This paper is based on Lauren’s Qualifying Research Paper, which she completed in Jan. 2009.

Congratulations, Lauren!

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Congratulations, Anna!

The paper is based on Chris’ Qualifying Research Paper.