Andries Coetzee has published a new paper in Language, the Journal of the Linguistic Society of America.

Coetzee, Andries W.  2008.  Grammaticality and ungrammaticality in
phonology.  Language, 84(2):218-257.

Abstract

In this paper, I make two theoretical claims: (i) For some form to be
grammatical in language L, it is not necessary that the form satisfy
all constraints that are active in L – i.e. even grammatical forms can
violate constraints. (ii) There are degrees of ungrammaticality – i.e.
not all ungrammatical forms are equally ungrammatical. I first show
that these claims follow straightforwardly from the basic architecture
of an Optimality Theoretic grammar. I then show that the surface sound
patterns used most widely in formal phonology cannot be used to test
the truth of these two claims, but argue that results from speech
processing experiments can. Finally, I discuss three experiments on
the processing of non-words of the form [stVt], [skVk] and [spVp] in
English that were designed to test these claims, and show that both
claims are confirmed by the results of the experiments.

Jon Yip and Eric Brown are attending the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute for 8 weeks this summer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

SEASSI is supported by a consortium of over a dozen universities, including the University of Michigan.  The program offers language and cultural classes to undergraduate and graduate students, professionals and heritage speakers in almost every national language of Southeast Asia, as well as some minority languages.  SEASSI provides one of the only opportunities in the United States to take certain Southeast Asian languages for credit.  This summer, Jon is taking Khmer language classes and acquainting himself with implosive stops and central vowel diphthongs.  Eric is taking Lao language classes and collecting information on the heritage language programs offered by SEASSI.  Those traveling to Madison the first week of August should come and watch them both play Javanese gamelan!”

Robin Queen, along with Andrei Markovits, gave an invited lecture on their work concerning the involvement of women in canine rescue organizations.  The lecture was presented to the Fellows of the Human-Animal Interaction Symposium.

Marlyse Baptista, along with Viviane Deprez, gave an invited lecture at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique lab  on “Structures Formelles du Language”, Groupe de Recherche sur les Grammaires Creoles. June 16, 2008. Paris, France.

View the abstract.

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

Robin Queen gave a keynote address at the Indiana University Sociolinguistics Fest Workshop, entitled Language variation and social essentialism.  She explored the place of social and cognitive essentialism for understanding and explaining language variation, using data from a variety of sources, including the television sitcom, Ellen, and weblogs maintained in the voice of a family dog.

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.

Susannah Levi presented a poster at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Paris.

The poster, co-authored with Stephen Winters and David Pisoni, was entitled, “A cross-language familiar talker advantage. The abstract is available as a downloadable .pdf file.

Susi now takes up her new position as Assistant Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology at New York University.

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.

Christopher Becker has filed his dissertation,  Clausal and Nominal Agreement in Russian: A Unified Approach, thereby completing all the requirements for his Ph.D. in Linguistics.

Congratulations, Christopher!

ABSTRACT

This dissertation unifies, in different respects, the formal and theoretical analysis of morphosyntactic agreement patterns, both those internal to the clause and internal to the noun phrase, focusing empirically on the syntax of Russian. Specifically, I develop a Minimalist analysis modifying the Agree and Probe-Goals approaches and show that many long-standing issues regarding agreement of formal features and Case can be accounted for without resort to certain stipulations and unclarities. In particular, I propose that clausal agreement reflects the features of the constituents of a subject DP (determiner phrase) and propose locality constraints on this agreement operation. Such a unified account of clausal and nominal feature agreement has been lacking in many proposals that consider the data in only one, or the other, domain.
Within the clausal domain, I examine copular structures in Russian, and propose modifications to the Probe-Goal hypothesis to account for the issues these structures present. Specifically, I demonstrate that DPs in copular structures can bear agreement features and Case independent of each other and I argue that the syntactic head that enters into agreement with the subject is unable to agree with the post-copular nominal. I account for Case variation of the post-copular nominal by positing two distinct Case-licensing heads, one that values nominative Case and one that values instrumental.
Within the nominal domain, I demonstrate that the uniformity of agreement features and Case on determiners, adjectives, and nouns in Russian can be accounted for if the inflectional head of the clause enters into simultaneous agreement relations with each head of the nominal domain – the multiple goal approach to agreement. This formulation of the Probe-Goal hypothesis allows for agreement between the inflectional head of the clause and the subject, and accounts for multiple and uniform occurrence of agreement features and Case within the subject. Regarding numeral phrases, I demonstrate the locality effects of the multiple goal approach to agreement, and account for disparate features and Case marking within these phrases.
This dissertation contributes to the theoretical understanding of agreement phenomena in morphologically rich agreement languages such as Russian and less inflected agreement languages such as English.