Author Archives: Joseph Pater

Di Canio colloquium Friday Nov. 30

Christian DiCanio of the University of Buffalo will present a colloquium entitled “Is intonation universal?” on Friday Nov. 30th at 3:30 pm in ILC N400 (abstract below). The talk will be followed by a reception. All are welcome!

Abstract. Languages with large lexical tone inventories represent a unique challenge to studies of intonation and prosody. Such languages typically involve less freedom for suprasegmental properties of speech to be manipulated for indicating either pragmatic meaning or phrasal constituency (Connell 2017). Might it be possible for a complex tonal language to lack intonation altogether? In this talk, I report on two phonetic studies carried out in the field examining how the nine complex tones of Itunyoso Triqui (Otomanguean: Mexico) are affected by information structure (broad focus, narrow focus, contrastive focus) and utterance boundaries. Though prosodic lengthening occurs, tones are surprisingly consistent across these contexts, maintaining both their shape and height. These findings are examined in relation to an emerging typology of the tone-intonational interface and in comparison with a set of parallel experiments carried out on a related language with a complex tonal system (Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, c.f. DiCanio et al 2018). What seems to distinguish tonal languages with strong intonational effects from those with weak effects is the degree to which prosodic and pragmatic distinctions have been grammaticalized as non-suprasegmental processes, a fertile topic at the interface of linguistic fieldwork, phonetics, and phonology

Tom Roeper quoted in the Atlantic

Via UMass news

Thomas Roeper, linguistics, says learning language from a special application on a smartphone isn’t quite the same as learning from a human teacher. He says a teacher can hold a student’s attention better and can tailor lessons to the individual’s talents. “There are all kinds of contextual factors in language learning. It would be hard for an app to take them all into account,” Roeper says. (The Atlantic, December 2018)

DELV Relaunch

From Tom Roeper

The Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV) was developed by a cooperative team from the Linguistics Department and Communications Disorders Dept in 2005.  It is now being relaunched with a new publisher: Ventris. https://www.ventrislearning.com/delv/

This disorders test is designed to probe deep principles of grammar (long-distance wh-movement, wh-pairing, quantification, pragmatics, etc) without being biased against dialect speakers, particularly AAE speakers.

The DELV has been used with Navajo, Appalachian, Canadian, Australian children, and translated into Afrikaans.   Ideas
of further extensions, possible translations and potential applications are all welcome.

The DELV included many faculty from linguistics, beyond the authors Harry Seymour, Tom Roeper, and Jill deVilliers (to whom Peter deVilliers and Barbara Pearson have been added): Lisa Green, Lisa Selkirk, Peggy Speas, Angelika Kratzer, Joe Pater, and John Kingston were all involved in major and minor ways.  In addition many students were involved: Bart Hollebrandse, Mike Dickey, Elena Benedicto, Deanna Moore (and I hope I have not forgotten anyone).

      The original team met November 15th at the ASHA (American Speech and Hearing Association—20,000 attendees) for a wonderful re-union and brainstorming session with Robert Ventris our new publisher.
      Many of the ComDis PhD’s joined us including: Valerie Johnson [starting a new comdis program at Rutgers], D’Jaris Coles (Andrews University), Eliane Ramos (FIU), Janice Jackson, and former ComDis faculty Shelley Velleman (now chair at U of Vermont) and Christine Foreman.
     Presentations by Jill deVilliers, on new tests (Chinese,
Roma,and  Spanish) were presented. AAE and word-learning, and a variety of other subjects were given in lectures and posters.

Bobaljik Colloquium Fri. Nov. 16 at 3:30

Jonathan Bobaljik (Harvard University) will present a colloquium on Friday Nov. 16th at 3:30 on “Syncretism, Person, and a Chukotkan Inverse? *næ-“. All are welcome – a reception will follow.

