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.

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.

Marlyse Baptista, along with Lisa Green and Tom Klinger, presented a keynote address at the Symposium on Louisiana Dialects and Cultures at Louisiana State University.

View the full program

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.

Rob Burling is currently in the field in NE India working on an underdocumented Tibeto-Burman language called Dimasa.

Libu Lakhi, Brook Hefright and Kevin Stuard (20007).  ”The Namuyi:  Linguistic and Cultural Features.” Asian Folklore Studies 66, 233-253. 

Abstract:  The Namuyi live in southern Sichuan Province, the People’s Republic of China, and form part of the officially recognized Tibetan ethnic group. This paper first introduces the Namuyi in terms of location, population, and ethnonym. It then provides brief background on the Namuyi language, including comparisons of the dʐə¹¹ qu¹¹ and Luóguōdǐ varieties and a 207-item Swadesh list of English words with their dʐə¹¹ qu¹¹ Namuyi equivalents. Finally, it discusses Namuyi religion and provides a transcription of the ka¹¹ ju¹¹ bu⁴ ritual. 

“At a Loss for Words“, on endangered languages in general and Sally Thomason’s fieldwork on the Salish-Pend d’Oreille language in particular, has just appeared in the December 2007/January 2008 issue of Natural History magazine.  The article discusses reasons for the imminent demise of this language and of 50% or more of the world’s other 6,000 (or so) languages, and reasons why even non-linguists should care about this disastrous situation.

Heath, Jeffrey. 2007. Bidirectional case-marking and linear adjacency. Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2007) 25:83–101

Abstract
Bidirectional case markers in West African languages, including those of
the Songhay family, are morphemes inserted between subject and object NPs that
would otherwise be adjacent. They therefore specify both that the NP to the left is
a subject, and that the NP to the right is an object, and they cannot be bracketed
uniquely with either. This is shown by the fact that these morphemes are absent when
either subject or object position is (structurally and phonologically) absent, for exam-
ple due to extraction. This is the only morphological case-marking in the relevant
languages. The operation inserting such morphemes must have reference to constit-
uent structure (NP), abstract case (subject, object), and linear adjacency. These data
increase the evidence that complex case-marking operations can apply in a centrally
located morphology component that has simultaneous access to categorial and linear
relations. The idea is questionable that such morphological operations take place at a
syntax/PF interface, where syntactic categories are first aligned with prosodic phrases,
since actual prosodic (e.g. accentual) bracketings do not always coincide with the
bracketings relevant to case morphology. This point is made with data from Tam-
ashek (Berber) nominal prefix alternations, preceding the main section on Songhay
case marking.

Carmel O’Shannessey received a grant from the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP), administered by School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, to document a traditional Warlpiri ceremony in northern Australia next summer. The project has supplementary funding from the Warlpiri community, and has been developed in response to a request from community elders.