Carmel O’Shannessy gave a colloquium at the University of Indiana on Feb. 1 entitled, “Language contact and acquisition: A new mixed language in northern Australia.

Abstract:

A new mixed language, Light Warlpiri, has emerged in a remote community in northern Australia. It is spoken by children and young adults in the multilingual community of Lajamanu and has developed within the last 30 years. Light Warlpiri is a verb-noun mixed language, meaning that it cannot be traced to a sole parent language, and that its verbal and nominal components tend to come from different source languages. 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. But the system for indicating grammatical functions draws directly on the typologically different source languages. Lajamanu Warlpiri uses case-marking in an ergative-absolutive system while AE/Kriol uses word order (SVO) in a nominative-accusative system. In Light Warlpiri these two systems meet and are in functional competition. The structure of Light Warlpiri, and code-switching patterns of older speakers in the community, provide empirical evidence that languages of this type can arise from alternational code-switching practices.The language ecology in the community is complex, and code-switching between languages is very common. The complex contact situation, in which there is also rapid change, raises the question of how much variation there is in how grammatical functions are indicated within each of the two main languages spoken, and how children deal with the mixed input they receive. Analyses show that adults and children who speak both Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri distribute ergative marking differently in each language - they use it more often in Lajamanu Warlpiri and less often in Light Warlpiri. Children produce more regular patterns of interaction between case-marking and word order than adults do, suggesting that they are active agents of language change.

Andries Coetzee presented a talk at NELS in Ottawa.

The title of the  talk was ”Lexical frequency and variation”. Andries proposed a model of how the mental lexicon interacts with phonological grammar. It has been known for a long time that variable phonological processes apply more frequently to words with a higher usage frequency. For, in stance, the shcwa in the second syllable of “memory” is more likely to delete than the schwa in the second

syllable of “mammary”, corresponding to the fact that “memory” is a much more frequent word that “mammary”.  Existing models of phonological variation do not allow a way in which these kinds of lexical properties can interact directly with the grammar.

NELS was heavily dominated by syntax talks, as it is always is. But there was also a semantics workshop on pronouns and binding with Irene Heim (MIT) as invited speaker, and a phonology workshop on “abtractness without innateness” with Bruce Hayes (UCLA) as invited speakers.

Li Yang has just returned from the 10th Conference of the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics (PACLING 2007) in Melbourne, where he presented a paper titled Named Entity Recognition Using Syntactic/Semantic Information, co-authored with Steven Abney.

In their paper, Yang and Abney show that combining deep syntactic knowledge with machine learning methods significantly improves the performance on the task of named entity recognition.

Deep processing is the major theme of PACLING 2007.

Carmel O’Shannessey and Sally Thomason attended the “Variations et changements morphosyntaxiques en situation de contacts de langues” workshop in Paris, Sept. 20-25.

Carmel presented “The emergence of a new mixed language in Australia”

and as reported by an unbiased and anonymous observer, “…if the workshop attendees had voted on which data-rich paper had the clearest and most elegant presentation of data and analyses, Carmel’s would have won hands down.”

Sally presented “On internally- and externally-motivated morphosyntactic change in contact situations (and how to tell which is which)”

The (MSU) Linguistics Department Colloquium Series 2007

Dr. Acrisio Pires
University of Michigan

Thursday, September 27th
4:30 PM in Wells 607

The Syntax of Wh-in-situ and Common Ground

In this talk I will present the results of collaborative work showing that single-question wh-in-situ occurs in English under specific discourse-pragmatics (1)-(2). I will argue these questions are possible only when the information being requested is part of the Common Ground (CG) (Stalnaker 1978). The same analysis constrains wh-in-situ in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) (1c)-(2c), restricting the optionality of wh-in-situ. It will then be proposed that both languages display a [+wh] complementizer that does not trigger wh-movement. This is supported by the fact that wh-in-situ in both languages is not subject to the same locality conditions associated with wh-in- situ in a language such as French, and is also not an instance of head-movement.

(1) a. A: I made desserts.
b. B: You made what kind of desserts?
c. B: Você fez que tipo de sobremesa?

(2) a. B. Attorney: Tell me what happened on January 1, 2005 at 4 pm
A. Defendant: I was driving along Andrews Avenue.
b. B. Attorney: And the police officer said you were traveling about how fast?
c. B: E o policial disse que você estava dirigindo em que velocidade?