages are combined systematically in the new language, with verbal and nominal structures derived from different sources. Code-switching patterns used most often when addressing children appear to be the patterns that have become entrenched as the new way of speaking.

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.

Marlyse Baptista and Miki Obata presented their paper, “The Vacuous Movement Hypothesis:  On Complementizers and Extraction Patterns in Creoles” at the Formal Approaches to Creole Studies conference in Tromsoe, Norway.

Abstract

This paper focuses on the lack of ‘that-trace’ effects in creoles and non-creoles in an attempt to fine-tune minimalist accounts that rely on the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) and the Vacuous Movement Hypothesis (VMH), (i.e., Ishii, 2004).  We argue against the VMH and propose that in some of the languages under consideration, we have empirical evidence that in subject wh-extractions, the subject does not remain in situ but raises to Spec of C.  If correct, this is a challenge to theory-internal considerations such as the economy condition that stipulates that simpler operations are more optimal, thus chosen over more complex ones.  The implications are also important for creole languages, as those under study are clearly opting for more complex operations involving both Agree and Move over Agree alone.   We study extraction patterns and complementizer behavior in both matrix and embedded wh-questions, as shown in (1) and (2).  For the latter, assuming that derivations are evaluated locally, our analysis that the subject wh-phrase raises to Spec-C entails that it is the edge of C in the embedded phase and accessible to operations at the matrix vP phase and higher.  This analysis makes the correct prediction that in the languages under study, the complementizer may be overt in the case of subject extraction. Our proposal for languages such as Cape Verdean Creole (CVC) in which no that-trace effects are observed, we argue that several steps in the derivation must be stipulated:  First, we stipulate that the P-feature of C in such languages are specific and that both the C probe and the wh-phrase goal are specified with a topic feature that upon agreeing, match.  This operation accounts for the Agree phase of the derivation.  To account for the fact that the wh-subject phrase does not remain in situ in Spec of T but raises, we propose that the wh-phrase being the edge of CP, it is accessible to operations at the matrix vP phase.  This allows us to predict that the type of utterances exemplified in (2) are acceptable in CVC.
Given the empirical evidence laid out above, what we argue for CVC is that in this particular language as well as in a number of other creole and non-creole languages, the Q-feature and EPP feature of C and the wh-feature of the wh-phrase are both strong: We assume that that C[Q] obligatorily carries a strong [uwh] feature which checks with the wh-expression it c-commands.  Since [uwh] on C is strong, the wh-phrase must move to a local position with C and given the phrasal nature of who, this local position is Spec of C.  Ki could be argued to be a reflex of the Move operation and to be a non-defective P feature.
This paper is organized as follows: In the first section, we review the pre-minimalist accounts of the ECP approach to that-trace effects.  In the second section, we present the recent minimalist proposals based on the PIC and VMH.  In the third section, we introduce empirical evidence from several creole and non-creole languages against VMH. In the fourth section, we offer a parametric model of extraction variation observable in the languages under study that is reducible to the presence versus absence of overt complementizers.  The fifth and last section synthesizes our findings.
Examples:

(1)    a. Kuze ki bu   odja?  (Cape Verdean Creole)
what  ki you saw
‘What did you see?’
b. Kuze ki maria-bu?
what  ki upset+you
‘What upset you?’

(2)    Kenhi ki bu   kuda  ki kaza   ku    Maria?
who    ki you  think ki marry with Maria
‘Who do you think married Maria?’

Carmel O’Shannessy gave a lecture in the MSU Colloquium Series on Oct. 23, entitled, ” Coding a register:
how a language register has led to the formation of a new code.”

Abstract
There has long been debate over whether code-switching between languages could lead to the formation of a new mixed language. Recent data shows that code-switching practices between Warlpiri and English have led to a new mixed code, Light Warlpiri, in a remote community in northern Australia. More specifically, it appears that the specific code-switching patterns which occur most often in a register for addressing young children are the patterns that were taken up to form the new code.
Light Warlpiri is spoken by children and young adults in the multilingual community of Lajamanu and has developed within the last 30 years. Most verbs and the verbal morphology are from Aboriginal English or Kriol (AE/Kriol), while most nominal morphology is from Lajamanu Warlpiri (the variety of Warlpiri spoken in Lajamanu community). Nouns are drawn from both types of source language. An innovative auxiliary system has developed which draws on, but is not the same as, the systems in the source languages.
The paper will outline how the two systems are combined systematically in the new language, and how code-switching patterns, specifically those used when addressing children, are the patterns that have become entrenched as the new way of speaking.

Carmel O’Shannessy has published  ”Children’s production of their heritage language and a new mixed language” In Simpson, Jane and Gillian Wigglesworth (eds) Children’s Language and Multilingualism. London / New York: Continuum International Press      

Abstract:
Children in Lajamanu community grow up in a complex linguistic environment in which people around them talk in several languages and code-switch between them. They learn two Indigenous languages in the home – Light Warlpiri, which they use on a daily basis from when they fi rst start to talk, and Warlpiri, which they begin to produce between the ages of 4 and 6 years. Light Warlpiri and Warlpiri share a lot of vocabulary and grammatical patterns. They differ mainly in the use of verb systems, and in the distribution of certain types of suffixes on nouns. The similarities and differences in the two languages lead to intriguing
questions about how the children in the community deal with such complex and variable input. In this paper I discuss the children’s development in speaking each language, by examining their production of a set of stories told in both Light Warlpiri and Warlpiri. Analysis shows that they can identify and reproduce quite finely differentiated patterns within and between languages.