Abstract (includes joint work with Uli Sauerland)
This talk looks at syncretism in paradigms of person marking (pronouns, agreement) in both a large, cross-linguistic perspective and in a detailed case-study of apparently unusual paradigm structures in Chukotkan languages. We pursue the idea there are true linguistic universals in the domain of person-marking, masked by instances of accidental homophony (and other ‘surface noise’). We offer a proposal for inferring the most likely feature structure from the observed distribution of paradigm types, recognizing that not every attested observation reflects a deep property of these systems. In the second part of the talk, I look at one such ‘irregular’ paradigm, and provide a specific proposal for how it is to be best described synchronically and what its historical source is within Chukotko-Kamchatkan. The analysis offered bears on the typology of ‘inverse’ marking, concluding that the Chukotkan prefix*næ- is not an inverse marker, contra Comrie and others.

Report from BUCLD

From Tom Roeper

BUCLD (Boston University Child Language Development) Nov 2-4 saw many students faculty and alumni come together as usual and with our traditional dinner Saturday night.

There were talks and posters by all of these folks:
Jill deVilliers and Jessica Kotfila
     LD wh-movement and tense
Ken Drozd and Bart Hollebrandse on quantifier spreading across 17 langauges
     (with 22 others including Uli Sauerland)
Jennifer Spenader on quantifier spreading
Suzi Lima on recursion and plurals in an Amazonian language
Barbara Pearson and Janice Jackson on African American English
Ana Perez on recursion and productivity
Angeliek van Hout on causation and events
And Jill deVilliers gave an invited talk on wh-movement and False Belief at the  conference the day before on cognitive and linguistic approaches to False Belief.

Call for papers: Brazilian Linguistics Association 50th Anniversary

The Brazilian Linguistics Association (ABRALIN) is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2019 with a special event: ABRALIN50: abralin.org/abralin50. The event, which will host the 11th International Congress of ABRALIN, the 24th ABRALIN’s Institute and five satellite meetings will take place in beautiful Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil, from May 02 to May 09, 2019.
The main objective of the 11th International Congress of ABRALIN is to address fundamental issues for Linguistics today, instigating debates that facilitate courses of actions in the area in face of the transformations in the contemporary world. Moreover, the event also aims to promote propositional dialogues between Linguistics and other areas of knowledge. Keynote speakers: Andries Coetzee, Daniel Everett, Dermeval da Hora, Eni Orlandi, Geoff Pullum, José Morais, Marcos Bagno, Maria Helena Mira Mateus, Noam Chomsky, Oliver Niebuhr, Roland Pfau, Tom Roeper, and Willem Adelaar.
Paper Submission Deadline: November 30th.
The ABRALIN‘s Institute, with a long tradition in the history of our Association, aims to contribute to the international colaboration and to the qualification in the area of Linguistics. The Institute will offer a selection of courses taught by renowned foreign and Brazilian specialists, promoting the discussion, the dissemination and the sharing of the most recent theoretical and methodological trends in the area of Linguistics. Lecturers: Andries Coetzee, Daniel Everett, Erez Levon, Geoff Pullum, Jean-Jacques Courtine, José Luiz Fiorin, José Morais, Marcos Bagno, Oliver Niebuhr, Roland Pfau, Tom Roeper, Willem Adelaar and Xinchun Wang, among others.
ABRALIN invites the academic community to celebrate its 50th anniversary in a stunning place: Maceió, Alagoas.

 

Ayoub Noamane successfully defends his dissertation!

Ayoub Noamane successfully defended his dissertation “Patterns of Gemination in Moroccan Arabic: Issues in Phonology and Morphology” at Mohammed V University in Rabat on Saturday Nov. 10, 2018. Ayoub spent a year at UMass on a Fulbright fellowship, and his dissertation was co-supervised by Karim Bensoukas and Joe Pater. This continues a tradition: Karim Bensoukas was also a Fulbright visitor, and his dissertation was co-supervised by Lisa Selkirk. (Lisa and John McCarthy in fact travelled to Morocco for three defenses!). Congratulations Ayoub!
Pictured (from R-L)
Prof. Mohamed Marouane, Chouaib Doukkali University, El Jadida
Karim Bensoukas
Prof. Aziz Boudlal, Ben M’sik University, Casablanca
Malika Jamraoui (Ayoub’s mother)
Ayoub Noamane
Mehdi Noamane (Ayoub’s father)
Prof. Hassan Souali, Mohammed V University, Rabat
Prof. Abdellatif Al Ghadi, Mohammed V University, Rabat
Joe Pater
Prof. Ikbal Zeddari, Mohammed V University, Rabat