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.

Acrisio Pires and Jason Rothman have published:

Minimalist inquiries into child and adult language acquisition. (De Gruyter)
Acrisio Pires and Jason Rothman (editors)

This book includes original research about the acquisition (L1, bilingualism) and acquisition/ learning (L2 or L3) of Brazilian and European Portuguese. It includes studies exploring both empirical/experimental and theoretical aspects of the acquisition of syntax, and its interfaces with morphology, with semantics/pragmatics, and with language change, with a focus on Minimalist approaches to language acquisition.

John Swales has published “Incidents in an educational life: A memoir (of sorts)“  with the University of Michigan press.

From the publisher:

Incidents in an Educational Life explores the lessons Swales learned by teaching and by being taught. The story follows his gradual transformation from an English as a Second Language teacher to one of the leading international figures in his field, stopping along the way to tell the sometimes amusing, sometimes painful anecdotes that have made him the recognized educator he is today. His entertaining prose make this volume a must-read for anyone considering the field, or the many ways in which we all become teachers.

John also published “Telling a research story: Writing a literature review” with Chris Feak, also with  University of Michigan press.

from the publisher:

Telling a Research Story: Writing a Literature Review is concerned with the writing of a literature review…This volume progresses from general to specific issues in the writing of literature reviews. It opens with some orientations that raise awareness of the issues that surround the telling of a research story. Issues of structure and matters of language, style, and rhetoric are then discussed. Sections on metadiscourse, citation, and paraphrasing and summarizing are included.

Carmel O’Shannessy published the book chapter, “Language variation and change in a north Australian indigenous community.” In James N.. Stanford and Dennis R. Preston (eds) Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages, Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins pp419 – 439

Abstract:
A new mixed language, Light Warlpiri, has arisen in a remote community in northern Australia, systematically combining elments of Warlpiri (mostly nouns and nominal morphology) and Aboriginal English or Kriol (mostly verbs and verbal morphology). Grammatical relations are indicated in the two source languages by differing systems – Warlpiri uses case-marking in an ergative-absolutive system and AE/Kriol uses
SVO word order. Both systems operate in Light Warlpiri to some extent. Ergative marking is variably applied to A arguments and word order is mostly SVO, but also varies. Both adults and children use the ergative marker quantitatively differently in each language, and children are adult-like in how often they apply it in the two languages. But children mark postverbal agents ergatively more often than adults to. In doing so the children are regularizing a pattern found in adult speech.

Rene’ Kager, Joe Pater and Andries Coetzee guest edited a volume of “Phonology” (Volume 26(1), 2009). The theme for the volume is “Phonological Models and Experimental Data”.  I had two contributions in the volume: (i) The introduction with Pater and Kager. (ii) And a single-authored research paper with the title “Learning lexical indexation”.

Here is a link to the TOC of the volume:

Abstract of Andries’ paper: Learning lexical indexation.
Morphological concatenation often triggers phonological processes. For instance, addition of the plural suffix /-en/ to Dutch nouns causes
vowel lengthening in some nouns due to the stress-to-weight principle ([xat] vs. [xa:ten] ‘hole’). These kinds of processes often apply only
to a subset of words – not all Dutch nouns undergo this process ([kat] vs. [katen] ‘cat’). Nouns need to be lexically indexed as either undergoing this process or not. I investigate how phonological grammar and lexical indexation are learned when learners are confronted with data like these. Based on learnability considerations, I hypothesise that learners acquire a grammar with default non-alternation, so that novel items are treated as non-alternating. I report the results of artificial language learning experiments compatible with this hypothesis, and model these results in a version of the Biased Constraint Demotion algorithm (Prince & Tesar 2004).

Carmel O’Shannessey’s paper (co-authored with Felicity Meakins) has appeared as an e-print in Lingua

Article title: Ordering arguments about: Word order and discourse motivations in the development and use of the ergative marker in two Australian mixed languages
Abstract:
Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol are mixed languages which are spoken in northern Australia. They systematically mix the lexicon and morpho-syntax of a traditional Australian language (Warlpiri and Gurindji) and an Australian contact variety (Kriol), bringing systems from the source languages into functional competition. With respect to argument disambiguation, both Warlpiri and Gurindji use a case marking system, whereas Kriol relies on word order. These two systems of argument marking came into contact and competition in the formation of the mixed languages. The result has been the emergence of word order as the dominant system of argument disambiguation in the mixed language, the optionality of the ergative marker, and a shift in the function of the ergative marker to accord discourse prominence to the agentivity of a nominal.

Anna Babel’s paper, “”Dizque”, evidentiality and stance in Valley Spanish” has been accepted for publication at Language in Society.  The paper explores evidentials in Andean Spanish and shows the importance of the differential usage of evidentials for various social goals and within and across individual speakers.  This paper is a revision of Anna’s Qualifying Research Paper.

Congratulations, Anna!

Chris Odato and Deborah Keller-Cohen have had their paper, Evaluating the speech of older adults: Age, gender, and speech situation, accepted for publication at the Journal of Language and Social Psychology.

The paper is based on Chris’ Qualifying Research Paper.

San Duanmu has published The “spotty-data problem” and boundaries of grammar. In Interfaces in Chinese Phonology: Festschrift in Honor of Matthew Y. Chen on his 70th Birthday, ed. Yuchau E. Hsiao, Hui-Chuan Hsu, Lian-Hee Wee, and Dah-an Ho, 261-278. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.

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.